Want To Play (Monkeewrench)

Halloran drained his glass and refilled it. ‘Probably. Everyone else is.’

Bonar was silent for a moment, and then started to chuckle. The Dewar’s was working.

By the time Halloran’s cell phone chirped Ralph was a bloody memory on chipped white dishes and the kitchen was trashed. ‘Here we go,’ he said, flipping open the phone, wishing he’d had a little less to drink, trying to remember all the questions he’d wanted to ask the doctor. ‘Hello?’

A man’s cultured voice soared through space and into his ear, slow and rich with southern heat. ‘Good evening. Dr LeRoux, returning the call of Sheriff Michael Halloran.’

Good evening. Jesus, did people actually talk like that? He didn’t know what it was – the accent, maybe – but something about talking to southerners always made Halloran feel like a country rube, a farmer’s son, which he was; and an uneducated fool, which he was not.

‘This is Mike Halloran. Thank you for returning my call, Dr LeRoux. If you’ll hang up, sir, I’ll call you right back on my dime.’

‘As you wish.’ There was an abrupt click.

Halloran folded up the cellular and went for the phone on the wall.

‘What’s he sound like?’ Bonar asked.

‘Like Colonel Sanders with an attitude. Hello, Dr LeRoux. Mike Halloran again. I’m the sheriff of Kingsford County up here in Wisconsin, and I’m trying to locate the heir of some patients you tended to years ago –’

‘Martin and Emily Bradford,’ South interrupted North. ‘My wife told me.’

‘That was over thirty years ago, Doctor. You remember them?’

‘Vividly.’

Halloran waited a moment for him to volunteer more information, but there was only silence on the line. ‘You have an impressive memory, sir. You must have had hundreds of patients since then –’

‘I don’t talk about my patients, Sheriff, no matter how long it has been since I’ve treated them. As a law enforcement officer, you should know that.’

‘The Bradfords died earlier this week, Doctor. Confidentiality no longer applies. I’ll be happy to fax you copies of the death certificates, but I was hoping you’d be willing to take my word and save us some time.’

The doctor’s sigh traveled over the wires. ‘What precisely did you need to know, Sheriff?’

‘We understand there was a child.’

‘Yes.’ Something new in the voice. Sadness? Regret?

‘We’re trying to locate that child.’ Halloran glanced at Bonar, then punched on the speakerphone.

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, Sheriff.’ The doctor’s drawl filled the kitchen. ‘I delivered the child, I treated Mrs Bradford and the child after the birth, and then I never saw them again. Or heard from them.’

Halloran’s shoulders slumped in disappointment. ‘Doctor, we’re at a dead end here. Your county’s birth certificate was never completed. No name, no sex. We don’t even know if it was a girl or a boy.’

‘Neither do I.’

Halloran was stunned into silence. ‘Excuse me?’

‘The child was a hermaphrodite, Sheriff. And unless someone intervened on behalf of that poor creature, I doubt that he or she knows its own gender to this day. I tried to get Social Services involved down here immediately after the birth, and I have always suspected that those good intentions were responsible for the Bradfords’ sudden disappearance from the Atlanta area.’

‘Hermaphrodite,’ Halloran repeated numbly, exchanging a glance with Bonar, who looked positively stupefied.

Doctor LeRoux sighed impatiently. ‘Asexual, or more precisely, duality of gender. There are variations of physical manifestation within certain parameters. In the case of the Bradford baby, testes and penis were partially internalized but nonetheless complete. The vaginal configuration was present but deformed, and whether or not the ovaries were functional was indeterminate.’

‘My God.’

The doctor went on, warming to his subject. ‘It’s a rare occurrence – I can’t remember the statistics off hand – but even that long ago, it didn’t have to be a lifelong tragedy. When the genitalia and internal organs of both sexes are present, as they were in the Bradford baby, the parents simply choose the gender of their child based on the physical viability of the organs. The surgery to implement that choice is really quite simple.’

‘And which did the Bradfords choose?’ Halloran asked, and the doctor snapped back immediately.

‘They chose a living hell for their child, and for that, I hope they now find themselves in the same location.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Those . . . people,’ the doctor sputtered, ‘called their own child – and I’m quoting here, because I will never forget the phrase they used – “an offense to the eye of God. An abomination.” They believed its birth was divine punishment for some imagined sin, and that to interfere would somehow compound the sin and . . .’ He stopped and took an audible breath. ‘At any rate, in the short time they were under my care, the parents chose neither name nor gender for their child, and I tell you, Sheriff, even all these years later, my thoughts are haunted by what that child’s life must have been like. Can you imagine? They wouldn’t even give it a name . . .’

Someone in the background was talking urgently to the doctor, his wife, probably, but Halloran couldn’t make out the words. ‘Is there something wrong, Doctor?’ He heard a dark chuckle.

‘Atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure, a slight valve defect. At my age any number of things are wrong, Sheriff, and my wife worries about all of them. Tell me one thing, if you will, before we close this conversation.’

‘Anything I can, Doctor.’

‘In my part of the country, it is not generally within the purview of law enforcement to track down missing heirs. There is a crime involved, is there not?’

Halloran looked at Bonar, saw him nod. ‘Homicide.’

‘Really.’

‘The Bradfords – actually they called themselves the Kleinfeldts while they lived here – were murdered early Monday morning.’ And then, because the doctor had been forthcoming, and much more human than Halloran had expected, he gave him what he knew he’d want to hear. ‘They were shot to death in church, while they were praying.’

‘Ah.’ It was more of a breath than a word, and there was the sound of satisfaction in it. ‘I see. Thank you, Sheriff Halloran. Thank you very kindly for that information.’

The disconnect was loud on the speaker.

Halloran went over to the table and sat down with Bonar. Neither one of them said anything for a minute, then Bonar leaned back in his chair, tugging his belt away from his belly. ‘I got an idea,’ he said. ‘What say we just close this thing down and say the Kleinfeldts died from natural causes.’

21

Magozzi had never been in a war zone, but figured it couldn’t look this bad or no one would have stayed to fight the damn thing.

The access road to the riverboat landing was clogged with emergency vehicles, news vans, and an amazing array of upscale SUVs and sleek sedans, some of them abandoned with doors open and engines running. News helicopters hovered overhead, sweeping the ground below with their big floods, rotors beating the cold night air with the rhythmic whomp of a war movie soundtrack.

There were people everywhere: uniforms, plainclothes, crime scene, and a lot of tense-looking civilians milling about, the more determined ones barging through the brush on either side of the vehicle checkpoint to get to the landing.

Magozzi maneuvered the Ford through the maze of people and vehicles and stopped at the booth Chilton’s men had set up. Through the windshield he saw the MPD uniforms and Red Chilton’s crew fighting a losing battle as they tried to keep civilians and the media out of the parking lot. The barriers had kept the news vans from driving in, but reporters and cameramen with handhelds were all over the place, shouting into their mikes to be heard over one another as they broadcast live back to their stations, interrupting regular programming for a special