“Have you considered a support group for homophobics?”
“Look, way I see it, men are men and women are women, and everyone should sleep in the tent he was born with. You start crossing lines, no one’s going to know where to buy their undies.”
I didn’t point out the number of metaphoric lines Slidell had just crossed.
“Cagle was also going to scan photos of the bones and send them by e-mail,” I said.
“Jesus in a fish market, everything’s e-mail these days. If you ask me, e-mail’s some kinda voodoo witchcraft.”
I heard Slidell’s chair groan under the strain of his buttocks.
“If Aiker’s out, what about the other one?”
“Different tent.”
“What?”
“The other FWS agent was female.”
“Maybe you got it wrong with the bones.”
Not bad, Skinny.
“That’s possible for the privy remains, but not for the Lancaster skeleton.”
“Why’s that?”
“Cagle sent a bone sample for DNA testing. Amelogenin came back male.”
“Here we go again. The black arts.”
I let him listen to silence for a while.
“You still there?”
“Do you want me to explain amelogenin, or do you prefer to remain in the nineteenth century?”
“Keep it short.”
“You’ve heard of DNA?”
“I’m not a total cretin.”
Questionable.
“Amelogenin is actually a locus for tooth pulp.”
“Locus?”
“A place on the DNA molecule that codes for a specific trait.”
“What the hell’s tooth pulp got to do with sex?”
“Nothing. But in females, the left side of the gene contains a small deletion of nonessential DNA, and produces a shorter product when amplified by PCR.”
“So this pulp locus shows length variation between the sexes.”
“Exactly.” I was incredulous that Slidell had grasped this so quickly. “Do you understand sex chromosomes?”
“Girls got two X’s, boys got an X and a Y. That’s what I’m saying. Nature throws the dice, you stick with the toss.”
The metaphor thickened.
“When the amelogenin region is analyzed,” I went on, “a female, having two X chromosomes, will show one band. A male, having both an X and a Y chromosome, will show two bands, one the same size as the female and one slightly larger.”
“And Cagle’s bones came up male.”
“Yes.”
“And your skull is male.”
“Probably.”
“Probably?”
“My gut feeling is yes, but there’s nothing definitive about it.”
“Genderwise.”
“Genderwise.”
“But it’s not Aiker.”
“Not if we have the right dental records.”
“But the skeleton could be.”
“Not if it goes with the privy skull.”
“And you think it does.”
