As she drove, the postcard sat on the passenger seat. It carried an image of a wooden cabin surrounded by the leaves of autumn. On the back was handwriting Avery had recognized the moment she pulled it from her mailbox. She had ripped up the card when she realized whom it was from. Later, though, the untamable lure of unconditional love found her, and the natural bond that ties daughters to their fathers emerged and forced her to tape the pieces back together and read her father’s words. It did not take long to dawn on her that her father hadn’t sent the card because he missed her. He hadn’t sent it to acknowledge his wife’s passing. He sent it because he needed help.
Getting in touch with her father would be dangerous. Offering assistance of any kind would be outright stupid. She had nothing to gain from doing so, but everything to lose. Still, she couldn’t stop looking at the numbers her father had written along the bottom of the card.
777
She knew what they meant, and had tried hard to ignore them. The federal agents who had asked Avery questions about her father’s whereabouts had it wrong. He was not in Mexico or South America. He hadn’t made it as far as Europe or Australia. He was right here in the United States, and Avery knew exactly where.
CHAPTER 12
Manhattan, NY Tuesday, June 22, 2021
EXHAUSTED FROM HER WEEK OF TRAVEL, AND DRAINED FROM THE emotional upheaval of seeing Connie Clarkson, Avery had taken the day to decompress. But now, feeling rejuvenated, she needed the distraction of her work to clear her mind. She came to New York to gather information. She came to chase a story. Her meeting tonight was meant to test the strength of that story. Avery believed that the identification of a 9/11 victim twenty years after the towers fell was fascinating. If the details turned out to be as interesting as they sounded, Avery would pitch the idea to her producers and get the network to greenlight formal recorded interviews for production in the fall to coincide with the twenty-year anniversary of 9/11.
In the evening, she took a long, hot shower, put herself together, and rode the elevator to the lobby where she hailed a cab to Kips Bay. The taxi crawled through Manhattan traffic until the driver pulled to the curb outside Cask Bar. Avery paid the fare, crossed the sidewalk, and entered the tavern. Inside, she took a seat at the long mahogany bar and ordered a Tito’s and soda. She checked her watch, 7:30 p.m., and kept an eye on the door. Halfway through her cocktail, Avery spotted a tall woman stride through the door and immediately recognized her.
Dr. Livia Cutty had completed her residency and fellowship in North Carolina before taking over the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York. Her time in North Carolina had been punctuated by her involvement in a disturbing case of missing women from bordering states, and the evidence she discovered that helped break the case. After she came to New York, she was linked to one of the most-watched true-crime documentaries in television history when her expertise in forensic pathology helped successfully solve the case of an American medical student who had been killed in the Caribbean. Her exposure in both cases attracted worldwide attention. Both criminal defense attorneys and prosecutors alike sought Livia Cutty’s expertise as a high-profile forensic pathologist. She was a medical consultant for NBC and HAP News, and Avery had worked with her on a number of occasions over the past few years when her true-crime specials required the knowledge of a leading pathologist. Avery had reached out to discuss the recent discovery her office had made—the first successful identification of a 9/11 victim in years.
“Livia, thanks so much for this,” Avery said as Livia walked up to the bar.
“Are you kidding me? When Avery Mason calls, I’m interested. What are you doing in New York?”
“I’m on summer sabbatical, but when this news broke I knew I had to talk with you to get the details.”
“Happy to help any way I can.”
They sat on adjacent stools and Livia ordered a white wine.
“I’m fascinated with the discovery your office recently made,” Avery said. “I’d love to get some details about it. I’m hoping to feature the process and the discovery on my show in the fall. The timing is eerie.”
“It is,” Livia said. “Twenty years later and we’re still identifying victims from the World Trade Center. It’s mind numbing.”
“I’m curious how that’s even possible. Tell me about it.”
“Well, I obviously wasn’t the ME in New York during 9/11. But I’ve heard stories from folks who were on the frontlines. Some of them are still part of the office today. It was horrific, as you might imagine. When the towers fell, the loss of life was not only tragic, but destructive. Gruesome, even. There were very few fully intact bodies recovered from the rubble. Mostly what was found were body parts. It made identifying the victims a monumental challenge. Many recovered body parts were too badly damaged to match them together, so each one had to be identified. Since many of the bodies were catastrophically burned, the usual methods of identification—finding a tattoo or a birthmark or other distinguishing characteristics—were impossible. Instead, we had to rely on DNA. Dental records helped in some cases. But relying on dental ID and DNA analysis had its limitations. Those methods are reliant on the families delivering dental records and DNA samples of their loved ones to the medical examiner’s office. As we sit here tonight, there are over twenty thousand pieces of remains, mostly bone fragments, that have yet to be identified. We’ve extracted DNA from a portion of those remains but we have nothing to match it to.”
“Because families never provided a reference DNA sample?”
“Correct.”
“And the rest of the twenty thousand remains?”
“Until recently,” Livia said, “we had no way of extracting DNA from them. And remember, we’re talking about thousands of bone fragments. The math is simple. Just fewer than three thousand people died when the towers collapsed. We have over twenty thousand specimens to ID. Many of those specimens belong to the same victim. Occasionally, we extract DNA from bone and realize the remains belong to an already identified victim. We check it off the list and move on. But many of the bone fragments were burned so badly that nearly all of the DNA was destroyed.”