Run Away(70)

He looked for Yvonne, hoping to shake the damn answer out of her about his wife’s past, but she was nowhere to be found all of a sudden. Why? Did she want to avoid him, or was she just needed—especially with her partner out of commission—at work? Yvonne had said something about that, about taking care of the office, about pacing themselves for the “long haul,” about not needing both of them here at the same time.

Simon was somewhere between annoyed and angry with Yvonne, but he also recognized that her argument for keeping her promise to Ingrid had merit and even nobility. Simon had known Ingrid for twenty-four years—three years before Paige was born. How could anything from before Paige was born or even before Simon and Ingrid met, no matter how bizarre or sordid or just plain awful, factor into this?

It made zero sense.

“Simon?”

Elena Ramirez was suddenly next to him. She asked whether there was any update on Ingrid’s condition. Simon told her that Ingrid was in surgery and said, “So fill me in on what’s going on.”

They moved to one of those corners he’d been leaning against, the one farthest away from the entrance and general population.

“I haven’t put it all together yet,” Elena said in a low voice.

“But?”

Elena hesitated.

“You found something, right?”

“Yes. But I still don’t know how it connects to you. Or your daughter.”

“I’m listening.”

“Let’s start with Paige and this family tree club.”

“Okay.”

“We know that Damien Gorse visited an ancestry DNA site called DNAYourStory dot com.” She looked around as though she feared someone would overhear her. “So I asked my client to check his son Henry’s charge cards too.”

“And?”

“There was a charge to DNAYourStory. In fact, Henry Thorpe signed up for several DNA ancestry sites.”

“Wow.”

“Right.”

“So I guess I need to check Paige’s credit cards,” he said. “See if she signed up too.”

“Yes.”

“How about Aaron? Was he on the site?”

“There is no way to know, unless we find it on a charge card. Do you think you could ask the mother?”

“I could ask, sure, but I doubt she’ll help.”

“Worth a shot,” Elena said. “But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that they all sent in their samples to the same DNA site and got tested. Do you know how these tests work at all?”

“Not really.”

“You spit into a test tube and they analyze your DNA. Different sites do different things. Some claim they can look at your DNA and give you a genetic health workup—do you possess certain variants that make you more likely to get Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s?…Stuff like that.”

“Is that accurate?”

“The science seems questionable, but that’s not really important right now. At least, I don’t think it is. The basic package is probably what you’d know about if you’ve read anything about these DNA sites. It gives you an ancestry composition—like you’re, say, fifteen percent Italian and twenty-two percent Spanish, that kind of thing. It can map your ancestral migration too, like where your people first started and where they settled over time. It’s pretty wild.”

“Yeah, that might be interesting, but how does that play into this?”

“I doubt it does.”

“These tests,” Simon said. “They also tell you about your parents, right?”

“And other relatives, yes. I assume that’s why both Henry Thorpe and Damien Gorse took the test.”

“Because they were adopted,” Simon said.

“And didn’t know anything about their birth parents. That’s the key. It’s very common for adoptees to sign up for these services, so they can find their parents or learn about siblings or really, any blood relative.”

Simon rubbed his face. “And Aaron Corval might have done something like that too. To learn about his mother.”

“Yes. Or maybe to prove his father wasn’t his father.”

“You mean like maybe Aaron was adopted too?”

“It could be, I don’t know yet. One of the problems is that these DNA sites are highly controversial. I mean, millions of people have done them, maybe tens of millions. More than twelve million last year alone.”

Simon nodded. “I know a lot of people who sent in their samples.”

“Me too. Yet everyone is naturally squeamish about sending their DNA in to an internet company. So these ancestry sites are absolutists about security and privacy. Which I get. I tried every contact I know. DNAYourStory won’t tell me a thing without a warrant—and they’ve promised to fight any warrant to the Supreme Court.”

“But the connections you found—”

“—are right now tenuous at best. Two otherwise unconnected murders—different means, different states, different weapons—we can only link marginally to someone in Chicago via a few internet messages. It’s less than nothing in a court of law.”

Simon tried to absorb what she was saying. “So you think Aaron and your client and this Gorse guy—all three of these guys—could all be related?”