Робин Кук - Genesis

“I want you out of here, and I never want to see you again,” Diane shouted.

“All right.” Aria stood. “Whatever you say, you plastic-surgerized, fake piece of shit. You probably couldn’t have helped me anyway.”

With a strong feeling of disgust, Aria headed for the door.

May 10th

5:35 P.M.

Emerging from the Hanna apartment building onto a Fifth Avenue clogged with rush-hour traffic, Aria stopped at the curb just under the very end of the blue awning. She needed a moment to take a few deep breaths and allow herself to calm down. Diane’s intransigence to even speak about her adoption experience seemed like the final nail in the coffin of Aria’s commitment to expose Kera Jacobsen’s homicidal-at-worst, inconsiderate-at-best lover. It was particularly frustrating after having spent all afternoon closeted at GenealogyDNA with a bunch of arrested-development nerds.

Gazing at the beckoning park greenery over and through a rising haze of exhaust coming from the slowly passing cars, taxis, and buses, Aria thought she should walk home rather than trying to languish in traffic. Not only would it be more pleasant, walking across town would undoubtedly again be faster.

Just when she was about to cross the street, Vijay’s comment about the district attorney having the power to unseal adoption records popped back into her consciousness. What brought the thought to mind was having learned during her first week at the OCME how close a working relationship the OCME had with the district attorney’s office. On many cases of homicide, of which there was almost one a day in New York, both organizations had to collaborate closely for justice to prevail. What that said loud and clear to Aria was that Dr. Montgomery, as the OCME chief, would undoubtedly know some of the DAs personally and thereby could have significant clout. Maybe there was a way to get around the problem of sealed adoption records. One way or the other, it suddenly seemed to Aria to be worth trying.

Quickly Aria got her phone out and checked the time. By coincidence it was almost the same time as yesterday when she found Laurie Montgomery alone in her office. Gambling that might be a regular occurrence for the chief, Aria opened the Uber app. Just as she was about to order a vehicle, a taxi pulled up directly in front of her and disgorged a resident of 812. After checking with the driver to ascertain that he was free, Aria jumped in.

A little after six Aria paid the fare and got out in front of the OCME at 520 First Avenue. After being buzzed in by a uniformed security man, she headed directly into the front office. To her encouragement, the scene was almost an exact visual repeat of what she had encountered a bit more than twenty-four hours previous. Once again, the only artificial light was spilling out of Dr. Laurie Montgomery’s office, suggesting that all the secretaries had departed and the chief was still toiling away. Advancing to the open inner office door, Aria saw that even Dr. Montgomery was in the same position, elbows on the desk, hands supporting her head, studying what might have been the same architectural plans.

“Hello, hello!” Aria called out as she walked in, which Laurie had specifically asked her to do rather than sneak in and surprise her like she’d done the night before. Since she was going to be essentially asking Laurie for a favor, Aria felt compelled to be more considerate, despite the fact that to her an open door was both literal and figurative.

“Come in and have a seat, Dr. Nichols!” Laurie said, even though by then Aria was already nearing the desk. “Seems that you and I are on the same schedule.”

“It does appear that way,” Aria said, choosing initially to remain standing rather than sitting down. “I wanted again to bring you up to date with my progress or, sadly enough, the lack of it. A lot has been accomplished, but I’m afraid we’ve hit up against that brick wall we spoke about earlier.”

I’m sorry to hear,” Laurie said. She took her hands away from supporting her head and sat back, studying Aria. To her there seemed to be a subtle change in the woman’s projected persona, with less of the in-your-face defiance than she’d exhibited on previous occasions. “What’s the latest?”

“First let me show you some family trees,” Aria said. She reached across the desk with the two that she’d brought and positioned them in front of Laurie. “The first one, as you can see, is of the Thompson family, which is the genetic family of the fetus we found at Kera Jacobsen’s autopsy, going all the way back to a great-great-grandfather. That takes it back to the late eighteen hundreds. And just so you know, the fetus was male.”

“Interesting!” Laurie said while studying the Thompson family tree, as Aria took a seat in the desk chair facing her. “So, you believe the surname of the individual you are calling Lover Boy is Thompson.”

“That was what was thought initially,” Aria said. “Unfortunately, that’s where the genealogical brick wall plays an unwelcome role. As you can see from the Thompson family tree, Eric Thompson is the father of Lover Boy. But today, when Eric Thompson was called, he wasn’t all that cooperative, but he was cooperative enough to deny absolutely that he had any other children other than the three you see on the family tree with his wife, Clara.”

“I hope you weren’t the one who spoke with him,” Laurie said.

“No, I wasn’t,” Aria said. “It was one of the principals of GenealogyDNA. But what difference would it have made if it had been me?”

“Early in my career as a medical examiner I learned the hard way that doing my own investigating can be dangerous if there’s strong emotion or potential criminality involved.”

“Oh, for shit sake,” Aria said. “That’s the last thing on my mind.”

“I thought the same way until I managed to almost get killed by some organized-crime people,” Laurie said. “It’s just a word to the wise. You can take it or leave it.”

“Whatever,” Aria said with a wave of her hand. “The brick wall is that it seems that Lover Boy was adopted, ergo has a different surname than that which his Y chromosome would suggest.”

“Okay,” Laurie said. “I understand. Adoption can cause a break in a family tree, and in this instance it means that it’s the end of using genetic genealogy to find the father of the fetus. I’m still impressed. There’s no doubt genetic genealogy will be useful to forensics.”

“It was my fear it was the end, too,” Aria said. “But GenealogyDNA had more to offer, and that was to create a family tree of the fetus’s paternal grandmother. That’s this one. You understand who the fetus’s paternal grandmother would be?”

“I think so,” Laurie said. “She would be Lover Boy’s mother.”

“Exactly,” Aria said. “The thought was that maybe Eric Thompson wasn’t lying when he said he only had three children. There’s a definite possibility he could have sired a son as a young teenager and never knew about it. Although that is not the rule, we all know it happens.”

“True,” Laurie said.

“So GenealogyDNA put their entire team into seeing what they could find out about the paternal grandmother’s side of the family. With a bit of luck, they did find a distant match, but while trying to follow up on that, they struck gold, as they called it. Like pennies from heaven, they came across a thirtysomething woman named Patricia Hanna, who’d just uploaded her genealogical kit and who turned out to be a half-sibling with Lover Boy. That meant that her mother, Diane Hanna née Carlson, was Lover Boy’s mother and the fetus’s paternal grandmother.”

“I see that,” Laurie said, studying the second family tree. She then looked up at Aria. “So, did someone try to call her?”