The Gender Experiment: (A Thriller) Read Free

Carson and had felt a kinship with Taylor when he learned her mother had been stationed there.
    As soon as she finished entering the data, her brain spun back to the dead men. She had to figure this out. But how could she investigate something that might have happened two decades ago, if she was afraid of talking to people? And afraid of getting hurt? She would have to find the courage somewhere.

Chapter 2
    After work, Taylor entered her apartment and headed straight for the fish. The coffin-sized glass tank occupied the space where a dining table should have been, but she didn’t mind. “Hey, kids, I’m home.” The silliness of her daily greeting made her smile. She tapped food flakes into the water and watched the little beauties gulp them down. The clownfish were her favorites—she related to their shyness—but the Mandarin was the most stunning, with its wavy turquoise and orange patterns. As she watched them swim around, the tension of her long workday melted off. The long shifts three days a week left her free to take classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but they wiped her out.
    Hungry, she put a bag of popcorn in the microwave—a dinner she could eat in front of her laptop—then checked her messages. An email from her dentist, reminding her of an appointment, and two texts from a classmate who wanted her notes from a microbiology class. How pathetic was her social life? Her best friend had dropped out of college to take care of her sick mother, so Taylor didn’t hear from her much anymore. She texted Jonie just to let her know she was thinking about her, then set her phone aside. She had an Instagram account, but didn’t use it unless she took a picture of something really interesting. But pictures of dead people didn’t go over that well with her few followers.
    Eager to discover everything she could about the accident victims, Taylor opened Facebook in two tabs and keyed each of their names into a search field. Adrian Warsaw’s profile came up quickly with no other exact name matches, but Logan Hurtz didn’t have a page, at least not under his real name. Adrian’s profile listed his birthplace as Colorado Springs, the town sixty miles south of Denver near Fort Carson, where she’d lived as a child. Adrian had attended community college in Aurora, then lived in Denver.
    His collection of photos stood out, and fire was a dominant theme. Campfires, candle flames, even a few images of forests burning, but few pictures with people. A loner pyromaniac? Had he ever started a fire? Taylor opened the Denver newspaper website and keyed Adrian’s name into the search field. He’d been a
person of interest
in connection with a fire at an abandoned factory. Was that why someone might want him dead?
    What about Logan Hurtz? The police report had listed him as a volunteer firefighter. It seemed weird that he and Adrian had a common interest that was potentially dangerous. Taylor keyed Logan’s name into Google, then plowed through several pages of sites that linked to an older businessman with the same name who’d started a windmill company. About to give up, she spotted a headline at the bottom of the page:
Obstetrics Clinic Hosts 20-year Reunion
. She clicked through to the website and found a year-old story by the Colorado Springs newspaper. The clinic, an off-base extension of the Fort Carson Community Hospital, had thrown a party for people who’d been brought into the world by staff doctors in the past twenty years. Logan Hurtz had attended and been singled out for being the oldest of the birth babies.
    Taylor glanced at the time: 4:45 p.m. The facility might still be open. She keyed in the number but didn’t press the dial icon. What would she say? Voice trembling, she practiced her introduction a few times. The questions would be the hardest. She wrote out several in longhand, then practiced asking them. Finally, she popped in her earpiece and made the call.
    A tired-sounding woman answered on the fifth