The Suspect   By Melissa Tawn   This is just another story about crossdressing in the workplace … or is it?

CHAPTER 1. THE SPECIAL AUDIT

Almost every major corporation, and certainly all of those dealing with defense contracts, has an internal investigations group — an in-house detective agency as it were. This group is usually hidden under some innocuous title where nobody would notice it. At the Wright-Terradyne Corporation (WTC), where I work, it is known as Section 3 of the Special Audits Division of the Company Comptroller’s Office. Sections 1 and 2 of the Special Audits Division are headed by experienced CPA’s and their job is — duh — to perform special audits. Section 3 is headed by Bill Novak, who had 15 years’ experience working with the FBI but who can barely balance his own checkbook. My name is Mary Ingham, and I am one of Bill’s senior investigators.

The case which Bill assigned to me was serious. We had good reason to believe that details of a radically-new satellite-stabilization system which we had developed were being leaked to one of our competitors. At stake was a multi-billion-dollar contract with the Defense Department, and so it was important to locate the leak and plug it quickly. I was given unlimited resources and authority to do what was needed.

A quick check of those who had access to the leaked information and the technical know-how to understand it narrowed the field down to fifteen engineers and project managers. Of these, twelve seemed to be above suspicion — they were married with children, lived within their means, displayed no suspicious behavior, had no unusual spending habits. As far as we could see, they did not have gambling, alcohol, drug, or other problems. They were just good clean-cut citizens leading dull, nerdy, and normal lives. The other three required a more detailed look-see.

The first was Harry Chan, a 45-year-old bachelor who seemed to have no life at all other than his work. He went directly home from work and never left his apartment until the next morning. He did all of his shopping — including grocery shopping and nightly ordering of pizzas — over the internet. In fact, he seemed glued to his computer every minute away from work (and, from what I gather, most of the time at work too). We tapped into his DSL connection and found that Harry’s “life” was split between participation in rather raunchy chat rooms, often several simultaneously, and viewing rather extreme and disgusting pornography (adult stuff only — no kiddy porn; at least that is some consolation). A good part of his time was spent jerking off, and broadcasting this over the net via his webcam. But we could find no evidence that he was in touch with anybody outside the company or that he was passing company secrets to an outsider. His bank account showed no influxes of cash. As far as we could determine, he drank nothing stronger than Diet Pepsi.

The second special case was Martin Orlinsky. Martin was a mathematics freak (though he had studied engineering rather than theoretical mathematics in college) and was obsessed with proving the Goldbach Conjecture — a famous problem in number theory that has been open for the past 200 years and is considered so difficult that few serious mathematicians are willing to sacrifice their careers working on it. Since Andrew Wiles finally proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1995, the Goldbach Conjecture has become the major target of amateurs and mathematical cranks around the world, and most of them were tied together in a network of internet newsgroups and fora, feeding each other’s egos. Among these were people from North Korea, Iran, China, Syria, and other places that raised red flags on our computer. Martin Orlinsky was an active member of all of these groups. However, after following his activities for a while, we concluded he was just a harmless geek, as were the others. (Six months later we were rather shocked to find that an article of his was published in the prestigious journal Mathematische Annalen and was hailed by senior mathematicians as “a major step forward in eventually solving the Goldbach Conjecture”.)

The third special case was Chris Davis. Chris was a young and very promising engineer, who had been with the company for only five years. He was quiet and lived alone, or so it seemed. However, the first day we staked out his apartment we noticed a very pretty woman leaving it a few hours or so after Chris arrived home. Chris was obviously no monk. She returned that evening, and stayed the night. The next morning, Chris went to work as usual. That afternoon, the same pattern was repeated. The young lady went out shortly after Chris returned home and came back several hours later. Again, she stayed the night. Our taps showed no internet or phone activity from the apartment while she was away, nor did we hear any music, television, or other noise.

We decided to follow the woman, and I assigned two female operatives to the task. They reported that she went to a local mall, window-shopped a bit, tried on some clothes but bought nothing. She then went to a steakhouse and ate dinner by herself, and returned to the apartment. What was Chris doing while she was gone? What did the two of them do after she returned? What did she do during the day while he was at work? Every day the pattern was the same. The woman would leave the apartment, spend a few hours shopping or just walking around, have dinner by herself at the same steakhouse, and then return to Chris’ apartment.

I asked one of the operatives trailing her to make contact, and she did so at the steakhouse, asking if she could share a table. She said the woman, whose name was Linda, was nice enough, and seemed to have nothing to hide. In fact, they had a very enjoyable conversation.

We had to find out what Linda did during the day. One of our men, carrying phone-company credentials, arrived at Chris’ apartment building during the day, when Chris was at work, and persuaded the manager to let him in to check a problem with the lines. The apartment was empty! So where was Linda? She was seen returning the evening before, and nobody had left the apartment during the night. Suddenly I had an inspiration. I brought up on my computer screen pictures of Chris and Linda and scaled them to the same size. I then superimposed one on the other. The bone structures and eyes matched exactly. Eureka! Linda and Chris had to be the same person — in other words, Chris was a secret crossdresser.

Crossdressing is not illegal and WTC, like most big corporations, has learned to accept that form of deviant behavior from its employees. There is even a support group for crossdressers which meets at the company’s Activity Center once every other week. Granted, that sort of thing did not sit well with certain people in the Pentagon and the DoD, who were among our biggest customers, but even they were learning to be tolerant. The important thing was not to try and hide the fact, because attempting to hide any sort behavior left the employee open to possible blackmail. With Bill Novak’s approval, I decided to call Chris in for a talk.

CHAPTER 2. CHRIS AND LINDA

Chris was asked to meet me in one of the conference rooms “in connection with a special audit being conducted into the work of your department.” He arrived promptly. He was neatly dressed and well-groomed, and seemed to be unaware that he was under any suspicion. I pulled a photo of Linda out of the file I had in front of me and asked him of he recognized the person in the picture. He blanched a bit, and then slowly nodded his head.

“That is you, isn’t it?” I said. Again, he nodded, without saying a word.

“Would you like to tell me about it?” I asked. He sat there and didn’t say a word.

“Look,” I said,” there is a major leak in your department and we are checking everyone very carefully. Anyone with anything to hide is a suspect. Now if you have something to tell us, it is best to come right out and tell it. We will find out the truth anyway, and there is no point in allowing things to get rough.”

Chris sat there looking glum for a few seconds, and then put his face in his hands, as though he were going to cry. Then he looked at me and began his story.

“You think that I am a crossdresser, and I suppose that technically you are right. However, it is not at all what you believe. The situation is much more complicated.

First of all, Linda is, in some sense, ‘the real me’. Biologically, I am not a male, I am female. If you want, I can prove it to you by getting undressed or by giving you a sample of my DNA. The name on my birth certificate is Linda Christine Davis. However, ever since I was around 6 years old I was convinced that I was ‘really’ a boy inside and insisted on being called Chris rather than Linda. At first, my parents humored me, thinking that I was just going through a ‘tomboy’ stage, as many girls do. But I never got over it. I wore only boys’ clothes, cut my hair short, and hung out with boys as a boy. Even in school, the teachers got used to calling me Chris and treating me like a boy. By the time my parents realized that something was wrong, I was big enough and mean enough to frighten them into living with my behavior. I must say that I was somewhat of a terror as a teenager. When my breasts started growing, I bound them with Ace bandages. When I started getting a period, I took steps to make sure that it did not impinge on my macho image or behavior. I even picked up girls.

When I went to college, I deliberately enrolled in engineering school -- a boy thing to do -- and continued to behave like a male. I was registered under the name of Chris Davis and while I expect that, somewhere in my records, there is an “F” in the appropriate “sex” box, nobody seems to have paid attention to it.

I had intended to have my breasts surgically removed and undertake sexual reassignment surgery after I completed college, but somehow kept on pushing the date back, ostensibly because of the cost involved but in fact because I was a bit afraid of the finality of it all. Even though I am convinced that I am a man ‘inside’, somehow I found it hard to translate that conviction into concrete surgical steps. Finally, last year, I sat down and assessed my position. I realized that I had to make up my mind. After thinking things over carefully, I came to the conclusion that my life had passed a point of no return and that — whatever fears were lurking in me — I was stuck in a male life forever. I therefore contacted the office of the noted gender surgeon Dr. Jayne Mautner, who has recently begun doing female-to-male sexual reassignment surgery as well as male-to-female surgery, and asked her to operate on me. She explained to me that I must first undergo a psychological screening by her in-house psychologist, Dr. Catherine Gold. I assumed that this was just a formality to limit Dr. Mautner’s legal liabilities, but it turned out to be far from that.

Dr. Gold subjected me to a long series of psychological tests, as well as extensive interviews, after which she told me that she was unconvinced that I was a true transsexual and that, in her opinion, I should reassess whether I truly wanted to be a man. She suggested that I try living as Linda for a period of a few months, just so that I could see what that would be like. I told her that it was impossible because of my job, and we arrived at a compromise. I would continue going to work at WTC as Chris, but as soon as I came home I would change into being Linda — not the tomboy I had grown up to be, but Linda a young woman in her late twenties who has the world before her.

This experiment was to last three months and you people caught me two weeks before the end.”

I asked Chris what he had concluded.

“I am not sure,” replied Chris. “I have encountered a Linda which I had really never known, whom I really never let emerge during her girlhood. I think she now deserves a chance. I think that I would like to be her full-time, at least for a while. That does not mean that Chris will disappear — after all, Linda may turn out to get a kick from crossdressing at times. But I doubt if there will be any surgery in my future.”

“Dr. Gold is a very wise woman,” I said. “I was very impressed by her the first time I met her. She explained to me once that all too many people diagnose themselves as transsexuals on flimsy or uncertain grounds and are ready to hop under a knife -- in a foreign country if necessary -- only to regret it after the irreversible fact. That is why there are so many suicides among post-ops. She was really very concerned that the multiplication of TG-oriented websites and chat rooms is enticing people to come to facile conclusions that they end up regretting later, when it is too late to turn back."

“I am surprised you know her,” said Chris.

“Oh yes, I have known her for many years.” I replied. “In fact, I even underwent the same battery of tests you took — only in my case she had no problem approving my operation.”

AFTERMATH.

I made arrangements to have Chris’ corporate identity changed to Linda and to have her transferred to another of WTC’s many engineering centers. Indeed, she ended up getting a slight promotion along the way. Dr. Gold phoned me and thanked me for my efforts. Linda and I have become good friends. We often go out together, with or without dates. She tells me about her experiences with Drs. Mautner and Gold, and I tell her about mine, and about what having the operation is like. When she feels that she misses Chris, I suggest that I would be very honored if he were to emerge and escort me to the opera or some such event. We both have a wonderful time.

As far as the leak is concerned, I went back and examined the twelve others who were “above suspicion”. Sure enough, it turned out that the father-in-law of one of them had had a major stroke the year before and had to be moved to a quite expensive managed-care geriatric home. The tab for his stay was being picked up by someone who turned out to be a senior employee of our competitor. It took only a few hours of Bill Novak’s “intensive interrogation” for the man to confess.