Chapter 9 - Coordinating A Covert DNA Test In Chicago
We couldn't rely on private doctors or local clinics where the Vance family influence still held sway. Alejandro arranged for an independent forensic geneticist from Northwestern University to visit our estate discreetly. Dr. Sterling—no relation to my father—arrived after dark through the private back service entrance.
I led him upstairs to the guest suite where my mother was sleeping peacefully under heavy sedation. Dr. Sterling swabbed the inside of her cheek with clinical precision while I stood watching anxiously.
"We will have definitive mitochondrial DNA matching results within twelve hours," Dr. Sterling assured me quietly. Downstairs in the kitchen, Alejandro poured coffee for the geneticist before escorting him out through the side security gate.
I returned to my mother's bedside, brushing a stray lock of gray hair from her forehead. For twenty years, I had visited a cold marble headstone in the Columbus cemetery that bore her name. Now, the woman resting in my guest bed was breathing, dreaming, and slowly waking from a twenty-year nightmare.
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"Who are you, my sweet girl?" Lucy murmured in her sleep, her hand twitching against the satin blanket. "I'm your daughter, Mom," I whispered into the quiet darkness of the bedroom. "And I'm going to make sure the monsters who did this pay for every single day."
My phone vibrated on the bedside table with an incoming encrypted email notification from the lab. The subject line read: Urgent Priority Case File - Bennett Maternal Lineage Verification.
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