“How come Rico’s is a case and Annika’s isn’t? Because his dad’s important?”
“No. That’s why it made the news. It’s a case because the kid’s Corvette was found at LAX twenty-four hours after he was supposed to be home for dinner.”
“That doesn’t sound so dire,” I said. “Maybe he made a detour to Tijuana.”
Another pause. “If he did, he left two grand in the glove compartment. And what looks to be his own blood all over the trunk.”
Oh. I’d missed that, back in my apartment, channel surfing. The case was on the local stations, but I’d caught only snippets, most featuring Rico’s father, John J. Rodriguez: John’s career as congressman, John’s business as an industrial developer, and John’s ex-model wife, Lauren. One reporter stood outside the Rodriguez’s multimillion-dollar home in Lost Hills. John and Lauren did not appear, but a Dalmatian was spotted on the front lawn, its identity confirmed as the family dog, Hero.
His own blood in the trunk of his car. I felt sick. I pushed aside my doughnut, wishing I’d eaten it before calling Cziemanski.
I was headed back to Liberal Arts when my attention was caught by a guy smiling as he walked toward me. I couldn’t place him, but I smiled back anyway, on general principle.
He stopped. “Wendy,” he said.
“No, uh-”
“Winnie.”
“It’s Wollie.”
“Troy.” He stuck out his hand, and we shook. “We met last month. Some coffee place in West Hollywood. I’m Annika’s friend. Well, her tutoree. Tutee. Whatever. And you’re her other one, right? Alle meine Entchen?”
“Um, I don’t speak German. Sorry.”
“Oh, okay, I’m a geek.” He gave me a quizzical look. “She wasn’t tutoring you?”
“In math, not German,” I said. “What was it you just said?”
“Oh.” He grinned. “This nursery-rhyme thing she made me memorize, to help with prepositions. I figured you’d know it too.”
Something nibbled at my memory banks. “How does it go?”
“Well, she told me not to try picking up German girls with it, they’d laugh at me.”
I smiled. “Why? What’s it mean?”
“Okay.” He smiled again, dimples showing. “Alle meine Entchen-that’s, uh, all my little duckies-Schwimmen auf dem See, schwimmen auf dem See-swimming in the sea, swimming in the sea-Köpfchen in das Wasser, Schwänzchen in die Höh, heads in the water, tails in the air. Okay, the plot’s weak, but you know what? It helped. I aced my German final. She’ll be so jazzed. Bin ich nicht gut? Hey, do you know, is she out of town?”
With a shake of the head, I told him what was going on, and watched his face fall.
“Disappeared? You’re kidding,” he said. “That is, like, so weird.”
“Yeah, it is weird.”
“Yeah.” He gazed off, clearly troubled. “The last time I saw her was right here. Well, there. In front of the bookstore. Man, you wanna know what’s really weird-” He stopped, looked at me, then at his watch. “Shit, eleven fifty-two? Shit! My psych teacher said one more late, it counts against my grade. Sorry, man-” He turned and took off at a lope.
“But-!”
“Can’t slow down,” he yelled over his shoulder.
I loped after him. I hate loping. It attracts stares. “Troy! Wait up!” I yelled. Also, I wasn’t in loping shape. Especially after Krav Maga.
Happily, Troy wasn’t in shape either. He slowed, I caught up with him, and we switched to racewalking. “Jeez,” he said. “Gotta get to… the gym… more.”
“Me too,” I said. “So what’s ‘really weird’ about Annika disappearing?”
He held up a hand, battling for breath. “Confidential.”
I said, “I already know she was looking for a lawyer, and a gun, that she worried about disappearing into the criminal justice system-”
He stopped. “No shit?”
I stopped too. Nodded.
“Okay, shit.” He was panting heavily. “Not good. I was the one who told her this could happen. This means-what? It means she did what I told her not to. Unless she’d done it already. You know, I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t talk about this.”
“Troy.” I fought for breath and patience. “I have no idea what you’re not talking about, but as I seem to be the only person in North America looking for her, anything you know-please. Please, please, please.”
Troy veered to the right, and I veered with him, still racewalking. We passed the facilities maintenance building. “Okay,” he said. “I told her about how my roommate’s brother in Chicago got in trouble with the Feds because he lent his cell phone to someone who was part of a drug deal that was going down. He disappeared-”
“The drug dealer?”
“No, my roommate’s brother. The Feds arrested him on conspiracy, and he didn’t get a phone call, so no one knew where he was. For, like, two weeks. Of course, he’s Iranian.”
“Your roommate’s brother?”
“My roommate too. Second generation. No accent whatsoever, and not even Moslem or Muslim or whatever, but they busted him anyway. He’s doing time now.”
“For conspiracy.” I was struggling to follow the story. “How’s this tie in to Annika?”
“Man, she’s German. The Feds totally have it in for Germans. And the French.”
“Why would she even come to their attention? She’s an au pair in Encino.”
Troy looked at me, then away. We’d reached an old, fairly ugly brick building. He took the stairs two at a time, and at the top grasped a railing to recover, breathing hard. Apparently he wasn’t here on an athletic scholarship. “She wouldn’t,” he said, “come to their attention. If she was smart. That’s what I told her.”
The conversation couldn’t have been less clear if it were in German. “Does this have to do with guns? Or drugs? Or a guy named Feynman?”
Troy said nothing. My heartbeat, already in the anaerobic range, beat faster. I could see him teetering on the fence: to tell or not to tell. He glanced inside the glass door of the building.
“Please, Troy,” I said. “I’m not the Feds, I’d never talk to the Feds, I’m practically a Socialist; heck, I’m a Communist. Well, in the area of universal health care.”
He looked at the people hurrying into the building, then back at me. “She wanted to know about-the drug scene on campus, how you’d score stuff. So I told her the thing with my roommate’s brother. I told her, Don’t even go there. Keep your nose clean.”
“What kind of drugs was she interested in scoring?”
“She said she was just asking, but why do you ask about them unless you want them, know what I mean?”
“Troy, what kind of drugs?”
He closed his eyes and sighed. “Euphoria.”
It was a sister drug to Ecstasy, only a warmer, fuzzier trip, he said, a way more happy trip. As my knowledge of Ecstasy was limited, this was not really helpful. I remembered when you got ecstasy through transcendental meditation, when a rave was a good review, when euphoria was a guy you liked liking you back. How innocent I was. How ancient.
Troy hadn’t done Euphoria himself, he assured me, but it was the Next Big Thing. Very hard to get. U4. He drew the nickname in the air with his finger. And then he went to class.
And I went to my assessment test. The office was open. I put drug thoughts aside long enough to state my intention to a girl in capri pants and an SMC sweatshirt, who led me into a small room and set me up at a computer terminal.
Fredreeq believed my stars were so aligned today as to make a multiple-choice test impossible to fail. I considered what Vaclav had suggested about religion, that mere belief conferred an advantage. Why not try to believe in astrology? I cleared my mind of its kaleidoscope of concerns and focused on the computer screen. Amazingly, I sailed through the first two levels of questions. Annika’s tutoring worked. I was exhilarated. Then came question thirteen.