Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(56)

I shut my eyes, again seeing the cabin.

“Her poor parents,” Jess said, as if reading my mind. “Can you imagine?”

“I don’t think they’re alive,” I said, remembering the family photo clenched in her hand.

“The poor woman.”

“Let’s keep going,” I said. “We have a lot to get through.”

Other addresses came up frequently enough that we put them in a second pile. Several restaurants, a Starbucks and a wine bar, both near where she lived. I pictured her at the bar. Sitting alone, a glass in front of her, maybe with a laptop open. Probably having a second glass but not a third. We kept at it. Moment by moment, her life rewound. A fitness club. A yoga studio. Normal places for an energetic, successful woman in her midthirties. All the things people did and places they went when they were alive.

In the third category went the addresses that came up less frequently but didn’t seem out of step with routine. Restaurants and bars, a spa at a fancy hotel, a few different apartment buildings that I assumed were addresses of friends. A location a dozen miles south of San Francisco, just off the Bay, that turned out to be a rental car facility serving the San Francisco Airport. A Kaiser hospital, an AMC movie theater, a nail salon. A nonprofit in San Francisco called Tiananmen Lives, various stores and parking garages, and a handful of random addresses that looked to be street parking.

The stack of papers in front of us steadily diminished.

There was a fourth category: addresses that actually meant something. Potential hiding places. Except we got through the printouts without putting anything there. “Now what?” Jess sounded exhausted.

I pushed my chair back from the counter and rubbed my eyes. “Lunch.”

We ate at a little Mediterranean place up the block from the bookstore, taking gyro wraps and fries and salads on plastic trays to a table. “Here I was thinking you were running around being exciting,” Jess said. “If this is how you spend your spare time, I’ll stick with the bookstore. I have more fun reading Gogol than Google.” She took a bite of her gyro, holding it carefully so that the juice leaked downward into the foil wrapper. “Also, what if she walked somewhere? She could have ditched the car entirely.”

“You don’t spend enough time in the South Bay,” I said. “Nobody ditches their car. They can’t. It’s worse than LA.”

“How can anything be worse than LA?”

“LA has a subway.”

“Okay, fine. But how do you look for something if you don’t know what it is? You said the fourth pile would be the key. So how do you find something that isn’t there?”

“It’s there,” I said. “We just have to know how to look.”

“You mean where to look?”

I wiped my chin with a napkin and finished chewing. “When I was a kid my family went to a Seder every year, hosted by a Russian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Berkovich. They managed to get out of the USSR in the seventies and wound up in Bolinas. They always said they wanted the exact opposite of Moscow, and Bolinas was the closest they could find.”

“Soviets—so did they teach you spycraft or something?”

I laughed. “God, no. They would have made terrible spies. He was a painter and she taught piano. But the Seder. Everything is ritual, the whole meal. Early on, Mr. Berkovich would break a piece of matzah in half. He’d wrap half in a napkin and then sneak away from the table to hide it. The afikoman, it’s called. Then later on, us kids would try to find it, and we’d get a reward if we did.”

Jess interjected. “I grew up in SoCal. I’ve probably been to more Seders than Moses. But this applies how…?”

“The rule was that it always had to be hidden in plain sight. Just a matter of looking.”

“Let me guess who found it each year.”

I smiled. “Not trying to boast. But if Karen Li hid something, it’s there for us to see.”

“Talk about a needle in a haystack.”

I thought about Mr. Berkovich. “It’s not, though. What we’re looking for was hidden by a person. A needle in a haystack is a random occurrence. But finding something hidden is the opposite of random. Because people hide things. And people can’t hide things randomly no matter how hard they try. There’s always a decision process. Choosing, eliminating, choosing. It’s like coming up with an e-mail password. The security experts always say make it totally random, just a jumble of letters and numbers. But no one actually listens. We’re people. Coming up with something truly random is unnatural. Finding something is just about figuring out how the person doing the hiding thinks.”

“So what do we do?”

“We narrow it down. One: it has to be a place where she could physically hide something. In Mendocino she told me it wasn’t with her.”

“Okay, what else?”

“Two: she was scared. She had to assume they would check the obvious places. Three: she had to be able to get to it again. So, accessible on relatively short notice. Not halfway across the world or in a time-locked bank vault. And four: she had to make sure that someone else wouldn’t accidentally find it in the meantime.”

Jess thought. “Maybe that Starbucks or the wine bar she liked?”

“Possible, but I don’t think so. Food service is tricky. Too many staff members constantly doing inventory, cleaning, moving around. I don’t see how a customer could hide something and be confident a busboy or barista wouldn’t run into it.”