The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  “So?”

  “So in Maine, if you take a blood sample from a suspect for one case, you can indeed use it for subsequent tests in a different case,” Marita said. “The problem is that when you took blood from Trixie Stone, she consented because she was a victim, and that’s very different from consenting because she’s a suspect.”

  “Isn’t there some kind of loophole?”

  “Depends,” Marita said. “There are three situations when you’re talking about an individual sample that was given based on consent, as opposed to based on a warrant. In the first, the police tell the individual the sample will be used for any investigation. In the second, the police tell the individual the sample will be used only for a certain investigation. In the third, the police obtain consent after saying that the sample will be used to investigate one particular crime, but they don’t make any mention of other uses. You with me so far?”

  Bartholemew nodded.

  “What exactly did you tell Trixie Stone about her rape kit?”

  He thought back to the night he’d met the girl and her parents in the hospital. Bartholemew could not be entirely sure, but he imagined that he said what he usually did with a sexual assault victim: that this was going to be used for the purposes of the rape case, that it was often the DNA evidence that a jury would hang their hat on.

  “You didn’t mention using it for any other potential case, did you?” Marita asked.

  “No,” he scowled. “Most rape victims have enough trouble with the current one.”

  “Well, that means the scope of consent was ambiguous. Most people assume that when the police ask for a sample to help solve a crime, they aren’t going to use the sample indefinitely for other purposes. And a pretty strong argument could be made that in the absence of explicit consent, retaining the sample and reusing it is constitutionally unreasonable.” She pulled off her glasses. “It seems to me you have two choices. You can either go back to Trixie Stone and ask for her permission to use the blood sample you’ve got in the rape kit for a new investigation, or you can go to a judge and get a warrant for a new sample of her blood.”

  “Neither one’s going to work,” Bartholemew said. “She’s missing.”

  Marita glanced up. “Are you kidding?”

  “I wish.”

  “Then get more creative. Where else would there be a sample of her DNA? Does she lick envelopes for the drama club or Teen Democrats?”

  “She was too busy carving up her arms for any other extracurriculars,” Bartholemew said.

  “Who treated her? The school nurse?”

  No, this had been Trixie’s big secret; she would have gone to great pains to hide it, especially if she was cutting herself during school hours. But it did beg the question: What did she use to stanch the flow of blood? Band-Aids, gauze, tissue?

  And was any of that in her locker?

  • • •

  The bush pilot from Arctic Circle Air had been hired to fly in a veterinarian headed to Bethel for the K300 sled dog race. “You going there too?” the vet asked, and although Trixie had no idea where it was, she nodded. “First time?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  The vet looked at her backpack. “You must be a JV.”

  She was; she’d played junior varsity soccer this fall. “I was a striker,” Trixie said.

  “The rest of the JVs headed up to the checkpoints yesterday,” the pilot said. “You miss the flight?”

  He might as well have been speaking Greek. “I was sick,” Trixie said. “I had the flu.”

  The pilot hauled the last box of supplies into the belly of the plane. “Well, if you don’t mind riding with the cargo, I don’t mind giving a pretty girl a lift.”

  The Shorts Skyvan hardly looked airworthy—it resembled a Winnebago with wings. The inside was crammed with duffels and pallets.

  “You can wait for the commuter flight out tomorrow,” the pilot said, “but there’s a storm coming. You’ll probably sit out the whole race in the airport.”

  “I’d rather fly out now,” Trixie said, and the pilot gave her a leg up.

  “Mind the body,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m okay.”

  “Wasn’t talking about you.” The pilot reached in and rapped his knuckles against a pine box.

  Trixie scrambled to the other side of the narrow cargo hold. She was supposed to fly to Bethel next to a coffin?

  “At least you know he won’t talk your ear off.” The pilot laughed, and then he sealed Trixie inside.

  She sat on the duffels and flattened herself against the riveted metal wall. Through the mesh web that separated her from the pilot and the vet, she could hear talking. The plane vibrated to life.

  Three days ago, if someone had told her she’d be riding in a flying bus beside a dead body, she would have flat-out denied it. But desperation can do amazing things to a person. Trixie could remember her history teacher telling the class about the starving man in a Virginia settlement who’d killed, salted, and eaten his wife one winter before the rest of the colonists ever noticed she was missing. What you’d deem impossible one day might look promising the next.

  As the plane canted off the ground, the pine box slid toward Trixie, jamming up against the soles of her shoes. It could be worse, she thought. He might not be in a coffin but in a body bag. He might not be some random dead guy but Jason.

  They climbed into the night, a rich batter mixed with stars. Up here, it was even colder. Trixie pulled down the sleeves of her jacket.

  Oooooh.

  She leaned toward the mesh to speak into the front of the cockpit. The vet was already asleep. “Did you say something?” she called to the pilot.

  “Nope!”

  Trixie settled back against the side of the plane and heard it again: the quiet long note of someone singing his soul.

  It was coming from underneath the lid of the pine box.

  Trixie froze. It had to be the engine. Or maybe the veterinarian snored. But even louder this time, she could trace the origin to the coffin: Ohhhhh.

  What if the person wasn’t dead at all? What if he’d been stapled into this box and was trying to get out? What if he was scratching at the insides, splinters under his fingernails, wondering how he’d ever wound up in there?

  Ohhh, the body sighed. Noooo.

  She came up on her knees, grabbing through the mesh at the bush pilot’s shoulder. “Stop the plane,” she cried. “You have to stop right now!”

  “You should have gone before we left,” the pilot yelled back.

  “That body . . . it’s not dead!”

  By now, she’d awakened the vet, who turned around in the passenger seat. “What’s the matter—”

  Trixie couldn’t look back at the coffin; if she did there would be an arm reaching out of that box, a face she couldn’t lose in her nightmares, a voice telling her that he knew the secret she hadn’t told anyone else.

  Ooooh.

  “There,” Trixie said. “Can’t you hear that?”

  The vet laughed. “It’s the lungs expanding. Like when you take a bag of potato chips on a plane and it puffs up after liftoff? That’s all you’re hearing—air going over the vocal cords.” He grinned at her. “Maybe you ought to lay off the caffeine.”

  Mortified, Trixie turned back toward the coffin. She could hear the pilot and the vet bonding over her stupidity, and her cheeks burned. The body—dead as could be, dead as the wood it was surrounded by—continued to sing: one lonely note that filled the hold of the plane like a requiem, like the truth no one wanted to hear.

  • • •

  “This really is a shock,” said Jeb Aaronsen, the principal of Bethel High. “Trixie seemed to be getting along so well in school.”

  Bartholemew didn’t even spare him a sideways glance. “Before or after she stopped coming altogether?”

  He didn’t have a lot of patience for this principal, who hadn’t noticed any change in his own daughter’s behavior, either, when she’d been a student here
. Aaronsen always put on his tragedy face but couldn’t seem to keep the next one from happening.

  Bartholemew was tired. He’d traced the Stones to the airport, where they’d boarded a plane to Seattle. That would connect to one that landed in Anchorage just shy of midnight. They’d paid $1,292.90 per ticket, according to the American Express agent who’d given the detective the lead.

  Now he knew where Trixie was headed. He just had to convince a judge that she needed to be brought home.

  Bartholemew had awakened the principal and waved the search warrant. The only other people in the school at this time of night were the janitors, who nodded and pushed their rolling trash receptacles out of the way as the men passed. It was strange—almost eerie—to be in a high school that was so patently devoid of commotion.

  “We knew the . . . incident was . . . difficult on her,” the principal said. “Mrs. Gray in guidance was keeping an eye on Trixie.”

  Bartholemew didn’t even bother to answer. The administration at Bethel High was no different from any other group of adults in America: Rather than see what was right under their noses, they pretended that everything was exactly like they wanted it to be. What had Mrs. Gray been doing when Trixie was carving up her skin and slitting her wrists? Or, for that matter, when Holly had skipped classes and stopped eating?

  “Trixie knew she could have come to us if she was feeling ostracized,” the principal said, and then he stopped in front of a drab olive locker. “This is the one.”

  Bartholemew lifted the bolt cutters he’d brought from the fire department and snipped the combination lock. He opened the metal latch, only to have dozens of condoms spring out of the locker like a nest of snakes. Bartholemew picked up one string of Trojans. “Good thing she wasn’t being ostracized,” he said.

  The principal murmured something and disappeared down the hallway, leaving Bartholemew alone. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and pulled a paper bag out of his coat pocket. Then he brushed the remaining condoms from the innards of the locker and stepped closer to investigate.

  There was an algebra textbook. A dog-eared copy of Romeo and Juliet. Forty-six cents in assorted change. A ruler. A broken binder clip. Mounted on the swinging door underneath a sticker that said HOOBASTANK was a tiny compact mirror with a flower painted in the corner. It had been smashed hard enough to crack, and the bottom left corner was missing.

  Bartholemew found himself looking at it and wondering what Trixie Stone had seen in there. Did she picture the girl she’d been at the beginning of ninth grade—a kid, really, checking out what was going on in the hall behind her and wishing she could be a part of it? Or did she see the shell she’d become—one of the dozens of faceless adolescents in Bethel High who made it through the day by praying, one step at a time, they wouldn’t attract anyone’s notice?

  Bartholemew peered into Trixie’s locker again. It was like a still life, without the life.

  There was no gauze or box of Band-Aids. There was no shirt crumpled into the corner, stained with Trixie’s blood. Bartholemew was about to give up when he noticed the edge of a photo, jammed down into the joint between the back metal wall and the floor of the locker. Pulling a pair of tweezers out of his pocket. Bartholemew managed to inch it free.

  It was a picture of two vampires, their mouths dripping with blood. Bartholemew did a double take, then looked again and realized the girls were holding a half-eaten bucket of cherries. Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein was on the left. Her mouth was a bright crimson, her teeth stained, too. The other girl must have been Trixie Stone, although he would have been hard-pressed to make an identification. In the photo, she was laughing so hard her eyes had narrowed to slits. Her hair was nearly the same color as the fruit and fell all the way down her back.

  Until he saw that, he’d forgotten. When Bartholemew had first met Trixie Stone, her hair had reached down to her waist. The second time they’d met, those locks had been brutally shorn. He remembered Janice the rape advocate telling him that it was a positive step, a donation Trixie had made to a charity that made wigs for cancer patients.

  A charity that would have taken, recorded, and labeled Trixie Stone’s hair.

  • • •

  Daniel and Laura sat in an airport bar, waiting. A snowstorm in Anchorage had delayed the connecting flight out of Seattle, and so far three hours had passed, three hours that Trixie was getting farther away from them.

  Laura had tossed back three drinks already. Daniel wasn’t sure if it was because of her fear of heights and flying in general, or her worry about Trixie, or a combination of both. There was, of course, the chance that they had been wrong—that Trixie was heading south to Mexico, or sleeping in a train station in Pennsylvania. But then again, Trixie wouldn’t be the first kid in trouble to turn to Alaska. So many folks on the run from the law wound up there—the last great frontier—that states had long ago given up spending the money to come pick them up. Instead, the Alaska state troopers hunted down fugitives from justice. Daniel could remember reading newspaper stories about people who were dragged out of cabins in the bush and extradited on charges of rape or kidnapping or murder. He wondered if Trixie’s picture was being e-mailed to sergeants around Alaska, if they’d already started to search.

  There was a difference, though, between searching and hunting, one he’d learned with Cane and his grandfather. You have to clear your mind of the thoughts of the animal, the old man used to say, or he’ll see you coming. Daniel would focus, wishing he was less white and more like Cane—who, if you told him, “Don’t think of a purple elephant,” could truly not think of a purple elephant.

  The difference here was that if Daniel wanted to find Trixie, he couldn’t afford to stop thinking about her. That way, she’d know that he was looking.

  Daniel moved a martini glass that had been on the bar when they first sat down—someone’s leftovers. You didn’t have to clean up after yourself; there was always waitstaff to do it for you. That was one difference between Eskimo culture and white culture he’d never quite understood—people in the lower forty-eight had no responsibility to anyone else. You looked out for number one; you fended for yourself. If you interfered in someone else’s business—even with the best of intentions—you might suddenly be held accountable for whatever went wrong. The good Samaritan who pulled a man from a burning car could be sued for injuries caused during the process.

  On the other hand, the Yupiit knew that everyone was connected—man and beast, stranger and stranger, husband and wife, father and child. Cut yourself, and someone else bled. Rescue another, and you might save yourself.

  Daniel shuddered as more memories passed through him. There were disjointed images, like the Kilbuck Mountains in the distance flattened by an air inversion in the utter cold. There were unfamiliar sounds, like the plaintive aria of sled dogs waiting for their dinner. And there were distinctive smells, like the oily ribbon of drying salmon that blew in from fish camp. He felt as if he were picking up the thread of a life he had forgotten weaving and being expected to continue the pattern.

  And yet, in the airport were a thousand reminders of how he’d been living for the past two decades. Travelers belched out of jet-ways, dragging wheeled carry-ons and hauling wrapped presents in oversized department store bags. The smell of strong coffee drifted from the Starbucks stand across the way. Carols played in an endless loop on the speaker system, interrupted by the occasional call for a porter with a wheelchair.

  When Laura spoke, he nearly jumped out of his seat. “What do you think will happen?”

  Daniel glanced at her. “I don’t know.” He grimaced, thinking of all that could go wrong from this point on for Trixie: frostbite, fever, animals she could not fight, losing her way. Losing herself. “I just wish she’d come to me instead of running off.”

  Laura looked down at the table. “Maybe she was afraid you’d think the worst.”

  Was he that transparent? Although Daniel had told himself Trixie hadn’t killed Jason, although
he’d say this till he went hoarse, there was a seed of doubt that had started to blossom, and it was choking his optimism. The Trixie he knew could not have killed Jason; but then, it had already been proved that there was a great deal about Trixie he didn’t know.

  Here, though, was the remarkable thing: It didn’t matter. Trixie could have told him that she killed Jason with her bare hands, and he would have understood. Who knew better than Daniel that everyone had a beast inside, that sometimes it came out of hiding?

  What he wished he had been able to tell Trixie was that she wasn’t alone. Over the past two weeks, this metamorphosis had been happening to him, too. Daniel had kidnapped Jason; he’d beaten the boy. He’d lied to the police. And now he was headed to Alaska—the place he hated more than anywhere else on earth. Daniel Stone was falling away, one civilized scale at a time, and before long he’d be an animal again—just like the Yupiit believed.

  Daniel would find Trixie, even if it meant he had to walk across every mile of Alaska to do it. He’d find her, even if he had to slip into his old skin—lying, stealing, hurting anyone who stood in his way. He’d find Trixie, and he’d convince her that nothing she could do or say would make him love her any less.

  He just hoped when she saw what he’d become for her, she’d feel the same way.

  • • •

  The race headquarters for the K300 were already in full swing when Trixie arrived with the veterinarian shortly after six o’clock. There were lists posted on dry-erase boards: the names of the mushers, with grids to post their progress at a dozen race checkpoints. There were rule books and maps of the course. Behind one table a woman sat at a bank of phones, answering the same questions over and over. Yes, the race started at eight P.M. Yes, DeeDee Jonrowe was wearing bib number one. No, they didn’t have enough volunteers.

  People who arrived by snow machine stripped off several layers the minute they walked into the Long House Inn. Everyone wore footwear with soles so thick they looked like moon boots, and sealskin hats with flaps that hung down over the ears. There were one-piece snowsuits and elaborately embroidered fur parkas. When the occasional musher came in, he was treated like a rock star—people lined up to shake his hand and wish him the best of luck. Everyone seemed to know everyone else.