her sweatshirt; she looked so unlike her mother that people often asked if she was adopted. From the first, Ryan treated Amanda with the exaggerated courtesy of a Japanese gentleman. He made no effort to help her during their long bike ride to Los Angeles, although, being an experienced triathlete, he had helped her to train and prepare for the trip, something that won him the girl’s trust.
One Friday morning at seven, all three of them—Indiana, Amanda, and Ryan—set off from San Francisco with two thousand other keen cyclists wearing red AIDS awareness ribbons, escorted by a procession of cars and trucks filled with volunteers transporting tents and provisions. They arrived in Los Angeles the following Friday, their butts red-raw, their legs stiff, and their minds as free of thoughts as newborn babes. For seven days they had pedaled up hills and along highways, through stretches of beautiful countryside and others of hellish traffic. To Ryan—for whom a daily fifteen-hour bike ride was a breeze—the ride was effortless, but to mother and daughter it felt like a century of agonizing effort, and they only got to the finish line because Ryan was there, goading them like a drill sergeant whenever they flagged and recharging their energy with electrolyte drinks and energy bars.
Every night, like an exhausted flock of migrating birds, the two thousand cyclists descended on the makeshift campsites erected by the volunteers along the route, wolfed down five thousand calories, checked their bicycles, showered in trailers, and rubbed their calves and thighs with soothing ointment. Before they went to sleep, Ryan applied hot compresses to Indiana and Amanda and gave them little pep talks about the benefits of exercise and fresh air.
“What has any of this got to do with AIDS?” asked Indiana on the third day, having cycled for ten hours, weeping from sheer exhaustion and for all the woes in her life. “What do I know?” was Ryan’s honest answer. “Ask your daughter.”
The ride may have made only a modest contribution to the fight against AIDS, but it cemented the budding friendship between Ryan and Indiana, while for Amanda it led to something impossible: a new friend. This girl, who looked set to become a hermit, had precisely three friends in the world: her grandfather, Blake Jackson; Bradley, her future boyfriend; and now Ryan Miller, the Navy SEAL. The kids she played Ripper with didn’t fall into the same category; she only knew them within the context of the game, and their relationship was entirely centered around crime.
Amanda’s godmother, Celeste Roko, the most famous astrologer in California, made her “bloodbath” prediction the last day of September 2011. Her daily show aired early, before the morning weather forecast, and repeated after the evening news. At fiftysomething, thanks to a little nip and tuck, Roko looked good for her age. Charming on screen and a dragon in person, she was considered beautiful and elegant by her many admirers. She looked like Eva Perón with a few extra pounds. The set for her TV show featured a blown-up photo of the Golden Gate Bridge behind a fake picture window and a huge model of the solar system, with planets that could light up and be moved by remote control.
Psychics, astrologers, and other practitioners of the mysterious arts tend to make their predictions on New Year’s Eve, but Madame Roko could not bring herself to wait three months before warning the citizens of San Francisco of the horrors that lay in store for them. Her prophecy was of such magnitude that it captured the public imagination, went viral on the Internet. Her pronouncement provoked scathing editorials in the local press and hysterical headlines in the tabloids, speculating about terrible atrocities at San Quentin State Prison, gang warfare between blacks and Latinos, and an apocalyptic earthquake along the San Andreas Fault. But Celeste Roko, who exuded an air of infallibility thanks to a former career as a Jungian analyst and an impressive number of accurate predictions, was adamant that her vision concerned murders. This provoked a collective sigh of relief among devotees of astrology, since it was the least dreadful of the calamities they had feared. In northern California, the chance of being murdered was one in twenty thousand; it was, everyone believed, a crime that happened to other people.
It was on the day of this prediction that Amanda and her grandfather finally decided to challenge the power of Celeste Roko. They were sick and tired of the influence Amanda’s godmother wielded over the family by pretending that she could foretell the future. Madame Roko was a temperamental woman with the unshakable belief in herself common to those who receive direct messages from the universe or from God. She never managed to sway Blake Jackson, who would have no truck with astrology, but Indiana always consulted Celeste before making important decisions, allowing her life to be guided by the dictates of her horoscope. All too often Celeste Roko’s astrological readings thwarted Amanda’s best-laid plans. When she was younger, for example, the planets had deemed it an inauspicious moment to buy a skateboard but a propitious time to take up ballet—which left Amanda in a pink tutu, sobbing with humiliation.
When she turned thirteen, Amanda discovered that her godmother was not in fact infallible. The planets had apparently decided that Amanda should go to a public high school, but Encarnación Martín, her formidable paternal grandmother, insisted she attend a Catholic boarding school. For once Amanda sided with Celeste, since a co-ed school seemed slightly less terrifying than being taught by nuns. But Doña Encarnación triumphed over Celeste Roko—by producing a check for the tuition fees. Little did she suspect that the nuns would turn out to be feminists in pants who challenged the pope, and used science class to demonstrate the correct use of a condom with the aid of a banana.
Encouraged by the skepticism of her grandfather, who rarely dared to directly challenge Celeste, Amanda questioned the relationship between the heavenly bodies and the fates of human beings; to her, astrology seemed as much mumbo-jumbo as her mother’s white magic. Celeste’s most recent prognostication offered grandfather and granddaughter a perfect opportunity to refute the predictive powers of the stars. It is one thing to announce that the coming week is a favorable one for letter-writing, quite another to predict a bloodbath in San Francisco. That’s not something that happens every day.
When Amanda, her grandfather, and her online buddies transformed Ripper from a game into a criminal investigation, they could never have imagined what they were getting themselves into. Precisely eleven days after Celeste Roko’s pronouncement, Ed Staton was murdered. This might have been considered a coincidence, but given the unusual nature of the crime—the baseball bat—Amanda began to put together a case file using information published in the papers, what little she managed to wheedle out of her father, who was conducting the investigation, and whatever her grandfather could dig up.
Blake Jackson was a pharmacist by profession, a book lover, and a frustrated writer until he finally took the opportunity to chronicle the tumultuous events predicted by Celeste Roko. In his novel, he described his granddaughter Amanda as “idiosyncratic of appearance, timorous of character, but magnificent of mind”—his baroque use of language distinguishing him from his peers. His account of these fateful events would end up being much longer than he expected, even though—excepting a few flashbacks—it spanned a period of only three months. The critics were vicious, dismissing his work as magical realism—a literary style deemed passé—but no one could prove he had distorted the events to make them seem supernatural, since the San Francisco Police Department and the daily newspapers documented them.
In January 2012, Amanda Martín was sixteen and a high school senior. As an only child, Amanda had been dreadfully spoiled, but her grandfather was convinced that when she graduated from high school and went out into the world that would sort itself out. She was vegetarian now only because she didn’t have to cook for herself; when she was forced to do so, she would be less persnickety about her diet. From an early age Amanda had been a passionate reader, with all the dangers such a pastime entails. Although the San Francisco murders would have been committed in any case, Amanda would not have been involved if an obsession with Scandinavian crime novels had not developed into a morbid interest in evil in general and premeditated murder in particular. Though her grandfather was no advocate of censorship, it worried him that
