The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  If he was going to find proof, it was going to have to be in the school itself.

  The locker room looked exactly like the photo he’d used during his testimony earlier this week, except that the bodies, of course, had been removed. Unlike the corridors and classrooms of the school, the locker room hadn’t been cleaned or patched. The small area held too much damage—not physical, but psychological—and the administration had unanimously agreed to tear it down, along with the rest of the gym and the cafeteria, later this month.

  The locker room was a rectangle. The door that led into it, from the gym, was in the middle of one long wall. A wooden bench sat directly opposite, and a line of metal lockers. In the far left corner of the locker room was a small doorway that opened into a communal shower stall. In this corner, Matt’s body had been found, with Josie lying beside him; thirty feet away in the far right corner of the locker room, Peter had been crouching. The blue backpack had fallen just to the left of the doorway.

  If Patrick believed Josie, then Peter had come running into the locker room, where Josie and Matt had gone to hide. Presumably, he was holding Gun A. He dropped his backpack, and Matt—who would have been standing in the middle of the room, close enough to reach it—grabbed Gun B. Matt shot at Peter—the bullet that had never been found, the one that proved Gun B was fired at all—and missed. When he tried to shoot again, the gun jammed. At that moment, Peter shot him, twice.

  The problem was, Matt’s body had been found at least fifteen feet away from the backpack where he’d grabbed the gun.

  Why would Matt have backed up, and then shot at Peter? It didn’t make sense. It was possible that Peter’s shots had sent Matt’s body recoiling, but basic physics told Patrick that a shot fired from where Peter was standing would still not have landed Matt where he’d been found. In addition, there had been no blood-spatter pattern to suggest that Matt had been standing anywhere near the backpack when he was hit by Peter. He’d pretty much dropped where he’d been shot.

  Patrick walked toward the wall where he’d apprehended Peter. He started at the upper corner and methodically ran his fingers over every divot and niche, over the edges of the lockers and inside them, around the bend of the perpendicular walls. He crawled beneath the wooden bench and scrutinized the underside. He held his flashlight up to the ceiling. In such close quarters, any bullet fired by Matt should have made enough serious damage to be noticeable, and yet, there was absolutely no evidence that any gun had been fired—successfully—in Peter’s direction.

  Patrick walked to the opposite corner of the locker room. There was still a dark bloodstain on the floor, and a dried boot print. He stepped over the stain and into the shower stall, repeating the same meticulous investigation of the tiled wall that would have been behind Matt.

  If he found that missing bullet here, where Matt’s body had been found, then Matt clearly hadn’t been the one to fire Gun B—it would have been Peter wielding that weapon, as well as Gun A. Or in other words: Josie would have been lying to Jordan McAfee.

  It was easy work, because the tile was white, pristine. There were no cracks or flakes, no chips, nothing that would suggest a bullet had gone through Matt’s stomach and struck the shower wall.

  Patrick turned around, looking in places that didn’t make sense: the top of the shower, the ceiling, the drain. He took off his shoes and socks and shuffled along the shower floor.

  It was when he’d just scraped his little toe along the line of the drain that he felt it.

  Patrick got down on his hands and knees and felt along the edge of the metal. There was a long, raw scuff on the tile that bordered the drainage grate. It would have easily gone unnoticed because of its location—techs who saw it had probably assumed it was grout. He rubbed it with his finger and then peered with a flashlight into the drain. If the bullet had slipped through, it was long gone—and yet, the drainage holes were tiny enough that this shouldn’t have been possible.

  Opening a locker, Patrick ripped a tiny square of mirror off with his hands and set it face-up on the floor of the shower, just where the scuff mark was. Then he turned off the lights and took out a laser pointer. He stood where Peter had been apprehended and pointed the beam at the mirror, watched it bounce onto the far wall of the showers, where no bullet had left a mark.

  Circling around, he continued to point the beam until it ricocheted up—right through the center of a small window that served as ventilation. He knelt, marking the spot where he stood with a pencil from his pocket. Then he dug out his cell phone. “Diana,” he said when the prosecutor answered. “Don’t let that trial start tomorrow.”

  * * *

  “I know it’s unusual,” Diana said in court the next morning, “and that we have a jury sitting here, but I have to ask for a recess until my detective gets here. He’s investigating something new on the case . . . possibly something exculpatory.”

  “Have you called him?” Judge Wagner asked.

  “Several times.” Patrick was not answering his phone. If he was, then she could have told him directly how much she wanted to kill him.

  “I have to object, Your Honor,” Jordan said. “We’re ready to go forward. I’m sure that Ms. Leven will give me that exculpatory information, if and when it ever arrives, but I’m willing at this point to take my chances. And since we’re all here at the bench, I’d like to add that I have a witness who’s prepared to testify right now.”

  “What witness?” Diana said. “You don’t have anyone else to call.”

  He smiled at her. “Judge Cormier’s daughter.”

  * * *

  Alex sat outside the courtroom, holding tight to Josie’s hand. “This is going to be over before you know it.”

  The great irony here, Alex knew, was that months ago when she’d fought so hard to be the judge on this case, it was because she felt more at ease offering legal comfort to her daughter than emotional comfort. Well, here she was, and Josie was about to testify in the arena Alex knew better than anyone else, and she still didn’t have any grand judicial advice that could help her.

  It would be scary. It would be painful. And all Alex could do was watch her suffer.

  A bailiff came out to them. “Judge,” he said. “If your daughter’s ready?”

  Alex squeezed Josie’s hand. “Just tell them what you know,” she said, and she stood up to take a seat in the courtroom.

  “Mom?” Josie called after her, and Alex turned. “What if what you know isn’t what people want to hear?”

  Alex tried to smile. “Tell the truth,” she said. “You can’t lose.”

  * * *

  To comply with discovery rules, Jordan handed Diana a synopsis of Josie’s testimony as she was walking up to the stand. “When did you get this?” the prosecutor whispered.

  “This weekend. Sorry,” he said, although he really wasn’t. He walked toward Josie, who looked small and pale. Her hair had been gathered into a neat ponytail, and her hands were folded in her lap. She was studiously avoiding anyone’s gaze by focusing on the grain of the wood on the rail of the witness stand.

  “Can you state your name?”

  “Josie Cormier.”

  “Where do you live, Josie?”

  “45 East Prescott Street, in Sterling.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m seventeen,” she said.

  Jordan took a step closer, so that only she would be able to hear him. “See?” he murmured. “Piece of cake.” He winked at her, and he thought she might even have smiled back the tiniest bit.

  “Where were you on the morning of March 6, 2007?”

  “I was at school.”

  “What class did you have first period?”

  “English,” Josie said softly.

  “What about second period?”

  “Math.”

  “Third period?”

  “I had a study.”

  “Where did you spend it?”

  “With my boyfriend,” she said. “Matt Royston.�
� She looked sideways, blinking too fast.

  “Where were you and Matt during third period?”

  “We left the cafeteria. We were going to his locker, before the next class.”

  “What happened then?”

  Josie looked into her lap. “There was a lot of noise. And people started running. People were screaming about guns, about someone with a gun. A friend of ours, Drew Girard, told us it was Peter.”

  She glanced up then, and her eyes locked on Peter’s. For a long moment, she just stared at him, and then she closed her eyes and turned away.

  “Did you know what was going on?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see anyone shooting?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “To the gym. We ran across it, toward the locker room. I knew he was coming closer, because I kept hearing gunshots.”

  “Who was with you when you went into the locker room?”

  “I thought Drew and Matt, but when I turned around, I realized that Drew wasn’t there. He’d been shot.”

  “Did you see Drew getting shot?”

  Josie shook her head. “No.”

  “Did you see Peter before you got into the locker room?”

  “No.” Her face crumpled, and she wiped at her eyes.

  “Josie,” Jordan said, “what happened next?”

  10:16 A.M., The Day Of

  Get down,” Matt hissed, and he shoved Josie so that she fell behind the wooden bench.

  It wasn’t a good place to hide, but then, nowhere in the locker room was a good place to hide. Matt’s plan had been to climb out the window in the shower, and he’d even opened it up, but then they’d heard the shots in the gym and realized they didn’t have time to drag the bench over and climb through. They’d boxed themselves in, literally.

  She curled herself into a ball and Matt crouched down in front of her. Her heart thundered against his back, and she kept forgetting to breathe.

  He reached behind him until he found her hand. “If anything happens, Jo,” he whispered, “I loved you.”

  Josie started to cry. She was going to die; they were all going to die. She thought of a hundred things she hadn’t done yet that she so badly wanted to do: go to Australia, swim with dolphins. Learn all the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Graduate.

  Get married.

  She wiped her face against the back of Matt’s shirt, and then the locker room burst open. Peter stumbled inside, his eyes wild, holding a handgun. His left sneaker was untied, Josie noticed, and then she couldn’t believe she noticed. He lifted his gun at Matt, and she couldn’t help it; she screamed.

  Maybe it was the noise; maybe it was her voice. It startled Peter, and he dropped his backpack. It slid off his shoulder, and as it did, another gun fell out of an open pocket.

  It skittered across the floor, landing just behind Josie’s left foot.

  Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever? Josie watched her hand stretch back, watched her fingers curl around the cold black butt of the gun. Fumbling it, she staggered upright, pointing the gun at Peter.

  Matt backed away toward the showers, under Josie’s cover. Peter held his gun steady, still pointing it at Matt, even though Josie was closer. “Josie,” he said. “Let me finish this.”

  “Shoot him, Josie,” Matt said. “Fucking shoot him.”

  Peter pulled back the slide of the gun so that a bullet from the clip would cycle into place. Watching him carefully, Josie mimicked his actions.

  She remembered being in nursery school with Peter—how other boys would pick up sticks or rocks and run around yelling Hands up. What had she and Peter used the sticks for? She couldn’t recall.

  “Josie, for Christ’s sake!” Matt was sweating, his eyes wide. “Are you fucking stupid?”

  “Don’t talk to her like that,” Peter cried.

  “Shut up, asshole,” Matt said. “You think she’s going to save you?” He turned to Josie. “What are you waiting for? Shoot.”

  So she did.

  As the gun fired, it ripped two stripes of her skin from the base of her thumb. Her hands jerked upward, numb, humming. The blood was black on Matt’s gray T-shirt. He stood for a moment, shocked, his hand over the wound in his stomach. She saw his mouth close around her name, but she couldn’t hear it, her ears were ringing so loudly. Josie? and then he fell to the floor.

  Josie’s hand started shaking violently; she wasn’t surprised when the gun just fell out of it, as singularly repelled by her grasp as it had been glued to it moments before. “Matt,” she cried, running toward him. She pressed her hands against the blood, because that’s what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it, but he writhed and screamed in agony. Blood began to bubble out of his mouth, trailing down his neck. “Do something,” she sobbed, turning to Peter. “Help me.”

  Peter walked closer, lifted the gun he was holding, and shot Matt in the head.

  Horrified, she scrambled backward, away from them both. That wasn’t what she’d meant; that couldn’t have been what she meant.

  She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn’t been thinking, she knew exactly what he’d felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.

  “Don’t tell,” Peter whispered, and Josie realized he was offering her a way out—a deal sealed in blood, a partnership of silence: I won’t share your secrets, if you don’t share mine.

  Josie nodded slowly, and then her world went black.

  I think a person’s life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the director’s cut—the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way.

  There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you’ve survived, or the minutes you’ve been stuck there.

  Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over.

  Five Months After

  Alex pushed past the people in the gallery who had erupted in confusion in the wake of Josie’s confession. Somewhere in this crowd of people were the Roystons, who had just heard that their son had been shot by her daughter, but she could not think of that right now. She could only see Josie, trapped on that witness stand, while Alex struggled to get past the bar. She was a judge, dammit; she should have been allowed to go there, but two bailiffs were firmly holding her back.

  Wagner was smacking his gavel, although nobody gave a damn. “We’ll take a fifteen-minute recess,” he ordered, and as another bailiff hauled Peter through a rear door, the judge turned to Josie. “Young lady,” he said, “you are still under oath.”

  Alex watched Josie being taken through another door, and she called out after her. A moment later, Eleanor was at her side. The clerk took Alex’s arm. “Judge, come with me. You’re not safe out here right now.”

  For the first time she could actively remember, Alex allowed herself to be led.

  * * *

  Patrick arrived in the courtroom just as it exploded. He saw Josie on the stand, crying desperately; he saw Judge Wagner fighting for control—but most of all, he saw Alex single-mindedly trying to get to her daughter.

  He would have drawn his gun right then and there to help her do it.

  By the time he fought his way down the central aisle of the courtroom, Alex was gone. He caught a glimpse of her as she slipped into a room behind the bench, and he hurdled the bar to follow her but felt someone
grab his sleeve. Annoyed, he glanced down to see Diana Leven.

  “What the hell is going on?” he asked.

  “You first.”

  He sighed. “I spent the night at Sterling High, trying to check Josie’s statement. It didn’t make sense—if Matt had fired at Peter, there should have been physical evidence of destruction in the wall behind him. I assumed that she was lying again—that Peter had been the one to shoot Matt unprovoked. Once I figured out where that first bullet hit, I used a laser to see where it could have ricocheted—and then I understood why we didn’t find it the first time around.” Digging in his coat, he extracted an evidence bag with a slug inside. “The fire department helped me dig it out of a maple tree outside the window in the shower stall. I drove it straight to the lab for testing—and stood over them all night with a whip until they agreed to do the work on the spot. Not only was the bullet fired from Gun B, it’s got blood and tissue on it that types to Matt Royston. The thing is, when you reverse the angle of that bullet—when you stand in the tree and ricochet the laser off the tile where it struck, to see where the shot originated from—you don’t get anywhere close to where Peter was standing. It was—”

  The prosecutor sighed wearily. “Josie just confessed to shooting Matt Royston.”

  “Well,” Patrick said, handing the evidence bag to Diana, “she’s finally telling the truth.”

  * * *

  Jordan leaned against the bars of the holding cell. “Did you forget to tell me about this?”

  “No,” Peter said.

  He turned. “You know, if you’d mentioned this at the beginning, your case could have had a very different outcome.”

  Peter was lying on the bench in the cell, his hands behind his head. To Jordan’s shock, he was smiling. “She was my friend again,” Peter explained. “You don’t break a promise to a friend.”

  * * *

  Alex sat in the dark of the conference room where defendants were usually brought during breaks, and realized that her daughter now would qualify. There would be another trial, and this time Josie would be at the center of it.