Genesis

Chapter 29

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.”

“That’s unfortunate,” she said. She remembered from her reading that the term’s genealogical meaning referred specifically to situations where there was an apparent break in a family tree that couldn’t be solved by following the paper trail of birth certificates and marriage licenses. Donor conception, as she was claiming with her leukemia scam, was one issue that could create such a brick wall. So was adoption, misattributed parentage, or even hospital baby switches that caused a sudden change in the genetic family tree defined by DNA inheritance.

“Yes, it is unfortunate,” Vijay said. “And it is discouraging. Using a lot of tricks and taking advantage of the huge ancestral DNA database that now exists, we’ve traced down the appropriate Thompson family tree to where we should have found our target, but frustratingly enough, we haven’t. An hour or so ago we even found what we believe to be half-siblings of Hansel’s father using the Lazarus kit we developed for the missing sperm donor. And one of the half-siblings, named Robert Thompson, even created a very complete family tree, all the way back to Clarence Thompson, that he was willing to share with us. That gave us Hansel’s paternal grandfather and several half-aunts and half-uncles. That should have been more than enough, but we are still empty-handed. Unfortunately, the paternal grandfather, Eric Thompson, wasn’t helpful like his son. When we tried to explain the situation to him, he told us we had to be mistaken and that he only had the three kids, two girls and Robert, all of whom we already had on the Thompson family tree. He also denied ever being a sperm donor. Of course, that flies in the face of what genetic genealogy is trying to tell us, meaning in all likelihood a son of Eric Thompson had to have been the sperm donor for Hansel’s creation. When there’s this kind of problem, it’s really frustrating. What we are beginning to believe is there was an adoption involved.”

“So, what does all this mean?” Aria said with irritation. It seemed that after all the effort she was going to be deprived of success. It wasn’t fair. “Does this mean the search is over?” The way everyone was working suggested otherwise, but how was she to know?

“No, not yet. We haven’t totally given up,” Vijay said. “What we are concentrating on now is the maternal side of the missing sperm donor’s family, or Hansel’s paternal grandmother, who would be the mother of the missing individual. If we can find her, and if she is cooperative, and if it was an adoption as we now suspect, and if it was an open adoption, we’ll have the father. Otherwise, all bets are off as adoption records here in New York State are sealed.”

“Would they be sealed in a situation of life or death like we’re facing?” Aria asked. She looked down at the family tree diagram she was holding, lamenting that all this work might be in vain.

“My understanding is that New York State has some of the most restrictive laws guarding confidentiality in adoption, even for medical reasons. Unsealing a record can happen if all parties agree, but it is a time-consuming process that would take months, if not a year. At the same time, if criminality is involved, I believe a district attorney can subpoena them, but that is the exception, not the rule.”

“Shit,” she said, feeling progressively depressed.

“Hallelujah!” someone cried out suddenly, causing Aria’s head to pop up. Simultaneously a round of applause broke out along with accompanying cheers from many of the people in the room. Aria could see the youthful, skinny boy with mild acne who had asked her the sole question the previous day pumping his hands in the air like a professional bicyclist having just won a race. He had apparently jumped up from the desk where he’d been sitting at his laptop. “I’ve come across another first cousin, but this time on the father’s maternal side,” he cried. “And it’s a good match, with over eight hundred centimorgans.”

From her reading, she knew that centimorgans were a complicated method of measuring distance on a chromosome. The more centimorgans involved, the better the match. Thanks to the applause and excitement, she was encouraged. “Are we back in business?” she asked.

“Let’s hope,” Vijay said. “This should give us the grandmother we are looking for. Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”