“Let me just double-check something.”
Elena grabbed her phone and checked her texts. There was one from Simon Greene, who’d informed her that his daughter Paige had no charges on her credit card for DNAYourStory, but that he had found one for $79 to:
Ance-Story.
She filled Lou in on Simon’s text. “Okay,” Lou said, “so this is going to be even bigger news than I thought.”
Elena’s eyes traveled down the home page. No doubt about it — this was definitely one of those DNA genealogy sites. There were all kinds of photographs of people embracing and cute catchphrases like “Discover Who You Really Are” or “Only You Are You — Uncover Your Unique Ethnic Origins.” There were other links that could help the potential customer — like the thrilled people in the embracing photographs — “find new relatives.”
Below that, the packages the potential customer could purchase were displayed. The first option, priced at $79, offered you a breakdown of your ancestry and the chance to connect with DNA relatives. The second option was called “For Your Health Too.” It offered the same as package one, but for an extra eighty dollars, you’d receive a “full medical report that could make you healthier.”
The word RECOMMENDED was stamped in flashing letters above the more expensive package. What a surprise. The company itself was suggesting you spend more money on their products. Gasp.
“You on the home page?” Lou asked.
“Yes.”
“Click Sign in.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll see two fields. User name and Password.”
“Right.”
“Okay, this is the part where I get legal on you. I called on the secure app because I figured out how to get into Henry Thorpe’s DNA account.”
“How did you do that?”
“You really want to know?”
“No.”
“I know we could get permission from his father—”
“But he has no standing. I already heard this today.”
“So what we would be doing by signing in... well, I’m not sure it’s completely legal. This could be viewed technically as hacking. I want to caution you.”
“Lou?”
“Yeah?”
“Give me the user name and password.”
He did so. She typed them in. A page came up that read: “Welcome back, Henry. Here’s your ethnic composition.”
Henry was 98 percent European. Under that, he was listed as 58 percent from Great Britain, 20 percent from Ireland, 14 percent Ashkenazi Jew, 5 percent Scandinavian, and then everything else was negligible.
“Scan down to the bottom of the page,” Lou said.
She traveled past something called Your Chromosomes.
“You see the link that says ‘Your DNA Relatives’?”
She said that she did.
“Click it.”
A new page came up. On the top, it read “Sorted Strength of Relationship.” Next to that, it noted that “You have 898 relatives.”
“Eight hundred and ninety-eight relatives?” Elena said.
“Henry Thorpe better get a bigger Thanksgiving table, right? That’s normal, maybe even on the low side. The vast majority are distant cousins who share less than one percent of your DNA. But click Page One.”
She could hear the excitement in his voice.
Elena clicked. The page took its time loading now.
“You see it?”
“Calm down, I’m using a Howard Johnson’s Wi-Fi.”
And then she did indeed see it. The whole case started to come together. That was how it felt. Like a whole bunch of those big puzzle pieces suddenly started to fit.
Four people were listed as: Half-Sibling(s) of Henry.
“Holy crap,” she said.
“Yep.”
Damien Gorse of Maplewood, New Jersey, was listed first. His full name. Just like that. The murdered owner of the tattoo parlor was a half brother of Elena’s client.
Under that, also listed as a “half-sibling male,” were just initials.
“AC from the Northeast,” Elena said. It didn’t take much to guess. “Aaron Corval.”
“Probably.”
“Any way to confirm?”
“I’m working on it. See, the site doesn’t let people just list themselves anonymously. It gives you two options. Full name. Or initials. But they have to be real. I’d say half the people do full name, half do initials.”
Next, also listed as a half-sibling male, were the initials NB of Tallahassee, Florida.
“Any way to trace down NB?”
“None that are legal.”
“How about illegal?”
“Not really. I could send him a message as Henry Thorpe, see if he’ll tell me his name.”
“Do it,” she said.
“That violates—”
“Can it be traced back to us?”
“Don’t insult me.”
“Then do it,” Elena said.
“It turns me on when you bend the rules.”
“Super, great. We also need to contact the authorities. Maybe they can get a warrant off what we have, I don’t know.”
“We can’t give them what we have, remember?”
“Right, okay. But NB, if we find his identity, needs to be warned. He could be next.”
“There might be more.”
“What do you mean, ‘more’? More what?”
“Siblings.”
“How do you figure that?” she asked.
“Henry Thorpe put his DNA into at least three of these sites.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Lot of people do. The more databases you’re in, the better your odds of finding blood relatives. My point is, he found four half siblings in Ance-Story alone. He may have found more elsewhere, I don’t know.”
“These are all half siblings, right?”
“Right. On the father’s side.”
She glanced down the page. “What about this last guy, the fourth half sibling?”
“What about him?”
“He’s listed as a Kevin Gano from Boston. Did you check him out?”
“Yeah. And — drumroll — this is big. You ready?”
“Lou.”
“Gano is dead.”
She’d expected that reply, and yet it still landed with a wallop. “Murdered?”
“Suicide. I talked to the local cops. Nothing suspicious about the case. He lost his job, seemed depressed. He went into his garage and shot himself in the head.”
“But they weren’t looking for anything suspicious,” she said. “He was probably...”
She stopped. Her heart fell.
“Elena?”
She didn’t say it out loud, but suddenly the answer seemed obvious. A suicide. Two murders.
And a disappearance.
Henry Thorpe was probably dead. If the killer wanted to make sure he didn’t link to the others — if he didn’t want a cop to start looking at any links between murder victims on, say, a DNA site — you’d just make one of the victims look like a runaway.
Damn.
Was Elena searching for a dead man?
“Elena?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Something else we need to look at.”
“What’s that?”
“We know Paige Greene signed up with Ance-Story too.”
“Yeah, well, she’s not a half sibling. That’s the total list there. All male.”
“Maybe some other way.”
“There’s a search engine. Use it.”
She typed in “Paige Greene.” Nothing. She typed in “Greene” and her initials and a few other ways that Lou suggested. Nothing. She looked through the relatives list. There was one first cousin, also male, listed and then several third cousins.
No Paige. No PG.
“Paige Greene is not a relative,” Lou said.
“Then how does she fit into this?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A commuter app told Simon that taking the 1 train south to get to Columbia University would take eleven minutes total, which was considerably faster than a taxi or car. Simon stood waiting for the elevator that plummets you into the bowels of Washington Heights when his mobile rang.