The Jodi Picoult Collection #4

by Jodi Picoult

  “Do you know how she got abrasions on her back?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever strike her in the face?”

  “No.” Mark’s voice sounds like it is wrapped up in wool. He has been looking down at the floor, but when he lifts his face now, everyone can see how his eyes are wet, how he is swallowing hard. “When I left her,” he says, “she looked like an angel.”

  As Helen Sharp finishes, Oliver stands up and buttons his suit jacket. Why do lawyers always do that? On CrimeBusters, the actors playing lawyers do it, too. Maybe it’s so that they look professional. Or they need something to do with their hands.

  “Mr. Maguire, you just testified that you were actually arrested for the murder of Jess Ogilvy.”

  “Yes, but they had the wrong guy.”

  “Still . . . for a little while, anyway, the police believed you were involved, isn’t that true?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You also testified that you grabbed Jess Ogilvy during your fight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “On her arms.” He touches his biceps muscle. “Here.”

  “You choked her, too, didn’t you?”

  He goes beet red. “No.”

  “You are aware, Mr. Maguire, that the autopsy revealed bruises around Jess Ogilvy’s neck, as well as on her upper arms?”

  “Objection,” the prosecutor says. “Hearsay.”

  “Sustained.”

  “You are aware that you’re testifying here today under oath?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “So let me ask you again if you choked Jess Ogilvy.”

  “I didn’t choke her!” Mark argues. “I just . . . put my hands on her neck. For a second!”

  “While you were fighting?”

  “Yes,” Mark says.

  Oliver raises his eyebrows. “Nothing further,” he says, and he sits back down beside me.

  Me, I duck my head, and smile.

  Theo

  I was nine when my mother made me go to a therapy group for siblings of autistic kids. There were only four of us—two girls with faces that looked like ground over a sinkhole, who had a baby sister who apparently never stopped screaming; a boy whose twin was severely autistic; and me. We all had to go around a circle and say one thing we loved about our sibling, and one thing we really hated.

  The girls went first. They said they hated the way the baby kept them up all night, but they liked the fact that her first word had not been Mama or Dada but instead Sissy. Then I went. I said that I hated when Jacob took my stuff without asking and how it was okay for him to interrupt me to give some dinosaur fact nobody cared about but that if I interrupted him he’d get really angry and have a meltdown. I liked the way he said things, sometimes, that were hilarious—even though they weren’t meant to be—like when a camp counselor told him swimming would be a piece of cake and he freaked out because he thought he’d have to eat underwater and surely would drown. Then it was the other boy’s turn. But before he could speak the door burst open and his twin brother ran inside and sat down on his lap. The kid reeked—and I mean reeked. All of a sudden their mom poked her head into the room. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Harry doesn’t like anyone but Stephen to change his diaper.”

  Sucks to be Stephen, I thought. But instead of getting totally embarrassed, like I would have been, or pissed off, like I also would have been, Stephen just laughed and hugged his brother. “Let’s go,” he said, and he held his twin’s hand and led him out of the room.

  We did other stuff that day with the therapist, but I wasn’t concentrating. I couldn’t get out of my head the image of nine-year-old Harry wearing a giant diaper, of Stephen cleaning up the messes. There was one more thing I liked about my own sibling with autism: he was potty-trained.

  At our lunch break, I found myself gravitating toward Stephen. He was sitting by himself, eating apple slices from a plastic bag.

  “Hey,” I said, climbing into the seat next to him.

  “Hey.”

  I opened the straw of my juice pack and poked it into the cardboard box. I stared out the window, trying to figure out what he was looking at.

  “So how do you do it?” I asked, after a minute.

  He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He picked an apple slice out of the bag, chewed it, swallowed. “It could have been me,” he said.

  * * *

  Mama Spatakopoulous can’t fit into the witness chair. She has to push and wedge, and finally the judge asks the bailiff to get a seat that might be more comfortable. If it were me up there, I’d want to hide under the stupid chair in embarrassment, but she seems to be perfectly happy. Maybe she thinks it’s a testimonial to how good her food is.

  “Mrs. Spatakopoulous, where do you work?” asks the Dragon Bitch, a.k.a. Helen Sharp.

  “Call me Mama.”

  The prosecutor looks at the judge, who shrugs. “Mama, then. Where do you work?”

  “I own Mama S’s Pizzeria, on Main Street in Townsend.”

  “How long have you run the restaurant?”

  “Fifteen years this June. Best pizza in Vermont. You come by, I’ll give you a free sample.”

  “That’s very generous of you . . . Mama, were you working the afternoon of January tenth, 2010?”

  “I work every afternoon,” she says proudly.

  “Did you know Jess Ogilvy?”

  “Yes, she was a regular. Good girl, with a good head on her shoulders. Helped me salt the walkway once after an ice storm because she didn’t want me to throw my back out.”

  “Did you speak to her on January tenth?”

  “I waved to her when she came in, but it was a madhouse.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “No, she came with her boyfriend, and the kid she tutored.”

  “Do you see that kid in the courtroom today?”

  Mama S. blows my brother a kiss.

  “Had you ever seen Jacob before January tenth?”

  “Once or twice, he came in with his mama to get pizza. Got celiac problems, like my father, God rest his soul.”

  “Did you talk to Jacob Hunt that afternoon?” the prosecutor asks.

  “Yes. By the time I brought the pizzas they had ordered, he was sitting alone at the table.”

  “Do you know why Jacob Hunt was sitting alone?” Helen Sharp asks.

  “Well, they were all fighting. The boyfriend was angry at Jacob, Jess was angry at the boyfriend for being angry at Jacob, and then the boyfriend left.” She shakes her head. “Then Jess got angry at Jacob, and she left.”

  “Did you hear what they were fighting about?”

  “I had eighteen take-out orders to fill; I wasn’t listening. The only thing I heard was what Jess said, before she left.”

  “Which was what, Mama S.?”

  The woman purses her lips. “She told him to get lost.”

  The prosecutor sits back down, and then it is Oliver’s turn. I don’t watch cop shows. I don’t really watch anything, unless it’s CrimeBusters, since Jacob hogs the TV. But being in court is kind of like watching a basketball game—one side scores, and then the other takes the ball back and scores, and this goes on and on. And just like basketball, I bet it all comes down to the last five minutes.

  “So you really don’t know what the argument was about,” Oliver says.

  “No.” She leans forward. “Oliver, you look very handsome in your fancy suit.”

  He smiles, but it looks a little painful. “Thanks, Mama. So, you were in fact paying attention to your customers.”

  “I’ve got to make a living, don’t I?” she says, and then she shakes her head. “You’re losing weight, I think. You’ve been eating out too much. Constantine and I are both worried about you . . .”

  “Mama, I kind of need to get through this?” he whispers.

  “Oh. All right.” She turns to the jury. “I didn’t hear the argument.”

  “You were behind the counter?”

&
nbsp; “Yes.”

  “Near the ovens.”

  “Yes.”

  “And there were other people working around you?”

  “Three, that day.”

  “And there was noise?”

  “The phone, and the pinball, and the jukebox were all going.”

  “So you’re not really sure what upset Jess in the first place?”

  “No.”

  Oliver nods. “When Jacob was sitting alone, did you talk to him?”

  “I tried. He wasn’t big on conversation.”

  “Did he ever make eye contact with you?”

  “No.”

  “Did he do anything threatening?”

  Mama S. shakes her head. “No, he’s a good boy. I just left him alone,” she says. “It seemed to be what he wanted.”

  * * *

  My whole life, Jacob’s wanted to be part of the group. This is one of the reasons why I never brought friends home. My mother would have insisted we include Jacob, and frankly, that would have pretty much guaranteed the end of the friendship for me. (The other reason is I was embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone to know what my household was like; I didn’t want to have to explain Jacob’s antics, because even though my mother insisted they were just quirks of his, to the rest of the free world, they looked freaking ridiculous.)

  Every now and then, though, Jacob managed to infiltrate my separate life, which was even worse. It was the social equivalent of when I once built a house of cards using all fifty-two of them and Jacob thought it would be funny to poke it with his fork.

  In elementary school I was a total social outcast because of Jacob, but when we got to middle school, there were people from other towns who didn’t know about my brother with Asperger’s. Through some miracle I managed to become friends with two guys named Tyler and Wally, who lived in South Burlington and played Ultimate Frisbee. They invited me to play after school, and when I told them sure and didn’t have to even call my mom to check if it was okay, that only made me seem cooler. I didn’t explain that the reason I didn’t have to call was because I spent as much time away from my house as possible, that my mother was used to me not coming home until it got dark out and, half the time, probably didn’t even notice I was gone.

  It was, and I am not just saying this, the best day of my life. We were flinging the Frisbee around the softball field, and a few girls who had stayed after for field hockey practice came to watch in their short skirts, with the sun all caught up in their hair. I jumped extra high, showing off, and when I worked up a sweat, one of the girls let me have a drink from her water bottle. I got to put my mouth where hers had been a minute before, which was practically like kissing her, if you want to get technical.

  And then Jacob showed up.

  I don’t know what he was doing there—apparently it had to do with some kind of testing that was being administered at my school instead of his, and he was waiting with his aide for my mother to come pick him up. But the minute he saw me and called out my name, I knew I was screwed. At first I pretended I didn’t hear him, but he ran right onto the field. “Friend of yours, Hunt?” Tyler asked, and I just laughed it off. I whipped the Frisbee in his direction, extra hard.

  To my surprise, Jacob—who couldn’t catch a freaking cold if he tried—nabbed the Frisbee and started to run with it. I froze, but Tyler took off after him. “Hey, retard,” he yelled at Jacob. “I’m gonna kick your ass!”

  He was faster than Jacob, big surprise, and he tackled my brother to the ground. He lifted his hand to deck Jacob, but by then I was on his back, yanking him off and straddling his body as the Frisbee went spinning into the street. “You don’t fucking touch him,” I yelled into Tyler’s face. “If anyone’s going to beat up my brother, it’s going to be me.”

  I left him in the dirt, coughing, and then took Jacob’s hand and walked him to the front of the school, where I couldn’t hear the girls whispering about me and my dork of a brother, where there were enough teachers milling around to keep Tyler and Wally from jumping me in revenge.

  “I wanted to play,” Jacob said.

  “Well, they didn’t want you to play,” I told him.

  He kicked at the dirt. “I wish I could be the big brother.”

  Technically, he was, but he wasn’t talking about age. He just didn’t know how to say what he meant. “You could start by not stealing someone’s goddamn Frisbee,” I said.

  And then my mother drove up and rolled down the window. She was smiling a huge smile. “I thought I was only picking up Jacob, but look at that,” she said. “You two found each other.”

  Oliver

  I am sure that the jury isn’t absorbing anything that Marcy Allston, the CSI, is saying. She’s so drop-dead gorgeous that I can practically imagine the dead bodies she stumbles across sitting up and panting.

  “The first time we came to the house, we dusted for fingerprints and found some on the computer and in the bathroom.”

  “Can you explain the process?” Helen asks.

  “The skin of your fingers, the palms of your hands, and the soles of your feet aren’t smooth—they are friction ridge skin, with lines that start, stop, and have certain contours or shapes. Along those lines of skin are a series of sweat pores, and if they become contaminated with sweat, blood, dirt, dust, and so on, they leave a reproduction of those lines on the object that’s been touched. My job is to make that reproduction visible. Sometimes you need a magnifying glass to do it, sometimes you need a light source. Once I make the print visible, it can be photographed, and once it can be photographed I can preserve it and make a comparison against a known sample.”

  “Where do those known samples come from?”

  “The victim, the suspects. And from AFIS, a fingerprint database for all criminals in the United States who have been processed.”

  “How do you make the comparison?”

  “We look at specific areas and find patterns—deltas, whorls, arches, loops—and the core, the centermost part of the fingerprint. We make a visual comparison between the known fingerprint and the unknown one, looking for general shapes that match, and then we look at more specific details—ending ridges, or bifurcations where one line might split into two. If approximately ten to twelve similarities occur, a person trained in fingerprint identification will be able to determine whether the two fingerprints came from the same individual.”

  The prosecutor enters into evidence a chart that shows two fingerprints, side by side. Immediately, Jacob sits up a little straighter. “This fingerprint on the right was found on the kitchen counter. The one on the left is a known sample taken from Jacob Hunt during his arrest.”

  As she walks through the ten little red flags that show similarities between the prints, I look at Jacob. He is grinning like mad.

  “Based on your comparison, did you come to a conclusion?” Helen asks.

  “Yes. That this was Jacob Hunt’s fingerprint in the kitchen.”

  “Was there anything else of note during your processing of the house?”

  Marcy nods. “We found a kitchen window screen that had been cut from the outside, and the sash jimmied and broken. A screwdriver was found in the bushes below the window.”

  “Were there any fingerprints on the sash, or on the screwdriver?”

  “No, but the temperature that day was extremely cold, which often compromises fingerprint evidence.”

  “Did you find anything else?”

  “A boot print beneath the windowsill. We made a wax cast of the print and were able to match it to a boot on the premises.”

  “Do you know who that boot belonged to?”

  “Mark Maguire, the victim’s boyfriend,” Marcy said. “We determined that these were boots he kept at the house, since he often stayed there overnight.”

  “Did you find anything else in the house?”

  “Yes. Using a chemical called Luminol, we found significant traces of blood in the bathroom.”

  Jacob writes a note on the pad and
gives it to me:

  Bleach + Luminol = false positive for blood.

  “At some point did you receive a 911 call from the victim’s cell phone?” Helen asks.

  “Yes. Early on January eighteenth, we responded to a culvert approximately three hundred yards from the home where Jess Ogilvy had been house-sitting, and found the victim’s body.”

  “What was the position of the body?”

  “She was propped up with her back against the cement wall, and her arms were folded in her lap. She was fully clothed.”

  “Was there anything else noteworthy about how the body was found?”

  “Yes,” Marcy replies. “The victim was wrapped in a distinctive, handmade quilt.”

  “Is this the quilt that you found with the victim that day?” the prosecutor asks, and she offers Marcy a bulky roll of fabric in all the colors of the rainbow, the pattern marred by dark brown areas of dried blood.

  “That’s the one,” Marcy says, and as it is entered into evidence, I can hear Emma draw in her breath.

  Helen thanks her witness, and I stand up to cross-examine. “How long have you been a CSI?”

  “Four years,” Marcy says.

  “So not that long, then.”

  She raises a brow. “How long have you been a lawyer?”

  “Have you seen a lot of dead bodies at crime scenes?”

  “Fortunately, not as many as I would if I worked in Nashua or Boston,” Marcy says. “But enough to know what I’m doing.”

  “You said that you found a fingerprint at Jess Ogilvy’s house, in the kitchen, that belongs to Jacob.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you say that the presence of that fingerprint identifies him as a murderer?”

  “No. It only places him at the scene of the crime.”

  “Is it possible that Jacob might have left the fingerprint there at some other point?”

  “Yes.”

  “You also found Mark Maguire’s boot prints beneath a window sash that had been jimmied and cut,” I say. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “Did you find Jacob’s boot prints anywhere outside?”

  “No,” Marcy says.

  I take a deep breath. I hope you know what you’re doing, I think silently, looking back once at Jacob. “And the blood in the bathroom—were you able to determine whether it belonged to the victim?”