Anonymous Rex (34 page)

Flattery will get her everywhere; this helps to soften me up. “I’m sure I would have. Go on.”

“It took some time to get Donovan over the concept of marriage, but once he warmed to the subject he really went at it with gusto. You know, planning our lives together, our futures … We had a place in the West Eighties, Donovan was still working for Raymond, I was occupied with the Council seat I’d won with his help, and we were what half the world would consider the perfect couple and the other half would consider the perfect Yuppie scum. Either way, we were happy. There was just the one little problem …”

“Kids.”

“Yeah. Kids.” Jaycee tucks her long, brown legs beneath her body and slumps against a pillow, propping her tail along the side of the sofa. I remain rigid against the far armrest. “I wanted them, Donovan wanted them, but with our two different races … We could have adopted, I guess. I know there are enough egg donors in this world, but we wanted something we could call our own. Is that selfish? Donovan mentioned it once at work, I think, and Raymond put us in touch with Dr. Vallardo.

“We were an early case for him, actually. He’d been messing around with birds, some monitor lizards, frogs, snakes, but he’d only had a few dino patients before us. Things were still clandestine in his lab, and he had us come to the medical center at all hours of the night for tests and treatments. I still remember this one horrendous stew of chalk and zinc I had to suck down; even today, I can feel it rubbing against my tonsils.”

“So you were guinea pigs,” I say.

“We knew it going in. But if it was going to give us the chance to be parents, we would have gladly been boll weevils if that’s what it took.

“A month went by, six months, a year, no luck. I kept donating my eggs, Donovan kept donating his seed, Dr. Vallardo kept mixing them
together, toggling whatever genetic switches he had to toggle to get tab A to fit into slot B, but nothing ever came of it.”

I shrug. “It happens all the time.”

“Sure, but it doesn’t make it any easier. It hit Donovan worse than it did me. He became despondent. Donovan was good at that, switching his happiness on and off. Most of his down times weren’t long, and I’d gotten used to trudging through the doldrums along with him, the long days spent asleep, the somber mood music … but this one dragged on and on for weeks. He was sluggish, at home, at work, in bed.… The weeks turned into months, and soon enough I started noticing that he was avoiding things. Avoiding me.”

“How?”

“Take the wedding. Half a year away, and Donovan, who’d been planning this event like it was the invasion at Normandy, didn’t seem as … intense as he once was. It was like he was questioning things. Not me, not my motives, but himself.

“It was only a few weeks later that I realized he’d been sleeping with Judith McBride.”

“Detective service?” I ask.

“Common sense,” she replies. “It had been there all along, but I just hadn’t bothered to see it.” Sounds familiar. “In fact, I’d had my so-called friends—a wolf pack of society bitches who spent their time crooning over their fake human nails and new knitted hairdos—just about dropping it in my lap for over a month.

“ ‘Saw Judith and Donovan over lunch today,’ one would tell me. ‘Had a marvelous time.’ And I would smile and nod and go through the motions of conversation, assuming that she’d seen them as employer and employee, negotiating perhaps a business deal.

“Well, I figured it out eventually, and can you blame me for being crushed? Five years of my life down the tubes, and all because of some withered old bag who didn’t have anything better to do with her time than take advantage of an emotionally distraught Raptor.”

I ask her if she said anything to Donovan, confronted him with her suspicions, and she shakes her head. “I meant to. Time and time again, I’d approach him, ask him to talk, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was like, if I didn’t say it …”

“Maybe it wasn’t true,” I finish.

“Exactly. So I sat in the house, sat in Council meetings, sat in restaurants, kept my mouth shut, and moped around just about as much as Donovan.”

“And then?” I’m getting wrapped up in the story, despite that high level of resentment I’m trying to maintain, the narration weakening my resolve.

Jaycee glances around my darkened apartment. “Do you have any herbs?” she asks, moistening her lips with a flick of that luscious tongue.

“Fresh out. And if I’m not chewing, nobody is. What I wanna know is where does your little costume act come in?”

“I’m getting there,” says Jaycee. “I was ready to break it off with Donovan, move out of the apartment, go on with my life. If not forgive, at least forget. And then we had an emergency Council meeting.”

“I’m familiar with them.”

“This one was about Raymond and his increasingly open relationships with human women. There was some concern among the group and, I admit, I was one of the most vocal. Raymond had been playing it up around town with a few of his secretaries, some acquaintances, even a professional or two from a popular human escort service, and the whole thing was just … wrong. Meanwhile, the Council was looking for a way to catch him in the act so they could levy some fines—and we’re talking heavy. Forty, fifty million bucks in what amounted to extortion. I didn’t know who to be more disgusted with—Raymond or the Council.

“Only question was how to catch him in the act. It was decided that we needed someone on the inside. Someone who could make him slip up and let us be there to get the physical evidence.”

“Entrapment,” I say.

She’s about to correct me, then stops, nods. “Yes, entrapment.”

“So that’s when Jaycee Holden became Sarah Archer,” I say, beginning to piece it all together.

“Very good, detective. And now you move into our bonus round.”

Now that I think about it, certain elements of my investigation are coming together, making a little more sense. It’s amazing I didn’t see it all before, but it’s like working a maze from finish to start—the
twists and turns are there, but you can’t see ’em until they’ve already passed you by.

“That’s how you disappeared so easily,” I say. “You had Council help.”

“I had minimal Council help,” Jaycee amends, “but they did manage to pull a few strings. Only two of the other Council members knew that I was the one … switching over, as it were. They thought I had disappeared, just like everyone else.”

“But a simple costume switch wasn’t enough, was it?” I say, thinking back to Officer Tuttle, the nice policeman who let me out of that nasty speeding ticket on the 405 that I so richly deserved. “You had to get rid of your scent glands, too.”

Jaycee fingers the small scar on the side of her neck. A light, ragged river of skin tissue, it is barely visible on her ridged hide. “That was the hardest part for me,” she admits. “I had a really kick-ass smell.” She tries to grin, a wan, melancholy smile, and for the first time in more than an hour I find myself being drawn toward her again rather than repulsed by what I had considered her betrayal.

“Honey and gumdrops,” I guess. “Light, airy.”

“Jasmine,” she says. “Sharp. I could walk into a florist’s and you’d never find me. At least, not with your nose. But my desire for revenge was stronger than my desire to retain my scent, so we had our Diplodod representative extract my glands for the undercover work. He was a physician, and we had a little midnight rendezvous in his office, just him, me, a scalpel, and a lot of laughing gas.”

“Can they be replaced?” I ask. “I might like to smell you sometime.”

She shakes her head. “He kept them suffused with blood and whatever other vitamins they needed for as long as he could, but the tissues died out a few months into it. We didn’t know how long my … seduction of Raymond would take. No one thought the whole affair would go on this long. He suggested mixing me up a chemical patch that could replicate the dino odor nicely, but I’ve … I’ve smelled them before. They say you can’t tell the difference. What they say is wrong. It’s metallic. Synthetic. And I don’t like it in the least.

“So I was worried about my scent glands, yes, but the thought of
bringing down Raymond, who I guess was pretty much the pawn in all this, was too tempting. Because if it brought down Raymond, it brought down Judith, too, and I couldn’t wait to see her suffer like I had suffered. Was that wrong of me, Vincent, to want Judith McBride to suffer? Are those feelings wrong? I like to think I did the moral thing. Eye for an eye, man for a man.”

I shake, I nod, I shrug—I’ve felt those pangs before, given birth to my own revenge fantasies, so I can’t deny her those emotions. “And the singing? The gig out here?”

“True, every word of it. Here I am, my scent removed, my guise firmly in place, my past life a fabrication. We faked a place of birth, a few jobs, everything clean and neat, but when you can’t come through with the qualifications … I couldn’t type, couldn’t take dictation, couldn’t even use a computer.” She holds up her fingers, wiggles them around. “Still can’t. Pretty useless, I guess. Most of my professional life has been spent messing around in the swamp pits of dino politics, so there certainly wasn’t a place for me in the human world.”

“But you had your voice,” I point out.

“That I did. I had my voice, and, more important, I had that fake body, and I had that fake face. And I gotta admit, it was damn good. We’d done a check of Raymond McBride’s likes and dislikes before we guised me up—the goal was to present him with a willing partner who was his ideal human female. It just so happened that it worked in a nightclub setting, too.

“So there I am at this charity event that I’ve gotten my agent to take me to, and just before I’m about to be introduced to Raymond as Sarah Archer, I get cold feet. Nerves, tension, I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly decided I couldn’t do it.

“I was all ready to tell my agent that I wanted to get the hell out of there when I heard a commotion from the kitchen. Bored with the conversation—I think we were babbling on about some opera or another—I wandered in to see what the fuss was about, and found Judith McBride and my Donovan spread out across the preparation counter, thigh-deep in salmon platters, kissing, groping, fondling each other.” Sarah—damn it, Jaycee!—leans her head back and stares at the ceiling. I think she’s chuckling.

“You okay?” I ask. “We can take a break.”

“Please,” says Jaycee. “I’ve had a long time to get over it. Where was I? Right, they’re slobbering all over the kitchen counter and each other, and I let out a little gasp.

“Judith looks up and says, ‘Do you mind?’ No remorse, no guilt, no sense of chagrin at being caught. And that cold, eight-ball blackness in her eyes, that glare the bitch gave me … For a moment I thought I caught a glimpse of recognition in her eyes, but then I realized that this was how Judith acted to everyone. If only for that reason, she needed to be punished—if not for me, then for the countless others whose lives she’d made miserable. Well, my resolve was strengthened then and there, and I stared Judith down, then shot my own glance back at Donovan. At least he looked a tad embarrassed at the situation.

“ ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves,’ I said to them. ‘This is hardly sanitary.’ And then I took my leave. Walked out of the kitchen, into the living room, had my agent introduce me to Raymond, and the rest is history.”

“He fell for you quickly,” I say.

“And hard. Natural charm, of course, but the guise didn’t hurt, either.”

“And then?”

“Then what?” she says, shrugging. “You know the rest—Donovan came out to the left coast a few weeks later, Raymond and I had our affair, I let the Council members in on when and where to instruct the detective agency to take pictures. You should have seen the trouble I went through to get Raymond to leave the blinds open when we had sex—I had to convince him that I was an exhibitionist, that it added something special with the windows uncovered. That got him moving …”

I say, “So the Council got their pictures, you got your revenge. Why didn’t you break it off?”

“I was going to,” says Jaycee, and once again I can sense her lachrymal glands preparing to spray their saltwater jets. “And then … then he died.”

“He was killed,” I clarify.

She nods, begins to tear up, and I find myself pulling her closer, into me, against my body, soothing her with long, full strokes across
her back. I need to ask her about the murder, to ask her what she knows, what she thinks, what she suspects, but for now my foolish emotions are running things once again. “You loved him?” I ask.

“No,” she sniffles. “I loved Donovan. But Raymond was a kind man, he was charming, he was intelligent. He didn’t deserve … what I did.”

“Setting him up?”

After a moment, Sarah nods, off and running on her crying fit once more. “And that’s all,” she says once she’s regained control. “Since then, I’ve been too tired to make the change back to Jaycee. For that matter, there’s no reason I should. With Donovan dead, I don’t have anyone left for me in the dino world. I figured maybe I’d stay on as Sarah, see what I could make of myself as a human. I sure as heck screwed up as a dinosaur …”

“And that’s everything?” I ask, curious why she left out what I consider to be a crucial piece to this puzzle.

“Everything.”

“What about Vallardo?”

“What about him? I told you, Donovan and I stopped going after a few years.” But Jaycee, who’s managed a great deal of eye contact throughout her story, doesn’t turn those baby browns to look at me when she says this, and I know it’s a point I can press.

“But you’ve seen him since,” I say. “Come on, Jaycee, no more hiding.”

“Maybe at parties or something, but I don’t know why you’d think I’ve seen—”

“The letter,” I say plainly, and this quiets her up. “The letter that came to your apartment the night we met, the one that sent you into catatonia. It was from Vallardo, wasn’t it?”

She doesn’t try to deny it, nor to stall any longer. “How’d you know?” she asks me.

“Same way you knew without even having to pick the thing up,” I say. “The handwriting. Your name was scrawled all over the envelope. When I went to see Vallardo the next day, I noticed that he had a palsy in his left hand, yet he still used it for his daily functions. Didn’t put the two together until a little bit ago. So you want to tell me why you wanted to have a kid with Raymond McBride?”