As Knight tugged his wheelie bag toward a black town car idling on Columbus Circle, he received a call he had been expecting all day from Dr. Lara Klesser. Lara ran the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory in Pretoria, which was the leader in sequencing exotic animal DNA. And in a business where provenance was nine-tenths of the law, that kind of data was invaluable. While Knight’s company relied on all sorts of private labs in its forensic investigations, Lara’s animal DNA lab was the only one of its kind in the world.

“Dr. Klesser, did the university receive my earmarked donation?”

Knight knew that Lara didn’t mind his requests. They were usually a fun puzzle to solve, and his donation would buy a cutting-edge PCR machine she had her eye on.

“Yes, we’re very grateful, Randall.”

“Any luck with that tiger?”

“Where did you say the tiger cub came from?” Knight could hear a loud whirring noise in the background—likely one of Lara’s techs drilling a confiscated rhino horn or lion bone for a sample.

“Supposedly wild caught,” Knight replied skeptically.

“Unless two of the rarest tigers in the world traveled thousands of miles to mate, that’s impossible.”

The tiger was a mixed breed—Sumatran and Indochinese DNA. In Knight’s experience, hybrid and inbred tigers emerged only in captivity.

“How certain can you be of that finding?”

“We used twenty-three data points in the DNA. In a murder trial you’d need only fifteen data points for a conviction.”

Knight thanked her for her time, then hung up, his mind racing with questions. Who the hell would mix tiger DNA when all zoos and collectors wanted only purebreds or designer cats? Moreover, how did some shady importer in Macau get his hands on it? Though Knight’s job was to investigate the claim, the fact that the definitive answer to those questions could save his company a lot of money was now secondary to the thrill of hunting down the hidden truth.

CHAPTER 20 TRADITIONAL MEDICINE

CHAPTER 20
TRADITIONAL MEDICINE

hong kong

Audrey sat by her son’s bed, listening to the beep and whir of the monitoring equipment as he slept. Joshua had lost ten kilos and was now the same weight as when he was only nine years old. The detective had tried to work, but she was too distracted. Her desperate fear for her son had forged an idea in her—one that she had assumed would pass, but it hadn’t. It was an idea that forced her to weigh her principles against the life of her son. If he should die and she had failed to do everything in her power to save him, what kind of mother was she?