by Jodi Picoult
Had Jacob Hunt felt the same way when he held Jess’s tooth?
With a deep breath, I walk back into my office. The gloves are off. “You ever been to an autopsy, Jacob?”
“No.”
I settle back down behind my desk. “The first thing the ME does is take a huge needle and stick it into the jelly of the eye so he can draw out the vitreous humor. If you run a tox screen on it, you can see what was in the victim’s system at the moment of death.”
“What kind of toxicity test?” Jacob asks, not fazed at all by the gruesome image I just presented. “Alcohol? Prescription meds? Or illegal drugs?”
“Then the medical examiner cuts the torso open with a Y incision and peels back the skin. He’ll saw through the ribs to make a little dome that he can lift up like the top of a jar, and then he starts pulling out the organs, one by one . . . weighing them . . . cutting slices he can look at under a microscope.”
“A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
“Then the medical examiner takes his saw and cuts off the whole top of the skull and pops it open with a chisel. He reaches in, and he pulls her brain out. You know the sound a brain makes when it’s being pried out of a skull, Jacob?” I imitate it, like a seal breaking.
“Then it gets weighed, right?” Jacob asks. “The average human brain weighs three pounds, but the biggest one on record was five pounds, one-point-one ounces.”
“All that stuff I just described,” I say, leaning forward. “All of that just happened to your friend Jess. What do you think about that?”
Jacob sinks deeper in his chair. “I don’t want to think about that.”
“I want to tell you some of the things that were found at Jess’s autopsy. Maybe you can tell me how they might have happened.”
He brightens considerably, ready to play the game.
“There were bruises that showed someone had grabbed her by the arms, and choked her around the neck.”
“Well,” Jacob muses, “were they fingertip bruises or handprints?”
“You tell me, Jacob. You’re the one who grabbed Jess by the arms, aren’t you?”
His face, when he realizes he is trapped, looks a great deal like his mother’s. Jacob’s hands curl over the arms of his chair, and he shakes his head. “No.”
“What about choking her? You’re not going to lie to me about doing that, are you?”
He closes his eyes and winces, as if he’s in pain. “No . . .”
“So what made you choke her?”
“Nothing!”
“Was it a fight? Did she say something you didn’t like?” I press.
Jacob moves to the edge of his chair and starts rocking. He won’t look me in the eye, no matter how loud my voice gets. I wish I’d had the foresight to videotape this conversation instead of audiotaping it. If this kid’s demeanor isn’t a Hallmark card for guilt, frankly, I don’t know what is. “Nothing made me choke Jess,” Jacob says.
I ignore this completely. “Did you choke her till she stopped breathing?”
“No—”
“Did you hit her in the face?”
“What? No!”
“Then how did her tooth get knocked out?”
He looks at me, and that takes me by surprise. His stare is direct, open, with emotion so raw that I feel compelled to turn away, like he usually does. “That was an accident,” Jacob confesses softly, and only then do I realize I have been holding my breath.
Oliver
This morning, I managed to teach Thor to balance a paper clip on top of his nose. “All right,” I say, “let’s give it another whirl.” The way I figure it, if I can get him to balance and multitask—roll over, maybe, or bark to the tune of “Dixie”—we can get on Letterman.
I have just placed the paper clip on top of his nose again when a crazy woman bursts in. “I need a lawyer,” she announces, breathless.
She’s probably in her late thirties or early forties—there are some lines around her mouth and her dark hair has a few strands of gray in it—but her eyes make her look younger. They’re like caramel, or butterscotch, and why the hell am I looking at a potential client and channeling ice cream toppings? “Come right in!” I stand up, offering her a chair. “Sit down and tell me what the problem is.”
“We don’t have time for that. You have to come with me right now.”
“But I—”
“My son is being interrogated at the police station, and you have to stop it. I’m retaining you on his behalf.”
“Awesome,” I say, and Thor drops the paper clip. I pick it up so he doesn’t swallow it in my absence and grab my coat.
I know it’s totally mercenary of me, but I’m hoping that she’s going to lead me to the BMW parked outside the pizza place. Instead, she veers to the right, to the battered Volvo that probably has 300,000 miles on it. So much for asking for my retainer in cash. I slide into the passenger seat and stick out my hand. “I’m Oliver Bond.”
She doesn’t shake it. Instead, she slips the key into the ignition and peels out of the parking spot with a recklessness that makes my jaw drop. “Emma Hunt,” she says.
She takes a corner, and the back wheels spin. “You, um, should probably tell me a little more about what’s going on . . .” I gasp as she runs a red light.
“Do you watch the news, Mr. Bond?”
“Oliver, please.” I tighten my seat belt. The police station is only a mile or two away, but I’d like to be alive when we reach it.
“Have you followed the story about the UVM student who went missing?”
“The one whose body was just found?”
The car screeches to a stop in front of the police station. “I think my son might be responsible,” she says.
* * *
Alan Dershowitz, the famous Jewish lawyer, was once asked if he’d defend Adolf Hitler. “Yes,” he said. “And I’d win.”
When I fell asleep during my torts class, the professor—who spoke in a monotone and made law slightly less exciting than watching paint dry—poured a bottle of water over my head. “Mr. Bond,” he intoned, “you strike me as the kind of student on whom admission should not have been wasted.”
I sat up, sputtering and soaked. “Then with all due respect, sir, you should be struck harder,” I suggested, and I got a standing ovation from my classmates.
I offer these anecdotes to the proverbial jury as examples of the fact that I have never lived my life by shirking a challenge, and I’m not about to start right now.
* * *
“Let’s go.” Emma Hunt turns off the ignition.
I put my hand on her arm. “Maybe you should start by telling me your son’s name.”
“Jacob.”
“How old is he?”
“Eighteen,” she says. “He has Asperger’s syndrome.”
I’ve heard the term, but I’m not about to pretend I’m an expert. “So he’s autistic?”
“Technically, yes, but not in a Rain Man kind of way. He’s very high-functioning.” She looks longingly at the police station. “Can’t we discuss this later?”
“Not if you want me to represent Jacob. How did he get here?”
“I drove him.” She takes a long, shaky breath. “When I was watching the news today, and they were reporting from the crime scene, I saw a quilt that belongs to Jacob.”
“Is it possible that other people have it, too? Like, anyone who happened to shop at Kohl’s last season?”
“No. It’s handmade. It was upstairs in his closet, or so I thought. And then I heard the reporter say that they’d arrested Jess’s boyfriend for the murder.”
“Was Jacob her boyfriend?”
“No. That’s someone named Mark. I don’t know him, but I couldn’t stand the thought of him going to jail for something he didn’t do. I called the detective in charge of the case, and he said if I brought Jacob down here, he’d talk to him and take care of everything.” She buries her face in h
er hands. “I didn’t realize that meant he’d ambush Jacob. Or tell me I couldn’t sit in on the interview.”
“If he’s eighteen, that’s true,” I point out. “Did Jacob agree to talk to him?”
“He practically raced into the police station, once he was told he could help analyze a crime scene.”
“Why?”
“It would be like you getting a high-profile celebrity murder case after years of practicing property law.”
Oh. Well, that I could understand. “Did the police tell you Jacob was under arrest?”
“No.”
“So you just brought him down here voluntarily?”
She crumples in front of me. “I thought they were going to talk to him. I didn’t know he would be considered a suspect right away.” Emma Hunt is crying now, and I know less about what to do with a crying woman than I would with a greased piglet on a New York City subway. “I was just trying to do the right thing,” she sobs.
When I was a farrier, I worked with a mare that had a fracture in the pedal bone. Weeks of rest hadn’t helped her; the owners were talking about putting her down. I convinced them to let me hot-fit a straight bar shoe to the hoof, and I wrapped it instead of nailing it. At first, the mare didn’t want to walk, and who could blame her? It took a week of coaxing to get her to take a step from her stall, and then I worked with her for thirty minutes a day, until a year later, I led her out to a field and watched her fly across the open space, fast as a rumor.
Sometimes, you need someone else to help you take the first step.
I put my hand on her shoulder; she jumps at the contact and stares up at me with those crazy molten eyes of hers. “Let’s see what we can do,” I say, and I hope like hell she cannot tell that my knees are shaking.
At the dispatch desk, I clear my throat. “I’m looking for an officer . . .”
“Which one?” the bored sergeant asks.
My face floods with heat. “The one who’s doing the interview with Jacob Hunt,” I say. Why hadn’t I thought to ask her the guy’s name?
“You mean Detective Matson?”
“Yes. I’d like you to interrupt that interview he’s doing.”
The sergeant shrugs. “I’m not interrupting anything. You can wait. I’ll let him know you’re here when he’s done.”
Emma isn’t listening. She’s edged away from me, toward a door that leads down the hallway of the police department. It’s on a locked mechanism controlled by dispatch. “He’s down there,” she murmurs.
“Well, I think right now the best course of action is to play by their rules until—”
Suddenly the door buzzes and opens. A secretary wanders into the waiting area carrying a FedEx box for pickup.
“Now,” Emma says. She grabs my wrist and pulls me through the windfall of that open doorway, and in tandem, we start to run.
Jacob
I am here as living proof to tell you that dreams really do come true.
1. I am sitting with Detective Matson, shooting the shit.
2. He’s sharing details of an open investigation with me.
3. Not once has he yawned or checked his watch or in any way indicated that he is not enjoying speaking to me at length about crime scene investigation.
4. He wants to talk to me about the crime scene surrounding Jess’s disappearance—a crime scene that I orchestrated.
Seriously, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Or so I think until he begins firing questions at me that feel like bullets. And his mouth is smiling halfway, and I cannot remember if that means he’s happy or not. And the conversation moves from the practical—the weight of the human brain, the nature of postmortem toxicity tests—to the personal.
The fascination of creating a liver slide to look at microscopically loses some of its entertainment value when Detective Matson forces me to remember that the liver in question belonged to someone I actually knew, someone I laughed with and looked forward to seeing, which is far from how I feel about most social interactions. As theoretical as I would like death to be, it turns out there is a significant difference when it’s corn syrup and food coloring instead of the real McCoy. Although I can logically understand that Jess is gone, which therefore means there’s no point wishing she weren’t since she’s not able to reverse the situation, it doesn’t account for the fact that I feel like a helium balloon is caught inside me, and that it keeps inflating, and that it might actually tear me apart.
Just when I think things cannot get any worse, Detective Matson accuses me of being the one to hurt Jess.
You’re the one who grabbed Jess by the arms, aren’t you?
I wasn’t. And I tell him so.
What about choking her? You’re not going to lie to me about doing that, are you?
I know the answer, of course, but it’s bogged down in the syntax. It’s like when someone asks you at dinner, You don’t want that last piece of steak, do you? when of course you do. If you say yes, are you saying that you want the last piece of steak? Or that you don’t want it?
So what made you choke her?
Was it a fight? Did she say something you didn’t like?
If Jess were here, she’d tell me to take a deep breath. Tell the person you need him to speak more slowly, she’d say. Tell him you don’t understand.
Except Jess isn’t here.
“Nothing made me choke Jess,” I finally manage to say, which is the absolute truth. But my face is red, and my breath feels like sawdust spilling out of me.
Once, when we were little and Theo called me a mental midget, I threw a couch pillow at him and, instead, it knocked over a lamp my mother had gotten from her grandmother. How did this happen? my mother asked, when she retained the power of speech again.
A pillow knocked it off the table.
It was unequivocally the truth, but my mother’s hand came down and swatted me. I don’t remember it hurting. I remember being so embarrassed that I thought my skin might melt off. And even though she apologized later, there was always a disconnect for me: telling the truth was supposed to set you free, wasn’t it? So how come it got me in trouble when I told a new mother that her baby looked like a monkey? Or when I read another kid’s paper in class during a peer edit and said it was abysmal? Or when I told my mother that I felt like an alien who’d been sent down to analyze families, since I never really seemed to be a part of ours?
Or now?
Did you choke her until she stopped breathing? Did you hit her in the face?
I think of Lucy and Ethel at that candy factory. Of one time when I went into the ocean and could not get out of the oncoming waves before the previous one drove me to my knees. On CrimeBusters, at the end, the CSIs interrogate the suspects and the suspects always crack in the face of cold, hard evidence.
None of this is happening the way I planned it to.
Or maybe it’s just that my plan is working a little too well.
I never meant to hurt Jess, and that’s why the next question spears me like a javelin. “Then how did her tooth get knocked out?” Detective Matson asks.
I watch it unfolding in front of me, an instant invisible replay. Lugging Jess down the stairs, dropping her on the final riser. I’m sorry! I had cried, even though that was not necessary; she could not hear me anymore.
Whatever words I am using, though, are falling short, since Detective Matson doesn’t understand me. So I decide to take a drastic step, to show him the inside of my mind right here and right now. I take a deep breath, and then I stare directly into his eyes.
It’s like having strips of my skin pulled off from the inside. Like needles in every nerve center of the brain.
God, it hurts.
“That was an accident,” I whisper. “But I saved it. I put it in her pocket.”
Another truth, but one that makes him jump in his seat. I’m sure he can hear my pulse as loudly as I can. That’s a sign of arrhythmia. I hope I do not die right here in Detective Matson’s office.
Without any traffic it takes sixteen minutes to get from the police station to my house. That means we will not get home till 4:33, and CrimeBusters begins at 4:30. I stand up, both of my hands fluttering in front of my chest like hummingbirds, but I don’t even care anymore about trying to stop them. It feels like the moment on the TV show when the perp finally caves in and falls to the metal table, sobbing with guilt. I want to be watching that TV show, instead of living it. “Are we done now?” I ask. “Because I really have to go.”
Detective Matson gets up, and I think he might open the door for me, but instead he blocks my exit and leans closer, until he is too close for me to breathe, because what if I wind up with some of the air that he exhaled? “Did you know you fractured her skull?” he says. “Did that happen at the same time you knocked out her tooth?”
I close my eyes. “I don’t know.”
“What about her underwear? You put it on backward, didn’t you?”
At that, my head whips up. “It was on backward?” How was I supposed to know? There were no labels, like there are in my boxer shorts. Shouldn’t the graphic of the butterfly have gone on the front, rather than back?
“Did you take her underwear off her, too?”
“No, you just said it was on her . . .”
“Did you try to have sex with her, Jacob?” the detective asks.
I am utterly silent. Just thinking about that makes my tongue swell up like a monkey’s fist knot.
“Answer me, goddammit!” he yells.
I scramble for words, any words, because I do not want him to yell at me again. I will tell him that I had sex with Jess eighty times that night if that’s what he needs to hear, if that makes him open the door.