The Gender Experiment: (A Thriller) Read online

  Novels by L.J. Sellers

  Detective Jackson Mysteries

  The Sex Club

  Secrets to Die For

  Thrilled to Death

  Passions of the Dead

  Dying for Justice

  Liars, Cheaters & Thieves

  Rules of Crime

  Crimes of Memory

  Deadly Bonds

  Wrongful Death

  Death Deserved

  Agent Dallas Thrillers

  The Trigger

  The Target

  The Trap

  Standalone Thrillers

  The Gender Experiment

  Point of Control

  The Baby Thief

  The Gauntlet Assassin

  The Lethal Effect

  THE GENDER EXPERIMENT

  Copyright © 2016 by L.J. Sellers

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual people, locations, or events is coincidental or fictionalized.

  All rights reserved. Except for text references by reviewers, the reproduction of this work in any form is forbidden without permission from the author.

  Cover art by Gwen Thomsen Rhoads

  ISBN: 978-0-9840086-3-6

  Published in the USA by Spellbinder Press

  Contents

  Novels by L.J. Sellers

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1 • Chapter 2

  Chapter 3 • Chapter 4

  Chapter 5 • Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 • Chapter 8

  Chapter 9 • Chapter 10

  Chapter 11 • Chapter 12

  Chapter 13 • Chapter 14

  Chapter 15 • Chapter 16

  Chapter 17 • Chapter 18

  Chapter 19 • Chapter 20

  Chapter 21 • Chapter 22

  Chapter 23 • Chapter 24

  Chapter 25 • Chapter 26

  Chapter 27 • Chapter 28

  Chapter 29 • Chapter 30

  Chapter 31 • Chapter 32

  Chapter 33 • Chapter 34

  Chapter 35 • Chapter 36

  Chapter 37 • Chapter 38

  Chapter 39 • Chapter 40

  Chapter 41 • Chapter 42

  Chapter 43 • Chapter 44

  Chapter 45 • Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Point of Control

  Chapter 1

  Monday, Oct. 10, 10:45 a.m., Denver, Colorado

  The body was young and undamaged, except for the waterlogged skin.

  “Peaceful journey,” Taylor Lopez whispered, pulling the white plastic sheet over him. She’d taken a quick peek to make sure the corpse matched the name and age on the paperwork: Adrian Warsaw, age 21.

  “Can I go now?” The transport driver shivered in the cold autumn air. The blue sky and bright sun mocked the dark nature of their behind-the-morgue exchange.

  “Do you know what happened?” Taylor asked. As a medical-legal-death intern, or MLDI, it was her job to help investigate the cause of death for the corpses her supervisor was assigned.

  “He drowned in the pool at his apartment complex, probably early this morning.” The driver’s tone was impatient.

  The dead man had probably been up late, drinking. So sad. Why did so many of her peers act so recklessly? He’d also died alone, poor man. One of her deepest fears.

  The driver cleared his throat. Taylor didn’t know what else to ask, so she said, “We’re good.” The man hurried back to his van.

  She rolled the gurney into the lift shaft, pressed the button, and jogged upstairs to meet the corpse on the main floor of the Denver Medical Examiner’s Office. In the wide hall, she pushed the gurney onto the floor scale and logged the dead man’s weight, then rolled him into the x-ray room. Nothing unusual displayed, except a healed fracture in his right arm.

  Preliminaries completed, Taylor took a seat at the shared computer desk and began the log-in process. After she keyed in his name, the digital form asked her to choose a gender by checking one of two boxes: male and female. The choice annoyed her every time. Only once had she encountered a form—from Microsoft—that gave a third option of not specified. The transport driver had said ‘he,’ so she clicked that box and moved through the rest of the brief form. More detail would be added to his file as they investigated his death.

  Taylor stood and pushed the gurney farther down the hall, nodding at another intern who walked by. All six interns were female college students, but she was the youngest. Taylor had breezed through high school and started early at the University of Colorado with the help of a Pell Grant. When a girl in her advanced biology class had mentioned interning at the morgue, Taylor had been intrigued enough to apply. What better way to begin a career as a forensic investigator? The job was creepy at times and fascinating at others, but dealing with dead people was easier than interacting with the living.

  Before moving the corpse into the cooler to wait his turn for autopsy, Taylor stared at the young man’s face. Lean, with sharp bones and symmetrical features. Almost androgynous. Much like her own profile, except he was pale and blond compared to her dark hair and toffee-colored skin. A burning curiosity consumed her. She pushed him into an empty autopsy room, grabbed scissors from a stainless steel drawer, and cut both sides of the spandex swimsuit he still wore. When her skin made contact with his flesh, she flinched. Damn. She’d forgotten to put on latex gloves. Taylor rushed over to the counter and pulled a pair from one of the six large boxes. They went through gloves like they were paper towels.

  Taylor bagged the swimsuit in a plastic container, then turned back to Adrian’s body. His genitalia caught her attention. He had a tiny, two-inch penis. A tingle ran up her spine. Another one? Cutting quickly, she removed the still-damp tank top clinging to his chest. Small breasts, like those of a thirteen-year-old girl. Sucking in a worried breath, Taylor pushed his legs apart. Was that a vaginal opening?

  The discovery was disturbing. Not the mixed genitalia—that was familiar—but the fact that he was dead. This was the second intersex person to come into the morgue recently. Taylor tried to do the math. One in fifteen hundred people were born that way, and Denver had a population of 650,000. What were the odds? She shook her head. It didn’t matter. Two dead dual-gender people in the same city within three weeks didn’t seem like a coincidence—especially since they were about the same age. It was even strange that she’d seen both dead bodies. As an investigative intern, she didn’t participate in the autopsies like the pathology interns did. Her job was to do everything else necessary to determine the cause of death. That usually meant asking the people who knew the deceased a lot of questions.

  She couldn’t get the first intersex corpse out of her mind. Maybe he was still in the cooler. Some bodies were never claimed. Other times, the family took weeks to arrange for burial services. Taylor covered Adrian and rolled him down the hall. The thick cooler door required a hefty tug, then she pushed the gurney into the walk-in. The 45-degree air penetrated her long-sleeved sweater, but she was used to it by now. She parked the gurney next to another one—which also held a body in a metal tray—and glanced around. Metal racks against the walls held a dozen white body bags. She didn’t want to stay in the chilled room long enough to look at every tag, so she started with the first corpse that looked about the right size. The third ID she checked was Logan Hurtz. She’d never forget his name. His was the first body she’d ever seen that was like hers.

  Logan had fallen from a balcony. Even bruised and broken, the genital confusion had been obvious to her. She remembered that he didn’t really have breasts and that his
gender on the check-in sheet had been listed as male. Shivering, she changed her mind about looking at him again. Now that she knew he was still in the morgue, she felt more confident about reporting her concerns to her supervisor.

  She turned back to Adrian. Had he presented himself to the world as male? She would never know what he’d felt in his heart. Sometimes a person’s private parts didn’t match up with their self-identity. Her own body was much like theirs, but her mother had raised her as a girl simply because she’d wanted a daughter. Taylor had never related to other females, but she didn’t feel like a guy either. She belonged to both worlds. Catching frogs and getting dirty had been natural to her as a child, but she hated team sports and wasn’t competitive at all. Dresses and makeup seemed superfluous, but she loved to read, and her tastes ranged from historical mysteries to sci-fi. The past and the future, male and female, shy but aggressive about important things. Her life was a cluster of contradictions. So were her sex organs. Taylor touched herself, her own small penis tucked into soft cotton briefs. She’d been attracted to both men and women but had never acted on her impulses. Except that one time with a prostitute, who’d been amused by her body, but accommodating anyway.

  Footsteps outside the cooler made her jerk her hand away. She hurried to the door and exited into the hall. The head of the investigative unit had passed by and was walking toward his office. Should she talk to him about this? He’d hired her, and she both liked and trusted him. But what exactly were her concerns?

  That these deaths weren’t accidents? If not, that implied someone was targeting and killing young intersex people. But why? It seemed a little crazy. These could be well-disguised hate crimes. Transgender people had the highest murder—and suicide—rates in the country. But hate crimes were usually passionate, and the violence inflicted on the victims was obvious—with bullet holes or ugly bruises. If these two young people had been murdered, the killer had been careful. So it didn’t really make sense. Just let it go.

  She couldn’t. The similar age of the corpses bothered her too. Counting herself, what were the odds of three intersex people all about the same age living in Denver? A statistical anomaly. A scary thought slammed into her gut. Was she next?

  Dr. Houton, the lead pathologist, came out of the shared office across the hall. “Hey, Taylor. Who did we get this morning?” Tall, with a long neck and tiny face, Houton looked like an ostrich.

  “Adrian Warsaw, age twenty, drowned in a swimming pool.”

  “That’s a shame.” The pathologist walked toward the cooler, shaking her head.

  Taylor followed her inside.

  Dr. Houton headed for the first gurney, a corpse that had come in the night before.

  Taylor worked up her nerve. “Would you look at this new one?”

  Houton turned in the dimly lit room. “Sure. Why?”

  “He’s an intersex person, like the young man a few weeks ago.”

  The doctor scowled as she walked over. “Are you sure? That seems odd.” The pathologist peered over her glasses at the waterlogged flesh on the white sheet. With gloved hands, she probed his genital area. “An opening, but no cervix. Still, he does seem to be mixed gender. I’ll know more when I open him up.” Houton stepped back. “I only processed one similar body the whole time I worked in Los Angeles. And now, we have two here in Denver in a few weeks. That is peculiar.” She locked eyes with Taylor. “Who was the investigator on the first one?”

  “Briggs and I handled that case too.” The details came back to Taylor. “Logan Hurtz had been raised in foster care, and his foster mother refused to claim the body, calling him an abomination.”

  “It’ll be interesting to see if you find any similarities between the cases. Keep me posted.” Dr. Houton grabbed the other gurney. “Get the door please.”

  Taylor pulled the latch and stepped back to let the pathologist pass through, then followed her out. She headed upstairs to her workspace, a cubicle in a crowded office partitioned by cabinets. Only one investigator was at his desk. Taylor glanced at the time on her monitor: 12:40. Everyone was probably at lunch. Good. She could make some calls without being distracted. The first thing she wanted to determine was their birth dates and locations. A quick review of Logan Hurtz’s file revealed that he’d been born July 5, 1996 and had worked in a Walmart warehouse. He’d also been a volunteer firefighter. They hadn’t located his biological parents, and his neighbors and co-workers had referred to him as a loner.

  She called the Denver Police Department. “This is Taylor Lopez from the Medical Examiner’s office. We have a drowning victim from early this morning, Adrian Warsaw. I would like whatever information you have.” The calls got a little easier every time. Her first day on the job, she’d stammered through them, blushing and sweating.

  “Give me a minute.” The department’s clerk put her on hold for awhile, then cut back in. “I’ll send you the report, but I can tell you that he’s twenty and lived in unit five at the Meadow View Apartments where he drowned. No foul play is suspected.”

  “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.