THE NEW YORK CITY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE WAS LOCATED IN a nondescript, six-story white brick building in Kips Bay on East Twenty-Sixth Street and First Avenue. If offices had occupied the top two floors they would have offered views of the East River and the north end of Brooklyn. But the upper floors were not meant for the scientists and doctors who roamed the building. They were instead reserved for water and air purification systems. The circulated air within the world’s largest crime lab was clean, pure, and dry. Very, very dry. Humidity was bad for DNA, and DNA extraction was one of the crime lab’s fortes.
In the cold, damp basement was the bone-processing laboratory. A technician opened the airtight seal of the cryo tank, releasing liquid nitrogen fog into the air. A triple layer of latex gloves protected the technician’s hands. His face was safe behind a plastic shield. He reached into the tank with a pair of forceps and lifted the test tube from the fog. It was filled with white powder that had minutes earlier been a small bone fragment specimen. The liquid nitrogen had been used to freeze the bone, and then the frozen specimen was shaken violently in the bulletproof test tube. The result was total pulverization of the original bone sample into a fine powder. The technique allowed scientists to access the innermost portion of the bone, which made the chance of extracting usable DNA more likely. The concept was remarkably simple and had been developed based on two of the basic concepts of physics—the law of motion, and thermodynamics. If an apple were thrown at a wall, it would break into many pieces. But if the same apple were frozen solid by liquid nitrogen and then hurled at the wall, it would shatter into millions of pieces. When it came to extracting DNA from bone, the more pieces the bone could be broken into, the better. The finer the powder, better still.
The tech placed the test tube into a rack with a dozen others containing pulverized bone. With the nitrogen fog still spiraling from the latest tube, he dipped a titrating syringe into a beaker of fluid, drew ten cc’s into the chamber, and added the extraction products to the pulverized bone. The next day, instead of bone powder, a pink liquid would fill the tubes. It was from this liquid that a genetic code would be procured—a sequence of twenty-three numbers unique to every human on the planet. Their DNA profile.
In the room next to the bone-processing lab, a continuous bank of computers lined all four walls. It was here where scientists took the DNA profiles generated from the original bone fragments and attempted to match them to profiles stored in the Combined DNA Index System databank known as CODIS. But this was not the national databank the FBI utilized to match DNA profiles gathered from crime scenes to previously convicted criminals. The databank searched here was a stand-alone archive of DNA profiles provided by the families of 9/11 victims who were never identified after the towers fell.
Greg Norton had worked at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for three years. Most of those years were spent in the computer lab. Each morning he was met with a stack of DNA profiles recently sequenced from bone fragments that had been collected from the rubble of the Twin Towers. He entered each sequence into the CODIS databank and searched for matches. In three years of employment he had never made a single match. But this morning, just as he sat down with his second cup of coffee and pecked away at the keyboard, a green indicator light blinked at the bottom of the screen.
Green?
A red light meant no matches had been found on sequences entered, and Greg had become so accustomed to misses that the red light was all he ever expected. He’d never seen a green indicator light during his tenure at the OCME. He clicked on the icon and two DNA profiles popped up onto the monitor—white numbers against a black background. They were identical.
“Hey, boss?” he said in a careful tone, keeping his eye on the set of twenty-three numbers in front of him to make sure they didn’t change.
“What’s up?” Dr. Trudeau asked as he worked his fingers over a keyboard on the other side of the room.
As the head of Forensic Biology, Arthur Trudeau was in charge of identifying the remains of mass casualties from across the state of New York. For nearly twenty years it had been his mission to identify every specimen collected from those killed in the World Trade Center attack.
“We got a hit.”
Trudeau’s fingers stopped tapping the keyboard and he slowly looked over to Greg Norton’s station. “Say that again.”
The tech nodded and smiled as he continued to stare at the numbers on his screen. “We got a hit. We got a frickin’ hit!”
Dr. Trudeau stood from his desk and walked across the lab. “Patient?”
“One one four five zero.”
Trudeau walked to a standing computer station, pulled the keyboard toward him, and typed the numbers.
“Who is it?” Greg asked.
Other technicians had heard the news of a confirmed identification and gathered around. Trudeau stared at the monitor and the small hourglass that spun as the computer searched. Finally, a named appeared on the screen.
“Victoria Ford,” he said.
“Next of kin?” Greg asked.
Trudeau shook his head. “Parents, but they’re deceased.”
“Any other contacts?”
“Yes,” Trudeau said, scrolling down the page. “A sister. Address in New York State.”
“Want me to make the call?”
“No. Let’s run it one more time to be sure. Start to finish. If it hits a second time, I’ll give her a call.”
“First one in how long, boss?”
Dr. Trudeau looked over at the young technician. “Years. Now run it again.”
PART I
The Sting
CHAPTER 1
Los Angeles, CA Friday, May 14, 2021
AVERY MASON WAS NOT LOOKING FOR FAME. WITH A GRAVEYARD OF secrets in her past, fame was the last thing she needed. Still, she had found it. Whether this had been by accident or with intent was a question that only counseling could answer. It would require a deep dive into her tumultuous upbringing, an examination of her complicated relationship with her father, and some honest soul-searching and self-reflection—none of which Avery had time for. Because however it came to be, what Avery knew for certain about fame was that it arrived like a colossal wave rolling toward shore. You either rode it, or let it drown you. She chose to ride it, and in spectacular fashion.
Avery Mason was thirty-two years old and the youngest woman to ever anchor American Events, the most popular prime-time newsmagazine program on television. Her ascension to the top of the ratings was improbable, statistically unheard of, and something Avery never expected. Mack Carter had been the long-running and popular host of American Events. His death the year before while on assignment covering the Westmont Prep slaughters had rattled the television news industry. It also produced a vacancy at the top of American Events. In a panic, the network tapped Avery to fill Mack’s massive shoes until a more permanent anchor could be found. As a frequent contributor to the show, Avery’s segments had consistently earned high ratings. So high, in fact, that she was named as the first co-host in the show’s storied history. Avery had held that position for exactly one month before Mack Carter died. Thrust into the hottest of spotlights and widely expected to fail, Avery Mason had stepped into the lead anchor role the previous fall and killed it. American Events not only stayed at the top of the ratings, but the audience grew by 20 percent.