The Darker Side Page 3

  I picture myself at fourteen. Would I have been that straight arrow, if I’d been him? Embarrassment before dishonor?

  Uh-uh. Hell, no. Mom would have lost a set of underwear.

  “I understand,” I tell Rosario. “What happened then?”

  She grimaces. “Oh God. Three terrible years, that’s what happened. You have to understand, I come from a Mexican-American family. Catholic, very conservative. On the other side of that, I was a lawyer, used to rules and structure—and keeping secrets. The first thing I did was keep this between Dexter and me.”

  “Understandable.”

  “Yes. It took me some time to pry it out of him, and to be fair, it was pretty formless for Dexter. He was confused, still sorting through what was happening himself. He told me that he felt ‘weird’ sometimes, like when he looked in the mirror, he wanted to see a female body, not a male. I was scandalized. I confiscated the underwear and the bra and sent him packing to a psychologist.”

  “But things continued to change.”

  “The psychologist said that Dexter had gender dysphoria, also known as gender identity disorder. Fancy words meaning that Dexter strongly identified with the opposite sex.”

  “I’m familiar with the subject. It can range from a light obsession to a certainty the individual is the opposite sex trapped in the wrong body.”

  “That’s right. He ‘treated’ Dexter. He wanted to use psychotropics as a part of his therapy, but I forbade it. Dexter was bright, considerate, alert, kind, he was a straight-A student who’d never been in trouble with the law—why in the world would I let him be drugged?” She waves a hand. “It was all useless. Treatment boiled down to assigning the label and working with him to ‘behave against the compulsion.’ It changed nothing.”

  “When did he decide to go the route of sexual reassignment?”

  “Oh, he told me about it when he was nineteen. But I imagine he’d decided before that. He was simply trying to figure out how to do it so that it would hurt his father and I the least. Not that we made it easy, regardless.” She shakes her head. “Dillon went ballistic. We’d kept this from him for so many years, and he was enjoying the political game so much. It blindsided him in the worst way.”

  “How did Dexter handle that?”

  She smiles. “He was calm. Calm and ordered, with that quiet certainty.” She shrugs. “He’d decided and that was that. His father’s strength.”

  Yours too, I think to myself.

  “Go on.”

  “He told us that he understood this was going to be a problem for us, particularly for his father, and that his solution was that we publicly disown him. He said that it was important to him that his decision impact us as little as possible. Can you imagine?” Her voice is full of grief and amazement. “I remember, he said: ‘Dad, what you do is valuable. You help a lot of people. I don’t want you to have to give that up for me. But I’m not going to give this up for you either. This is the best compromise.’ I think that’s what got through to Dillon. That his son was willing to be publicly castigated so that his father could continue doing what he loved. I’m not saying it was smooth sailing, but…”

  “Dexter got through.”

  “Yes.” She looks at me, and all I see now is a deep, deep pain tinged with regret, maybe a little bit of self-loathing. “The details aren’t important. What’s important is that like the good political family we’d become, we did exactly what Dexter proposed. We set up a trust, and he moved out. When he began to actually live as a woman—do you know about that part of the process?”

  “Part of the procedure for getting approval for the surgery is living for a year as the sex you are becoming—something like that?”

  “Exactly like that. You don’t get to have any surgical alterations done until you’ve lived as a woman or a man for a full year. For Dexter that meant attending work dressed as a woman, going out in public, etc. It’s designed to ensure that you’re certain.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “I think so. So did Dexter, for that matter. Anyway, when that began, we gave our wonderfully perfectly worded statement. About how we still loved our son but couldn’t agree with his choices. It was a masterpiece of deception.” She pauses, searching for words. “You’re not from the South, Smoky, so I don’t think you can truly understand how deep the differences run. Don’t misunderstand, there are plenty of liberal intellectuals in Texas, but I would not put them as a majority.”

  “Sure.”

  She shakes her head. “No. You have an idea of it, perhaps a stereotype. There’s no way you can appreciate the truth of it unless you grew up there. You probably imagine tobacco-chewing rednecks with gun racks in their trucks. We have those, it’s true, but the more complex picture is of a well-educated, very intelligent, likeable individual who preaches that homosexuality is an abomination without blinking. That person will have a friend, a best friend, someone he grew up with, who thinks gays should have more rights. The two can still be friends across this divide—still be good friends.” She lifts an eyebrow. “But if the liberal friend was actually gay? Oh no. And transsexuals? Oh my. Freaks of nature, perhaps to both of the friends in that example. We’ve made great strides in the South, and I love the place. It’s my home. But it’s a creature of habit, resistant to great changes.”

  “I get the picture.”

  “Meanwhile,” Rosario continues, “as you know, Dexter still came for Christmas, but on the sly.” She pauses. “Horrible, don’t you think? Giving up our child for professional ambition?”

  I think about this. This woman deserves a real answer, not something trite and clever.

  “I think,” I say, cautious, “that anything else would have hurt Dexter. He felt that he had to do what he was doing, but he was worried about how it would affect your husband’s career. I mean, he said ‘publicly disown.’ Did he ever seem to expect that either of you would actually disown him?”

  She’s startled by this concept. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

  “So he was secure in being loved by you. I’m not saying it excuses everything, but it’s certainly not nothing, Rosario.”

  Grief is sometimes simple, but often complex. It encompasses self-doubts, what-ifs, if-onlys. It resembles regret, but is more powerful than that. It can disappear in an instant or settle in till death. I see versions of all these things run across Rosario’s features, and I’m happy for it, because it means I’ve given her a truth. Lies can hurt, but nothing moves us like truth.

  It takes her a moment to get herself under control. Still no tears.

  “So, Dexter got through that year, and that year was the end of Dexter. A son died, a daughter was reborn. Such a beautiful daughter too. Lisa blossomed, both inside and out. She’d always been a happy child, but now she seemed to glow. She was…content. Contentment is hard to come by, Smoky.”

  I notice how easily she’s slipped into using “Lisa,” “she,” and “her.” Dexter became Lisa, not just to himself, but to his mother.

  “How did the congressman adjust?”

  “He was never really comfortable with it. But I don’t want to paint a picture of him as a stereotypical intolerant, Smoky. Dillon loved Dexter and he was trying very, very hard to love Lisa. He considered any difficulty in doing so to be his failing, not Lisa’s.”

  “I’m sure Lisa saw that too.”

  Rosario nods and smiles. “She did. She was—happy. The hormones took very well, and she was wise with her breast augmentation, fitting it to her frame, not going too big or too small. She took to makeup like a fish to water, walked like a woman without any real effort, had a good sense of style. Even her voice lessons, which can be the most difficult for some, went easy for her.”

  Men have lower voices because their vocal cords elongate during puberty. This elongation is not reversible, requiring that men who transition to women learn how to pitch their voices higher.

  “Was she planning on…going all the way with it?”

  Not all
transsexuals elect to change their genitalia.

  “She hadn’t decided.”

  “Why was Lisa in Texas?” I ask. “I understand she lived here, in Virginia. Was she visiting you?”

  “She came down for her grandmother’s funeral. This was Dillon’s mother.”

  “Did you and the congressman attend the funeral?”

  “Yes. It was small and private. We’re not in the middle of a campaign right now, so there was no media. We held the service and Lisa left the next day to go back home. She was supposed to be working tomorrow.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She ran her own travel agency. A one-woman show, but she did fine. She had a very profitable niche, coming up with vacations designed for the gay, lesbian, and transgendered community.”

  “Are you aware of any enemies she had? Anyone she might have mentioned bothering her?”

  “No.” Emphatic. “I’m not brushing off the question or operating in denial, Smoky. It’s the first thing I considered, and nothing came to mind.”

  But you might be surprised, I think.

  All those late night secrets, the big and the small, the ones that come knocking when the moon goes behind a cloud—children have them too, and the parents are usually the last to know.

  “What about you or the congressman? I realize you both have enemies, all high-profile people do, but is there anything specific, anything recent or in the recent past that stands out?”

  “I wish I could say so. Dillon gets the occasional crazy letter, and I read them all before passing them on to the Secret Service. The last one like that came in six or seven months ago. Some kook threatened to kill Dillon with his mind or some nonsense. We’re not straddling any contentious issues on the moral front at the moment. Rarely are, truth be told. Avoiding that type of confrontation is how Dillon’s managed to hold a Democratic seat in Texas.”

  I search for more to ask her, but can’t think of anything at the moment.

  I choose my next words with care. “Rosario, I want you to know that I’m going to do everything I can to find the person responsible for this. I can’t promise I’ll catch them—I learned not to make promises like that a long time ago—but my team and I are very, very good. We are going to need access in order to do our jobs. I’ll bow to a certain amount of political decorum, but in the end, I’m not working for you or for your husband, I’m working for Lisa.”

  “Lisa is all that matters.”

  “I’m not trying to be insensitive. I just want to ensure I make it clear what my priorities are.”

  “Your priorities are reassuring.” She reaches into her jacket pocket and hands me a slip of paper. “All of my numbers. Contact me any time of the day or night for the smallest thing.”

  I take the paper from her. She knocks on the partition again, a signal to return us to the morgue. The sun is setting and the blood in the sky mingles with the fire-trees of fall.

  Winter is coming. Winter here is still, like death.

  “Can I ask you a question, Smoky?” Rosario says.

  “You can ask me anything you want.”

  She looks at me, and I see, finally, the tears. Not a sobbing grief, no hysteria here, just a stream from the corner of each eye, evidence of the deepest ache.

  “Do you ever get over it?”

  Truth, truth, nothing but truth, that’s what this woman deserves. I give it to her.

  “Not ever.”

  3

  “CALLIE, ALAN, AND JAMES ARE ON THEIR WAY HERE,” AD Jones tells me. “They should arrive in a few hours.”

  We’re outside the autopsy room, watching through a pane of glass as the medical examiner disassembles the body of Lisa Reid in order to help us catch her killer. It’s the final outrage. There’s no soul to an autopsy, just the reduction of a human being to their lowest common denominator: meat.

  It’s now after seven o’clock and I am beginning to feel the disconnection from home.

  “Pretty weird to be here,” I remark.

  “Yeah,” AD Jones replies. He’s silent for a moment. “My second wife and I actually talked about moving out here once.”

  “Really?”

  “You saw those trees? They have four real seasons here. White Christmas, things coming to life in the spring.” He shrugs. “I was into it. Then the marriage went south and I forgot about it.”

  He goes quiet again. This is the story of our relationship. He doles out personal information at unexpected times in little dollops. They’re often bittersweet, as now. He’d loved a woman and they’d talked about moving someplace where they could rake fallen leaves and build snowmen. Now he is here because of a corpse. Dreams evolve, not always for the better.

  “Dr. Johnston is a strange one,” I mutter, changing the subject.

  “Yeah.”

  Dr. Johnston, the ME, is in his mid-forties and he is huge. Not fat—muscular. He’s got biceps it would take both of my hands to fit around. His legs are so big he probably has to get his pants tailored. His hair is bleach blond and shaved close to his head. His face is square jawed and brutal looking, with a big nose that’s bent from past breaks and a vein that throbs away in his forehead like a living metronome, mesmerizing. He could be a professional bodybuilder or a mob knee-breaker.

  He’s all business with Lisa, putting those muscular arms to good use as he cuts through her rib cage. Even through the window, the sound is unsettling, like someone stepping on a series of Styrofoam cups. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but his lips are moving as he dictates his findings into the microphone that hangs above the table.

  “How did it go with Mrs. Reid?” AD Jones asks me.

  “Fine. Terrible.”

  I fill him in.

  “You were right. About why she asked for you.”

  “Yep.”

  Johnston is leaning forward to peer into Lisa. Looking inside her. I’ve seen much worse, but for some reason this makes me queasy.

  “What’s your take on this so far, Smoky?”

  I know what he’s asking me, what he wants. He wants me to do what I’m best at. To exercise my gift.

  I do what I do because I have an ability to understand the men I hunt. It’s not immediate, and it’s not clairvoyant, but give me enough data and a picture will form. It will have three dimensions. It will have emotions and thought processes. Above all, it will have hungers. Hungers I can almost taste inside my own mouth, dark flavors so tangible I can almost swallow them.

  I have worked with talented men, AD Jones among them, who helped me to hone this gift. I came to understand that the crux of it is my ability to do the most unnatural thing; I look closer when normal people would turn away.

  It’s like diving into oil; you can’t see through the murk while immersed, but you can feel its slickness covering you. Sometimes, I dive too deep. Sometimes, this scars me on the inside, and gives me secrets all my own.

  Five years ago I was hunting a man who murdered only young, beautiful brunette women. None of them were over twenty-five, and all of them were striking. Even in death, and even to me, as a woman, they were lush and beautiful. Made to cloud men’s minds.

  The man killing them felt the same way. He raped them and then he killed them with his fists. He beat them to death slowly, methodically with focused dedication. It’s an intimate, personal way to kill another human being.

  I stood over one of those victims and I looked. I looked and I saw him. The killer. I kept looking until I felt him. He was a man in a frenzy, an overwhelming mix of sexual desire and anger. In the end, I realized, he wanted his sex with them to shake the moon loose from the sky.

  I’d stood up, dazed, and had found to my horror that I was a little bit wet between the legs. I had dived too deeply, felt what he felt too strongly.

  I found the nearest bathroom and puked my guts out.

  Bad as that was, it helped. I knew we were looking for a man who was organized and smart, but who couldn’t control himself if the right trigger occurred.


  We caught our man, we had DNA, but because of my deep dive, we got a confession as well. Stacy Hobbs was a new agent in the LA office, and she was exactly what I needed. Twenty-four, brunette, a distraction to all the men in a thousand-foot radius.

  I had her dress as the women he killed had dressed, had her make herself up. I told her how to stand in the corner, how to stare at him, how to cock her hip and smile seductively. I told her she wasn’t to say a word.

  His name was Jasper St. James, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. I watched his fists clench. Watched as his mouth fell open, just a little. His lips actually plumped up before my eyes, like the lips of a vampire. He began to sweat and he muttered under his breath.

  “Bitch. Bitch.” Over and over.

  In prior interviews, he’d been cool as a cucumber.

  I crossed my legs, a signal to Stacy. She did what I’d told her to do: she looked right into Jasper’s eyes and licked her lips, long and slow, smacking and obscene and wet-sounding. Then she turned, abrupt, and left without a word.

  Jasper actually screamed with frustration when that happened. It was just a single screech, a high-pitched keen, as if someone had squeezed his balls with a pair of pliers. I leaned forward over the interrogation table.

  “It must have felt so so so so so so good,” I said, pitching my voice low and breathy, “to watch them realize they were going to die.”

  I remember his look. Horror and fascination and hope. Could almost hear his thoughts.

  Could she actually understand? Was it possible?

  It was, God help me, though not in the way he thought. I felt it, I understood it, but in the end, my understanding was synthetic. I was unfaithful; only Jasper’s love was pure.

  He blabbered and blathered and sweated and shook and he talked. He told me his secrets. He was happy to share, grateful to finally have an audience. I listened and nodded and pretended empathy.

  It occurred to me that Jasper had probably used false empathy to lure those women. Did this make him my victim? Our aims weren’t that much different. He wanted to destroy those women; I wanted to destroy him. The difference between us is that he deserved it.