“How much?”
“Hard to give you an exact amount. I’ll argue that you have no prior record and are not a flight risk. But the DA is pushing for first-degree murder, and on that charge alone there is precedent on bail. Minimum, a million. Likely more. Plus the remainder of my retainer.”
Victoria stared out the window of her attorney’s office and looked at the buildings of New York. She made a mental list of her assets. She had just over $10,000 in a joint savings account with her husband. Her investments would wring out another eighty thousand, although she’d likely have to fight her husband tooth and nail for every penny since the account was in both their names. They hadn’t spoken since the details of her affair came out during the investigation, which she knew was inevitable. The media had salivated over every dirty detail, spreading them far and wide. Her husband had moved out soon after.
She could borrow against her 401k, where another hundred thousand resided. The equity in their home might yield five figures. Even with all that, she’d still be well short. She could ask her parents and sister, but Victoria knew that wouldn’t get her far. Victoria’s best friend had all the money in the world, and a million dollars would not be a stretch for Natalie Ratcliff. It was Victoria’s only option. The weight of the situation drooped her shoulders and brought tears to her eyes. Things were not meant to play out like this. Just a short couple of months ago, she and Cameron were happy. They were planning a future together. But then everything changed. The pregnancy and the abortion and everything that followed. The jealously and the hate. It had all come so quickly that Victoria barely had time to digest it. And now she was in the middle of a nightmare with no way out. She pulled her gaze from the window and looked at her attorney.
“What happens if I can’t come up with the money?”
Roman Manchester pursed his lips, picked up his coffee mug, and took a slow sip before carefully placing it back on his desk. “I think you should find a way to secure the money; let’s leave it at that. It will be much easier to mount a viable defense if you are not in jail prior to trial. Not impossible, just easier.”
Victoria’s mind buzzed. An actual, audible vibration. She imagined it was the neurons of her brain attempting to grasp the gravity of the moment, until she realized it was something else. The vibration was real, a growing flutter that rattled her chair and shook the desk. The sound that accompanied it changed from a far-off buzz to a screaming whine. Suddenly, an object streaked through her peripheral vision but was gone before she could bring her gaze to the window. Then, her attorney’s office rocked and swayed. Pictures fell from the wall and glass shattered just as the concussion of an explosion filled her ears. The lights flickered and the ceiling tiles rained down on her. Outside the windows, the blue sky that had been visible just a moment before was gone. In its place was a wall of black smoke that erased the brilliant morning sun. That same dark smolder spiraled through the vents as an ominous odor filled her nostrils. She recognized the scent but couldn’t immediately place it. It wasn’t exactly the same, but the closest she came was that it smelled like gasoline.
Manhattan, New York
Twenty Years Later
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.