I slowly scroll through the pages just to feel like I’m doing something, and as I go, a pattern slowly emerges from Mason’s IQ scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. I was too busy searching for other things to notice it before. He’s had five IQ tests over a period of seven years, and his IQ scores are almost identical. Three of them are exactly the same—38. The others only one point off. I’ve never seen that much consistency among tests. I scroll to the end of the document, where all the testing protocols are attached. I only glanced at them before since all the scoring was finished.
This time, I make my way through each testing response booklet. I’ve given so many WISCs throughout my career I can practically do them in my sleep. At one point during graduate school, I think I did, so it doesn’t take long to notice a pattern. Mason gets all the same answers wrong and all the same answers right on each test. That’s really tough to do, but theoretically, not impossible. However, when I dig deeper, I discover that it’s not just that he gets the same answers wrong but that each wrong answer is identical. Alarm bells go off inside me.
Nobody consistently gives the same wrong answer to math problems. If someone doesn’t know how to add or subtract, they guess. Guessing is random. You can’t end up with the same answer. Not that many times. It’s the same situation on the working memory test, where he’s given a list of items and asked to repeat them back. This is usually one of the easiest tests for kids with ASD. Typically, their highest scores, but that’s not the case with Mason. He never gets past the third section. Not only that, he remembers things wrongly in the same pattern every time too. How’s that possible?
My heart speeds up as I print out the pages from his block-design answer sheets and lay them all out next to each other on the dining room table. Block design is the most basic cognitive test, and a low score drags down your overall IQ, so if kids do poorly on this one, it has an impact on their total score. And that’s exactly what Mason does. He fails out of block design over and over again. He fails the same way each time, making the exact same wrong design on each test. That’s not the most concerning part, though.
Block design is a timed test. Kids have to complete their designs within a specific limit. The evaluator records how long it takes them to finish each one and notes it in the scoring. In Mason’s case, it takes him the exact same amount of time on each test too. He does it in the same number of seconds when he’s eight years old that he does when he’s eleven.
Is it even statistically possible to give the same wrong answers across multiple testing times and situations like this? Was he just remembering how he’d done it before and then repeating? There’s no way to do that unless you’ve rehearsed and practiced the test multiple times. You’d have to spend hours studying it just like you would a regular exam.
The idea sneaks up slowly, then floods me.
“Oh my God,” I say out loud as the full impact of the realization hits me.
“Come in.” I pull Detective Layne inside and shut the door behind us. It felt weird inviting him to my house, but I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t explain any of this over the phone, and I couldn’t meet him anywhere because Harper’s asleep. Dad’s the only one who watches her, and he’s been asleep longer than she has, so I’m not waking him up, especially since he’s been taking care of her for me so much lately.
Detective Layne doesn’t look the least bit uncomfortable that I’ve called him over to my house at eleven o’clock at night, but then again, having to go to random people’s homes in the middle of the night probably comes with the job. He’s still in his uniform. Maybe he hasn’t even been home yet.
“Hi, I know it’s late, but do you want coffee?” I ask.
“Sure, coffee would be great,” he says and follows me into the kitchen, where the pot is freshly brewed. I fill a mug and hand it to him, then point at the condiments on the counter in case he’s changed his mind about sugar or cream since the last time we met.
“Guess you’re not planning on sleeping tonight either,” he jokes with a smile as we slide into chairs on opposite sides of the kitchen table. He keeps his chair back a bit so he doesn’t make contact with the table.
“Actually, I could probably drink half this pot and go straight to bed. All the years in graduate school trained me to sleep on caffeine. Anyway, I know it’s late, but I just couldn’t wait until morning for this. I’ve been obsessing over the case since meeting with Savannah today. I pretty much haven’t done anything else tonight except try to dig up things on the internet.”
He gives me a rather patronizing look. “Find anything my guys couldn’t?”
“I can’t imagine I found anything different than what they found. There’s practically nothing on Mason, but Genevieve Hill has always been the southern belle at every ball.”
He smiles at my use of words. “I like that. I might use it.”
“Feel free.” I smile back. “She has a completely unblemished image. People adore her. The town is practically owned by her. She donates to every cause. I’ve never seen someone so active in the autism community. Do you know they even had ponies at their fundraiser last year?”
Every year, she puts together a weeklong series of entertaining community events to raise awareness for autism. They do all kinds of fun things for kids and their families—carnival games, face painting, and fun contests. They always do a feature on WDYM on opening night to kick it off.
“I believe it. A while back they had a full-blown circus.” He snorts.
“We must’ve missed that year,” I say before turning my attention to the reason I called him over so late. “I couldn’t find anything telling online, but all of my searching led me to take another look at the reports Genevieve gave us on Mason, and this time through, I found some things I missed before.” I pause a beat so I don’t get ahead of myself and unload a bunch of clinical jargon on him. “I’ve gone through all of Mason’s tests of intellectual functioning that he’s taken over the years, and they’re almost identical scores. That seems like something you would want when you’re testing a kid, and to a certain extent, it is. You want scores to be close to each other and fall within a particular range, but there should be some degree of variability on the scores because of the degree of variability inherent in the test. You know, like how the kid’s feeling that day, the testing situation, how hungry they are . . . things like that. A score of a 98 and a 92 is still in the same range. It gives you the same information. That’s why we have the ranges. But to get the exact same score? That’s almost impossible to do by chance.”
He wrinkles his forehead. “I’m not following you. You can’t get the same score?”
“Not that close across five different tests taken at five different time periods.” I shake my head. “Three of his full scale IQ scores are exact, but they’re all within one point of each other.”
“I don’t understand. How would something like that even work?”
“I think Mason was coached on how to fail the tests. What things he needed to get right versus what he needed to get wrong in order to look a certain way on them, and to do that, you’d have to fail in a particular order, since all the tests are standardized. Basically, how to fail the test to meet a specific diagnosis.” I still can’t believe someone would do that. I whip open my laptop and pull up his testing protocols from block design. This is the easiest one for the untrained eye to see. I angle my computer toward him so he can see the screen too.