Defending Jacob

by William Landay

  I made my way to the security station that had been set up in the school foyer. It consisted of a long table where coats and backpacks were inspected by hand and an area where Newton cops, two male, two female, swept the kids with metal-detecting wands. Jake was right: the whole thing was ridiculous. There was no reason to think anyone would bring a weapon into the school or that the murderer had any connection to the school at all. The body had not even been found on school grounds. It made sense only as a show for the anxious parents.

  As I arrived, the Kabuki ritual of searching each student had come to a stop. In a rising voice, a young girl negotiated with one of the cops while a second cop looked on, his wand held across his chest at port arms as if he might be called upon to club her with it. The trouble, it became clear, was her sweatshirt, which read “F-C-U-K.” The cop had deemed this message “inciteful” and thus, according to the school’s improvised security rules, forbidden. The girl explained to him that the initials stood for a brand of clothing that you could find at any mall, and even if it did suggest a “bad word” how could anyone be incited by it? and she was not giving up her sweatshirt which was very expensive and why should she let some cop throw an expensive sweatshirt in a Dumpster for no good reason? They were at an impasse.

  Her adversary, the cop, had a stooped posture. His neck craned forward so that his head rode out in front of his body, giving him a vulturous look. But he straightened when he saw me approach, drawing his head back, causing the skin under his chin to fold over itself.

  “Everything okay?” I asked the cop.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Yes, sir. I hated the military mannerisms adopted by police departments, the bogus military ranks and chain of command and all that. “At ease,” I said, intending it as a joke, but the cop looked down at his feet, abashed.

  “Hi,” I said to the girl, who looked like she was in seventh or eighth grade. I did not recognize her as one of Jacob’s classmates, but she might have been.

  “Hi.”

  “What’s the problem here? Maybe I can help.”

  “You’re Jacob Barber’s dad, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Aren’t you like a cop or something?”

  “Just a DA. And who are you?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Sarah. Okay, Sarah. What’s the trouble?”

  The girl paused, uncertain. Then another gush: “It’s just, I’m trying to tell this officer he doesn’t have to take away my sweatshirt, I’ll put it in my locker or I’ll turn it inside out, whatever. Only he doesn’t like what it says, even though no one will even see it, and there’s nothing wrong with it anyway, it’s just a word. This is all so totally—” She left off the last word: stupid.

  “I don’t make the rules,” the cop explained simply.

  “It doesn’t say anything! That’s, like, my whole thing! It doesn’t say what he says it says! Anyway, I already told him I’ll put it away. I told him! I told him like a million times but he won’t listen. It’s not fair.”

  The girl was about to cry, which reminded me of the grown woman I had just left on the sidewalk also near tears. Jesus, there was no escaping them.

  “Well,” I suggested to the cop, “I think it’ll be okay if she just leaves it in her locker, don’t you? I can’t imagine what harm could come of it. I’ll take responsibility.”

  “Hey, you’re the boss. Whatever you want.”

  “And tomorrow,” I said to the girl, to make it up to this cop, “maybe you’ll leave that sweatshirt at home.”

  I winked at her, and she gathered up her things and quick-marched away down the hall.

  I took a position shoulder to shoulder with the affronted cop and together we looked out through the school doors toward the street.

  A beat.

  “You did the right thing,” I said. “Probably should have kept my nose out of it.”

  It was bullshit, of course, both sentences. No doubt the cop knew it was bullshit too. But what could he do? The same chain of command that compelled him to enforce a stupid rule now compelled him to defer to some hulking dumb-ass lawyer in a cheap suit who did not know how hard it was to be a cop and how little of the cops’ work ever made it into the police reports that found their way to the clueless virginal DAs all sealed up in their courthouses like nuns in a convent. Pfft.

  “It’s nothing,” the cop told me.

  And it was nothing. But I stood there awhile, anyway, presenting a united front with him, to be sure he knew whose team I was on.

  4 | Mindfuck

  The Middlesex County Courthouse, where the DA’s office was headquartered, was an unrelievedly ugly building. A sixteen-story tower built in the 1960s, the exterior façades were molded concrete in various rectangular shapes: flat slabs, egg-crate grids, arrow-slit windows. It was as if the architect had banned curved lines and warm building materials in an effort to make the place as grim as possible. Things did not get much better inside. The interior spaces were airless, yellowed, grimy. Most offices had no windows; the solid block shape of the building entombed them. The modern-style courtrooms were windowless too. It is a common architectural strategy to build courtrooms without windows, to enhance the effect of a chamber isolated from the everyday world, a theater for the great and timeless work of the law. Here they need not have bothered: you could spend whole days in this building and never see sun or sky. Worse, the courthouse was known to be a “sick building.” The elevator shafts were lined with asbestos, and every time an elevator door rattled open, the building coughed out a cloud of toxic particulate into the air. Soon enough the whole ramshackle thing would have to be shut down. But for now, for the lawyers and detectives inside, the shabbiness did not matter much. It is in seedy places like this that the real work of local government so often gets done. After a while, you stop noticing.

  Most days I was at my desk by seven-thirty or eight, before the phones really got going, before first call at nine-thirty. But with Jacob’s school reopening that morning, I did not get in till after nine. Anxious to see the Rifkin file, I immediately closed my office door, sat down, and arrayed the murder scene photos across my desk. I propped one foot on an open drawer and leaned back, staring at them.

  At the corners of my desk, the photo-wood laminate had begun to peel away from the pressboard desk. I had a nervous habit of picking at these corners unconsciously, prying up the flexy laminate surface with my finger like a scab. I was sometimes surprised to hear the rhythmic clicking sound it made as I lifted and snapped it. It was a sound I associated with deep thought. That morning, I’m sure, I was ticking like a bomb.

  The investigation felt wrong. Strange. Too quiet, even after five long days of digging. It is a cliché but it is true: most cases break quickly, in the frantic hours and days right after a murder, when the noise is everywhere, evidence, theories, ideas, witnesses, accusations—possibilities. Other cases take a little longer to sort out, to pick out the right signal in that noisy environment, the true story among many plausible ones. A very few cases never get solved. The signal never does emerge from the static. Possibilities abound, all plausible, none confirmable, none provable, and that is how the case ends. But in every case there is always noise. There are always suspects, theories, possibilities to consider. Not in the Rifkin murder. Five days of silence. Somebody stitched three holes in a line across that boy’s chest and left nothing to indicate who or why.

  The tantalizing anxiety this caused—in me, in the detectives working the case, even in the town—was beginning to grate. I felt like I was being toyed with, purposely manipulated. A secret was being kept from me. Jacob and his friends have a slang term, mindfuck, which describes tormenting someone by misleading him, usually by withholding a crucial fact. A girl pretends to like a boy—that is a mindfuck. A movie reveals an essential fact only at the end, which changes or explains everything that went before—The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects, for example, are what Jake calls mindfuck movies. The Rifki
n case was beginning to feel like a mindfuck. The only way to explain the complete dead silence in the aftermath of the murder was that someone had orchestrated all this. Someone out there was watching, enjoying our ignorance, our foolishness. In the investigation phase of a violent crime, the detective often conceives a righteous hate for the criminal before he has any idea who the criminal is. I did not usually feel that sort of passion about any case, but I disliked this murderer already. For murdering, yes, but also for fucking with us. For refusing to submit. For controlling the situation. When I did finally learn his name and face, I would merely adjust my contempt to fit him.

  In the murder scene photos spread out before me, the body lay in the brown leaves, twisted, face up toward the sky, eyes open. The images themselves were not especially grisly—a boy lying in the leaves. Anyway, gore itself did not usually faze me. Like many people who have been exposed to violence, I confined my emotions within a narrow range. Never too high, never too low. Since I was a kid, I have always made sure of that. My emotions ran on steel rails.

  Benjamin Rifkin was fourteen years old, in eighth grade at the McCormick School. Jacob was a classmate but barely knew him. He told me Ben had a reputation at school as “kind of a slacker,” smart but not much of a student, never in the advanced classes that filled Jacob’s schedule. He was handsome, even a little flashy. He often wore his short hair swept up in front with something called hair wax. Girls liked him, according to Jacob. Ben liked sports and was a decent athlete, but he was more into skateboarding and skiing than team sports. “I didn’t hang out with him,” Jacob said. “He had his own crew. They were all a little too cool.” He added, with the casual acid of adolescence, “Everybody’s all into him now, but before, it was like nobody even noticed him.”

  The body was found on April 12, 2007, in Cold Spring Park, sixty-five acres of pine woods that bordered the school grounds. The woods were veined with jogging paths. They crisscrossed one another and led, through many branchings, to a main trail that ringed the perimeter of the park. I knew these trails pretty well; I jogged there most mornings. It was along one of the smaller trails that Ben’s body had been flung facedown into a little gully. It slid to a stop at the foot of a tree. A woman named Paula Giannetto discovered the body as she jogged past. The time of discovery was precise; she switched off her jogging watch as she paused to investigate at 9:07 A.M.—less than an hour after the boy had left his home for the short walk to school. There was no blood visible. The body lay with its head downhill, arms extended, legs together, like a graceful diver. Giannetto reported that the boy was not obviously dead, so she rolled him over hoping to revive him. “I thought he was sick, maybe he passed out or something. I didn’t think—” The medical examiner would later note that the body’s inverted position on sloping ground, feet above head, may have accounted for the unnatural flush of the face. Blood had drained into the head, causing “lividity.” When she rolled the boy over, the witness saw the front of his T-shirt was sopped in red blood. Gasping, she stumbled and fell backward, crabbed a few feet away on her palms and heels, then got up and ran. The position of the body in the murder scene photos—twisted, face up—therefore was not accurate.

  The boy had been stabbed three times in the chest. One strike punctured the heart and would by itself have been fatal. The knife was driven straight in and jerked straight out again, one-two-three, like a bayonet. The weapon had a jagged edge, evidenced by shredding at the left edge of each wound and in the torn shirt fabric. The angle of entry suggested an attacker about Ben’s size, five foot ten or so, although the sloping ground in the park made this projection unreliable. The weapon had not been found. There were no defensive wounds: the victim’s arms and hands were unmarked. The best clue, perhaps, was a single pristine fingerprint, stamped in the victim’s own blood, cleanly preserved on a plastic tag on the inside of the victim’s unzipped sweatshirt, where his murderer might have grabbed him by the lapels and tossed him down the slope into the gully. The print did not match either the victim or Paula Giannetto.

  The bare facts of the crime had developed very little in the five days since the murder. Detectives had canvassed the neighborhood and twice swept the park, immediately after the discovery and again twenty-four hours later to find witnesses who frequented the park at that hour of the day. The sweeps had yielded nothing. To the newspapers and, increasingly, to the terrified parents at the McCormick School, the murder looked like a random strike. As the days passed with no news, the silence from the cops and the DA’s office seemed to confirm parents’ worst fears: a predator lurked in the woods of Cold Spring Park. Since then, the park lay abandoned, though a Newton Police cruiser idled in the parking lot all day to reassure the joggers and power-walkers. Only the dog owners continued to come, to let their dogs off the leash on a meadow designated for this purpose.

  A state trooper in plain clothes named Paul Duffy slipped into my office with a familiar perfunctory knock and sat down opposite my desk, evidently excited.

  Lieutenant Detective Paul Duffy was a policeman by birth, a third-generation cop, son of a former Boston P. D. homicide chief. But he did not look the part. Soft-spoken, with a receding hairline and fine features, he might have been in some gentler profession than policing. Duffy headed a state police unit detailed to the DA’s office. The unit was known by its acronym, CPAC (pronounced sea pack). The initials stood for Crime Prevention and Control, but the title was essentially meaningless (“crime prevention and control” is ostensibly what all cops do) and hardly anyone knew what the letters actually meant. In practice, CPAC’s charge was simple: they were the district attorney’s detectives. They worked cases that were unusually complex, long term, or high profile. Most important, they handled all the county’s murders. In homicide cases, CPAC detectives worked alongside the local cops, who for the most part welcomed the assistance. Outside Boston itself, homicides were rare enough that the locals could not develop the necessary expertise, particularly in the smaller towns where murders were rare as comets. Still, it was a politically delicate situation when the staties swept in to take over a local investigation. A light touch like Paul Duffy’s was required. To lead the CPAC unit, it was not enough to be a smart investigator; you had to be supple enough to satisfy the different constituencies whose toes it was CPAC’s job to step on.

  I loved Duffy without reservation. Virtually alone among the cops I worked with, he was a personal friend. We often worked cases together, the DA’s top lawyer and top detective. We socialized together too. Our families knew each other. Paul had named me godfather to the middle of his three sons, Owen, and if only I had believed in God or fathers, I would have done the same for him. He was more outgoing than I, more gregarious and sentimental, but good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones.

  “Tell me you have something or get out of my office.”

  “I have something.”

  “It’s about time.”

  “That doesn’t sound very grateful.”

  He flipped a file folder onto my desk.

  “Leonard Patz,” I read aloud from a Board of Probation record. “Indecent A&B on a minor; lewd and lascivious; lewd and lascivious; trespass; indecent A&B, dismissed; indecent A&B on a minor, pending. Lovely. The neighborhood pedophile.”

  Duffy said, “He’s twenty-six years old. Lives near the park in that condo place, the Windsor or whatever they call it.”

  A mug shot paper-clipped to the folder showed a large man with a pudgy face, close-cropped hair, Cupid’s-bow lips. I slipped it out from under the paper clip and studied it.

  “Handsome fella. Why didn’t we know about him?”

  “He wasn’t in the sex offender registry. He moved to Newton in the last year and never registered.”

  “So how’d you find him?”

  “One of the ADAs in the Child Abuse Unit flagged him. That’s the pending indecent A&B in Newton District Court, top of the page there.”

  “What’s the bail?”


  “Personal.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Grabbed some kid’s package in the public library. The kid was fourteen, same as Ben Rifkin.”

  “Really? That fits, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Wait, he grabs a kid’s balls and he gets out on personal?”

  “Apparently there’s some question whether the kid wants to testify.”

  “Still. I go to that library.”

  “Might want to wear a cup.”

  “I never leave home without one.”

  I studied the mug shot. I had a feeling about Patz right from the start. Of course, I was desperate—I wanted to feel that feeling, I badly needed a suspect, I needed to produce something finally—so I distrusted my suspicion. But I could not ignore it altogether. You have to follow your intuition. That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A “gut” for it. And from this first encounter, my gut told me Patz might be the one.

  “It’s worth giving him a shake, at least,” I said.

  “There’s just one thing: there’s no violence on Patz’s record. No weapons, nothing. That’s the only thing.”

  “I see two indecent A&Bs. That’s violent enough for me.”

  “Grabbing a kid by the nuts isn’t the same as murder.”