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34.

Six weeks and two days after my arrival in San Francisco, I turned on Megan’s television set and learned that my father had murdered another man.

I wish I could say that I was surprised, but in my heart, I think I knew that he would do it again.

This time, the victim was a man named Baron Macomber, who was killed when he opened a mail bomb that had been sent to his office in Virginia. According to news reports, Macomber was a physicist who had been developing nanotechnology for military use. No evidence had yet been found that tied the bombing to my father—the package it came in had been obliterated—but already the conjecture had begun. Two prominent technology researchers killed within weeks by homemade explosives: It wasn’t much of a leap.

I watched the evening news sitting cross-legged on Megan’s eyelet coverlet, my legs gone numb beneath me. Was it possible they were wrong, and it wasn’t my father at all, just a wild coincidence, or even a copycat? I wanted, desperately, to believe this. But the newscasters seemed to take his complicity as a given, and the sick pit in my stomach was a sign that I knew they were right.

“A nationwide manhunt is on for Saul Williams, the man already being nicknamed The Bombaster, and his teenage daughter,” intoned the helmet-haired newscaster in a dutifully sober voice. “Although their last confirmed location was Montana, federal authorities are asking citizens everywhere to be on the lookout for this pair, possibly traveling under assumed names.”

At this, the screen filled with black-and-white police sketches of my father andme.

I couldn’t help it: I laughed out loud. The portrait of my father made him look like a small-time thug: the short hair jammed under his baseball cap, the Tom Selleck mustache, the disarming mirrored reflections of those sunglasses. His mouth was curled into a sneer, his chin pointed down as he glowered menacingly. The sketch looked nothing like him. I wondered if anyone in Bozeman had contributed to the portrait; or if the police had rejected the locals’ descriptions of the hermit Saul Williams—grizzled and bearded and slightly feral—and opted instead to draw the far more telegenic criminal from the security camera.

The sketch of me was just as unrecognizable. The coquettish girl in the portrait was bow-lipped and arch-eyebrowed, with a heart-shaped face and long fringed lashes. She gazed sleepily at the artist from behind thick hanks of long blond hair, a look of mild invitation in her eyes. The woman in the sketch looked at least a decade older than me, like she’d been around the block a few times but wasn’t about to tell you what she’d seen. (Was this how the security guard had described me? It couldn’t have come from Heidi or Lina.)

I should have felt relieved by this, but instead regret and self-recrimination surged through me, a bitter chew. Even though I hadn’t had anything to do with this second murder, I couldn’t help blaming myself. If I’d just stuck with my father, could I have stopped him? Been the positive influence he needed to temper his murderous impulses? Then again, my presence hadn’t exactly given him pause in Seattle, so what hubris made me think I could have prevented it this time?

Was my father still in North Dakota? There was a tip line listed at the end of the news segment, the FBI asking for information, promising anonymity and a cash reward. It would be so easy to call, to give them Malcolm Torino’s address and send them after my father. Megan’s phone, a modern cordless number, was sitting there. All I had to do was dial.

I didn’t.

—

At this point you might be asking yourself why I hadn’t gone to the police from the very first minute that I arrived in San Francisco. My father had killed a man. The ethically and morally correct move would have been to turn him in before he could do any further damage.

Looking back, I can clearly see three reasons for my fatal hesitation.

First: Because I believed that by walking away from my Montana life—by reinventing myself as Esme Nowak—I was somehow wiping the slate clean. That by pretending I was a whole new person (or, technically, stepping back into my original identity) I had washed my hands of everything that Jane Williams had done. That by closing my eyes, it would mean there was nothing to see; that Peter Carroll’s murder would magically vanish. A terrible act, of course, but one that had been relegated to the past.

Second: Fourteen years of listening to my father rail on about how the authorities could not be trusted had left me deeply skeptical of the legal system. What I knew about “justice” was based entirely on his paranoid mutterings about the feds. Could you blame me for believing that the minute I’d become a fugitive, there was no turning back? That if I walked into a police station, my life would be over? That the system was so rigged against me there was no true justice to be had?

Even if I made an anonymous call, I knew I would be turning myself in, too. After all, if the authorities found my father, it would surely be just a matter of time before they figured out his real name— Adam Nowak —and then Esme Nowak would be next. I would be right there in San Francisco, a sitting duck, waiting for them to catch up to me. And after that: a lifetime in prison, I figured.

Third, and perhaps the most weighty reason of all: I loved my father. Despite it all, he was the only safe haven I’d ever known, the person who’d nurtured me, the person I admired most in the world. I may have been horrified by his actions, but I certainly didn’t want him to suffer . What kind of a daughter would turn her father in to the enemy ?

Do you see why, if it came down to choosing my father or choosing justice, I was always going to choose my father?

What I didn’t choose: to see that this made me complicit. To imagine that my father might do it again .

But consider this: I was barely eighteen, and just experiencing the real world for the first time. I was like a baby fawn, taking my first wobbly steps into the world. I still couldn’t see past my own feet.

Decide for yourself whether that’s a valid excuse.

—

And so I turned off the television without writing down the tip line number, without picking up my phone. Something was bothering me. Something about the latest victim’s name, a faint ping of familiarity. Baron Macomber .

And that’s when it dawned onme.

I ran to my backpack and pulled out the photographs that I’d shoved in the pocket before I left the cabin. My father’s childhood photos; his college portrait; the two snapshots of me and my mom; and—finally—the image of my father in a suit and tie on the steps of a glass building, surrounded by work colleagues. I turned this last photo over and examined the names on the back. Nick Raymond Baron Peter Ajay Adam Mike Isaac.

Baron and Peter.

My father was targeting his former colleagues.

Why them? Was it something to do with his old job? Where had they worked? In Silicon Valley, presumably; but what had he said he was doing? Working for a technology research institute, in a group that was trying to figure out the future of computers. What they might be used for.

I looked at the photo more closely, and then—realizing—pulled out the I Hate Mondays photo, and the one of me in my mother’s arms . The three photographs had the same shape and size, the same yellowish tint, the same black fleck in an upper right corner, perhaps the result of a flawed lens: They had clearly been taken by the same camera. I flipped them over and compared the two that had captions. Esme and Theresa. Nick Raymond Baron Peter Ajay Adam Mike Isaac. The handwriting on both was the same, loopy and feminine, definitely not my father’s. The natural assumption, then, was that it was my mother’s. Who else would be so carefully labeling our family photos?

If that was the case, was it possible that my mother was there, too, on the steps of that office building? The ninth person, the person behind the camera; someone who clearly knew everyone in the photo by their first names.

In a rush, I understood two things: that if I could somehow figure out who the rest of the people in that photo were—if I could go find them and talk to them—maybe they would know my mother’s current whereabouts. And that somehow, in the process, I’d have to find a way to warn them that they were in danger.

So now I just needed to find someone who knew everyone—or, at least, everyone who worked in the tech world—to name some of the other people in that photo. The good news was that I happened to be working for just that someone.

Ross Marinetti.