Jennifer Marie Griffin.
As breezes flowed through treetops stirring birdsong, he stood there alone, his heart quaking as he struggled to understand.
How did this happen?
He was not sure how long he stood there, bound to his grief, the pain scraping his insides, until he dropped to his knees, wanting to gouge at the grave and crawl into it with her.
I’m sorry for what happened. I’m sorry it ended this way.
Huge tears streamed down his face. He sobbed and his body shook with such great spasms he steadied himself by hugging the cross.
I’m so sorry, Jenn. Please forgive me.
At that moment, his phone began buzzing, vibrating.
Greg ignored it until it stopped.
He couldn’t let go of the cross.
If he did, he’d fall off the face of the earth.
Sixty-One
Quantico, Virginia
Around the time Greg was driving Jake to school, Meredith Martin was catching up on her work at the FBI’s crime lab complex.
Only yesterday she and her husband were taking sunset walks on the beach in Ocho Rios.
Or so it seems, Martin thought, glancing out her small office window at the Virginia woods west of Washington, DC.
It was coming up on a week since she’d returned from her vacation in Jamaica, and she had cut down the backlog that was waiting for her. Sipping tea from her new mug with a hummingbird on it, she turned back to her computer monitor.
As a supervisory biologist with the CODIS Unit, Martin was performing more random quality assurance checks. She focused on recently completed cases of samples that had been submitted from law enforcement agencies across the country for comparison to DNA profiles in the National DNA Index System.
She’d examined two cases yesterday, one from California and one from Texas. Both were matches. Step by step, she’d scrutinized the work done. Everything in the process had been followed correctly. Martin affirmed the findings. Another sip of tea. She’d signed off on those cases, and this morning had moved on to another recently completed submission that had been a match.
Martin glanced at the Originating Agency Identifier, or ORI, of the profile in one of the national databases then pulled it up. Then she called up the submission.
Martin had a PhD and nearly fifteen years of experience in analyzing DNA with the FBI. She had testified in several court cases and had been recognized as a leading expert in her field.
After several long minutes of examining her monitor, her brow furrowed.
She reached for her phone and called her colleague, Abby Ross, to come to her office to consult on the submission.
A moment later, Ross joined Martin at her desk, looking at the monitor.
“All right.” Martin pointed with a pen to the monitor. “See that?”
“Sure. The mt is consistent,” Ross said.
“That’s correct. The mitochondria DNA is inherited solely from the mother.” Martin’s pen hovered in a new area. “Take a real close look at the STR sequences.”
Ross drew her face closer to the monitor.
“See it?” Martin said.
Ross began nodding. “There’s a variance in the repeats.”
“It’s almost imperceptible, easy to miss, but it’s definitely there.”
“Oh jeez.”
“Yup,” Martin said. “And this was identified as a match.”
“Oh no,” Ross said. “Who handled it?”
Martin shook her head.
“Doesn’t matter right now.” Martin clicked back to the ORI with all the contact information. “What matters right now, is we got some calls to make.”
Sixty-Two
Greater Buffalo, New York
Several long minutes had passed before Greg released his hold on Jenn’s cross and got to his feet.
He was thankful that no one else was at the church or in the cemetery.
The solitude was a gift.
He sat on a bench in the shade of a maple tree, wiping his face with his sleeves, pulling himself together. He took out his phone from his pocket. It had vibrated twice while he mourned at Jenn’s grave, but he’d ignored it. Checking it now, he saw it was not Jake, or his school. It wasn’t Kat, or his father.
No messages.
The number was blocked.
It could’ve been media, a spam call, or anybody.
He was sliding the phone back into his pocket when it vibrated and buzzed in his hand.
The number was blocked.
Dragging one hand over his face, he cleared his throat then said, “Hello?”
“Greg, it’s Claire Kozak.”
He hesitated, then sniffed. “Yeah?”
“Are you driving right now?”
“No. What is it, Kozak?”
“Greg, we’re in Cleveland and we wanted to reach you the moment we had this confirmed and before it got out to the press.”
The last time Kozak called like this it was to prepare him for the most devastating news of his life.
“Before what got out?”
“The woman killed in the crash here was not Jennifer.”
A sensation thundered through Greg’s entire body, and he sat there in numbed silence.
“Greg, listen, it’s complicated, but it was when they were analyzing the DNA—something got misinterpreted. Then the FBI’s experts in Quantico reexamined it exhaustively several times before alerting us with the confirmation that Jennifer was not the woman killed in the crash in Cleveland.”
“She wasn’t?” Greg’s voice broke as if reluctant to accept the news.
“No. I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through.”
Greg adjusted his grip on his phone.
“You’re sorry? What the f—” He stopped. “What—I just buried—dammit, Kozak!”
“Greg, it was a mistake.”
“But how—who was the woman killed?”
“The FBI tells us that from their analysis of the dead woman’s DNA, and the DNA we collected directly from Jennifer and Jake—you know, her toothbrush, comb, and Jake’s cheek swab—that the woman killed in Cleveland is a relative of Jennifer’s.”
Shutting his eyes, his heart sank. He was shaking his head.
“But she has no relatives! It’s another damned mistake!”