Sapphire's Place - Valerie Hope's " Music of Change "

Music of Change #4:

Fire Support

By Valerie Hope

"It has to be possible," Joshua said doggedly, trying to scrub the fatigue from his eyes with the heels of his hands. He looked in his Styrofoam cup of tepid coffee for answers, but no more were there than in the hundred times he'd looked before.

"You have to get some rest, honey," Claudette Renfro told him from the leather couch in the young doctor's office. She'd come in to bring him lunch, and possibly 'take his mind off his worries' for a minute, but Joshua was having none of it. "You haven't slept in days."

Joshua stared at the high-definition pictures he'd taken of Dr. Karl Renfro and Arturo LaPaglia, both before and after their transformations. There was very little in common between the two sets of pictures, but they were the same people. Karl Renfro had been a distinguished-looking septuagenarian with silver hair and a face that was a map of hard-earned lines and wrinkles. Karla Renfro was a buxom, seventeen-year-old Lolita with bee-stung lips and a predilection with very revealing clothes. Arturo LaPaglia had been a hatchet-faced, swarthy Mediterranean underworld figure with thinning hair and a thick moustache, hard-bitten black eyes and a seemingly permanent scowl. Anneliese LaPaglia was a round-faced, smiling teenager with flirtatious brown eyes and a thick, lustrous curtain of black curls which spilled across her heart-shaped face. The man who'd been sent to kill Dr. Renfro was now Karla's best gal-pal. The world-renowned developmental psychologist and the European assassin were out together now, shopping for boys and clothes at the local mall under the protective eyes of Heather and Jenna, the first transformees of the Music of Change and two of Dr. Renfro's most trusted aides.

"There has to be a way, Claudette," Joshua said. "The Music wouldn't have destroyed them utterly. It's a vehicle for change, yes, but not destruction."

"I know, sweetie," the chesty blonde, Dr. Renfro's wife, replied. She would know, too. She'd been one of the first to feel the healing power of the Music, being liberated from her repressed and sullen existence to the height of her own sexual freedom. Sure, some people considered her a slut on the order of a porn star, but Joshua had spoken to the woman at length about her transformation. She'd never been happier with herself.

"But you can't figure it out unless you're rested and well," she said, sounding eerily like her husband. "You're not going to do Karl any good if you keep grinding yourself down like this. You're off to a hot meal and bed, Doctor. Chop chop."

Joshua couldn't suppress a smile. "Yes, ma'am."

He rose stiffly and let Claudette lead him into the little apartment that he kept above the administrative offices of Corporate Rewards, the front they used to continue their work with the otherworldly Music, using it to reach out and help heal those lost souls in the world who would surely live in misery otherwise.

He flopped heavily on his little bed, and Claudette slithered atop him like a silken viper. Her lips tenderly stroked his, then down his neck and his chest as her long-nailed fingers expertly unfastened the buttons of his shirt. She stopped for a time to tease his navel with her soft and slick tongue, her fingers working on the fly of his khakis.

She was distracted by the young doctor's snoring. With a smile which was equal parts wanton and motherly, she went ahead and took Joshua's considerable 'endowment' between her manicured fingers anyway, licking her lips in anticipation.

Sometimes, a girl had to do what a girl had to do.

* * *

"All the technical mumbo-jumbo isn't going to help matters," Danielle Royal told Heather as they picked at the French fries on the tray between them. Around them, the hustle and noise of the mall Food Court faded into a comfortable background din. "Whether the Doc is a seventeen-year-old sexpot or a purple orangutan doesn't make any difference. Arturo LaPaglia was sent to kill Karl Renfro. Somebody had to order him to do it, and when you find that somebody you're going to figure out all the rest."

Heather slouched heavily, raking a hand through her lush blonde hair. The top of her skin-tight, low-cut Hooters uniform peeked above the bib of her faded overalls, letting Danielle know that she had just returned from waiting tables. Danielle fervently hoped her newfound friend wasn't wearing herself too thin. According to Joshua, Heather and Jenna had once been man and wife until Heather was accidentally transformed into the luscious blonde she saw before her. Ordinarily, it would have been extremely difficult for Danielle to believe, if she hadn't herself been Daniel Royal of the midtown fire department just a week earlier.

"I don't know what to do, Dani," Heather told her friend, using the nickname that only she and Jenna were allowed to use.

"You're not supposed to, sweetie," Danielle replied. "It's not your job."

"Then whose is it?" the blonde shot back, all the fire gone from her voice.

"As to that, I have an idea or two. Listen, can you make me up an invitation to Corporate Rewards? There's a... 'friend' of mine that I think could use a break."

* * *

It was an unusual name for an unusual man. Gray Kincaid stumbled tiredly into his apartment, throwing wallet, keys and holstered firearm down on the table beside the door, then threw his deadbolts and kicked off his shoes. The newest batch of recruits were a decent-looking lot, all told, but they were very green and not very attentive. Their heads were still packed full of all their academy nonsense and blissfully unaware of how the real world worked for the people who wore the badge. It was Gray's job to teach them otherwise. His job as training coordinator for the 33rd precinct wasn't exactly why he joined the force in the first place, but it served its purpose. Besides, it was probably the best he was going to get these days.

He turned on the television, not even caring what channel it was on, and then fished in the refrigerator, coming up with a canned beer and a plate of leftover Kentucky Fried. He plopped into his recliner and consigned himself to another boring, listless night of trying not to think about Joyce and figuring out reasons to keep putting the left foot in front of the right. It wasn't always as easy as it sounded.

A cold Original Recipe thigh in one hand and the changer in the other, Detective Sergeant Gray Kincaid surfed the channels, stopping briefly on PBS and A & E to see what mysteries might be on. Nothing he hadn't seen before, and he'd solved the crimes after about ten minutes in anyway. Nothing on the video shelf really caught his eye, either. Sighing, he tossed the picked bones of the thigh back onto his plate and decided to give the mail a once-over before he dug into the breast and leg.

"Junk, junk, bill, bill, junk, bill," he intoned, discarding the envelopes into the bill-basket or the waste-basket in turn. He stopped when he found a blue envelope addressed to him at his former address and forwarded. The handwriting on the envelope was a feminine, bubbly script. The I's in his last name were even dotted with little circles instead of a simple dot. Intrigued, he slit the envelope with his pinky finger and pulled out the simple, folded message and the little yellow "sticky" that was attached to it. The paper was an invitation to a place called Corporate Rewards, downtown in the middle of High Society. He'd heard about it from some brother officers - some kind of high-rent corporate retreat for executives who needed some time away from their schedules and meetings and appointments. Why in the hell would they be soliciting some old has-been training sergeant?

The little sticky-note was written in the same bubbly, 'airhead' hand that had addressed the envelope - they even used the same lavender ink-pen. It said simply, "A little gift for meritorious service. Signed, a good friend."

Gray was puzzled. He didn't know very many girls, much less many who'd know about any of his meritorious service. He'd been taken out of Homicide years ago when a perp decided to resist arrest four times with a 9mm Glock into Gray's lower intestines. And how would this same person be able to wrangle him an invitation to the hoi-palloi like this? Word at the precinct was that these invitations cost well into the five-figures to get. Maybe it was the trophy wife or trust-fund daughter of somebody he'd worked with in the past. Hard to tell. Curious, he picked up the phone and dialed the customer service number printed on the bottom of the invitation.

The receptionist picked up in mid-giggle, interrupted from another conversation. "Corporate Rewards, this is Vikki, how can I help you?"

"Hi, Vikki," Gray replied, using the girl's name straight away to keep himself from forgetting it. "My name is Sergeant Gray Kincaid. Somebody sent me an invitation to your facility and I think it's some kind of mix-up."

"Could I, like, get the invitation number?" the girl asked flightily.

"Sure," Gray said, reading it off twice to make sure she got it.

After a very quick pause - almost too quick to have been entered into a computer - she replied, "Sergeant Kincaid, that's a valid invitation in your name."

"Any idea who might have sent it to me?" he asked.

"I'm, like, not allowed to give out that information over the phone, sir," she said.

Gray's brow beetled in concentration. "I understand. There's no date on the invite, either, ma'am. When is it for?"

The girl seemed a little vexed with his supposed lack of insight. "It's at your convenience, sir. Any time you want to redeem it."

"Are you open holidays?" he asked, thinking about his upcoming long weekend. If he could make it through Friday, he'd have Dr. Martin Luther King to thank for being able to sleep a little later on Monday morning. As if he'd needed an additional excuse to like that fellow - but now there was another reason to shake the man's hand when he met him in the hereafter.

"Except Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving," the girl told him.

"Thank you, Vikki. Can I make an appointment for Monday, then?"

She giggled throatily - a very sexy sound. "No need for that, sir. Just show up. We open at nine a.m. Bring your invitation and valid I.D."

Gray hung up with a mumbled thanks, the cold chicken on his plate forgotten. He held the invitation up before his eyes and spent the rest of his evening trying to unravel the mystery of who might have sent it to him.

* * *

"That's him?" Joshua asked, looking through the security monitors at the rumpled, run-down gentleman who shuffled into the lobby of Corporate Rewards the following Monday.

"Uh-huh," Danielle said, looking at him intently. "He looks like he's aged a hundred years. God."

"Who was this guy?" Jenna asked, pouring herself a cup of coffee to go with her freshly-lit cigarette. Danielle fished one of the long Virginia Slims out of Jenna's open pack and waited for confirmation from Jenna before lighting it. Strange how Danielle, a firefighter, would have picked up a habit like smoking cigarettes. But it just seemed right, somehow, and they looked sexy as hell in her long-nailed hands and, hell - she just enjoyed hell out of it. Nobody really seemed to mind at the station house - a lot of the firefighters took the occasional smoke. And certainly nobody cared at Corporate Rewards - everybody there except Joshua seemed to smoke.

"A homicide detective," Danielle answered. "A natural born investigator. That was the guy who found Douglas Lee Witters." She referenced Kincaid's most famous case, the tracking down of a serial murderer who was stabbing and mutilating teenage boys on the west side of town. Witters had actually been a Ph.D. and had the local authorities and the FBI stumped for nearly three months before Kincaid had been brought on the case. Four weeks later, Kincaid had put the demented Dr. Witters in handcuffs and was instrumental on getting him sentenced to Death Row.

"What happened to him?" Joshua asked. "He looks beaten down."

"He was shot up pretty badly a while back, and while he was in the hospital his wife of fifteen years died. He just never really recovered," Jenna said, reading through the file they'd compiled on Kincaid to see if he was a worthy candidate for the Music. Since his wife's death Detective Sergeant Kincaid had been demoted back into training and had been in therapy nearly constantly. His medical records said he'd lost all will to go on. He wasn't suicidal, not by any stretch, but he just found no joy in life anymore. He'd fallen as far as he could fall and still keep any kind of pride at all.

"So we're clear on this," Joshua said. "He's a good candidate for the Music. We're not just doing this so that we can get him on our side and help us investigate."

"He's as worthy a candidate as I could ever think of," Danielle said. "He knew my dad. I've known Gray my whole life. They put him in that grave with his wife, Joshua, I swear. He's nothing like he used to be. If there's a way to give him back any of what he's lost, then I don't care if he helps us investigate this or not."

Joshua smiled. "That's good enough for me. Where are Dr... I mean, where are Karla and Annaliese?"

Jenna chuckled. "They needed some money and a place to stay. Heather got them both jobs with her at Hooters. She's training them today and tomorrow while I get them set up in an apartment that we can monitor."

"Why do they need an apartment?" Danielle asked.

Jenna almost cracked up. "Heather's idea. They're both very... noisy. During the late-night hours, if you get my meaning. Neither of us are getting any sleep."

Joshua straightened, trying hard not to join in the laughter - this was his mentor, his guru who was sneaking men into Heather and Jenna's house and keeping them all awake until the wee hours. He couldn't help but think that while the Doctor was enjoying his new life and body, and experiencing a well-deserved rest from responsibility and demands, that there was another part of Karl Renfro that was damned inside that prison.

"We should get started on Detective Kincaid," he announced.

* * *

After being processed quickly and efficiently, Gray was introduced to a stunning redhead named Jenna Hawthorne who allowed him to stow his valuables in the company safe - including his firearm - and then showed him into a lushly appointed anteroom where a masseur waited with a towel over one arm. Lance, the well-muscled man, was also completely deaf, which Jenna explained. Which was quite a shame, when Gray thought about it. They couldn't hear the absolutely intoxicating music that was playing softly in the room.

Gray stripped down to his skivvies and lay on the table, letting Lance work out all the aches and tension from his back, legs, arms and neck while he just kind of drifted away on the music, letting it soak into his skin like steam. His mind lost focus and acuity, but he didn't care. He thought too much anyway. It was nicer to just lay there and hum along to the atonal, soothing melodies.

A voice rose out of the music - or maybe it was just a part of the music that had transformed itself into something that Gray could understand.

"How do you feel, Gray?" the voice asked.

"Better," the policeman answered truthfully. "Relaxed."

"Happy?" the voice prompted.

"No," Gray replied. "Not that."

"Whyever not?"

Gray wasn't sure why he trusted the voice enough to say, "Because my Joycie isn't here to share it with me."

"Your wife. You must miss her terribly," the voice said with incredible compassion.

"I do," Gray said. "God, how I do."

"May I ask you a kind of personal question, Gray?"

"Shoot."

"Do you think your wife would be comfortable seeing what's happened to you since your passing?"

Gray took a while to answer. "I doubt it," he said. "She'd probably bop me on the head with the newspaper and tell me to get off my ass and make something of myself."

"So why don't you?" the voice asked.

"Because it's not about making something of myself," Gray answered.

"What is it about, then?"

"Being bopped on the head with the newspaper," Gray said. "I still do all the right things, all the things I did before. But they don't matter a damn if they're not making the world better for Joyce."

"So everything you did you did for her."

"Precisely," Gray said. "And now that she's gone, all the meaning has gone from everything I do. I don't want to live for myself, and I don't know anyone else who might be worth living for. So it leaves me basically fucked."

"That's very sad," the voice said. "Isn't there anything in your life that gives you joy?"

"Some things. I still get a charge out of figuring things out. Mysteries, puzzles."

"Anything else?" the voice pushed.

"Not really," Gray said with finality.

"I know that there's no way I could ever bring Joyce back to you," the voice said, "no matter how much I wish I could. But don't you think that there's a part of her inside you that you could find it possible to love?"

"I've looked," Gray said. "I can't find a thing."

"I have trouble believing that," the voice said.

"I failed her," Gray said, his tone betraying pain while his face didn't. "She wanted children so badly. I couldn't give them to her - something wrong with my 'plumbing.' She died wanting something I couldn't give her, and we never had the opportunity to try other, medical means of conceiving."

"So you're punishing yourself for something you couldn't help," the voice said.

"I guess you could call it that," Gray replied.

"Don't you think Joyce would want you to be happy?"

Gray tried to shrug, but Lance was working on his shoulders and couldn't make the gesture carry effectively. "I suppose so."

"What do you think it would take to find that part of Joyce that's inside you, Gray? What would have to be added or removed to your life so that you could access it?"

Gray betrayed emotion for the first time - he sobbed. Not a great, wracking sob, just a prolonged sniffle, but compared to the clinical detachment he'd shown previously it seemed like his heart was being torn in half. "I don't know. I'd have to be someone different, that's for damn sure. Someone more worthy of love than me. I can't look at this face in the mirror without thinking, 'that's the man who broke Joyce's heart.'"

"Joyce wanted children, you said," the voice said.

"More than anything in the world," Gray replied.

"Do you know what she wanted? A little boy?"

Gray smiled wistfully. "A little girl. She talked to me, late at night after we'd turned the lights out, telling me how she'd always wanted a daughter to teach to be a woman."

"What would she be like, Gray?" the voice asked.

Gray chuckled. "Smart as a whip, like her mother. Beautiful, like Joyce, too. That long shiny hair and the dancing blue eyes and the dancer's legs. That smile that could light up Chicago for a month. Joycie's laugh. As a father, I can't officially condone her being as sexy as Joyce was, but I'm sure she would have wound up being that way."

"Wouldn't she get anything from her father?" the voice prompted.

"I dunno," Gray said, suddenly embarrassed. "My sense of humor, and maybe my knack for figuring out puzzles. Maybe my hands - Joycie always said I had gorgeous hands for a man. I wouldn't have minded seeing her wearing a badge, actually. I bet she would have done her Old Man proud."

"I bet she would," Joshua said. "Form a picture of this girl in your mind, Gray. Picture her moving and talking, laughing. Bring her to life and hold on to that image as tight as you can. You're going to need her."

* * *

Gray had kept the girl tight in his mind, as the voice had told him, and had to confess that he was falling a little bit in love with the quirky, intelligent and beautiful girl. She'd somehow developed far beyond his hopes for what a daughter could have been - she was now an amalgam of what he wanted in a daughter, some of the things he'd wanted from Joyce but never received, and a lot of what Gray wished he could find in himself, with a whole lot of Playboy centerfold thrown in for spice. She was the distillation of everything that he and Joyce had ever desired, on any level. She was wonderful, almost too good to be true, but the faults she displayed were enough to make her real. Stubborn to a fault, for instance. So fiercely independent and self-reliant that it was nearly impossible to get close to her. Brutally honest, to the point where what she thought 'calling a spade a spade' was actually came across as being a total bitch sometimes. Never really satisfied, like her father. Condemnatory, like her mother.

She wasn't just in his imagination, Gray decided. She was too real for a schlub like himself to just invent. She had to be real. She had to be someone he'd met, long ago, and just had buried in his subconscious somewhere and was just surfacing now.

"No, Gray. She's as real as she can get," the voice told him. Somehow the voice now came from inside his own head, not just rising from the artery of the Music.

"How can she be?" Gray asked.

"She's real. She just doesn't exist. Existence, for her, is going to take something more. For her to actually live, exist, something else must die and cease to exist. It's the natural order of things."

"Who determines what must die so that she might live?"

"You do," the voice said.

* * *

Joshua was frantic, searching the computer and all the switches in the control booth for any loose connections, whether any of the synthesizers which they used to produce the Music of Change were malfunctioning or some old recording of the Doctor's was somehow on playback.

Everything registered normally on diagnostics, and his physical check of the equipment came up clear as well.

Joshua peered into the monitor as if the answers might be there. But there was nothing in the room that he hadn't put there by hand.

"Who the hell is he talking to?" Joshua asked himself, hand hovering over the 'abort' key on the master console.

* * *

"I don't want that kind of responsibility," Gray complained, trying to force the smiling image of the woman out of his mind. "Life and death aren't for me to decide."

"Haven't you killed before?" the voice pressed.

"Yes, I have," Gray said. "But it was self-defense. Kill them or they'd kill me."

"So you've made that decision before," the voice said. "And saved your life in the doing. So you are capable, and believe in yourself enough to make the decision if the occasion calls for it."

"Does this occasion call for it?" Gray asked.

"Look at her," the voice bade him. "Look at how she lives, moves, how she glows. Don't you think that she deserves life? Don't you think she deserves a shot?"

Gray could only lower his head, crying. "Yes."

"It's your chance, Gray," the voice told him. "You couldn't bring her into the world with Joyce. Now you can bring her into the world for Joyce. Wouldn't that make it somehow all right, heal some of the hurts you've borne for so long?"

* * *

"His psychometrics are nearly off the scale," Joshua said as Jenna came in, dragging Karla and Annaliese behind her. "He's taking control of the music from me. Dammit!"

His finger jabbed at the abort key several more times, but nothing happened. Gray Kincaid stayed in his trance, still talking to the voice that wasn't Joshua's, floating in the womb-like embrace of the Music. Everything was beyond his control.

"I can't reach him," Joshua said, his voice starting to deflate. "He's going to die."

"Die?" Jenna asked.

"Yes," Joshua said. "The Music is acting on him uncontrolled. Look at his vitals. His heart rate and blood pressure are rising, and his alpha- and beta-wave emissions are nearly to the level of a person having a stroke. His body can't take the strain."

Karla blew a bubblegum bubble and smacked it loudly. "Bummer," she said. "It would be better if, like, we could manage to get him on a two-unit demomethacardamine I.V. and try to draw down his psychometric thingies with transonic beta-wave blockers. The interference might push him into a sleep state."

Joshua looked at the gorgeous teenager in total shock. "What did you say?"

Karla twirled a lock of honey-blonde hair around one manicured finger. "Well, like, if he's gonna die. I mean, he's, like, a really focused mind, right? So I'm like, his mind is totally acting through his long-standing self-hatred and Christ complex and taking control away from you. He's, like, internalizing the Music and using it to punish himself."

"How do you remember all of this?" Jenna asked, thunderstruck.

"Duh... I was, like, a doctor before, Jenna. Did you think I totally forgot everything I'd learned just because my body changed?" She blew another bubble and popped it loudly, smiling her sultry smile.

"Actually, we did," Joshua said.

"Just because I'm a hottie now doesn't mean I'm, like, a total stupid bimbo," she explained. "But if I'm going on about mind-body transfer theory and the effects of lucid dreaming on diagnosed psychotics, then I'd probably never get laid. Guys are more interested if they think I'm fun, y'know?"

Joshua's laughter was nearly hysterical with relief. "Don't you think you ought to take over?" he asked when he could talk again.

"Neg," she said. "You're doing good, babe. Besides, his vitals are on a downswing. His B.P. is down nearly twenty points."

Joshua confirmed her observation on the monitors. "What do you think that means?"

"It means he's, like, getting a handle on the Music," Karla said, pulling a compact out of her purse to reapply the lipstick her bubblegum had ruined. "Smart guy."

* * *

"If I choose someone to die so that this girl can live, doesn't that leave me responsible for her conduct somehow?" Gray asked.

"No more than a father is responsible for his children," the voice said. "Once she's alive, Gray, then she's alive. Her choices are hers to make. You can only pass on your experience, your determination of right and wrong, and try to trust her to make her own decisions for her own reasons."

"But every person on the planet - including the person I have to kill to bring her life - works under those same rules," Gray argued.

"True," the voice confirmed.

"Then the choice is clear," Gray said. "If anyone has to die to bring this girl life, then it should be me."

"You choose yourself?" the voice asked.

"I do," Gray said with trembling courage. "My life has been misspent since Joyce died. I haven't done a good job with the gift I was given. Perhaps I can pass those gifts along and see if someone else can do a better job of them."

"I hope you're right," the voice said. "For both of your sakes."

The Music swelled, and Gray Kincaid died.

* * *

"He's flatlined!" Joshua shouted, overturning his chair in his scramble to get to the room where Gray Kincaid had collapsed. "Jenna, get me a crash cart in that room!"

"The Music's still in there, Joshua! You have to wait for it to shut off!"

"Not a chance," Joshua said, pushing past the group of women and into the hall outside the control room. He never saw Gray Kincaid start to cough and stir, and never saw the remarkable transformations that began to happen to his body.

* * *

Joshua was stopped by the automatic security lock, meant to keep employees and staff from accidental exposure to the Music. He bent and began to key in his override code to the number pad beside the door when the handle turned of its own accord and the door opened slowly.

She clutched a white bathrobe closed with one long-nailed hand, but even the thick terry-cloth did little to disguise the incredible feminine curves underneath. A tempting expanse of tanned cleavage peeked out of the top of the robe, which was the first thing that Joshua really noticed. His eyes traveled up past the long, lissome neck and the shoulder-length, shiny auburn hair, the small chin and wide, expressive mouth full of even white teeth, the high 'Sophia Loren' cheekbones and the adorable little mole on the left cheek. Finally they met and locked with as strong and direct a pair of sparkling blue eyes as Joshua had ever seen. No matter what the changes on the body, the eyes were still completely Gray Kincaid.

The smooth, melodious alto was hard as nails. "You have a hell of a lot of explaining to do, Doctor," she said angrily.

* * *

She sat primly and with her legs crossed at the knees as if she'd been doing it that way her whole life, and wore the lacy brassiere, panties and shirtwaist dress that she'd borrowed from one of the reassignment rooms without the slightest twitch of discomfort or embarrassment. Somehow she'd managed to incorporate all the natural, deeply-ingrained habits and mannerisms of a woman through the Music but still retained her higher-order cognitive abilities and memories.

Joshua put down his stethoscope and sat in front of her, transfixed, as if she were the first woman he'd ever seen.

"So you mean to tell me that if I hadn't somehow secretly wanted this change, it wouldn't have happened?" she asked directly.

"One out of every five of our subjects walks out of here with no change in their life whatsoever," Joshua said. "Two out of that same five have substantial changes, but don't change gender. The last two, well, they become as you see yourself."

"Has anyone ever retained memory of the transformation?" Gray asked.

"All of them," Joshua said. "It's the nature of the Music that they are completely at ease with their new bodies. As I said, I'm sure that all of the people who switch genders want the change profoundly on some level. The Music can't force anything on anyone. It's a force for healing, Sergeant, not some sort of a method of punishment or violation."

"So you're saying that even this assassin, Arturo LaPaglia, wanted down deep to be a woman, or it would not have happened?"

"Exactly," Joshua answered. "We can extrapolate from how caring and gentle Annaliese is, and her expressed desires to be sexually submissive and to someday become a mother that her transformation was based on a deep-seated guilt over her actions as a man."

"I wasn't aware that I was so conflicted about my own gender," Gray said, looking down at his new body. There was nothing about the person sitting in the chair across from Joshua that could not be considered completely feminine. A size 6 in shoe and dress, with an athletic figure that was still flatteringly curvy, a 36DD-24-36 centerfold frame and a face that wouldn't have been out of place on the cover of any magazine Gray could think of. And the real surprise, the one that really bothered Gray on the deepest level, is that no matter how hard he tried to be outraged, he couldn't find any problem with the body he was inhabiting now. It seemed natural. It seemed right.

"Perhaps you weren't," Joshua said. "Sometimes a feminine expression is the easiest course a mind can take to reconcile itself with itself. There are things, after all, that a woman can do that a man simply can't. I think that the mind takes the path of least resistance towards its healing, and sometimes the easiest way to get to that point is by looking at it all through the eyes of a woman."

"Fair enough," Gray said. "Look, Joshua, I can't say that I'm completely comfortable with what was done to me, but I seem comfortable enough in the form I have now. It was conjured out my own mind, after all. What I want to know is what's next."

"Generally, we use a very low-grade form of the Music at this point to reconcile the subject and everyone the subject might know to the new identity, to keep from having any repercussions. Then we'd process your documents to reflect the change as if you'd been born with them."

"This works?"

"Almost unfailingly," Joshua confirmed.

"We should probably get to it, then," Gray said with finality.

"Don't you want me to see if this process is reversible?" Joshua asked, bewildered.

"No," Gray said. "Doctor, I know what I felt. I died. My old body wasn't in the best of health anyway, between my wounds and the fact that I didn't care for myself at all. This body is young and vital, something I haven't felt since Joyce was alive. And I believe you when you say that this was somehow meant to be. That my healing will be carried out in the form I'm in now, not in the rickety old man that I used to be."

"I understand," Joshua said. "Now, as to the other matter?"

Gray beetled her brow and tapped her lower lip with one long-nailed finger. "I am a detective with the police department. I have duties."

"What if I offered you a job here with us?" Joshua asked. "It's obvious that our security isn't what it should be - Doctor Renfro was a little preoccupied and a little too trusting in human nature to keep himself and his work here safe. I practically had to beg him to install the Omega protocol, which is why he was transformed along with his attacker. Someone of your talents and abilities would be most valuable to us."

"I'll have to think about that," Gray said. "I don't want to make too many decisions too fast right now. But I will take this case in a police capacity - if, of course, your hypnotic treatment of my co-workers can get me reassigned to homicide?"

"That should be easy," Joshua said. "I'll begin the recordings as soon as I'm done here."

Gray Kincaid stood and offered a slender hand to the young doctor. "We'll get to the bottom of this, I promise you."

"Thanks," Joshua said, trying to believe that.

"But now, I think I'll find some shoes to go with this outfit and head back to my apartment. I have a lot of thinking to do and some things to figure out."

"We'll send the team over first thing in the morning and get your new clothes and furniture moved in," Joshua said, leading the attractive brunette towards the door of the reassignment center. "And if you'd like, I can set up interviews with both Annaliese and Karla later that morning."

"Best to strike while the iron is hot," Gray agreed. "I'll see you as soon as I'm squared away."

"And you have my number," Joshua said. "Call me if you have any problems or questions."

"I have one question right now," Gray said.

"And that is?"

"Why, when I quit ten years ago, do I have this sudden, overpowering urge for a cigarette? What? Why are you laughing?"

* * *

Joshua was a little groggy, having been up half the night going over the results of the newest round of tests he'd run on Dr. Renfro. Apparently Karla still had all the faculties, knowledge and memories of his previous incarnation, but it was all tempered by a lowered attention span, a drastically heightened libido and a newfound narcissistic interest in fashion and pop culture. She was now drawing the same joy and satisfaction from waiting tables at Hooters with Heather and Annaliese and seducing one-night stands at the local dance clubs with Vikki and Keri that he took from using the Music to heal others. Not that the drive to heal and perfect the Music's use was gone from her. She just had some different priorities to go along with her lovely new body and face.

Joshua was doing his level best not to respond to the girl's not-so-subtle flirting, busying himself with paperwork while she sat on the exam table, kicking her feet back and forth and sucking seductively on a lollipop. She'd worn the requisite tight white blouse, plaid kilt and white tights of the stereotypical 'Catholic schoolgirl' and was looking every inch the little Lolita. She began to fish in her little patent purse for a cigarette when there was a knock at the door.

"Come in," Joshua called, trying very hard not to pay any attention to Karla.

The door opened to a vision. The long auburn hair was in an upsweep held with a golden clip, and small rimless glasses rode the long, slender nose. Large gold teardrop earrings and a matching necklace accented a tailored navy serge suit with a very short skirt that hugged every luscious curve. A golden detective's badge hung from the breast pocket which could scarcely contain the firm breast it rode over. A cream-colored scoop-neck silk blouse showed a lovely expanse of cleavage. She wore a beige trenchcoat against the day's chill and tight brown kid-leather gloves, one of which held a briefcase and the other a smoldering white Virginia Slims cigarette. She struck a very fashionable pose in the doorway (without even meaning to - there was nothing of the vamp about her), perched on her four-inch velvet stiletto heels and opaque black tights. Her makeup was expertly applied, not too heavy but still enough to give her a very feminine allure. A thin plume of smoke escaped her peach-tinted glossy lips.

Joshua couldn't repress a smile. Karla narrowed her eyes at the newcomer, sizing the woman up. Deciding she liked what she saw, she extended a hand to the Detective.

"Karla Renfro," she introduced.

The Detective took the proffered hand firmly after setting down her slim attachi case. The sultry contralto was like a sexual caress, one of those 'Kathleen Turner' hoarse and husky voices that made Joshua think of things decidedly not police-related.

"Hi, Karla. Detective Grace Kincaid," she said. "I have some questions to ask you."

The End of Part Four