He hung his heavy jacket in the front closet, then placed his belt clip and gun on the shelf above.
‘How dumb is this?’ Bonar had asked the first time he’d seen him do it. ‘I’m a drug-crazed burglar, okay? And here you go, leaving your piece right here in the front closet so I can pick it up on my way in and shoot you in the gut when you come stumbling down the stairs in your skivvies.’
But Emma Halloran would never permit firearms beyond the entryway of her house. Not her husband’s fifty-year-old Winchester, and certainly not her son’s department-issue 9mm. Ten years she’d been in the ground, and Halloran still couldn’t make himself walk past that front closet wearing his gun.
There was a bottle of Dewar’s in the refrigerator, a criminal offense according to Bonar, but Halloran liked it cold.
He poured healthy shots in two glasses that had once held grape jelly, then sipped out of one as he examined the contents of the freezer. He pushed aside a stack of frozen dinners and found treasure in a rectangle of butcher paper covered with frost.
‘Honey, I’m home!’ Bonar called from the front door, slamming it hard behind him. He stomped down the hall into the kitchen and dropped two grocery bags on the counter. Halloran looked skeptically at the greenery poking out of the top.
‘You brought flowers?’
‘That’s romaine lettuce, you numbnuts. You got anchovies?’
‘Are you crazy?’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Bonar started unloading the bags. ‘Never fear. Got the anchovies, got the garlic, got a sad and limp bunch of green beans here that are going to need life support . . . ’
‘I got Ralph.’
Bonar sucked in a breath and looked at him. Ralph had been the last Angus Albert Swenson had raised before he sold his farm and moved to Arizona. They’d bought the young steer together, feeding him out on corn and beer for the last two months of its life. ‘I thought we polished him off last time.’
Halloran nodded toward the white package in the sink, then handed Bonar his Dewar’s in a jelly jar. ‘I saved the tenderloin.’
‘Praise Jesus.’ Bonar clinked his glass, downed his shot, and winced. ‘Man, how many times I gotta tell you? Cold mutes the flavor. You can’t keep this stuff in the fridge, and you sure as hell shouldn’t be drinking it out of old jars with cartoons all over them. Who is this? The Martian?’
Halloran peered at the dark figure on his friend’s glass. A lot of the paint had worn away over the years, but part of the helmet was still identifiable. ‘Damn. I wanted the Martian.’
Bonar snorted as he refilled his glass, then started to rub a clove of garlic around a wooden bowl Halloran had always thought was supposed to hold fruit. ‘Nuke Ralph on defrost for about three minutes, turn the oven as high as it will go, and get me out that big cast-iron skillet.’
‘I thought we’d just grill him outside.’
‘Well, you were wrong. We’re going to sear him on high heat and then finish him in the oven. Then I’ll add wine to the skillet drippings, reduce it to a glaze, throw in some morel mushrooms, and voilà.’
Halloran rummaged in the silverware drawer for steak knives. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Of course I’m kidding. You ever try to buy morels at Jerry’s Super Valu?’
‘In the old days you would have stuck this thing on a stick and held it over a blowtorch. I wish you’d quit watching that cooking channel.’
‘Can’t help it. Those guys are the twenty-first-century clowns. Like Gallagher without the watermelon, remember him?’
‘The guy with a sledgehammer.’
‘He’s the one. God, I loved that guy. Is he dead?’
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.’