Defending Jacob

by William Landay

  “You got to start somewhere.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know, Andy. I mean, I see where you’re going, but to me he sounds like more of a wanker than a killer. Anyway, the sex angle—the Rifkin kid had no signs of sexual assault.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he never got that far. He could have been interrupted. Maybe he propositions the kid or tries to force him into the forest at knifepoint, and the kid resists. Or maybe the kid laughs at him, ridicules him, and Patz flies into a rage.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes.”

  “Well, let’s see what he has to say. Go bring him in.”

  “Can’t bring him in. We’ve got nothing to hold him on. There’s nothing tying him to this case.”

  “So tell him you want him to come look through the mug books and see if he can identify anyone he might have seen in Cold Spring Park.”

  “He’s already got a Committee lawyer for the pending case. He’s not going to come in voluntarily.”

  “Then tell him you’ll violate him for not registering his new address with the sex offender registry. You’ve already got him jammed up on that. Tell him the kiddy porn on his computer is a federal offense. Tell him anything, it doesn’t matter. Just get him in and give a little squeeze.”

  Duffy smirked and raised his eyebrows. Ball-grabbing jokes never get old.

  “Just go pick him up.”

  Duffy hesitated. “I don’t know. It feels like we’re jumping the gun. Why not just show Patz’s picture around, see if anyone can put him in the park that morning? Talk to his neighbors. Maybe knock on his door, low-key it, don’t spook him, get him talking that way.” Duffy formed his fingers into a beak and flapped it open and shut: talk, talk. “You never know. If you pick him up, he’ll just call his lawyer. You might lose your only chance to talk to him.”

  “No, it’s better we pick him up. After that, you can sweet-talk him, Duff. That’s what you’re good at.”

  “You sure?”

  “We can’t have people saying we didn’t push hard enough on this guy.”

  The comment was off key, and a doubtful expression crossed Duffy’s face. We had always made it a rule not to give a shit how things looked or what people thought. A prosecutor’s judgment is supposed to be insulated from politics.

  “You know what I mean, Paul. This is the first credible suspect we’ve found. I don’t want to lose him because we didn’t do enough.”

  “Okay,” he said with a sour little frown. “I’ll bring him in.”

  “Good.”

  Duffy leaned back in his chair, the work conversation over, eager now to smooth the slight friction between us.

  “How’d it go with Jacob at school this morning?”

  “Oh, he’s okay. Nothing bothers Jake. Now, Laurie, on the other hand …”

  “She a little shook up?”

  “A little? You remember in Jaws when Roy Scheider has to send his kids into the ocean to show everyone it’s safe to swim?”

  “Your wife looked like Roy Scheider? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “The expression on her face.”

  “You weren’t worried? Come on, I’ll bet you looked like Roy Scheider too.”

  “Listen, pal, I was all Robert Shaw, I promise you.”

  “Things didn’t end well for Robert Shaw, as I recall.”

  “For the shark either. That’s all that matters, Duff. Now go get Patz.”

  “Andy, I’m a little uncomfortable with this,” Lynn Canavan said.

  For a moment I did not know what she was talking about. It actually crossed my mind she might be kidding. When we were younger, she used to like putting people on. More than once I got sucked in, taking seriously a comment that, a moment later, was revealed as a joke. But I saw, in the next moment, that she was quite serious. Or seemed to be. She had become a little hard to read lately.

  There were three of us that morning in Canavan’s big corner office, District Attorney Canavan, Neal Logiudice, and me. We were seated at a round conference table, at the center of which was an empty box from Dunkin’ Donuts, left over from a meeting earlier that morning. The room had a dressy finish, with wood paneling and windows overlooking East Cambridge. But it still had the same chill as the rest of the courthouse. Same thin plum-purple industrial carpet over a concrete slab floor. Same dingy flecked acoustic tiles overhead. Same stale, twice-breathed air. As power offices go, it was not much.

  Canavan fiddled with a pen, tapping the tip on a yellow pad, head tilted as if she was thinking it over. “I don’t know. You handling this case, I don’t know as I like it. Your son goes to that school. It’s a close thing. I’m a little uncomfortable.”

  “You’re uncomfortable, Lynn, or Rasputin here is?” I gestured toward Logiudice.

  “Oh, that’s funny, Andy—”

  “I am,” Canavan asserted.

  “Let me guess: Neal wants the case.”

  “Neal thinks there might be an issue. I do too, frankly. There’s an appearance of a conflict. That does matter, Andy.”

  Indeed, appearances did matter. Lynn Canavan was a rising political star. From the moment she was elected district attorney, two years earlier, there were rumors about which office she would run for next: governor, Massachusetts attorney general, even U.S. senator. She was in her forties, attractive, smart, serious, ambitious. I had known and worked alongside her for fifteen years, since we were both young lawyers. We were allies. She appointed me First Assistant the day she was elected DA, but I knew from the start it was a short-term gig. A courtroom mucker like me is of no value out in the political world. Wherever Canavan was headed, I would not be going along. But that was all still in the future. In the meantime, she was biding her time, polishing her public persona, her “brand”: the no-nonsense law-and-order professional. On camera she rarely smiled, rarely joked. She wore little makeup or jewelry and kept her hair short and sensible. The older people in the office remembered a different Lynn Canavan—fun, charismatic, one of the boys, who could swear like a sailor and drink like she had a hollow leg. But the voters never saw any of that, and at this point maybe the old, more natural Lynn did not exist anymore. I suppose she had no choice but to transform herself. Her life was now an endless candidacy; you could hardly blame her for becoming what she pretended to be for so long. Anyway, we all do have to grow up, put childish things aside and all that. But something was lost too. In the course of Lynn’s transformation from butterfly to moth, our long friendship had suffered. Neither of us felt the old intimacy, the sense of trust and connection we’d once had. Maybe she would make me a judge someday, for old times’ sake, to pay the whole thing off. But we both knew, I think, that our friendship had run its course. We both felt vaguely awkward and mournful around each other because of it, like lovers on the downside of an unwinding affair.

  In any event, Lynn Canavan’s likely ascent created a vacuum behind her, and politics abhors a vacuum. That Neal Logiudice might actually fill it would have seemed absurd, once upon a time. Now, who knew? Clearly Logiudice did not see me as an obstacle. I had said over and over that I had no interest in the job, and I meant it. The last thing I wanted was to live an exposed, public life. Still, he would need more than bureaucratic infighting to get there. If Neal wanted to be DA, he would need a real accomplishment to show the voters. A splashy signature win in the courtroom. He needed a skin. Whose skin, I was just beginning to understand.

  “Are you pulling me off the case, Lynn?”

  “Right now I’m just asking what you think.”

  “We’ve been through this. I’m keeping the case. There’s no issue.”

  “It hits pretty close to home, Andy. Your son might be in danger. If he’d been unlucky enough to be walking through that park at the wrong time …”

  Logiudice said, “Maybe your judgment is clouded, just a little. I mean, if you’re being fair, if you stop and think about it objectively.”

  “Clouded how?”

  “Does it make you emotional?”r />
  “No.”

  “Are you angry, Andy?”

  “Do I look angry?” I counted out the words one by one.

  “Yeah, you do, a little. Or maybe just defensive. But you shouldn’t be; we’re all on the same side here. Hey, it’s perfectly natural to be emotional. If my son was involved—”

  “Neal, are you actually questioning my integrity? Or just my competence?”

  “Neither. I’m questioning your objectivity.”

  “Lynn, does he speak for you? Are you believing this bullshit?”

  She frowned. “My antennae are up, to be honest.”

  “Your antennae? Come on, what does that mean?”

  “I’m uneasy.”

  Logiudice: “It’s the appearance, Andy. The appearance of objectivity. Nobody’s saying you actually—”

  “Look, just fuck off, Neal, okay? This doesn’t concern you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Just let me run my case. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the appearance. The case is going slow because that’s the way it’s going, not because I’m dragging my feet. I’m not going to be stampeded into indicting someone just to make it look good. I thought I taught you better than that.”

  “You taught me I should push every case as hard as I could.”

  “I am pushing as hard as I can.”

  “Why haven’t you interviewed the kids? It’s been five days already.”

  “You know damn well why. Because this isn’t Boston, Neal, it’s Newton. Every frickin’ detail has to be negotiated: which kids we can talk to, where we talk to them, what we can ask, who has to be present. This isn’t Dorchester High. Half the parents in this school are lawyers.”

  “Relax, Andy. No one’s accusing you of anything. The problem is how it will be perceived. From the outside, it might look like you’re ignoring the obvious.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The students. Have you considered that the killer might be a student? You’ve told me a thousand times, haven’t you: follow the evidence wherever it leads.”

  “There’s no evidence to suggest it’s a student. None. If there were, I’d follow it.”

  “You can’t follow it if you won’t look for it.”

  This was an aha! moment. I finally got it. The time had come, as I always knew it would. I was the one immediately above Neal on the ladder. Now he would target me the way he had so many others.

  I made a wry smile. “Neal, what is it you’re after? Is it the case? You want it? You can have it. Or is it my job? What the hell, you can have that too. But it’d be easier for everyone if you’d just come out and say it.”

  “I don’t want anything, Andy. I just want to see things come out right.”

  “Lynn, are you taking me off the case or are you going to back me?”

  She gave me a warm look but an indirect answer. “When have I ever not backed you?”

  I nodded, accepting the truth of this. I put on a resolute mask and declared a fresh start. “Look, the school just reopened today, the kids are all back. We have the student interviews this afternoon. Something good is gonna happen soon.”

  “Good,” Canavan said. “Let’s hope so.”

  But Logiudice chipped in, “Who’s going to interview your son?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not you, I hope.”

  “Not me. Paul Duffy probably.”

  “Who decided that?”

  “Me. That’s the way it works, Neal. I decide. And if there’s a mistake, it’ll be me standing in front of the jury to take the hit.”

  He gave Canavan a look—See? I told you, he won’t listen—which she met with a neutral expression.

  5 | Everyone Knows You Did It

  The student interviews began right after school. For the kids, it had been a long day filled with class meetings and grief counseling. CPAC detectives in plain clothes had gone from classroom to classroom encouraging kids to share tips with the investigators, anonymously if necessary. The kids stared back dully.

  The McCormick was a middle school, which in this town meant it covered grades six through eight. The building was an arrangement of plain rectangular boxes. Inside, the walls were painted thick with many layers of teal. Laurie grew up in Newton and went to the McCormick in the 1970s; she said the school had hardly changed except for the illusion, as she walked down the halls, that the whole structure had shrunk.

  As I had told Canavan, these interviews were a contentious subject. At first, the school principal flatly refused to allow us to “storm in” and talk to any kid we pleased. Had the crime happened in another place—in the urb rather than the suburb—we would not have bothered to ask permission. Here, the school board and even the mayor intervened directly with Lynn Canavan to slow us down. In the end, we were allowed to talk to the kids on school grounds but only on certain conditions. Kids who were not in Ben Rifkin’s homeroom were off limits unless we had a specific reason to believe they might know something. Any student could have a parent and/or a lawyer present and could end the interview at any time, for any reason or no reason. Most of this was easy to concede. They were entitled to a lot of it anyway. The real point of stipulating so many rules was to send the cops a message: treat these kids with kid gloves. Which was fine, but precious time was lost while we diddled around negotiating.

  At two o’clock, Paul and I commandeered the principal’s office and together we interviewed the highest-priority witnesses: the victim’s close friends, a few kids who were known to walk to school through Cold Spring Park, and those who specifically requested to speak with the investigators. Two dozen interviews were scheduled for the two of us. Other CPAC detectives would conduct interviews at the same time. Most we expected to be brief and yield nothing. We were trawling, dragging our net along the sea bottom, hoping.

  But something odd happened. After just three or four interviews, Paul and I had the distinct impression we were being stonewalled. At first we thought we were seeing the usual repertoire of adolescent tics and evasions, the shrugs and y’knows and whatevers, the wandering eyes. We were both fathers. We knew that walling out adults was what all teenagers did; it was the whole point of these behaviors. In itself, there was nothing suspicious about it. But as the interviews went on, we realized something more brazen and purposeful was going on. The kids’ answers went too far. They were not content to say they knew nothing about the murder; they denied even knowing the victim. Ben Rifkin seemed to have had no friends at all, only acquaintances. Other kids never spoke to him, had no idea who did. These were transparent lies. Ben had not been unpopular. We already knew who most of Ben’s friends were. It was a betrayal, I thought, for his buddies to disown him so quickly and completely.

  Worse, the eighth-graders at the McCormick were not especially competent liars. Some of them, the more shameless ones, seemed to believe that the way to pass off a lie convincingly was to oversell it. So, when they got ready to tell a particularly tall one, they would stop all the foot-shuffling and y’knows, and deliver the lie with maximum conviction. It was as if they had read a manual on behaviors associated with honesty—eye contact! firm voice!—and were determined to display them all at once, like peacocks fanning their tail feathers. The effect was to reverse the behavior patterns you might expect to see in adults—the teens seemed evasive when honest and direct when lying—but their shifting manner set off alarm bells just the same. The other kids, the majority, were too self-conscious to begin with and lying only made them more so. They were tentative. The truth inside them made them squirm. This obviously did not work either. I could have told them, of course, that a virtuoso liar slips the false statement in among the true ones without a flutter of any kind, like a magician slipping the bent card into the middle of the deck. I have had an education in virtuosic lying, believe me.

  Paul and I began to exchange suspicious glances. The pace of the interviews slowed as we challenged some of the more obvious lies. Between interviews, Paul joked about a code
of silence. “These kids are like Sicilians,” he said. Neither of us said what we were truly thinking. There is a plummeting feeling, as if the floor has fallen away beneath you. It is the happy vertigo you feel when a case opens up and lets you in.

  Apparently we had been wrong—there was no other way to say it. We had considered the possibility that a fellow student was involved, but we had discounted it. There was no evidence pointing that way. No sullen outcasts among the students, no sloppy schoolboy trail of evidence to follow. Nor was there an apparent motive: no grandiose adolescent fantasies of outlaw glory, no damaged, bullied kids out for revenge, no petty classroom feud. Nothing. Now, neither of us had to say it. That vertiginous feeling was the thought: these kids knew something.

  A girl sloped into the office and dropped into the chair opposite us, then, with great effort, she refused to acknowledge us.

  “Sarah Groehl?” Paul said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Detective Paul Duffy. I’m with the state police. This here is Andrew Barber. He’s the assistant district attorney in charge of this case.”

  “I know.” She looked up at me finally. “You’re Jacob Barber’s dad.”

  “Yes. You’re the sweatshirt girl. From this morning.”

  She smiled shyly.

  “Sorry, I should have remembered you. I’m having a tough day, Sarah.”

  “Yeah, why’s that?”

  “Nobody wants to talk to us. Now, why is that, you have any idea?”

  “You’re cops.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Sure.” She made a face: Duh!

  I waited a moment, hoping for more. The girl returned a look of exquisite boredom.

  “Are you a friend of Jacob’s?”

  She looked down, considered, shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “How come I haven’t heard your name?”

  “Ask Jacob.”

  “He doesn’t tell me anything. I have to ask you.”

  “We know each other. We’re not, like, friends, Jacob and me. We just know each other.”

  “How about Ben Rifkin? Did you know him?”