My heart skips slightly. Sliding my legs down, so I’m sitting facing Dean, I open the message. An attachment shows the side-by-side comparison of our DNA profiles.
“The crime lab must have put a serious rush on our test,” I say. “I just got the results.”
“And?” He raises an eyebrow with anticipation.
I set my phone down and go for my tablet instead. The bigger screen will make it easier to see the attachment. Opening it, I turn the screen so both of us can see it. My eyes sweep over the explanation several times before I feel like it’s really sunk in.
“The mitochondrial DNA is different, obviously, but we knew that. We have different mothers. But the other half shows similarities. That’s exactly what I was expecting.”
“What do you mean?”
“To somebody else reading these results, it would look like we’re brother and sister. Like we have the same father. But we don’t. We just happen to have fathers who share their DNA. Your father is my father’s identical twin,” I explain.
“We’re cousins,” he says.
I nod. “But Jonah is convinced he’s father to both of us.”
“Well,” Dean says, setting his tablet down so I can see the screen. “He’s apparently also dead.”
I don’t even know how to process what he just said. The words jumble up in my mind, and I can’t force them into anything that makes sense.
“What are you talking about?” I ask. “Obviously, he’s not dead.”
“According to the government, he is. Jonah Griffin is legally dead. After you told us your theory yesterday, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I spent my entire life wondering who my father is, and what happened to him. Following you had nothing to do with that. I didn’t know I was tracking down my family. It was really hard to wrap my head around it all, just trying to make sense of it. Suddenly I wasn’t just finding out more about my mother and possibly getting an answer about her death; I was finding out about my father. And he’s not exactly someone for me to be proud of.”
“I’m sorry, Dean,” I tell him.
He shakes his head.
“Don’t be. It’s a question I’ve always had, and if you hadn’t found the answer for me, I would have just kept wondering. You got an answer for me. It might not be exactly the type of answer I thought I’d find, but it means I don’t have to ask anymore. But, of course, I can’t just let it go that easily. I’m a private investigator. Digging deeper is what I do. So last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I started looking into Jonah Griffin, and I found this,” he says, gesturing toward the tablet.
He shows me a scan of a death certificate.
“It says he died in 1998,” I frown. “How is that possible? Could this belong to someone else with the same name?”
“No,” Dean says. “It’s him. All the other personal details are correct, and it’s linked to the other information about him I was able to find.”
“What other information?” I ask. “What were you able to find out about him?”
“He was born in Iowa, but you already knew that. He has an identical twin brother… “
“Knew that, too. All along I thought my father was an only child.”
“From everything I found about him, his early life was normal. Jonah and Ian participated in activities together; they did well in school. But in college, Jonah started to show some potentially alarming leanings. He’s got a rap sheet and was suspected of criminal activity, but they could never get a case on him. It looks like his relationship with Ian started to cool off quite a bit around then, but they were still spending time together and maintaining at least some connection immediately after college. Then things dropped off fairly dramatically about thirty years ago. I wasn’t able to find anything else that linked the two of them.”
“That’s not surprising, considering that would be right around the time Jonah raped my mother. I’m sure by then, my father had picked up on his brother’s obsession with his wife. That doesn’t make for good family ties. I don’t understand how you were able to find all this so quickly. I’ve looked into my father’s life and done everything I could to understand his background, and I didn’t find anything about his twin.”
“I looked up Ian too, and it was almost like it was scrubbed. You just didn’t know what to look for, so it was never there. But since Jonah was already dead, his records were left untouched. Somehow the two never made any official connection. That’s why you couldn’t find it.”
“So, what happened after that? Where did he end up?” I ask.
“This is where it starts to get a little interesting. Department of Corrections records show Jonah Griffin serving time for a few years, but obviously, it had nothing to do with the rape. He was convicted of criminal trespass, stalking, and weapons charges.”
“Who was he stalking?” I ask.
“The victim’s name was redacted. After that, there’s very little about him until the news of his death.”
“What do they say happened to him?”
“Crushed and burned in a horrific car accident outside Sherwood, Virginia.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Police have presumptively identified the remains found in the wreckage of an auto accident late Wednesday night as belonging to Jonah L. Griffin, thirty-two. Sources confirm the chase leading to the accident followed an attempted crime, but police declined to provide details.”
I scroll through the search results again and find another article, then another.
“They all say essentially the same thing,” I say. “There was a chase that led to a horrific accident, the body was burned and mangled beyond recognition, but since Jonah was the only person to have been seen getting into that
