An abandoned warehouse where homeless people dossed down for the night, except the evening two murders took place. Gascoigne had put it down to the frigid temperature, but now Ngaire wondered if it could be due to something else. Maybe having inadvertently witnessed one murder, the local populace had moved on, not keen to see another. Perhaps they’d feared for their safety, either from an implied or direct threat.
The boarding call for Ngaire’s flight came over the loudspeaker. She joined the queue at the gate and shuffled forward until her ticket was checked and cleared. The two-minute walk along to the tarmac where the plane was sitting woke her up so that by the time she took her seat in the ATR-72, Ngaire was bright-eyed.
There was no timeline except for the last time that Sam was seen alive. No motive, unless Shannon was lying about their relationship being a loving one. Now that Bob had claimed responsibility for the Kenton and Collingwood murders, even her potential for random violence was in question.
Sam was the wrong color in a society tearing itself apart in a national race debate. His sexuality was different at a time when homosexuality was still against the law. A foreigner in a city that viewed outsiders with rampant suspicion. A prince of oddities in a community where being the same was a commodity that bought a nice job, a nice spouse, a nice wife.
Worst of all, he was these things and proud of them. Walking around in public, demanding equal treatment for all races while clothed as a woman. Beautiful. Powerful. Exotic.
No wonder someone killed him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
When Ngaire took the first steps down the staircase ramp to dismount from the plane, the air smelled wonderful. Even at the airport, with the scent of jet fuel and the dank metallic tang from hot engines, it seemed fresh and full of green. By the time the cab drove through Mosgiel, Ngaire had the window down to inhale the heady scents of trees and earth blessedly free from burning.
The taxi driver sent one long, concerned glance in her direction as she stuck her head out into the night air, then focused on driving. Ngaire supposed that in his line of work, he’d seen far worse than someone overjoyed to be breathing air.
When she reached the hotel, Ngaire thanked him profusely and wrestled her own bag out of the trunk. The room she checked-in to was small and neat, not a single thing out of place. She sat gingerly on the edge of the single bed, amused at how tentative she felt about moving the bedding out of place.
The sleepiness that had been close to overwhelming at Christchurch airport had departed, never to be seen again. With the light out, Ngaire lay back in bed, staring at the soft pattern of city lights on the ceiling. After an hour, she started to practice her relaxation techniques.
As hard as it was to fall asleep, it was harder still to awaken the following morning. When the strange alarm in the strange room woke her to a strange city, Ngaire cracked open one eyelid and had to fight not to close it and fall straight back into a doze.
Her notepad was full of jottings from the night before. Names circled, sometimes up to three times, with arrows pointing everywhere. Crazy patterns that had made perfect sense last night but were now indecipherable to her tired brain. She flipped the pages back to find the list of questions she’d put together for Dr. Sanderson. Ngaire felt a curious sense of dread at the coming meeting. When she’d phoned to make the appointment, the old surgeon had sounded concerned and confused.
Oh, well. If Ngaire stuffed it all up massively, then she would just go back and confirm that there was nothing the good doctor could tell them.
Ngaire didn’t stop to think about the second page of questions. The ones that were personal. The queries she didn’t know if she’d have the courage to ask.
By the time she headed downstairs for the complimentary breakfast, Ngaire’s stomach was churning so badly that she struggled to chew on a piece of dry toast. Get a grip, woman, she chided herself. After all, there’d been times she’d headed into far worse situations without a second thought.
The retired doctor’s home was modest but set back beyond a long driveway which wended through old trees planted in a different era. A cluster of boxwood and laurel trees spoke of a history with topiary. Now, they had the same tangled branches and random leaves as the other bushes. Near the front door was a stand of old-fashioned roses. Their large, deeply colored petals produced a heady scent in the morning sunlight.
“Come in,” Dr. Sanderson said, “We’re in the drawing room.” Ngaire followed along behind him, wondering with a nervous lurch of her stomach who else was attending the meeting. She found, to her vast relief, an empty room and recognized that the doctor had been using the royal ‘we.’
“Was it you I spoke to on the telephone?” he asked, waving Ngaire into a cane chair opposite his. “When I called the police station?”
“Yes, that was me,” Ngaire said. “I hoped that you’d be able to answer a few more questions.”
He frowned. “I told you that Sam Andie wasn’t a patient, didn’t I? If not, I’m afraid you may have had a wasted journey.”
“You also said that you knew him, anyway,” Ngaire answered. “And at the moment, there’s precious few people at our disposal who admit to that.”
“Yeah, I remember him. Sam Andie was a particularly striking young man. Or young woman, as he presented to me.”
“Was he transsexual?” Ngaire asked. “And could you talk me through what that would mean?”
Dr. Sanderson sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “In my day, we would have called him a transvestite. Sam enjoyed dressing in women’s clothing, but in every other way, he was a heterosexual male. He didn’t display any sign of dysmorphia.”
“That’s where a person’s body doesn’t fit with their gender?” Ngaire asked.
The doctor nodded. “Gender is a result of our genes and how our bodies develop, but it also appears to be a specific framing in our minds. Unfortunately, they don’t always align. Where the mind identifies strongly with one gender but the body develops in the opposite sex, then dysmorphia occurs.” He shrugged, and added, “The same thing occurs in other diseases, of course. Anorexics have a strong image in their minds of a fat person, whereas their physical body may be thin to the point of starvation.”
Ngaire chewed at her lower lip, hesitant. “We treat people with anorexia by addressing the beliefs in their minds, though,” she said. “Not by adjusting their bodies to match.”
Dr. Sanderson laughed. “If we treated anorexia by altering the patient’s bodies, then we’d have a row of corpses. The starvation is how the disease tries to address the imbalance. If we can’t change the sufferer’s minds, then they die.”
“Why don’t we treat the minds in cases of gender dysphoria?”
“One day we might,” the doctor said. “One day we might be accepting of people who have that disconnect from birth so that they don’t need to change. But that’s not going to happen in a world where we can’t even decide which bathroom people can use. Besides, we don’t really need any more ammunition for conversion therapy. I think the legacy of that is pretty clear.”
He rubbed a hand over his eyes, scratching at his eyebrows as though they itched. “In this world, surgery is an answer that gives sufferers the greatest relief. Long before homosexuality was decriminalized, the government allowed gender reassignment surgery.”
“I have a signed release from a parent for medical records,” Ngaire said, showing him the slip but being deliberately vague. “Would you be able to tell me anything you remember about Shannon Rickards. She was your patient here, wasn’t she?”
The doctor sat further back in his chair and let his gaze drift up toward the ceiling. “Yes, I could hardly forget Shannon after what happened.”
“Can you explain how you were treating her?”
“Shannon was beginning to alter his body to the one that he felt comfortable in. The first step in that is with chemical changes, increasing doses of testosterone for example. He’d begun dressing to fit his gender months
beforehand and discussed the changes with his family. At the time of the murders, he’d been living as a male for close to three months.”
Ngaire wrote down the pronoun on her pad and circled it, trying to lock it into her mind. “How much is the surgery?”
The doctor shifted in his chair, stretching his legs further out in front of him and crossing them at the ankles. “Nowadays it can run upward of $150,000 for a female to male transition.”
Ngaire winced at the sum, thinking how small the bank account balance actually was in comparison to what was needed. With her mother balking at the changes in her child, there wasn’t much chance that money would be topped up by Shannon’s parents.
“At the time, it was maybe half that, but adjusted for inflation, it would actually be a comparatively higher cost. There also wasn’t the backing of the Ministry of Health to finance operations, whereas now they fund up to four a year.”
“And your clients could afford that?” Ngaire asked.
“Well, not all of them. Otherwise, our clinic wouldn’t have gone under. The opposite transition—male to female—is a fraction of that cost, although still expensive. There’re also a lot more female to male who don’t need the full transition to be happy. Once their mind and body are in agreement, they often opt out of later surgeries.”
“How much was the treatment with prescription medication?” Ngaire asked.
“Nothing much. It was covered under standard healthcare funding, so back then there wasn’t even a token prescription cost like there is now.”
“So, Shannon may never have needed the operation?”
“Shannon wanted a double mastectomy, which is the first step of the surgical transition process. We give time and space to patients in between so they can determine if they want to go further.” He shrugged, holding up his hands, palms out. “I can’t tell you what he would have decided after that, or if he could have afforded more, even if he wanted to go ahead.”
“Does testosterone make people more aggressive?” Ngaire said, circling back to the earlier part of their conversation. “I’d heard that it can.”
“It can, or it can make people who don’t produce enough naturally, feel in balance for the first time, and therefore, more peaceful.” The doctor leaned forward in his chair and shook his head. “There is no one-fit solution, so you should stop looking for it. Shannon didn’t show any signs of aggression or experience adverse side effects from the drug.”
“Do you think Shannon was physically capable of the crime that she confessed to?” Ngaire asked.
Dr. Sanderson gave an exasperated sigh. “How could I know that? I haven’t examined the evidence, and I don’t know the pathology of the victim’s death.” He waved a hand at Ngaire. “Obviously, the police believed him capable. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have locked Shannon up for fifteen years.”
“Would Shannon have had access to your drug regime in prison?”
The doctor shook his head. “No. Until recently, these counted as ‘recreational prescriptions’ in that the person wasn’t taking them to prevent disease. It’s changed now, but back in Shannon’s day, it wouldn’t have been possible. Not even if someone went to bat for that right, and he never asked me.”
“What other services did your clinic provide?” Ngaire asked. Her stomach was playing havoc with the toast she’d managed to swallow that morning. It felt like it was being tossed back and forth with painful force. She played with the page of questions, sliding it up to see the personal ones that were written on the page underneath, then slipping it back down to cover them.
Dr. Sanderson got to his feet with a grunt and moved over to the desk in the corner of the room. While he rummaged about for something, Ngaire turned her face into a patch of sun and closed her eyes, letting it warm her skin. Her vision flooded with a pulsing dance of reds and purples. Beautiful and nonsensical.
“Here you go.”
Ngaire opened her eyes to see a brochure. It was quite hefty, featuring more than a just a summary of the services on offer. She flipped through its pages quickly, noting with relief that the information she sought was contained inside.
“Am I able to take this with me?”
“Go ahead,” Dr. Sanderson said, sitting back down. “I have other copies, and it’s not like anyone else is going to use them.”
“Thank you.” Ngaire put it away in her bag and looked back down at the questions noted on her pad. “Is there anything else you can think of that was out of the ordinary for Sam Andie or Shannon Rickards?”
The doctor shrugged and shook his head. “Almost everything I dealt with at the clinic was out of the ordinary for most people. From that group, there was nothing that struck me as different. Sam Andie was particularly attractive—probably why I remember him so well—but nothing otherwise.”
As Ngaire leaned forward to shake the doctor’s hand, her phone buzzed insistently in her pocket. “Do you mind if I take this?” she asked.
“Go ahead,” he said, grunting to rise from his chair again to leave the room. Ngaire pressed the button to answer and watched him go before responding.
“Ngaire? It’s DSS Harmond here. We’ve got a lead on the tip-off that came through to Dunedin South Police Station.”
“The person who called in that they’d seen Sam?”
“That’s the one. The policeman who took the call noted down the number, and they could reverse trace it to the address. We’ve located a new address for the tenant at that time, do you have a pen?”
Ngaire flipped to a clean page in her notebook.
“It’s 41 Westchester Street. About a twenty-minute drive away from the doctor’s residence.”
“Should I take an escort?”
“I doubt you’ll need it. The man in question is a counselor with a born-again Christian outfit, called The Sons of God. His name is Matthew Jamieson.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
An hour into the interview and even Findlay’s natural surface charm was starting to slip. Elana Collingwood’s anger had distorted and crippled her. Her mind stuttered over simple formalities, turning a sentence of welcome into one peppered with abusive curse words.
The corners of her mouth pulled down so far that her lips formed an upside-down smile. The wrinkles on her forehead were carved so deeply from an expression of anger that her resting face looked like a scowl, her brow hardened over the years into a constant frown.
If grief had lived inside Elana’s thoughts once, it had long ago been displaced. Her fury consumed every other emotion within range until there was nothing left but hate.
Mildred Kenton was the opposite. When Findlay had spent time with her the day before, he’d drowned in her tears. She’d hugged him on arrival and departure and made sure that he ate while he was in her home and sent him away with half a dozen freshly baked cookies wrapped in a paper towel.
“Jessie wasn’t like they make out, these… these…” Elana broke off, pressing her lips into a thin line with such force they turned white.
Findlay would happily have supplied the word she searched for if he’d had an inkling of what it was. As far as he could tell, the coverage of her son’s death had nothing bad to say about him. In fact, more telling was that they barely had anything to say at all.
When he and Rhonda had turned up outside the properties on the day the news broke, they’d waited around outside for hours without touching base with the parents. By coincidence, or maybe as a result of the situation, the boys lived within walking distance of each other.
Neither set of parents had moved since their deaths, although George Kenton Sr. now resided in a hospital nursing home by necessity. “His brain went all doolally,” Mildred claimed before moving onto talk of brighter things.
With the two of them having recently left the date, it became quite awkward walking back and forth in tandem. When Rhonda announced that she had enough photos of the outside of the two properties and it didn’t seem likely they’d be invited in, Findlay had watched her
drive away with a sigh of relief.
Not that he’d given up on the thought of dating her. She still pressed the right buttons but over a glass of wine or a nice dinner, not watching like hawks for the opening of a door or the twitch of a curtain.
Elana’s husband had died a few years before. Although photographs of Jessie were still propped up on the mantel and mounted on the walls, Findlay noted that there didn’t seem to be a single one of Jessie’s father anywhere. Even the frame that should have contained a large family photo had white space on either side where it had been cropped down to two figures. There was a good story hiding somewhere in there, it tugged at his reporter soul. Findlay had to sternly remind himself that it wasn’t his focus and wait to hear what Elana had already tried a few times to say.
“These police and the media on the television, they keep bringing up Jessie’s poor attendance at school. They harp on about him getting a few detentions as though that’s not normal for a boy of his age.”
Findlay made a few notes on his pad. The woman hadn’t given him anything useful or new about her son in the half hour that he’d been there. He also remembered his high school years, mysteriously free of the detentions that Elana was now claiming were commonplace.
“Did Jessie like any sports?” Findlay tried. He was wearing down under the woman’s bottomless pit of repressed fury. It seemed that along with her rage, Elana had also swallowed down all her memories of her son. For all that she claimed the media was misrepresenting her boy, she’d added little information for them to add to the communal pot.
Elana shook her head, and Findlay felt the first stirrings of exasperation. Jessie seemed to be a ghost who’d only ever lived in the images on the walls.
“What would you like the world to know about your son, Jessie?” Findlay asked. “If you could let everyone know just one thing, what would that be?”
A stupid question for a stupid interview. Although his editor’s eyes had lit up at the opportunity, the man wouldn’t be happy with what Findlay was going to drag back to the press. A blank page, a missing outline, less than a day’s worth of searching through old microfiche at the library would have scored him.
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