“On the Monday after ... it happened, I was scheduled for surgery. I flew up to Montreal Sunday night, and I was at the hospital for ten days. Then I stayed at a nearby hotel a couple more weeks for outpatient checkups and to . . . get physically and psychologically settled. ”
“Slater’s death must have complicated that.”
She winced. “I didn’t know Matt was dead. My actions that evening were a matter of self-defense, pure and simple.”
Coscarelli found it interesting that Ingram referred to her lethal assault on Slater as “actions.” As for the “pure and simple”—he was pretty sure the psychologist was smart enough to know that when it came to the murder of a Brahmin lawyer, there wasn’t one single aspect of this crime that was either pure or simple.
“Matt was still alive when I ran out of the house. At least, I thought he was.”
“You’re a doctor. You didn’t check?”
“I’m not a medical doctor. And I was frightened. I ran. I’m not proud of myself. But as I said, I didn’t know Matt had . . . died. There was nothing in the news that whole weekend before I flew to Montreal, and if it made news up in Canada at some point later on, I never saw or heard about it while I was in the hospital or afterward—while I was recuperating up there. I assumed Matt was okay. I knew he wasn’t about to press charges for my attack on him. If anything, I was sure he was afraid I would be the one pressing charges against him. He beat me up quite severely. You can confirm that with Dr. Claude Brunaud.”
“And Brunaud would be—?”
“The Canadian plastic surgeon who did my vaginoplasty.” Her eyes held his.
Coscarelli had all he could do to keep himself from physically squirming, but he sure as hell was squirming on the inside. Ingram smiled, and he was certain it was at his expense.
But the smile wilted quickly. “That recuperative period—it should have been the happiest time of my life. I was finally whole. Right. Truly me. You can’t know how long I’d dreamed, prayed—”
The smile died altogether. “But I was never more depressed. Oh, my shrink at the hospital said depression wasn’t uncommon in my situation. He likened it to a new mother’s postpartum blues. But that wasn’t it. You see, I’d envisioned a life with Matt. A normal, happy, loving, lasting relationship. I thought he’d be there for me.”
“Yeah, hard to envision living happily ever after with a dead man.”
If he expected to shake her up, rile her, he wasn’t having any luck. Ingram’s expression was, if anything, sadder. “I didn’t murder Matt. He attacked me. We struggled. I had no choice but to protect myself. Save myself. It was self-defense.”
Coscarelli made no response, noting that as the silence lasted, Ingram shifted slightly in her seat. And, as he’d anticipated—or at least hoped—started talking again, a bit faster this time. A hint of agitation. So, she wasn’t as cool and composed as she’d tried to make him believe.
“The truth was too much for Matt. He told me very bluntly that he’d rather see me dead than risk its coming out. He said he would not be a national laughingstock. Interesting, don’t you think, Lieutenant Coscarelli, that he wasn’t particularly concerned about being seen as a man cheating on his wife?—just about being seen as a
deviant.
I truly believed Matt would have killed me if I hadn’t. . . stopped him. He . . . attacked me. Viciously. As if ... I would ever tell anyone.” She shook her head. “Matt couldn’t understand that I was devastated.”
“How’s that?”
“I loved him.” Her lips quivered slightly, and, for a moment or two, Coscarelli thought her well-constructed facade was going to crack. But then she pulled herself together with a resolute sigh. “It’s all in my statement, Detective. I don’t know why I’m rehashing it. I’ll only have to do it all again when Aaron gets here. ” Coscarelli tipped his chair back. “What should we talk about while we’re waiting?”
She waited several beats. “Don’t tell me you aren’t curious.” Her eyes locked with his. “Or do you know other postoperative M-to-Fs?”
“M-to-Fs?” But then he got it. “Male-to-female.”
“We don’t all look like this. I’m one of the lucky ones.
Growing up, I was often taken for a girl. Especially before I shot up to nearly six feet when I was about sixteen. I was blessed— or cursed, if you were to ask my father—with a pretty face. I’ve needed only the most minor facial reconstructive surgery and, naturally, some electrolysis. Even there, it wasn’t a long or elaborate process, as I’m very fair. I couldn’t have grown more than the most scraggly of beards even if I’d wanted to. And that was before I began hormone treatment. I’m the envy of most of my transsexual friends.”
“And Slater didn’t know or guess before that night?”
“Would you have guessed, Detective?” Ingram eyed him defiantly. “Did you ever see the film
The Crying Game
? Well, that Friday night was
The Crying Game Redux.”
There was a false ring of flippancy in her voice. “In the movie, the hero falls in lust with this exquisite woman at a bar, she takes him back to her apartment for a night of sexual bliss, and he freaks when he discovers she’s got one little added appendage he hadn’t counted on. Even so, he ultimately ends up falling in love with her.”
“In your case life didn’t imitate art, I assume.”
“Matt was horrified. Then he got angry. Very angry.”
“You might have warned him beforehand.”
She gave him a pained look. “You can’t imagine the number of times I’ve cursed myself for being so . . . blind. So . . . trusting. So damn stupid.”
Coscarelli tried to imagine himself in Slater’s place. How would he have reacted? He’d have been good and shaken, certainly. But would he have struck out at her? At
him
? Easy to
say
he’d have kept his cool.
Ingram leaned forward in her seat. “I don’t expect you to understand this, Lieutenant, but in my heart and soul, in the very fiber of my being, I was a woman before the operation. I’ve always been a woman locked in the wrong body. I fell in love with Matt almost from our first encounter, but I took it very slow. It wasn’t until I truly believed he was feeling something deeper than just lust for me, that I risked it. I deluded myself into believing he would understand. Not that he wouldn’t be taken aback at first, but that he could get beyond it.”
“You could have waited until after the surgery. Aren’t I right in thinking he wouldn’t have even known?”
A faint flush colored Lynn Ingram’s cheeks. “Thanks to Dr. Brunaud, when I am fully healed, I will have perfect female genitalia. Indistinguishable from that of a genetic female. The good doctor even assures me that I should, in time, be able to achieve orgasm.” Her tone was purely clinical.
“You still didn’t answer my question.” Coscarelli didn’t get easily distracted.
“I wanted Matt to know,” she said, a touch of fire in her voice now. “I’d spent too much of my life living—no,
suffering
— a lie. I thought I owed it to Matt for him to know the truth. To
see
the truth. I realized, too late, it was crazy, but at the time I thought it would help him be more accepting in the end. I thought he might even . . . come up to Canada with me. Hold my hand, so to speak. I knew Matt was married, but he told me he was going to leave his wife. He swore his marriage had gone sour long before we met. That I wasn’t responsible for breaking them up. He told me ... he loved me. He told me he believed we had a future. I believed him.” Her lips quivered in earnest now, tears finally arriving. “I was a fool.”
one
I was the victim, not Matt. He attacked me. I was only defending myself.
Lynn Ingram (excerpt from trial transcript)
HORIZON HOUSE PRERELEASE CENTER—INTAKE MEETING BOSTON
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2001
"I DON'T LIKE it. Ingram was trouble behind the wall and she’s gonna be even more trouble here.” Gordon Hutchins, the head CO, a stocky man fighting an ever-growing paunch, gray hair shorn military-short, caught the superintendent’s disapproving expression. She watched him pull back, not because he was afraid of her, but because he knew that open combat just made her more obstinate. At thirty-two, Natalie Price might be twenty-seven years younger than Hutch, and he might have a good thirty years on her in the system, but Price was from the new school— which included all the right credentials, even a Ph.D. in criminal justice—and as superintendent at Horizon House, she was the one who got to make the final decision.
“Ingram didn’t cause the trouble, Hutch,” Price said succinctly, to bring the message home. “And she meets all of the center’s qualifications. So, let’s just move on.”
Jack Dwyer, Price’s dark-haired, dark-eyed deputy superintendent, who most closely resembled a slightly over-the-hill street tough* wasn’t ready to “just move on.” Like Hutch, he was both older than Price—nearing forty and not enjoying it—and also had been in the system longer than she had. Unlike Hutch, he happened to enjoy butting heads with her. He’d have enjoyed doing more than that with her, but their relationship outside of work, convoluted from the get-go, had gotten especially twisted over the past year. He’d been making a concerted effort to unsnarl the tangles, but somehow, the more he tried, the more knotted they got. Jack Dwyer was not typically a patient man. On the other hand, he was used to getting his way. But then, so was Natalie Price. They just wanted different things.
“Whether she caused the trouble or not,” Jack said, zeroing in on Nat, “Ingram did need to be placed under protective custody after several assaults and at least one rape. And even though she refused to identify any of her assailants, it didn’t win her any fans among the other female inmates or the male and female staff.”
“Maybe she kept mum because they weren’t really
rapes”
Hutch muttered. “Maybe she was looking for some action.” “Maybe she was scared of getting whacked for ratting any of them out,” Sharon Johnson said heatedly. Although you
wouldn’t guess it to look at this elegant, full-bodied, cocoaskinned woman in her crisp russet Donna Karan suit, the thirty-eight-year-old job-placement counselor knew what she was talking about, having done three tough years at CCI Grafton.
Sharon was one of two ex-con staff members employed at Horizon House. The other, Akeem Ahmal, was the center’s cook, or “chef” as he preferred to be called. Nat had had to fight tooth and nail to secure those appointments, these two people being the only ex-cons employed by the Corrections Department within the confines of a prison facility.
And make no mistake, Horizon House, a tidy, renovated Victorian building that in its first incarnation at the turn of the last century served as a proper hotel for young women, might lack concrete perimeter walls and armed guard towers, and it might be located smack-dab in the middle of downtown Boston so the inmates who qualified for a placement there might get a taste of the “real world,” but there was absolutely no question that this six-story brick edifice was a prison, albeit the only corrections facility that housed male and female inmates in the same building. While the men and women had secured quarters on separate floors, and unsupervised fraternization was strictly forbidden, all of the rehab programs—alcohol or drug treatment, anger management, parenting skills, whatever—were now intentionally coed. It had taken all of Nat Price’s considerable persuasive powers to convince the commissioner and the governor that the potential benefits of this reality-based approach far exceeded the potential pitfalls, never anticipating the whopping pitfall on the table today.
“Who’s Ingram into, anyway? Men? Women? Both?” Hutch addressed the question to the group.
Sharon glared at him. “What difference does her sexual preference make?”
Hutch raised both palms in her direction. His style of apology. Although Nat had known for some time, Sharon had just recently come out of the closet to the rest of her colleagues. A couple of weeks ago, she even brought Raylene Ford, her partner of several years, to a staff picnic. The two women met up when they were incarcerated at CCI Grafton over eight years ago. They were friends inside and became lovers after they were both released. Nat first met Ray during a crisis last year at Horizon House. It was during that chaotic time that Nat also got to know her employment counselor a lot better.
“Look, Sharon, I don’t mean any disrespect,” Hutch verbalized his apology. “But I think we have a right to know who Ingram might target. Let’s face it, we can keep our boys and girls segregated except for supervised programs, but we all know, ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way—”’
“Let’s stick to the point here, folks,” Nat interrupted, wanting to guard against turning this intake meeting into a gossip session about which inmate had tried to hit on or somehow succeeded in scoring with which other inmate. Sure, it happened, but not that often; the risks—a one-way ticket back to the joint—far outweighed the benefits for most of the cons. This facility was a bridge for inmates between a walled prison and the street, placement running from six to nine months, max. Some of the inmates engaged in catch-as-catch-can flirting, but since they were doing “short time”—meaning they’d be hitting the street soon enough-— for the most part they kept their ardor in check.
“The point, as I see it,” Jack said, “is that Ingram had to serve all but four months of her three years isolated from the general population. Even given that it was no fault of her own, she needed protection. No way are we equipped to provide that kind of security here and we all know it. For her own best interests, as well as ours, I think she should finish up her six months right where she is now.”
Dr. Ross Varda cleared his throat, glancing across the brown Formica conference table at Nat Price. She gave the slightly overbearing, tall, young Freud look-alike a nod, relieved to let the visiting psychiatrist have the floor. Adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses, then smoothing down his neatly trimmed beard, the thirty-four-year-old shrink took in each of them in a clockwise turn—;Nat, then Dwyer, Hutch, and Sharon Johnson, then back to Nat again—as he spoke in flat, measured tones. “I have been meeting with Lynn twice a month throughout the duration of her incarceration at CCI Grafton. I believe this move is in Lynn’s best interest. With Superintendent Price’s approval, I will be continuing psychiatric sessions with my patient here at Horizon House, as well as overseeing her medications.”