Робин Кук - Genesis

“Touché,” Jack said. “At the same time, I’m not antisocial, just choosy, and I don’t lack empathy. And I’ve never lied to Chet. LOL.”

“Go! I’ll see you later. But to give you a heads-up, tonight we have to talk some more about JJ because I got some recommendations of potential psychological evaluators from the Brooks School this morning.”

“Oh, great,” he moaned. “Okay.” He turned away and headed back toward table #1 thinking that if it wasn’t one thing, it was another. But he recognized he couldn’t think about JJ. At the moment Laurie’s surgery was totally dominating his mind.

May 10th

10:20 A.M.

Aria straight-armed the door into the locker room with such force that its inside handle smashed hard enough against the wall to crack one of the tiles. She didn’t care but rather derived a bit of pleasure from the damage. Although she’d enjoyed doing the two autopsies, it irked her to death that at the end of each, she had to get in the same damn argument about being asked, or, worse still, commanded, to play mortuary tech or, worse, janitor. She had rebelled about that kind of hazing when she’d been a medical student and a first-year pathology resident, and she certainly wasn’t going to stand for it now.

Throwing open the door to her locker with similar force, she got out her phone to check for messages. She had a sense that she might hear from Vijay again, and she was right. It wasn’t much of a text message but still encouraging. It read: Another good match. Onward and upward. We look forward to seeing you later and hope to have even more positive news.

With a definite sense of excitement, Aria got her clothes out of the locker and dressed rapidly. Her intuition was telling her that her efforts were soon to be consummated, which was going to give her an almost orgasmic high when it happened. As the search for Lover Boy had continued, she’d become progressively interested in its successful conclusion as a kind of payback for the harassment and the concealment she’d suffered from the male gender from as early as she could remember. In her mind, whether Lover Boy played any role in Kera Jacobsen’s overdose by supplying the drugs, or, worse, didn’t make any difference. What vexed her the most was his ostensible desire for secrecy, which she considered an affront to Kera. Aria was fixated on blowing this bastard’s veil of secrecy to smithereens.

Before she was even finished dressing, Aria ordered a rideshare so that it would be waiting for her when she emerged from the OCME. The last of her clothing was her resident’s white coat. Once again when she arrived at GenealogyDNA, she wanted to look the part of a physician. In some respects, it had surprised her that Vijay had not asked her what kind of doctor she was, although she had been prepared to say she was a hematologist in keeping with the mythical toddler having leukemia.

Like the day before, the ride was quick. In less than twenty minutes she was climbing out of the car and heading into the building’s commercial entrance. When she entered the GenealogyDNA office, the lavender-haired receptionist recognized her and told her that she was to go right in.

Just inside the inner office door, she paused. The atmosphere of the large barnlike room was different. No one was playing Ping-Pong, and no one was at the game station. Although it appeared as if there were the same number of people present or even a few more, a heavy silence reigned. Everybody seemed to be working with their respective laptops, whether at a desk or sprawled in a beanbag. As she was scanning the room, Vijay stood up from the large leather couch close to the center of the space. Like Aria, he was dressed the same as he’d been the day before but with a freshly pressed white shirt.

“Welcome, Dr. Nichols,” he said as he approached with a welcoming grin. On this occasion he held back extending his hand, waiting for Aria to make the gesture. When she didn’t, he merely pointed back where he’d come from. “How about joining me on the couch, or would a table be more to your liking?”

She shrugged. “Whatever,” she said.

“Then the couch it is,” Vijay said.

Aria made her way in that direction, walking ahead of Vijay and weaving among the varied furniture. A few of the people briefly looked up in her direction but then went back to their screens. As had been the case the day before, the people in the room were overwhelmingly geeky males, although Aria did see several equally geeky females with spiky hair. Although she thought of herself as a young millennial, she felt light-years older than this group.

Gesturing for Aria to sit at one end of the couch, he sat at the other. In between was a stack of papers. “I want to show you some of what we have accomplished,” he said. He picked up the top paper that was a diagram of a family tree and handed it to her.

“Here is the very first match we got that we can map to Hansel: Arnold Thompson, through the great-great-grandfather and then the great-grandfather. To do that is a tribute to our proprietary software, since he is, at best, a third cousin of Hansel’s, meaning they share very little DNA. You do understand what a third cousin represents, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure,” Aria said, not wishing to reveal her general ignorance. She’d read about it two nights ago, but some aspects of her reading were a blur.

“Third cousins share a common ancestor that is a great-great-grandparent,” Vijay explained, “which means they generally share very little DNA, in fact on average less than one percent. With some of the genetic genealogy companies, that is too small to even come up as a match for fear it would be a false positive. But our software automatically combined the Y-DNA results with the autosomal results. By the way, you didn’t mention that the toddler was a boy.”

“I didn’t?” Aria questioned, trying to sound as if it were an oversight whereas in actuality, she didn’t know the fetus’s sex and had been afraid to guess. She thought if she had been wrong, then it would have blown her whole story.

“We were pleased when we determined it was a boy for the very reason that I am explaining. The Y chromosome doesn’t recombine like the autosomal chromosomes nor mutate at the same rate, which is why it’s more helpful in ethnicity estimates than genealogy studies. But in this case, it was key. What we did was contact this potential third cousin. You can see from the diagram. His name is Arnold Thompson. Luckily for us, he is a genealogical enthusiast and was eager to help by supplying the results that he’d obtained for one of his first cousins once removed, named Helen Thompson. Do you know what once removed means?”

“I think so,” Aria said. “It’s a generational thing. For an individual, a first cousin once removed means the ancestor they share is the individual’s great-grandparent but the cousin’s grandparent, meaning they are genetically connected but separated by a generation.”

“Exactly,” Vijay said. “When we matched Hansel to this new kit, we were happy to see that the match was significantly better: up to almost six percent. That meant that the potential third cousin was indeed a third cousin by descent, so we had a legitimate great-great-grandparent. His name was Clarence Thompson.”

“Does that mean that Hansel’s father’s name is Thompson?” Aria said with awe. It had been only a matter of hours that GenealogyDNA had been working on this.

“That was our initial thought,” he said. “But we believe we have hit a brick wall.”