Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(19)

“To be honest, I’m not quite sure yet,” I said. “I know that your friend Charlotte’s death was listed as an accident but there are three other similar deaths of women that are not. I’m writing about those three and just want to check out Charlotte’s death to make sure something wasn’t missed.”

“I think it was murder. I’ve said that from the beginning.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she wouldn’t have gone out to those cliffs at night. And definitely not alone. But the police aren’t interested in finding out the truth. An accident looks better for them and the school than a murder.”

I had little knowledge of who Kinsey Russell was. She had written one of the messages directly to her dead friend.

“How did you know Charlotte?”

“From school. We had classes together.”

“So this was like a school party.”

“Yes, kids from school.”

“So how do you jump from her disappearing at the party to it being a murder at the cliffs?”

“Because I know she wouldn’t have gone out there by herself. She wouldn’t have gone out there at all. She was scared of heights. She always talked about all the bridges they have up there where she was from and being too scared even to drive over the Bay Bridge or the Golden Gate. She almost never went into San Francisco because of the bridges.”

I wasn’t sure that was convincing enough to declare the death a murder.

“Well … I’m going to look into it,” I said. “I’ve already started. Can I ask you a few other questions?”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll help you any way I can because this isn’t right. I know something happened out there.”

“The obituary that ran in the paper up in Berkeley said she was survived by her family and several distant relatives she had discovered in the last year. Do you know what that meant, the part about distant relatives?”

“Yes, she did the DNA thing. We both did, except she was really into it and was tracing her family back to Ireland and Sweden.”

“You both did it. Which company did you use?”

“It’s called GT23. It’s not as well-known as the big ones, but it’s cheaper.”

There it was. I was four for four. Four AOD deaths, four victims who had turned their DNA over to GT23. There had to be a connection.

I asked Kinsey Russell a few follow-up questions but didn’t register their answers. I was moving on. I had momentum. I wanted to get off the phone and get to work. Finally, I thanked her for her help, said I would stay in touch, and ended the call.

I looked up after putting the phone down and saw Myron Levin looking over the half-wall of my cubicle. He was holding a mug of coffee with the FairWarning logo on it. The A in Warning was a red triangle with a lightning bolt through it. I was feeling the power of that bolt right now.

“Did you hear all of that?”

“Some of it. You have something?”

“Yeah, I got something big. I think.”

“Let’s go to the conference room.”

He pointed his cup toward the room.

“Not yet,” I said. “I need to make a few more calls, maybe go see somebody, then I’ll be ready to talk. You’re going to like it.”

“Okay,” Myron said. “Ready when you are.”





8

I pulled up everything I could on GT23 and immersed myself in the business of DNA analytics.

The piece that was most informative was a 2019 profile of the company published in Stanford Magazine as GT23 turned two years old and had just gone public, making its five founders extremely wealthy. It was an offshoot of an older company called GenoType23, which was founded two decades earlier by a group of Stanford University chemistry professors who pooled money to open a secure lab catering to law-enforcement agencies too small to fund their own labs to conduct forensic DNA analysis in criminal cases. The first company was initially successful and grew to have more than fifty court-certified technicians working and testifying in criminal cases across the western United States. But DNA became the panacea. It was increasingly being used around the world to solve crimes old and new, as well as to clear those wrongfully accused and convicted. As more and more police departments and law-enforcement agencies caught up technologically and opened their own forensic DNA labs or funded joint and regional labs, GenoType23 faced declining business and revenues and had to lay off staff.

As the company declined, a new area of social analytics emerged in the DNA field following the completion of the human-genome project. Millions of people began seeking their ancestral and health histories. The founders retooled and opened GT23, a budget DNA analytics firm. There was a catch to the low cost, however. While the large forerunners in the field asked customers to volunteer their DNA anonymously for research, GT23 didn’t offer a choice. The low cost of analysis needed to be offset by making the collected samples and data available—still anonymously—to research facilities and biotech firms willing to pay for it.

The move was not without controversy, but the whole field was awash in privacy-and-security concerns. GT23’s founders weathered the questions with the basic explanation that submitting DNA to them was in fact volunteering it for research, and they proceeded to market. And the market responded. So much so that little more than a year later the founders decided to take their company public. The five founders rang the bell on the New York Stock Exchange as trading in their company opened—ironically or perhaps coincidentally—at twenty-three dollars a share. The founders became rich overnight.