The 8th Confession - James Patterson [69]
Cindy was both propping Yuki up and pumping her for more information when Claire arrived, dropped down in the chair next to me.
“You were right not to go away with him,” Cindy was saying to Yuki. “You can’t make decisions when your head’s been through a blender.”
The teenage waitress removed our plates, and Claire ordered coffee all around. Yuki said, “I keep thinking maybe I should have toughed it out. Just gotten into the car —”
“And if you hadn’t felt better?” Cindy asked her. “What a bloody awful weekend this would’ve been if you’d been stranded in Napa with someone who might have repulsed you.”
“I hate it when you sugarcoat things, Cindy.”
“Well, I’m not wrong, am I?”
“So let me get this straight,” Claire said, bringing herself up to date since talking to Yuki on the phone. “Doc was born with ambiguous genitalia? The doctors didn’t know for sure if he was a boy or a girl?”
Yuki nodded, used a forefinger to wick the tears out from under her eyes.
“They told his parents that if they conditioned him as a girl, he’d never know.”
“They got that wrong,” I said.
Claire said, “It’s a damned tragedy, Yuki. I’m sure the parents were under a lot of pressure to tell people the baby’s sex. Anyway, it was a theory based on practicality. Even if the chromosomes read XY, if the parts looked messed up, they did the surgery. ‘Easier to make a hole than a pole,’ they used to say. Then, they’d advise, treat the kid like a girl. Give her estrogen at adolescence, and by God, she’ll be a girl.”
“They named him Flora Jean,” Yuki sputtered. “Like you said, Claire, they took a baby boy and made him a girl! But he never felt like one, ever — because he wasn’t a girl. Oh my God. It’s so sick!”
“So he reversed the process when he was how old?” Claire asked.
“Started when he was twenty-six. After that, he went through about four or five years of hell.”
“Oh man. That poor guy,” I said.
Yuki lifted her teary eyes to mine. “I’m crazy about Doc, Lindsay. He’s sweet. He’s funny. He’s seen me as a real bitch and as a total wimp. He gets me — but how am I going to stop thinking of him as a guy who used to be a girl?”
“Aw, Yuki. Where did you leave things with him?”
“He said he’d call me over the weekend. That we’d go out to dinner next week and talk.”
“Doc cares about you,” I said. “He’s showing you how much he cares by telling you what happened. Giving you time.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Yuki choked out.
Cindy held Yuki and let her cry until Claire reached across the table and took Yuki’s hand.
“Sugar, take it easy on yourself. It seems complicated, but maybe it’s not. And nothing has to be decided right now.”
Yuki nodded, and then she started to cry again.
Chapter 92
I GOT TO the squad room before eight on Monday morning and found a thick padded envelope on my desk. The routing slip showed that St. Jude had messengered it over from the Cold Case Division and had stamped the envelope URGENT, URGENT, URGENT.
I remembered now — McCorkle had called me, and I hadn’t called him back. I ripped open the envelope, dumped out a tattered detective’s notebook, found a note from McCorkle clipped to the front cover.
“ Boxer — check this out. This subject knew the last of the nineteen eighty-two snake victims and a few of the new ones. She’s expecting your call.”
I hoped “she” was a hot lead that hadn’t gone cold over the weekend, because right now, all we had on the “snake killer” was ugly press coverage and five dead bodies twiddling their thumbs in their graves.
Conklin wasn’t in, so I killed a few minutes in the coffee room, putting milk and sugar in the last inch of coffee sludge left over from the night shift.
When I returned to my desk, my partner was still absent, and I couldn’t wait for him any longer.
I opened the notebook to where a neon-green Post-it Note stuck between the pages pointed to a twenty-three-year-old interview with a socialite, Ginny Howsam Friedman.
I knew a few things about Ginny Friedman.
She was once married to a deputy mayor in the ’80s, now deceased, and was currently married to a top cardiologist.