The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  There were all sorts of stories that circulated about them: how Brady had given up football scholarships at colleges that didn’t have art programs for Haley; how Haley had gotten a tattoo of Brady’s initials in a place no one could see; how on their first date, he’d had rose petals spread on the passenger seat of his Honda. Josie, circulating in the same crowd as Haley, knew that most of this was bullshit. Haley herself had admitted, first, that it was a temporary tattoo, and second, that it wasn’t rose petals, but a bouquet of lilacs he’d stolen from a neighbor’s garden.

  “Josie?” Haley whispered now, from inside the room. “Is that you?”

  Josie felt her mother’s hand on her arm, restraining her. But then Haley’s parents, who were blocking a clear view of the bed, moved away.

  The right half of Haley’s face was swathed in bandages; her hair was shaved to the scalp above it. Her nose had been broken, and her one visible eye was completely bloodshot. Josie’s mother drew in her breath silently.

  She stepped inside and forced herself to smile.

  “Josie,” Haley said. “He killed them. Courtney and Maddie. And then he pointed the gun at me, but Brady stepped in front of it.” A tear streaked down the cheek that wasn’t bandaged. “You know how people are always saying they’d do that for you?”

  Josie started shaking. She wanted to ask Haley a hundred questions, but her teeth were chattering so hard that she couldn’t manage a single word. Haley grabbed on to her hand, and Josie startled. She wanted to pull away. She wanted to pretend she’d never seen Haley Weaver like this.

  “If I ask you something,” Haley said, “you’ll be honest, won’t you?”

  Josie nodded.

  “My face,” she whispered. “It’s ruined, isn’t it?”

  Josie looked Haley in the eye. “No,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  They both knew she wasn’t telling the truth.

  Josie said good-bye to Haley and her parents, grabbed on to her mother, and hurried even faster toward the elevators, even though every step felt like a thunderstorm behind her eyes. She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class—how a steel rod had pierced a man’s skull, and he opened up his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he’d never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.

  * * *

  By the time Patrick returned to Sterling High the next morning, the crimescene detectives had turned the halls of the school into an enormous spiderweb. Based on where the victims had been found, string was taped up—a burst of lines radiating from one spot where Peter Houghton had paused long enough to fire shots before moving on. The lines of string crossed each other at points: a grid of panic, a graph of chaos.

  He stood for a moment in the center of the commotion, watching the techs weave the string across the hallways and between banks of lockers and into doorways. He imagined what it would have been like to start running at the sound of the gunshots, to feel people pushing behind you like a tide, to know that you couldn’t move faster than a speeding bullet. To realize too late you were trapped, a spider’s prey.

  Patrick picked his way through the web, careful not to disturb the work of the techs. He would use what they did to corroborate the stories of the witnesses. All 1,026 of them.

  * * *

  The breakfast broadcast of the three local network news stations was devoted to that morning’s arraignment of Peter Houghton. Alex stood in front of the television in her bedroom, nursing her cup of coffee and staring at the backdrop behind the eager reporters: her former workplace, the district courthouse.

  She’d settled Josie in her bedroom to sleep the dark, dreamless sleep of the sedated. To be perfectly honest, Alex needed this time alone, too. Who would have guessed that a woman who’d become a master at putting on a public face would find it so emotionally exhausting to hold herself together in front of her daughter?

  She wanted to sit down and get drunk. She wanted to weep, her head buried in her hands, at her good fortune: her daughter was two doors away from her. Later, they would have breakfast together. How many parents in this town were waking up to realize this would never be true again?

  Alex shut off the television. She didn’t want to compromise her objectivity as the future judge on this case by listening to what the media had to say.

  She knew there would be critics—people who said that because her daughter went to Sterling High School, Alex should be removed from the case. If Josie had been shot, she would have quickly agreed. If Josie had even still been friendly with Peter Houghton, Alex would have recused herself. But as it stood, Alex’s judgment was compromised no more than that of any other justice who lived in the area, or who knew a child who attended the school, or who was the parent of a teenager. It happened all the time to North Country justices: someone you knew would inevitably wind up in your courtroom. When Alex was rotating as a district court judge, she’d faced defendants she’d known on a personal level: her mailman caught with pot in his car; a domestic disturbance between her mechanic and his wife. As long as the dispute didn’t involve Alex personally, it was perfectly legal—in fact, mandatory—for her to try the case. In those scenarios, you simply took yourself out of the equation. You became the judge and nothing more. The shooting, as Alex saw it, was the same set of circumstances, ratcheted up a notch. In fact, she’d argue that in a case with the massive media coverage this one had, it would take someone with a defense background—like Alex’s—to truly be impartial to the shooter. And the more she thought about it, the more firmly convinced Alex became that justice couldn’t be done without her involvement, the more ludicrous it seemed to suggest she was not the best judge for the job.

  She took another sip of her coffee and tiptoed from her bedroom to Josie’s. But the door stood wide open, and her daughter was not inside.

  “Josie?” Alex called, panicking. “Josie, are you all right?”

  “Down here,” Josie said, and Alex felt the knot inside her unravel again. She walked downstairs to find Josie sitting at the kitchen table.

  She was dressed in a skirt and tights and a black sweater. Her hair was still damp from a shower, and she had tried to cover the bandage on her forehead with a swath of bangs. She looked up at Alex. “Do I look all right?”

  “For what?” Alex asked, dumbfounded. She couldn’t be expecting to go to school, could she? The doctors had told Alex that Josie might never remember the shooting, but could she erase the fact that it had ever happened from her mind, too?

  “The arraignment,” Josie said.

  “Sweetheart, there is no way you’re going near that courthouse today.”

  “I have to.”

  “You’re not going,” Alex said flatly.

  Josie looked as if she were unraveling at the seams. “Why not?”

  Alex opened her mouth to answer, but couldn’t. This wasn’t logic; it was gut instinct: she didn’t want her daughter to relive this experience. “Because I said so,” she finally replied.

  “That’s not an answer,” Josie accused.

  “I know what the media will do if they see you at the courthouse today,” Alex said. “I know that nothing’s going to happen at that arraignment that’s going to be a surprise to anyone. And I know that I don’t want to let you out of my sight right now.”

  “Then come with me.”

  Alex shook her head. “I can’t, Josie,” she said softly. “This is going to be my case.” She watched Josie pale, and realized that until that moment, Josie hadn’t considered this. The trial, by default, would put an even thicker wall between them. As a judge, there would be information she couldn’t share with her daughter, confidences she couldn’t keep. While Josie was struggling to move past this tragedy, Alex would be knee-deep in it. Why had she put so much thought into judging this case, and so little into how it would affect her own daughter? Josie didn’t give a damn if her mother was a fair judge right now. She only wanted—needed—a mothe
r, and motherhood, unlike the law, was something that had never come easily to Alex.

  Out of the blue, she thought of Lacy Houghton—a mother who was in a whole different level of hell right now—who would have simply taken Josie’s hand and sat with her and somehow made it seem sympathetic, instead of contrived. But Alex, who had never been the June Cleaver type, had to reach back years to find some moment of connection, something she and Josie had done once before that might work again now to hold them together. “Why don’t you go upstairs and change, and we’ll make pancakes. You used to like that.”

  “Yeah, when I was five . . .”

  “Chocolate chip cookies, then.”

  Josie blinked at Alex. “Are you on crack?”

  Alex sounded ridiculous even to herself, but she was desperate to show Josie that she could and would take care of her, and that her job came second. She stood up, opening cabinets until she found a Scrabble game. “Well, then, how about this?” Alex said, holding out the box. “I bet you can’t beat me.”

  Josie pushed past her. “You win,” she said woodenly, and then she walked away.

  * * *

  The student who was being interviewed by the CBS affiliate out of Nashua remembered Peter Houghton from a ninth-grade English class. “We had to write a story with a first-person narrator, and we could pick anyone,” the boy said. “Peter did the voice of John Hinckley. From the things he said, you think he’s looking out from hell, but then at the end you find out it’s heaven. It freaked out our teacher. She had the principal look at the paper and everything.” The boy hesitated, scratching his thumb along the seam of his jeans. “Peter told them it was poetic license, and an unreliable narrator—which we’d been studying, also.” He glanced up at the camera. “I think he got an A.”

  * * *

  At the traffic light, Patrick fell asleep. He dreamed that he was running through the halls of the school, hearing gunshots, but every time he turned a corner he found himself hovering in midair—the floor having vanished beneath his feet.

  At a honk, he snapped alert.

  He waved in apology to the car that pulled up alongside him to pass and drove to the state crime lab, where the ballistics tests had been given priority. Like Patrick, these techs had been working around the clock.

  His favorite—and most trusted—technician was a woman named Selma Abernathy, a grandmother of four who knew more about cutting-edge technology than any technogeek. She looked up when Patrick came into the lab and raised a brow. “You’ve been napping,” she accused.

  Patrick shook his head. “Scout’s honor.”

  “You look too good for someone who’s exhausted.”

  He grinned. “Selma, you’ve really got to get over your crush on me.”

  She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Honey, I’m smart enough to fall for someone who doesn’t make my life a pain in the ass. You want your results?”

  Patrick followed her over to a table, on which were four guns: two pistols and two sawed-off shotguns. They were tagged: Gun A, Gun B—the two pistols; Gun C and Gun D—the shotguns. He recognized the pistols—they were the ones found in the locker room—one held by Peter Houghton, the other one a short distance away on the tile floor. “First I tested for latent prints,” Selma said, and she showed the results to Patrick. “Gun A had a print that matches your suspect. Guns C and D were clean. Gun B had a partial print on it that was inconclusive.”

  Selma nodded to the rear of the laboratory, where enormous barrels of water were used for test-firing the guns. She would have test-fired each weapon into the water, Patrick knew. When a bullet was fired, it spun through the barrel of a gun, which caused striations on the metal. As a result, you could tell, by looking at a bullet, exactly which gun it had been fired from. This would help Patrick piece together Peter Houghton’s rampage: where he’d stopped to shoot, which weapon he’d used.

  “Gun A was the one primarily used during the shooting, Guns C and D were left in the backpack retrieved at the crime scene. Which is actually a good thing, because they most likely would have done more damage. All of the bullets retrieved from the bodies of victims were fired from Gun A, the first pistol.”

  Patrick wondered where Peter Houghton had gotten his armory. And at the same time, he realized that it wasn’t hard in Sterling to find someone who hunted or went target shooting at the site of an old dump in the woods.

  “I know, from the gunpowder residue, that Gun B was fired. However, there hasn’t been a bullet recovered yet that confirms this.”

  “They’re still processing—”

  “Let me finish,” Selma said. “The other interesting thing about Gun B is that it jammed after that one discharge. When we examined it we found a double-feed of a bullet.”

  Patrick crossed his arms. “There’s no print on the weapon?” he clarified.

  “There’s an inconclusive print on the trigger . . . probably smudged when your suspect dropped it, but I can’t say that for certain.”

  Patrick nodded and pointed to Gun A. “This is the one he dropped, when I drew down on him in the locker room. So, presumably, it’s the last one he fired.”

  Selma lifted a bullet with a pair of tweezers. “You’re probably right. This was retrieved from Matthew Royston’s brain,” she said. “And the striations are consistent with a discharge from Gun A.”

  The boy in the locker room, the one who’d been found with Josie Cormier.

  The only victim who’d been shot twice.

  “What about the bullet in the kid’s stomach?” Patrick asked.

  Selma shook her head. “Went through clean. It could have been fired from either Gun A or Gun B, but we won’t know until you bring me a slug.”

  Patrick stared at the weapons. “He’d used Gun A all over the rest of the school. I can’t imagine what made him switch to the other pistol.”

  Selma glanced up at him; he noticed for the first time the dark circles under her eyes, the toll this overnight emergency had taken. “I can’t imagine what made him use either of them in the first place.”

  * * *

  Meredith Vieira stared gravely into the camera, having perfected the demeanor for a national tragedy. “Details continue to accumulate in the case of the Sterling shootings,” she said. “For more, we go to Ann Curry at the news desk. Ann?”

  The news anchor nodded. “Overnight, investigators have learned that four weapons were brought into Sterling High School, although only two were actually used by the shooter. In addition, there is evidence that Peter Houghton, the suspect in the shootings, was an ardent fan of a hard-core punk band called Death Wish, often posting on fan websites and downloading lyrics onto his personal computer. Lyrics that, in retrospect, have some people wondering what kids should and should not be listening to.”

  The green screen behind her shoulder filled with text:

  Black snow falling

  Stone corpse walking

  Bastards laughing

  Gonna blow them all away, on my Judgment Day.

  Bastards don’t see

  The bloody beast in me

  The reaper rides for free

  Gonna blow them all away, on my Judgment Day.

  “The Death Wish song ‘Judgment Day’ includes a frightening foreshadowing of an event that became all too real in Sterling, New Hampshire, yesterday morning,” Curry said. “Raven Napalm, lead singer for Death Wish, held a press conference late last night.”

  The footage cut to a man with a black Mohawk, gold eye shadow, and five pierced hoops through his lower lip, standing in front of a group of microphones. “We live in a country where American kids are dying because we’re sending them overseas to kill people for oil. But when one sad, distraught child who doesn’t see the beauty in life goes and wrongly acts on his rage by shooting up a school, people start pointing a finger at heavy metal music. The problem isn’t with rock lyrics, it’s with the fabric of this society itself.”

  Ann Curry’s face filled the screen again. “We’l
l have more on the continuing coverage of the tragedy in Sterling as it unfolds. In national news, the Senate defeated the gun control bill last Wednesday, but Senator Roman Nelson suggests that it’s not the last we’ve seen of that fight. He joins us today from South Dakota. Senator?”

  * * *

  Peter didn’t think he’d slept at all last night, but all the same, he didn’t hear the correctional officer coming toward his cell. He startled at the sound of the metal door scraping open.

  “Here,” the man said, and he tossed something at Peter. “Put it on.”

  He knew that he was going to court today; Jordan McAfee had told him so. He assumed that this was a suit or something. Didn’t people always get to wear a suit in court, even if they were coming straight from jail? It was supposed to make them sympathetic. He thought he’d seen that on TV.

  But it wasn’t a suit. It was Kevlar, a bulletproof vest.

  * * *

  In the holding cell beneath the courthouse, Jordan found his client lying on his back on the floor, an arm shielding his eyes. Peter was wearing a bulletproof vest, an unspoken nod to the fact that everyone packing the courtroom that morning wanted to kill him. “Good morning,” Jordan said, and Peter sat up.

  “Or not,” he murmured.

  Jordan didn’t respond. He leaned a little closer to the bars. “Here’s the plan. You’ve been charged with ten counts of first-degree murder and nineteen counts of attempted first-degree murder. I’m going to waive the readings of the complaints—we’ll go over them individually some other time. Right now we just have to go in there and enter not-guilty pleas. I don’t want you to say a word. If you have any questions, you whisper them to me. You are, for all intents and purposes, mute for the next hour. Understand?”