Робин Кук - Genesis

With such interesting reading, Madison’s sense of the passage of time was suppressed, but after a while, it suddenly occurred to her that she was still standing on the platform, waiting for the local 6 train. Glancing up from her notebook, she could tell that the crowd had significantly swelled on the platform from when she had arrived. That was what always happened when trains were running late.

Pulling out her phone, she checked the time. It was already almost twenty past seven, the time she usually was walking into the Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital, meaning she’d been standing there reading for fifteen to twenty minutes. Repocketing her phone, she could see that the commuters standing near her were all becoming restless like herself.

Madison did not want to be late after missing half of the previous day, some of whose patients had been rescheduled to be squeezed into that morning. With no countdown clock in view from where she was standing, she cocked her head and tried to listen for an oncoming train. She couldn’t hear one. Instead she moved forward, between other standees and approached the edge of the platform. Still keeping back from the yellow line painted on the very edge, she leaned forward out over the tracks and looked to the right into the subway tunnel that was relatively close to her. She could see that the tracks made a curve to the right, limiting how far she could see into the darkness. There were only a few distant, tiny points of light at intervals along the wall. It was at that very moment that she did see the headlights of an approaching train. A second later she could hear and feel the distant earth-shaking rumble followed by a sudden gust of wind being pushed out of the tunnel. Mesmerized for a moment by the thunderous approach as the black silhouette of the train grew in size, Madison continued to watch. As the 360-ton behemoth rapidly neared the tunnel opening, Madison leaned away and was about to step back when something suddenly pushed her violently forward. Completely off balance, she frantically flailed her arms, sending her notebook flying, but there was no way she could keep her footing as she was catapulted out over the tracks. An instant later, to the collective gasp of the crowd, the huge train shot into the station with a tremendous screech as the emergency brakes were applied but far too late. It took almost a minute for the train to come to an abrupt halt half-in and half-out of the tunnel. Madison Bryant was nowhere to be seen. A few of the people waiting on the platform screamed. Several others who had witnessed the shameless event yelled at a heavyset, dark-haired, and bearded man in a shabby overcoat whom they had seen push Madison in front of the oncoming train. They shouted for him to stop, but the homeless-appearing man ran up the stairs and quickly disappeared in the packed concourse. Others frantically dialed 911 even though the traumatized train’s engineer had already reported the incident and Emergency Services were being dispatched. The trick now was to get the body out from under the middle of the train.

May 9th

7:40 A.M.

During most of her rotations as a pathology resident, Aria was already at the hospital complex by 7:30 in the morning. It was routine and expected. While on her forensic rotation, however, she was arriving progressively later, aware that things generally didn’t get under way at the OCME until 8:00 or even 8:30. This more relaxed schedule didn’t bother her in the slightest. In fact, it seemed to make more sense. She’d always wondered why American medicine felt obligated to start the day so early, particularly surgery, where scalpels were expected to make the first cut at 7:30 sharp, meaning all the other preparations had to be done by then. She also knew that in Europe things were different, particularly in the United Kingdom, where the gentlemanly time of 9:00 A.M. seemed appropriate. So, it wasn’t out of the question for Aria to be just climbing into a rideshare at twenty minutes to 8:00.

In keeping with her late start, she had gotten significantly less sleep than she was accustomed to having. The night before she’d stayed up until the wee hours engrossed in genetic genealogy. With her ability to concentrate, Aria was a fast and effective reader, a skill that had made getting through medical school significantly easier for her than for most other students. She had now read, or at least skimmed, which for her was just about the equivalent of reading, both books that Madison Bryant had loaned her. The highlighting and underlining that Madison had done had not hindered Aria in the slightest and had actually helped to a degree. The benefit of having digested the two books was that now she shared Madison’s belief that genetic genealogy might very well work in finding the unknown male whom Aria was now calling “Lover Boy.” The more she had thought about the affair combined with what she had been able to learn from Madison Bryant and Evelyn Mabry, the more convinced she’d become that Lover Boy had had some significant role in Kera’s death. Whether it was a homicide, even if inadvertent, she wasn’t prepared to contend, but she certainly intended to find out. What she hoped was that Madison would prove to be as helpful a resource as she had suggested she’d be when they had met at Nobu.

As per usual, the morning rush-hour traffic was horrendous, particularly along Central Park South, the road that bordered the park at its southern end. A bit nervously, she checked the time with her phone. Although she’d not been at all concerned about her time of arrival since she’d started the forensic rotation, now that she had found something that truly interested her, namely finding Lover Boy, she didn’t want to annoy anyone, particularly the chief, Laurie Montgomery. At least until she’d solved this current quest, Aria preferred to stay in the chief’s good graces.

Instead of fretting over what she couldn’t alter, she put her phone away and went back to her musing about Lover Boy. Her first thought had been that Lover Boy was probably married, and now that she had had time to think about it, she was convinced that had to be the case. It might also explain why the sudden conception was most likely not thought of as a blessing. Instead it could have made serious waves. It seemed to make sense, and as such further lowered Aria’s opinion of the male gender.

With a sudden feeling of restlessness and the need to do something, Aria struggled to get her phone back out from the pocket of her jeans. Thinking about Lover Boy prompted her to put in an early call to Madison, hoping to catch her before her first client. With the phone pressed against her ear, she listened to the simulated ringing. After the fourth ring, she sensed that Madison wasn’t going to answer, and she guessed why: It was a bit after eight, and Madison most likely was meeting with her first family of the day.

Aria was planning on leaving a voice message to request a call back as soon as it was convenient, but voice mail never picked up. With a shrug, she disconnected. Instead she typed a text message, asking for Madison to contact her as soon as possible. As a teaser, she added: I read both books and I’m psyched.

Once Aria managed to get to Second Avenue, the trip picked up speed. Although she had made the same trip in just over fifteen minutes without traffic, on this particular morning it ended up taking almost an hour. She was dropped off at 8:35, and despite reasonable expectations of being close to being on time, she was more than a half hour late.

Normally Aria first went to the so-called residents’ room on the second floor to leave her personal belongings like a coat and any books she’d brought. It was located just beyond the space euphemistically called the lunch room, thanks to its assortment of vending machines. Both were subpar in most every respect, although the lunch room at least had some high windows that let in a bit of outside light. Of course, there was no view as the neighboring building was a scant fifteen or twenty feet away. The residents’ room was more like a closet with two aged metal desks pressed up against each other and no windows. The redeeming part was that both desks supported monitors with Internet access and first-class microscopes.