The Wonder Test

by Michelle Richmond

  Rory’s texts to Caroline’s small group of girlfriends produce no information. He reads their responses aloud. They don’t even sound like friends.

  “Is it possible she just didn’t want to face the test?” I ask. “That she took the mystery woman’s advice?” I want to ease his concern, but the more I think about the single text she sent last night, the more it bothers me.

  “Not a chance. She really wanted to do well, and she’s worked so hard to try to improve her score. The fact that someone told her not to show up would have only made her more determined.”

  After nearly two hours of searching, I pull into the Rodeo Pizza in Foster City and hand Rory my wallet. “I’m going to try to reach Officer Kyle. Why don’t you run in and get us a pepperoni to take home?”

  When Kyle doesn’t answer his work or personal cell phones, I call the station. The dispatcher tells me he’s out sick. I call Kyle’s personal cell and leave a message. “A friend of Rory’s didn’t show up to school today. Maybe unrelated, but I don’t like the timing. Her name is Caroline Donadieu. Can you get the CCTV footage from the school for this past Sunday?”

  Inside the pizza joint, Rory is the only customer. He seems worn out, not quite here. He hands me the wallet. “I didn’t pay yet.”

  A tatted-out skinhead stands behind the counter, tending the metal ovens. He looks me up and down, a creepy grin spreading across his face. He’s spindly and greasy, tall, a buck fifty at most, probably in his late thirties. He pulls the pizza out of the oven, cuts and boxes it. Instead of handing it over the counter, he walks around to where I’m standing and edges up close to me, so close the box touches my stomach. The look in his eyes, the way he presses the box against me, pisses me off.

  I take the pizza and hand it to Rory. “Go wait in the car. I’ll be out in a sec.”

  I don’t relax until I hear the door closing behind him.

  “How much?”

  “Seventeen ninety-five. But for you I’ll work out a discount. I get off in twenty. If you want to wait for me, I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “No thanks.” I reach around him to place a twenty on the counter.

  As I turn and move toward the door, he sidesteps in front of me, blocking my way.

  “Wait, mama. You’re the only pretty customer I’ve had all day. Let’s talk this through.” He’s on something, I’m not sure what. An upper, something that makes him unpredictable, probably even to himself.

  “You need to move. Right now.”

  “Come on. It’ll do you good, wake you up to possibilities.”

  A prison tattoo runs the length of his left arm. He wears a flannel shirt, sleeves torn off. He smells like smoke and a bad apartment, days spent playing video games and watching porn in a dark room. He places his hands on my shoulders, positioning himself between me and the door, his thumbs digging into my skin. I smell pizza burning in the oven.

  I force his hands off my shoulders. “Final warning. You do not want to do this.”

  He grins and reaches around me, sliding a bony hand up my back.

  Disgust surges through me. I feel my eyes narrowing, tunnel vision coming on. The training comes back instinctively. I lower my center of gravity by a couple of inches, planting my right foot behind me. I mumble something he can’t hear, drawing him in closer. It’s about balance. He expects me to push him back, so I pull him in instead. With his weight leaning forward, his mind momentarily relaxed, I have the advantage, even though he’s much taller.

  “What?” He tilts forward. “Was that a ‘yes’ I heard, mama?”

  I put my palms on his chest. I feel his bones, no muscle tone. I let loose with a burst of focused energy, pushing him backward. In Quantico they taught us about the torque that comes from your planted feet, the twist of your waist, how it’s an especially effective tool for women facing off against bigger guys. Of course, this target is a walk in the park compared to the rock of an agent who served as my DT partner.

  Pizza guy is even lighter than I expected. He loses his balance and falls backward. As his hands grab for the table behind him to break his fall, I lunge forward, twisting my core. I swing my fist low and fast across my body and slam it into his left cheek. His eyes are wide open, stunned; clearly, he didn’t expect things to go this way, this fast. His hands scramble for the table beside him, but his balance is all off, his body spinning away from the punch, blood streaming from where my ring caught his cheek. He hits the ground hard and the flimsy table falls over him.

  Adrenaline pulses through my body. I fight the urge to kick him once in the face or neck. Eliminate the threat. But it’s uncalled for, really, and I know that all this rage I’m taking out on the pizza guy isn’t just about him. It’s about Fred. It’s about my dad. It’s about not knowing how to fix anything for Rory. It’s about Gray and the Lamey twins, three kids who went missing and showed up a shell of themselves, and it’s about Caroline, this sick feeling I have in my gut that she’s in serious trouble.

  I watch for a moment, my center of gravity still low, arms and hands poised to fight. I pause to make sure he’s still breathing, but also to make sure he’s not going to pop back up and reengage.

  “Bitch,” he whimpers, his hand hovering over the cut on his face. He moves slowly to push the table off of him, but he has no strength.

  I take several deep breaths, take a few moments to compose myself. When I step outside, I realize Rory is standing just outside the restaurant, still holding the pizza, staring in the window, wide-eyed.

  “What the hell, Mom.”

  “Get in the car.”

  Once we’re inside the Jeep, I lock the doors and turn the key in the ignition. “How much did you see?”

  “All of it.”

  “I’m sorry. I lost my temper.”

  “Mom, you don’t have a temper.” Rory stares at me as if it has just occurred to him that he doesn’t entirely know me.

  “The guy was a jerk, but I could’ve talked my way out of it. I should have handled it differently, obviously.”

  “How did you even know how to do that?”

  “Training. Practice.”

  “Did Dad know you could do that?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Did he ever see you do something like that?”

  “God, no,” I laugh.

  Rory doesn’t pursue the subject any further, but I can tell from the way he stares at me, mulling it over, that we’ll return to this conversation.

  In the middle of the night, a message arrives from Malia:

  Your son seems to be dabbling in the family business. The girl’s parents are the real deal. A posting to Kiev, then one to Sofia, back to Paris for two years, then San Francisco. Not clear if they’re Asian or Eurasian Directorate. CD-2 wouldn’t sneeze at it if you bring them around. Definitely a team. The wife’s credentials are legit. She speaks Mandarin. He speaks Russian and Farsi. The two of them may have been in Algeria since last Wednesday, under different names and passports, completely off the grid, but you didn’t hear it from me.

  33

  A ten-meter-tall tree can have leaves ranging from one millimeter to one meter in length, but a hundred-meter-tall tree can have leaves ranging from only ten to twenty centimeters in length. Why does natural selection sometimes give the underdog a boost?

  On Tuesday morning, day two of the Wonder Test, Rory is out of sorts, still checking his phone obsessively. On the way to school, he clicks the door lock up and down, up and down, an old nervous habit. The relief of that single text from Caroline has faded. The strangeness of last night’s failed search and the ugly incident at the pizza joint casts a pall over everything.

  At school, he lingers in the car for a moment when we reach the curb. “Aren’t you going to tell me to do my best or something?”

  The car behind us honks.

  “I know you will.”r />
  “Yeah, but you’re still supposed to say it.”

  “Okay, kiddo,” I say, tapping his knee. “Do your best.”

  The truth is I don’t give a damn about the test. I’m distracted, hoping he’ll hear from Caroline, almost certain that he won’t. I think back to Kobayashi’s speech that night in the school auditorium. One student, one bad day, one errant key stroke . . .

  Moments after I walk in the door at home and set the coffee to brew, my phone rings, no caller ID.

  “Lina? It’s Nicole. Can we talk?”

  I’m surprised. I hadn’t expected to hear from her again. “I can be at your office in forty-five minutes, give or take.”

  “No, not the office. Do you know Louis’ Diner in the Outer Richmond?”

  When I arrive, the waitress is clearing the corner booth in the back. It’s my favorite seat in the place, windows on two sides. The place has the best view of any restaurant in the city, spanning the ruins of Sutro Baths, Seal Rock, down the long stretch of Ocean Beach. I take the left side, my back to the window overlooking Kelly’s Cove, so I can see the whole restaurant, leaving the panoramic ocean view for Nicole.

  I order coffee and wait. I have a nervous buzzing in my gut. My phone beeps three times, but it’s just Greenfield-Neighbors.org, mostly people going back and forth about the burglary on Marlborough yesterday. The intruders entered through a sliding glass door, took jewelry and electronics, the usual. Located just a quarter mile from the 280 exit, Marlborough is a favorite target of burglars—easy in, easy out. Thieves rarely venture down the winding labyrinth of roads where grand estates stand behind iron gates or down steep, narrow driveways. I scroll the texts for posts about suspicious vehicles, lurkers, anything unusual that could be linked to Caroline but find nothing. Mister Fancy’s owner is on the hunt again, but I saw Mr. Fancy just this morning, and he seemed perfectly happy in our front yard.

  The restaurant clears out, tourists with places to go. Someone turns up the music, “Box of Rain.” It feels like the San Francisco I once knew. Sometimes when you least expect it—amid the fog, the tech workers and tourists, the noise of traffic and MUNI buses—1970s San Francisco pokes its head through to say hello. The song ends and someone hits Repeat.

  Nicole appears at the door, clad in a gray cashmere sweater, dark skinny jeans, riding boots. She walks over and slides into the booth. “Sorry for dragging you out here. I didn’t want to email. Does that make me paranoid?”

  “Makes you smart.”

  Nicole must have put her makeup on in a rush. A streak of foundation is visible at her jawline, black dots of mascara scattered across her eyelids. Every time I see her, she looks more exhausted than the last. Something is keeping her up at night. Is it the business with Gray Stafford or something else?

  “Everything okay?”

  “Not exactly. Boy troubles, you know.”

  Nicole seems too old to be dating boys. Maybe that’s her problem. Still, the way she says it is unconvincing. The waitress brings coffee. Nicole orders an egg-white omelet with mushrooms and bell peppers, hold the cheese.

  “Same for me,” I say. “Except I’ll take the whole egg and extra cheese.” The Dead song grows louder, the spiraling guitar and harmonies wrapping around my brain.

  The waitress walks away. Nicole picks up the salt shaker, puts it down again. She’s not hiding her nervousness very well. When I first took the job, I used to underestimate the effect my presence had, the stress people feel when they meet with me. It doesn’t matter that Nicole called me. I’m still FBI, and that freaks her out. “Any progress with the case?”

  “No. In fact, there’s been a big setback.”

  “What kind of setback?”

  “Another kid has disappeared. Same school.”

  Nicole’s hand goes to her mouth in horror. “You think it’s connected? Oh, God, is it my fault?”

  “You’re here now.”

  “Did you find the swimmer?”

  “Not yet.”

  Nicole starts fumbling inside her bag, looking for something. I see a laptop, a Kindle, phone, billfold. She pulls out a blue Moleskine notebook and places it on the table. “That day, when it happened, my first instinct was not to get involved. Later, after I let myself think about it, I knew my silence wasn’t justified, but I forced the reservations out of my mind.” She raps her fingernails against the side of her coffee mug. “Do you do yoga?”

  “I’ve tried but I get antsy. I can’t turn my mind off.”

  “I go to this place in Cole Valley. It’s mellow, more of a workout than a way of life, you know. But it has feel-good quotes painted all over the walls.”

  The waitress brings the food, refills our coffee. The sourdough toast is crunchy and slick with butter. Nicole takes one bite of her omelet, then pushes the plate away.

  “At the yoga studio, I always get a spot in the back row. There’s this quote in big letters on the back wall. When we do some of the poses, the quote is directly in front of my face, and I’m just stuck there staring at it. I’m sure you know it. ‘If not me, who? And if not now, when?’”

  “Hillel the Elder. ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, what am I? If not now, when?’”

  “I guess it got a little watered down over time,” she says, mulling it over. “Point is, I’ve stared at that quote a hundred times. The day after I found the boy on the beach, I went to yoga. And when I went into warrior pose, there I was, staring at the words on the wall. I felt that they were speaking directly to me, accusing me. But by then it seemed too late. How could I go back and revise my story?”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “I met you. We’re about the same age, maybe similar backgrounds. Obviously, very different trajectories but still.” She shakes her head. “Here I was, doing nothing, not getting involved, while you were doing the opposite. And I just keep thinking, ‘If not me, who?’ But I knew the ‘who’ was you, and it made me ashamed.”

  She pulls a pen out of her bag and tears a piece of paper from her notebook. She starts writing, transcribing from the notebook onto the torn-out page. Her cursive is elegant, old-fashioned. When the waitress comes over to refill our coffee again, Nicole covers the paper with her hand. As the waitress walks away, she returns to copying the information. “If,” she says, “hypothetically, you knew that someone broke the law, but you also knew they broke the law in good faith, in pursuit of important information, are you required to report it?”

  I crunch into my toast, considering. “I broke ten traffic laws on my way here.”

  Nicole smiles, the stress fading from her face for just a few seconds. For an instant she looks younger, transformed, and I wonder if this is the way she always looked before that day on the beach and her subsequent silence changed her, forcing her to see herself in a harsher light. She slides the paper across the table. I open it and read. She has drawn a vertical line down the middle to form two columns. In the first, she has written the following:

  Seaside Fresh Seafood

  650-393-5921

  Owner: John Murphy

  Boats: Rock Crawler (Princeton) & Left Wing Preacher (Ferndale)

  1900 Main St.

  Half Moon Bay, CA

  In the second column, she has written:

  Ivy Blankenship

  415-575-7979

  DOB: 12/12/1991

  670 Pacific Way, B

  Moss Beach, CA

  I can feel her gaze on me as I scan the information. She is so nervous, so eager to please. “You should eat,” I say.

  I glance over my shoulder, out the window. A massive cargo ship, stacked high with orange shipping containers, is slowly making its way out of the mouth of the bay, into the ocean.

  “That’s a lot of shit going somewhere,” Nicole says.

  “They’re all empty. True
fact. It’s from Shanghai. The boats come in filled to the brim, but most of them depart the Port of Oakland empty.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A case I once worked.” I examine the names and addresses again. “Apple or Google?”

  “Google.”

  “Secret’s safe with me.”

  “My friend Susan had a party last night,” she explains, even though she doesn’t need to. I don’t care where she got the information. I’m just glad she got it. “There was this guy. Not too attractive, interesting, though. Google coder. He just broke up with his girlfriend, caught her cheating with some guy from Square. So I asked him how he found out. He wouldn’t tell me at first, but I badgered him until he did. He was depressed, a little drunk. He said he ran a script at work that let him track her phone. Did you know that nearly every single Android phone in the world pings back to Google headquarters as often as every fifteen minutes?”

  “Yes. Everybody’s worried about the government spying. It’s silly. They should be worried about big tech. For me to get that kind of information requires a hundred-page FISA warrant, eleven approvals, a day in a pantsuit, and a judge in a giving mood.”

  “Well, this guy tracked his girlfriend’s phone to a hotel bar in Berkeley when she was supposed to be at work. It went downhill from there. But when he told me the story, it gave me an idea. I asked him if he could do the reverse, if he could tell me all the phones that pinged from a certain location at a certain time. He said that he could, but he probably wouldn’t.”

  “So how did you convince him?”

  Nicole moves a mushroom around on her plate, not looking at me.

  “You didn’t sleep with him?”

  She gives a look of feigned innocence. “I didn’t?”

  “You said you found him unattractive!”

  “No, I said he was not too attractive. Totally different.”

  I smile. “I hope he didn’t have dirty dishes in the sink. Old bedsheets for curtains. Don’t tell me he vapes.”

  “No and no and no,” she says. “He was really sweet. I woke up at four in the morning, and he was on his laptop. He wrote a geolocate script with lat/long fences and then ran it against the historical pings for the hour before and after my encounter on the beach.”