Run Away(86)

Those were the thoughts that haunted Simon as he stepped on the campus where he’d spent four years.

Students hurried by him, mostly with their heads down. He could make the standard whining observation about how the youngsters were all staring at their little screen or had headphones jammed into their ears, how they all wanted to shut out the world so that they could be surrounded by people and yet completely alone, but his generation was just as bad, so what was the point?

Simon spotted the bronze statue of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, sitting on her throne. If you looked closely, Simon knew, you could find a tiny owl hidden in her cloak by her left leg. Legend had it that the first member of an incoming class to find the owl became the valedictorian. Athena’s left arm is outstretched, purportedly to welcome visitors, but Simon sometimes saw it as more like his grandmother’s shrug gesture when she’d say, “Eh, what can you do about it?”

His mobile rang again. The caller ID told him it was Elena Ramirez.

“Anything new?” he asked.

“Yeah, a lot.”

Elena hit only briefly on the actual reasons she’d gone to Maine, just to say that something was clearly fishy with the adoptions. She concentrated instead on what her tech guy had helped her discover about the DNA genealogy. Simon moved up the steps of Low Library. He half sat, half collapsed on the cool marble and listened as Elena ran through what she had learned—the adoptions, the half brothers on the DNA website, the sudden deaths.

“Someone is killing them off,” Simon said at one point.

“It seems so, yes.”

He wasn’t sure what he felt when she told him that Paige, who had signed up for the same DNA genealogy test, was not a blood relative. It should have been a comfort—didn’t it mean that he was indeed the father?—but then a thought occurred to him.

“We don’t know for sure,” he said.

“Don’t know what for sure, Simon?”

“That Paige isn’t a half sibling too.”

“How so?”

“Maybe Paige didn’t list her real name. I read about a few cases where people put in other people’s DNA or fake names or whatever. So maybe she’s that other sibling, the one with initials.”

“NB?”

“Right.”

“No, Simon, that can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“He’s listed as a male. If Paige put her own DNA in here, even if she used a fake name, they’d know if the DNA sample came from a male or a female. This was from a male. So NB can’t be Paige.”

“So maybe she used another pseudonym.”

“Maybe. But we now control Henry Thorpe’s page. It lists all his relatives. There are no female relatives who are closer than a third cousin.”

“So I still don’t get it. How is Paige involved?”

“Through Aaron somehow, but I don’t know. Maybe we’ve been looking at it the wrong way.”

“How so?”

“Maybe your daughter put someone else’s DNA in instead of her own.”

“I thought about that, but why?”

“I don’t know. We need to track down her movements. Maybe Paige discovered something. A crime or something that made no sense. Something that led her to Aaron.”

Simon thought about it. “Let’s take a step back and see what we know for sure.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“First off, all of these men came from the same biological father.”

“Right.”

“They were all probably adopted out of the same small agency in Maine.”

“Right.”

“And there was some kind of cover-up. The father’s name isn’t listed on the adoption reports.”

“As far we know right now, yeah,” Elena said.

Simon switched the phone from his right hand to his left. “Have you read about those cases where an infertility doctor ends up using his own semen to impregnate his patients? There was one case in Indiana, I think, where a woman found eight unknown siblings on one of these DNA sites, sort of like what you’re saying here, and then the siblings all got together and figured out the infertility doctor had been using his own sperm and pretending it came from a bank or something.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Elena said. “There are a number of cases like that. A big one in Utah, Canada too.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“I just don’t see how it would work here. The women in those cases weren’t giving up the babies for adoption. They wanted them more than anything.”

She had a point.

“We’re still missing something,” he said.

“Agree. So I’m going to take another run at Alison Mayflower because she’s the one who set up the adoptions. I’m going to threaten her with prison, whatever it takes. I also want to try to get the FBI interested, but I’ll have to do that through a backdoor channel.”

“Why?”

“All the info I just gave you, you can’t tell anyone. Someone could claim that it was obtained illegally—the fruits of a bad act or some such thing. Either way, even if we go to the feds today, it won’t be a priority. It’ll take days, probably weeks, just to get it assigned to someone. We don’t have…” There was a pause. “Simon, hold on, I have another call.”