“‘It’s like a novel,’ a newspaper editor once told me, shaking his head. When I recently asked Ruggeri, the chief investigator, to sum up the case, she stared at her desk and just said ‘incredible’ four times.”

A DHL tycoon’s small plane disappeared near the Phillipines amidst rumors of children fathered with teenage Asian villagers. Every scrap of his DNA went missing, but that didn’t stop a forensic mathematician.