“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.”

“Until you developed this new technology.”