House Rules: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  There are obvious differences—the physical trauma being the biggest one. But there’s something else about her I cannot put my finger on. Did she lose weight? Not really. Was it the makeup? Nah, she wasn’t wearing any in either shot.

  It’s the hair.

  Not the cut, which would be easy. It’s straight in the picture of Jess and her boyfriend. In the crime scene print, though, it’s curled and frizzy, a cloud around her battered face.

  I pick up the photo and study it at closer range. It seems likely that curls were the default setting for her hair, given that she would have gone to the trouble to style it when out with her boyfriend. Which means that her hair got wet while the body was out in the elements … something easily assumed, except for the fact that she was protected from rain and snow by the concrete culvert where she was dumped.

  So her hair was wet when she was killed.

  And there was blood in the bathroom.

  Was Jacob a Peeping Tom, too?

  “Captain?”

  I look up to find one of the street cops standing in front of me. “Dispatch just got a call from a kid who says he’s being abused by a parent.”

  “Don’t need a detective for that, do you?”

  “No, Captain. It’s just … the kid? He’s the one you arrested for that murder.”

  The photo flutters out of my hand, onto the floor. “You gotta be kidding,” I mutter, and I stand up and grab my coat. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Jacob

  Immediately, I realize I’ve made a colossal mistake.

  I begin hiding things: my computer, my file cabinet. I shred papers that are sitting on my desk and tuck a stash of journals from forensics associations in the bathtub. I figure all of these things can be used against me, and they’ve already taken so much of what was mine.

  I don’t think I can be arrested again, but I am not entirely sure. Double jeopardy only refers to the same crime, and only after an acquittal.

  I will say this for the boys in blue—they are speedy. Less than ten minutes after my 911 call, there is a knock at the door. My mother and Theo, who are still downstairs trying to reinstall the fire alarm Theo set off with some abortive kitchen snack, are caught completely unawares.

  It’s stupid, I know, but I hide underneath my bed.

  Rich

  “What are you doing here?” Emma Hunt demands.

  “Actually, we received a call through 911.”

  “I didn’t call 91— Jacob!” she yells, and she turns on her heel and flies up the stairs.

  I step into the house to find Theo staring at me. “We don’t want to donate to the police athletic league,” he says sarcastically.

  “Thanks.” I point up the staircase. “I’m, uh, just going to … go … ?” Without waiting for him to answer, I head toward Jacob’s room.

  “Abusing you?” Emma is shrieking when I reach the doorway. “You’ve never been abused a day in your life!”

  “There’s physical abuse and there’s mental abuse,” Jacob argues.

  Emma whips her head in my direction. “I have never laid a hand on that boy. Although right now, I’m incredibly tempted.”

  “I have three words for you,” Jacob says. “Doctor! Henry! Lee!”

  “The forensic scientist?” I am completely not following.

  “He’s speaking at UNH tomorrow, and she says I can’t go.”

  Emma looks at me. “Do you see what I’m dealing with?”

  I purse my lips, thinking. “Let me talk to him alone for a minute.”

  “Seriously?” Her eyes widen. “Were you not in the same courtroom I was in three hours ago, when the judge told you accommodations should have been made when you questioned Jacob?”

  “I’m not questioning him now,” I tell her. “Not professionally, anyway.”

  She throws up her hands. “I don’t care. Do what you want. Both of you.”

  When her last footstep fades down the stairs, I sit down beside Jacob. “You know you’re not supposed to call 911 unless you’re in serious trouble.”

  He snorts. “So arrest me. Oh, wait, you already did.”

  “You ever hear of the boy who cried wolf?”

  “I didn’t say anything about wolves,” Jacob replies. “I said I was being abused, and I am. This is the one chance I have to meet Dr. Lee and she won’t even consider it. If I’m old enough to be tried as an adult, how come I’m not old enough to walk to the bus stop and travel down there on my own?”

  “You’re old enough. You’ll just wind up with your ass in jail again. Is that what you want?” From the corner of my eye, I spy a laptop peeking out of a pillowcase. “Why is your computer under the covers?”

  He pulls it free and cradles it in his arms. “I thought you’d steal it from me. Just like you took my other stuff.”

  “I didn’t steal that, I had a warrant to seize it. And you’ll get it back, one day.” I glance at him. “You know, Jacob, your mother is only protecting you.”

  “By locking me up in here?”

  “No, the judge did that. By not letting you break your bail requirements.”

  We are both quiet for a second, and then Jacob glances at me from the corner of his eye. “I don’t understand your voice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It should be angry because I made you come all the way out here. But it’s not angry. And it wasn’t angry when I talked to you at the police station, either. You treated me like I was just a friend of yours, but then you arrested me at the end, and people don’t arrest their friends.” He clasps his hands between his knees. “Frankly, people don’t make sense to me.”

  I nod in agreement. “Frankly, people don’t make sense to me, either,” I say.

  Theo

  Why do the cops keep coming to our stupid house?

  I mean, given that they’ve already arrested Jacob, shouldn’t they let justice take its course?

  Okay, I get that Jacob was the one to summon them this time. But surely a phone call would have been just as effective to get him to call off his request for help. And yet, the police—this one guy in particular—keeps showing up. He chats up my mother, and now I can hear him yapping with Jacob about maggots that land on bodies within ten minutes of death.

  Tell me how, exactly, this has any bearing on the 911 call, hmm?

  Here’s what I think: Detective Matson isn’t even here to talk to Jacob.

  He’s certainly not here to talk to my mother.

  He’s come because he knows that in order to get to Jacob’s room, he has to pass mine, and that means at least two glimpses inside.

  Maybe someone has reported missing the Wii game I took.

  Maybe he’s just waiting for me to crack, to fall at his feet and confess that I was at Jess Ogilvy’s place shortly before my brother, so that he can tell that bitch prosecutor to put me on the witness stand to testify against Jacob.

  For these reasons and a dozen more I haven’t thought of yet, I close my door and lock it, so that when Detective Matson passes by again, I don’t have to look him in the eye.

  Jacob

  I would not have thought it possible, but Rich Matson is not a complete and utter ass.

  For example, he told me that you can tell the sex of an individual by looking at the skull, because a male skull has a square chin and a female chin is rounded. He told me that he’s been to the Body Farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, where an acre of land is covered with corpses rotting in all different stages, so that forensic anthropologists can measure the effects of weather and insects on human decay. He has pictures and promised to mail me a few.

  This is still not Dr. Henry Lee–worthy, but it makes a decent consolation prize.

  I learn that he has a daughter who, like Jess, faints at the sight of blood. When I tell him that Jess used to do this, too, his face twists, as if he’s smelled something awful.

  After a while I promise him not to call the police on my mother again, unless she is causing me dire bodily harm.
And he convinces me that an apology to her might go a long way right now.

  When I walk him downstairs, my mother is pacing in the kitchen. “Jacob has something to tell you,” he announces.

  “Detective Matson is going to send me photographs of decomposing bodies,” I say.

  “Not that. The other thing.”

  I push my lips out and then suck them in. I do it twice, as if I’m melting the words in my mouth. “I shouldn’t have called the cops. Asperger’s impulsiveness.”

  My mother’s face freezes, and so does the detective’s. Only after I’ve said it do I realize that they’re probably assuming Jess’s death was Asperger’s impulsiveness, too.

  Or in other words, talking about my Asperger’s impulsiveness was a bit too impulsive.

  “I think we’re all set here,” the detective says. “You two have a nice evening.”

  My mother touches his sleeve. “Thank you.”

  He looks at her as if he is about to tell her something important, but instead he says, “You have nothing to thank me for.”

  When he leaves, a lick of cold air from outside wraps around my ankles.

  “Would you like me to make you something to eat?” my mother asks. “You never had lunch.”

  “No thanks. I’m going to lie down,” I announce, although I really just want to be alone. I’ve learned that when someone invites you to do something and you really don’t want to, they don’t particularly want to hear the truth.

  Her eyes fly to my face. “Are you sick?”

  “I’m fine,” I tell her. “Really.”

  I can feel her staring at me as I walk up the stairs.

  I don’t plan to lie down, but I do. And I guess I fall asleep, because all of a sudden Dr. Henry Lee is there. We are crouched down on either side of Jess’s body. He examines the tooth in her pocket, the abrasions on her lower back. He looks up the cavities of her nostrils.

  Oh yes, he says, crystal clear. I understand.

  I can see why you had to do what you did.

  CASE 8: ONE IN SIX BILLION

  In the 1980s and ’90s, over fifty women in the Seattle-Tacoma, Washington, area were murdered. Most of the victims were prostitutes or teen runaways, and most of the bodies were dumped in or near the Green River. Dubbed the Green River Killer, the murderer was unknown until science managed to catch up to crime.

  In the early 1980s, while performing autopsies on the victims, pathologists and medical technologists were able to recover small amounts of DNA in semen left behind by the killer. These were retained as evidence, but then-current scientific techniques proved worthless, since there wasn’t enough material for testing.

  Gary Ridgway, who was arrested in 1982 on a prostitution charge, was a suspect in the Green River killings, but there wasn’t any evidence to formally link him to the crimes. In 1984, he passed a polygraph test. In 1987, while searching his home, the King County Sheriff’s department took a saliva sample from Ridgway.

  By March 2001, improvements in DNA typing technology had identified the source of the semen on the victims’ bodies. In September 2001, the lab received results: they were able to get a comparative match between the DNA in that semen and the DNA in Ridgway’s saliva. A warrant was issued for his arrest.

  The DNA results linked Ridgway to three of the four women listed as victims in his indictment. Sperm samples taken from one of these victims, Carol Ann Christensen, were so conclusive that not more than one person in the world, excluding identical twins, would exhibit that particular DNA profile. Ridgway was charged with three more murders after microscopic paint evidence found with the bodies matched paint at his workplace. In return for confessing to more of the Green River murders, Ridgway was spared the death penalty and is currently serving forty-eight life sentences with no possibility of parole.

  8

  Oliver

  A month later I am sprawled on the couch in the Hunts’ living room, caught in a weird déjà vu: I am scanning the discovery that’s been sent to me, which includes Jacob’s journals on CrimeBusters, while he sits on the floor in front of me watching on TV the very same episode I’m reading about. “Want me to tell you how it ends?” I ask.

  “I already know.” Not that that’s kept him from writing down yet another journal entry, this one in a brand-new composition-style notebook.

  Episode 49: Sex, Lies, and iMovie

  Situation: After a suicide note is spliced into the credits of a feature at a film festival, a B-movie director is found dead in the back of a car—but the team suspects foul play.

  Evidence:

  Trailer from festival

  Cuttings from editing studio—who is the blonde and is she really dead or just acting?

  Hard drive of director’s computer

  Director’s collection of rare butterflies—red herring, entomology not involved

  Acid in pipes

  Solved: By ME! 0:24.

  “You figured it out in twenty minutes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The butler did it,” I say.

  “No, actually, it’s the plumber,” Jacob corrects.

  So much for making a joke.

  We’ve gotten into a routine: instead of staying at my office during the day, I do my trial preparation here at the Hunts’. That way, I can watch Jacob if Emma needs to run out, and I have my client available to answer any questions I’ve got. Thor likes it, because he spends most of the day curled up in Jacob’s lap. Jacob likes it, because I bring the Wii with me. Theo likes it because if I bring guacamole on Green Monday for his brother, I slip a personal-size nongreen sausage pizza into the fridge for him.

  I don’t really know if Emma likes it.

  Theo walks past us in the living room to a file cabinet in the back. “You still doing your homework?” Jacob asks.

  There’s not really any malice in his tone—it’s flat, like everything else Jacob says—but Theo flips him the bird. Usually Theo’s the one to finish his work first, but today, he seems to be dragging.

  I wait for Jacob to tell him to go fuck himself, but instead, he just fixes his glassy gaze on the television again.

  “Hey,” I say, approaching Theo.

  He startles and takes the piece of paper he’s scanning and stuffs it into his jeans pocket. “Stop sneaking up on me.”

  “What are you doing in here anyway? Isn’t this your mother’s file cabinet?”

  “Isn’t this none of your business?” Theo says.

  “No. But Jacob is. And you should apologize.”

  “I should also have five servings of vegetables a day, but that rarely happens,” he replies, and he heads back into the kitchen to finish his homework.

  I know Jacob well enough by now to pick up on the cues that flag his emotions. The fact that he’s rocking back and forth slightly means whatever Theo just said rattled him more than he’s letting on. “If you tell your mother he does that shit to you,” I say, “I can bet you it will stop.”

  “You don’t tell on your brother—you take care of him. He’s the only one you’ve got,” Jacob recites. “It’s a rule.”

  If I could only make the jury see how Jacob lives from one decree to another; if I could make the connection between a kid who won’t even break one of his mother’s rules much less the law governing our country; if I could somehow prove that his Asperger’s makes it virtually impossible for him to cross that line between right and wrong—well, I could win his case.

  “Hey, after lunch I want to talk to you about what’s going to happen later this week when we—”

  “Shh,” Jacob says. “The commercial’s over.”

  I flip the page and see an entry that doesn’t have an episode number.

  I start reading, and my jaw drops. “Oh, shit,” I say out loud.

  * * *

  A month ago, after the suppression hearing, I’d called Helen Sharp. “I think you need to give up,” I told her. “You can’t prove the case. We’re willing to take probation for five years.”


  “I can win this without his police department confession,” she said. “I’ve got all the statements that were made at the house before Jacob was in custody; I have the forensic evidence at the scene and eyewitness evidence that goes to motive. I’ve got his history of violence, and I’ve got the defendant’s journals.”

  At the time, I’d shrugged it off. Jacob’s journals were formulaic, and every other piece of evidence she listed was something I could excuse away on cross.

  “We’re going forward,” Helen had said, and I’d thought, Good freaking luck.

  Here’s what the journal says:

  At Her House. 1/12/10.

  Situation: Girl missing.

  Evidence:

  Clothes in pile on bed

  Toothbrush missing, lip gloss missing

  Victim’s purse and coat remain

  Cell phone missing … cut screen … boot prints outside match up with boyfriend’s footwear.

  “Jesus Christ, Jacob,” I explode, so loud that Emma comes running in from the laundry room. “You wrote about Jess in your CrimeBusters journals?”

  He doesn’t respond, so I stand and turn off the TV.

  “What do you mean?” Emma says.

  I pass her the photocopy of the notebook. “What were you thinking?” I demand.

  Jacob shrugs. “It was a crime scene,” he says simply.

  “Do you have any idea what Helen Sharp is going to do with this?”

  “No, and I don’t care,” Emma replies. “I want to know what you’re going to do about it.” She folds her arms and moves a step closer to Jacob.

  “I don’t know, to be honest. Because after all the work we did to get the police station statement thrown out, this brings it all back in.”