The Gender Experiment: (A Thriller) (2 page)

“What’s his birthday?”

“June 17, 1996.”

The same year as Logan Hurtz. Her own birthday was four months before, February 13. They had all been born within seven months of each other. All in Denver? She had to know. “What’s his birth city?”

“It’s not in the report.” A little exasperation in the desk officer’s tone. “I’m emailing it now.” The line went silent.

Icy fingers of fear wrapped around Taylor’s heart. Something bad was coming, she could feel it. She jumped up from her desk, headed downstairs, and grabbed a mop from the supply closet. Dread gripped her torso, and her back muscles cramped as she furiously scrubbed the stained cement floor in the autopsy room. The exercise didn’t help. She stopped and closed her eyes. Forcing herself to breathe deeply, she fought the familiar panic.
Everything is fine. Stay positive. Everything is fine.
Sometimes it took twenty minutes to calm herself. Other times, she reached for the anti-anxiety medicine she’d been prescribed at fifteen to combat the episodes. PTSD was the official label. But she’d never experienced any traumatic episodes—other than her mother’s suicide—and the anxiety had started long before that. She’d endured some bullying, like most kids, but nothing that justified the panic attacks. Her mother, a veteran medic from the first Gulf War, had suffered from bouts of PTSD, and Taylor had started to believe she had inherited the condition.

Don’t think about her! Not now.
Taylor went back to her desk, put in earbuds, and cranked up her favorite song. This was her first anxiety episode at work, and she wasn’t prepared for it. The music failed to soothe her. The deaths of the two young dual-gender people troubled her. Something wasn’t right. As much as it terrified her, she had to find out if they were connected. But how? Whatever was going on may have started twenty years ago, and she wasn’t a real investigator yet, just an intern with an interest in forensics. She would start by finding out where the two dead people had been born.

A wild thought hit her. What if there were more intersex kids from that time frame? Had their mothers all been exposed to something toxic? No one knew what caused babies to be born with mixed genitalia. But now that transgendered people were becoming accepted, Taylor hoped gender-fluid people would be eventually as well. For now, she couldn’t imagine showing her naked body to anyone. Yet she thought about sex all the time. Her hyper-sexuality seemed like a cruel joke—like being jacked up for a party she wasn’t invited to.

“Taylor!” Her supervisor was shouting her name, and he wasn’t smiling.

She fumbled to shut off her music, face flushed with heat as she looked up. “Sorry. What can I do?”

“I need you to enter lab results.” Ron Briggs, the MLDI she was assigned to, stepped toward her.

Taylor turned away. He had the worst breath! But he was usually pretty nice, for an older guy.

He shoved a stack of files at her. “I have to attend a death scene, and I’m behind on paperwork.”

“I’ve got this.” It was her job to do whatever was needed to assist the investigator she was paired with. Ron walked away, and Taylor logged into the main database to enter the case number for the lab results.

While the file loaded, she checked her email and found a message from the police department. The brief note said the report for Adrian Warsaw’s death was attached. Taylor downloaded the report and printed it, feeling a little guilty about putting her own stuff ahead of the lab results she was supposed to process. But she was eager to find out what she could about Adrian.

She skimmed the pages, struggling with the police jargon, and learned little. Except that the cops had found Adrian’s parents names in his phone. Burt and Ellen Warsaw, both with Denver area codes.
Good news.
The drowned man had probably been born right here. Now that she had his parents’ ID, she could probably find his birth records. But what about Logan, the guy who’d fallen off a balcony? Without knowing his biological mother, she might never find out where he was born. But he’d lived in Denver since he entered foster care as a kid, so she would just assume, for now, that he’d been born here as well. Her own entry into the world had started at Fort Carson Community Hospital on the military base an hour south, but she’d been a breach baby, and they’d rushed her mother to St. Paul’s in Denver.

Taylor pushed the troubling thoughts out of her mind and tried to focus on the data entry. She’d had nothing but good performance reviews so far, and she intended to keep it that way. If she wanted a career as a forensic investigator, she needed a good reference from her internship. Yet sometimes she worried she wouldn’t even make it through college, let alone find a good job. Interviews terrified her. She was sure the only reason she’d landed this position was because Briggs had been a military investigator at Fort Carson and had felt a kinship with Taylor when he learned her mother had been stationed there.

As soon as she finished entering the data, her brain spun back to the dead men. She had to figure this out. But how could she investigate something that might have happened two decades ago, if she was afraid of talking to people? And afraid of getting hurt? She would have to find the courage somewhere.

After work, Taylor entered her apartment and headed straight for the fish. The coffin-sized glass tank occupied the space where a dining table should have been, but she didn’t mind. “Hey, kids, I’m home.” The silliness of her daily greeting made her smile. She tapped food flakes into the water and watched the little beauties gulp them down. The clownfish were her favorites—she related to their shyness—but the Mandarin was the most stunning, with its wavy turquoise and orange patterns. As she watched them swim around, the tension of her long workday melted off. The long shifts three days a week left her free to take classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but they wiped her out.

Hungry, she put a bag of popcorn in the microwave—a dinner she could eat in front of her laptop—then checked her messages. An email from her dentist, reminding her of an appointment, and two texts from a classmate who wanted her notes from a microbiology class. How pathetic was her social life? Her best friend had dropped out of college to take care of her sick mother, so Taylor didn’t hear from her much anymore. She texted Jonie just to let her know she was thinking about her, then set her phone aside. She had an Instagram account, but didn’t use it unless she took a picture of something really interesting. But pictures of dead people didn’t go over that well with her few followers.

Eager to discover everything she could about the accident victims, Taylor opened Facebook in two tabs and keyed each of their names into a search field. Adrian Warsaw’s profile came up quickly with no other exact name matches, but Logan Hurtz didn’t have a page, at least not under his real name. Adrian’s profile listed his birthplace as Colorado Springs, the town sixty miles south of Denver near Fort Carson, where she’d lived as a child. Adrian had attended community college in Aurora, then lived in Denver.

His collection of photos stood out, and fire was a dominant theme. Campfires, candle flames, even a few images of forests burning, but few pictures with people. A loner pyromaniac? Had he ever started a fire? Taylor opened the Denver newspaper website and keyed Adrian’s name into the search field. He’d been a
person of interest
in connection with a fire at an abandoned factory. Was that why someone might want him dead?

What about Logan Hurtz? The police report had listed him as a volunteer firefighter. It seemed weird that he and Adrian had a common interest that was potentially dangerous. Taylor keyed Logan’s name into Google, then plowed through several pages of sites that linked to an older businessman with the same name who’d started a windmill company. About to give up, she spotted a headline at the bottom of the page:
Obstetrics Clinic Hosts 20-year Reunion
. She clicked through to the website and found a year-old story by the Colorado Springs newspaper. The clinic, an off-base extension of the Fort Carson Community Hospital, had thrown a party for people who’d been brought into the world by staff doctors in the past twenty years. Logan Hurtz had attended and been singled out for being the oldest of the birth babies.

Taylor glanced at the time: 4:45 p.m. The facility might still be open. She keyed in the number but didn’t press the dial icon. What would she say? Voice trembling, she practiced her introduction a few times. The questions would be the hardest. She wrote out several in longhand, then practiced asking them. Finally, she popped in her earpiece and made the call.

A tired-sounding woman answered on the fifth ring. “Carson Obstetrics Clinic.”

“Hello. This is Taylor Lopez from the Denver Medical Examiner’s Office.” She had that part down pat. The woman was silent, so Taylor blurted out her opening line. “Logan Hurtz, one of your birth babies, died in an accident a few weeks ago.”

A long pause. “I’m sorry to hear that.” The voice sounded weak and soft, like an older woman.

“Adrian Warsaw drowned in a pool early this morning. I think he might have been a clinic baby too.”

A strange sound escaped the receptionist’s throat. “Why are you calling here?” She sounded distressed.

Taylor gulped in air.
Just say it.
“Both men had genital abnormalities. Do you know anything about it? Or who I should talk to?”

A longer hesitation this time. “That information is confidential, and I’m not at liberty to discuss patients.”

“Can you tell me if Adrian Warsaw was one of the clinic doctor’s deliveries?”

“Technically no, I can’t.”

That meant he probably was, and the receptionist wanted her to know.

“How long have you worked at the clinic?” The question popped out of Taylor’s mouth, surprising her.

“Twenty-three years. But you should forget what you think you know about Logan and Adrian.” The woman ended the call.

Taylor’s pulse quickened. Was that a warning? The receptionist had been at the clinic the year Adrian and Logan were born, and she knew something about their condition. Feeling shaky, Taylor paced in front of the fish tank, thinking everything through. Logan and Adrian’s mothers had both been patients at Carson Obstetrics, where they’d received prenatal care around the same time. Then they’d both given birth to intersex babies. Taylor’s mother had been stationed at Fort Carson during her pregnancy, and she’d started labor in the military hospital. She had probably been a patient at Carson Obstetrics that year too.

A startling thought hit her brain.
How many more were there?
Taylor knew she was one of them—whatever they were. Two clinic babies from 1996 were dead. A chill ran up her spine. Was she in danger?

She ran to the end of the hall. On the closet floor sat a white plastic tub that contained everything she had left of her mother. Taylor pulled it out and dug straight to the bottom for the bundle of paper, trying to ignore the soft fabric of her mother’s favorite scarf and the scent of vanilla wafting from her jewelry box.
Please let there be something!
A receipt, a note, or maybe the doctor’s name was on her birth certificate. She would check that next.

Taylor scanned the military papers first, but nothing medical surfaced. Her mother’s high school track-and-field awards made Taylor smile, but she pushed them aside. A few handwritten letters from her father were also in here somewhere. He’d sent them when her mother had been overseas during the Gulf War. Or so she’d been told. Her dad had disappeared when she was four, and her mother had never talked about him. She’d never used the word
died
, so Taylor sensed he was still out there somewhere. Some day, she would take the time to find him, if only to ask him why he’d abandoned her. Right now, it didn’t matter.

She found the stash of letters inside a folder, remembering that she’d tucked them there for safekeeping. The first one was brief, written on lined paper, like she’d used in grade school before they got laptops in the classroom.
I love you… I miss you… I’m keeping the bed warm
. Taylor’s cheeks flushed, and she flipped to the next letter. They’d all been written before she was born.
No help.
That was her mother’s expression, and she’d subconsciously started using it soon after her death. Along with a few other choice phrases. It was a way of keeping her close.

Pushing to her feet, Taylor reached for the small metal safe on the top shelf. The code, made up of her favorite numbers, three and seven, was similar to her password for everything she did online. Keep it simple was her motto. Inside the safe was her birth certificate, high school diploma, social security card, pearl earrings that had belonged to her mother, and a hundred dollars she kept for emergencies.

Taylor scanned the birth certificate, not finding the doctor’s name. She looked again more slowly. There it was, near the bottom, in the middle box. But what the heck did it say? The first two letters of the first name were CH, and the rest was a squiggle. Charles? Chuck? There weren’t many options. The last name started with an M, then the signature shot out in a dramatic line. No help at all.
Damn.

Maybe she would skip her morning classes and drive down to Fort Carson tomorrow and talk to the receptionist in person. Show the woman the birth certificate and see if she recognized the obstetrician’s name—then find the doctor and talk to him. What if he was retired now? That would make it more challenging, but she’d try anyway. She also needed to track down Logan and Adrian’s birth certificates. But how? From their parents?

The thought made her cringe. This was really out of her comfort zone. But talking to grieving people would be a big part of her internship, so she had to get used to it. She closed the safe, keeping the birth certificate in hand, and pushed the plastic tub back into the closet. “Later, Mom,” she whispered, closing the door. Respect for the dead was a military motto, and she’d learned it young. Now that she worked with corpses all day, it was ingrained. Or maybe her acceptance of death had compelled her into the morgue as an intern.
Whatever.
She had to start a load of laundry, eat some protein, and write a paper for her sociology class.