by Jodi Picoult
Just like that, Emma bristles. --My son's doing you a favor by speaking with you, Detective. We didn't have to call and give you this information.||
I tamp down my frustration. --So you cleaned up the mess you saw downstairs?||
--Right,|| Jacob says. --I picked up the stools and I set the mail back onto the kitchen counter. And I put all the CDs that had been knocked over in alphabetical order.||
--Alphabetical order,|| I repeat, remembering Mark Maguire's call, and my theory about an anal-retentive kidnapper. --You're kidding me.||
--That's what his room's like,|| Emma says. --Jacob's a big fan of everything being in its right place. For him, it's the spatial equivalent of knowing what's coming next.||
--So when did you take the backpack?||
--After I cleaned up.||
The backpack still has its tags on, just like Maguire said. --Would you mind if I hang on to it, for the case?||
Suddenly, Jacob lights up. --You have to take it. You're going to need to run DNA tests on the straps and you can do an AP on the underwear inside. It might be worth spraying the whole thing with Luminol, to be honest. And you can probably get prints off the card inside with ninhydrin, but you'll want to compare them against my mother's since she handled the card when she first found the backpack. Which reminds me, you can look through it now if you want. I have latex gloves upstairs in my room. You don't have a latex allergy, do you?|| He is halfway out of the room when he turns back. --We have a grocery bag somewhere, don't we? That way Detective Matson can carry this back to the lab.||
He runs upstairs, and I turn to Emma. --Is he always like that?||
--And then some.|| She looks up at me. --Is anything Jacob said helpful?||
--It's all food for thought,|| I say.
--Everything changes if there are signs of a struggle,|| she points out.
I raise a brow. --You're a closet CSI, too?||
--No, in spite of Jacob's best efforts to teach me.|| She glances out the window for a moment. --I've been thinking about Jess's mother,|| she says. --The last time she talked to her daughter, was it about stupid things, you know? Did they have a fight about how she never called, or how she had forgotten to send a thank-you card to her aunt?|| She faces me.
--I used to say I love you every time I tucked my boys in at night. But now, they go to bed after I do.||
--My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.|| I smile faintly. --He had a stroke a few years ago. Before that, I used to screen his calls because I didn't have time to talk about whether the Sox would make it into the playoffs. But afterward, I started to call him. Every time, I'd finish by saying I loved him.
We both knew why; and it didn't sit right after all the time I hadn't said it. It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon. He died eight months ago.||
--I'm sorry.||
I laugh tightly. --And I don't know why the hell I'm telling you this.||
At that moment, Jacob reappears, clutching a pair of latex gloves. I snap them on and carefully lift the backpack just as my cell rings. --Matson,|| I say.
It's one of the lieutenants in the department, asking how much longer I'm going to be.
--I have to run.|| I lift the grocery bag into my arms.
Jacob ducks his head. --I'd be interested in hearing the test results, naturally.||
--Naturally,|| I reply, although I have no intent of sharing them. --So what's on CrimeBusters today?||
--Episode sixty-seven. The one where a mutilated woman is found in a shopping cart outside a box store.||
--I remember that one. Keep an eye on--||
----the store manager,|| Jacob finishes. --I've seen it already, too.||
He walks me to the door, his mother trailing behind. --Thanks, Jacob. And Emma?||
I wait until she glances up. --Say it when you wake them up in the morning, instead.||
*
When I reach Jess Ogilvy's place, the two CSIs who have been processing the house are standing outside in the freezing cold, staring at a cut window screen.
--No prints?|| I say, my breath fogging in the cold.
But I already know the answer. So would Jacob, for that matter. The chances of prints being preserved in temperatures as low as these are pretty slim.
--No,|| the first investigator says. Marcy's a bombshell with a knockout figure, a 155
IQ, and a girlfriend who could probably knock my teeth out. --But we did find the window jimmied to break the lock, too, and a screwdriver in the bushes.||
--Nice. So the question is, was this a B and E gone bad? Or was the screen cut to make us think that?||
Basil, the second investigator, shakes his head. --Nothing inside screams breaking and entering.||
--Yeah, well, that's not necessarily true. I just interviewed a witness who says otherwise and who, um, cleaned up.||
Marcy looks at Basil. --So he's a suspect, not a witness.||
--No. He's an autistic kid. Long story.|| I look at the edge of the screen. --What kind of knife was used?||
--Probably one from the kitchen. We've got a bunch to take back to the lab to see if any of them have traces of metal on the blade.||
--You get any prints inside?||
--Yeah, in the bathroom and off the computer, plus a few partials around the kitchen.||
But in this case, Mark Maguire's prints won't raise a red flag; he's admitted to living here part-time with Jess.
--We also got a partial boot print,|| Basil says. --The silver lining to it being crap weather for prints on the sill is that it's perfect for footwear impressions.|| Underneath the overhang of the gutter I can see the red splotch of spray wax he's used to make a cast. He's lucky to have found a protected ledge; there's been a dusting of fresh snow since Tuesday.
It's the heel, and there's a star in the center, surrounded by what look like the spokes of a compass. Once Basil photographs it, we can enter it into a database to see what kind of boot it is.
The sound of a car driving down the street is punctuated by the slam of a door. Then footsteps approach, crunching on the snow. --If that's the press,|| I say to Marcy, --shoot first.||
But it's not the press. It's Mark Maguire, looking like he hasn't slept since I last saw him. --It's about fucking time you got around to looking for my girlfriend,|| he shouts, and even from a few feet away, the fumes of alcohol on his breath reach me.
--Mr. Maguire,|| I say, moving slowly toward him. --You happen to know if this screen's always been cut?||
I watch him carefully to see his reaction. But the truth is, I can amass all the evidence I want against Mark Maguire and I still have nothing to arrest him for unless a body is recovered.
He squints at the window, but the sun is in his eyes, as well as the brilliant reflection of snow on the ground. As he moves a little closer, Basil steps behind him and shoots a jet of spray wax on the boot print he left behind.
Even from this far away I can make out the star, and the spokes of a compass.
--Mr. Maguire,|| I say, --we're going to have to take your boots.||
Jacob
The first time I saw a dead person was at my grandfather's funeral.
It was after the service, where the minister had read aloud from the Bible, even though my grandfather did not routinely go to church or consider himself religious. Strangers got up and talked about my grandfather, calling him Joseph and telling stories about parts of his life that were news to me: his service during the Korean War, his childhood on the Lower East Side, his courtship of my grandmother at a high school carnival kissing booth. All of their words landed on me like hornets, and I couldn't make them go away until I could see the grandfather I knew and remembered, instead of this impostor they were all discussing.
My mother was not crying so much as dissolving; that is the one way I can describe the fact that tears had become so normal for her it looked strange to see her face smooth and dry.
It
should be noted that I do not always understand body language. That's quite normal, for someone with Asperger's. It's pointless to expect me to look at someone and know how she is feeling simply because her smile is too tight and she is hunched over and hugging her arms to herself, just as it would be pointless to expect a deaf person to hear a voice. Which means that when I asked to have my grandfather's coffin opened, I shouldn't be blamed for not realizing it would upset my mother even more.
I just wanted to see if the body inside was still my grandfather, or maybe the man all those speakers had known, or something entirely different. I am skeptical about lights and tunnels and afterlives, and this seemed the most logical way to test my theories.
Here is what I learned: Dead isn't angels or ghosts. It's a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage.
I don't really see why that freaks people out, since it's the most natural cycle in the world.
The body in the coffin still looked like my grandfather. When I touched his cheek, though, with its crosshatched wrinkles, the skin no longer felt like human skin. It was cold, and slightly firm, like pudding that's been left too long in the refrigerator and has developed a virtual hide as a surface crust.
I may not understand emotion, but I can feel guilt about not understanding it. So when I finally cornered my mother, hours after she ran sobbing from the sight of me poking The-Thing-That-Used-to-Be-My-Grandfather's cheek, I tried to explain why she shouldn't be crying. --He's not Grandpa,|| I told her. --I checked.||
Remarkably, this did not make her feel better at all. --That doesn't mean I miss him any less,|| my mother said.
Pure logic suggests that if the entity in the coffin is not fundamentally the person you used to know, you cannot miss him. Because that's not a loss; that's a change.
My mother had shaken her head. --Here's what I miss, Jacob. I miss the fact that I won't get to ever hear his voice again. And that I can't talk to him anymore.||
This wasn't really true. We had Grandpa's voice immortalized on old family videos that I sometimes liked to watch when I couldn't sleep at night. And it wasn't that she couldn't talk to him that was hard for her to accept; it was that he could no longer talk back.
My mother had sighed. --You'll get it, one day. I hope.||
I would like to be able to tell her that, yes, now I get it. When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all the nerves are still a little raw.
I am headed to my meeting with Jess.
I'm late. It's 3:00 A.M., which is really Monday, not Sunday. But there's no other time for me to go, with my mother watching over me. And although she will probably argue that I broke a house rule, technically, I didn't. This isn't sneaking out to a crime scene. The crime scene is three hundred yards away from where I'm headed.
My backpack is full of necessities; my bike whispers on the pavement as I pedal fast. It's easier not being on foot this time, not having to support more than my own weight.
Directly behind the yard of the house into which Jess had moved is a small, scraggly forest. And directly behind that is Route 115. It runs across a bridge over the culvert that siphons the runoff from the woods in the spring, when the water level is high. I noticed it last Tuesday when I took the bus from school to Jess's new residence.
My mind is full of maps--from social flowcharts (Person is frowning -Person keeps trying to interrupt - Person takes step backward = Person wants to leave this conversation, desperately) to grids of relativity, like an interpersonal version of Google Earth. (Kid says to me, --You play baseball? What position? Left out?|| and gets a big laugh from the rest of the class. Kid is one person out of 6.792 billion humans on this planet. This planet is only one-eighth of the solar system, whose sun is one of two billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Put that way, the comment loses its importance. ) But my mind also functions geographically and topographically, so that at any given moment I can locate myself (this shower stall is on the upper level of the house at 132
Birdseye Lane, Townsend, Vermont, United States, North America, Western Hemisphere, Planet Earth). So by the time I got to Jess's new house last Tuesday, I completely understood where it lay in relation to everywhere else I'd ever been.
Jess is just where I left her five days ago, propped against the damp stone wall.
I lean my bike against the far end of the culvert and squat down, shining a flashlight into her face.
Jess is dead.
When I touch her cheek with the backs of my knuckles, it feels like marble. That reminds me, and so I open up my backpack and pull out the blanket. It is a silly thing, I know, but so is leaving flowers on a grave, and this seems to make more sense. I tuck it around Jess's shoulders and make sure it covers her feet.
Then I sit down beside her. I put on a pair of latex gloves and I hold Jess's hand for a moment before taking out my notebook. In it, I begin to write down the physical evidence.
The bruises underneath her eyes.
The missing tooth.
The contusions on her upper arms, which are, of course, covered up by her sweatshirt right now.
The leathery yellow scrapes on her lower back, which are also covered by that sweatshirt.
To be honest, I'm a little disappointed. I would have expected the police to be able to read the clues I left behind. But they haven't found Jess, and so I have to take the next step.
Her phone is still in my pocket. I have carried it everywhere with me, although I've only turned it on five times. Detective Matson would have subpoenaed Jess's cell phone records by now; they'll see the instances when I called her residence to listen to her voice on the answering machine, but they will assume it was Jess herself who made the call.
He's probably tried to locate her by GPS, too, which nearly all phones have now and which can be accessed by the FBI using a computer program that will pinpoint an active phone within a range of a few feet. This was first piloted in emergency response programs, namely, the 911 call. As soon as dispatch picks up on the other end, they begin to track, just in case an officer or an ambulance has to be sent out.
I decide to make it easy for them. I sit down next to Jess again, so that our shoulders are touching. --You are the best friend I ever had,|| I tell her. --I wish this had never happened.||
Jess, of course, does not respond. I cannot say whether she has ceased to be or if this is just her body and the thing that makes Jess Jess has gone somewhere else. It makes me think of my meltdown--of the room with no windows, no doors, the country where nobody speaks to each other, the piano with only black keys. Maybe this is why funeral dirges are always in a minor key; being on the other side of dead isn't that different from having Asperger's.
It would be incredible to stay and watch. There is nothing I would like more than to see the police swarm in to rescue Jess. But that would be too risky; and so I know I'll just get on my bike and be safe and sound in my bed before the sun or my mother rises for the day.
First, though, I power up her pink Motorola. It feels like I should recite something, a tribute or a prayer. --E.T., phone home,|| I finally say, and then I press 911 and place the little receiver on the stone beside her.
Through the speakers I can hear the voice of the dispatcher. What is your emergency? she says. Hello? Is anybody there?
I am halfway through the woods when I see the flashing lights in the distance on Route 115, and I smile to myself the whole rest of the way home.
CASE 4: SOMETHING'S FISHY
Something Stella Nickell loved: tropical fish. She dreamed of opening her own store.
Something Stella Nickell did not love: her husband, whom she poisoned in 1986 with Excedrin capsules she'd laced with cyanide in order to collect on his life insurance policies.
She first attempted to pois
on Bruce Nickell with hemlock and foxglove, but neither worked on him. So instead she contaminated Excedrin capsules. In order to cover her tracks, she also placed several packages of poisoned Excedrin in three different stores--leading to the death of Sue Snow, who had the bad luck to have been shopping at one of them. The drug manufacturers released the batch numbers of the pills to warn consumers, which was when Stella Nickell came forward and told authorities she had two bottles of contaminated pills that had been purchased from two different stores. This seemed unlikely, since out of thousands of bottles that had been checked in that region, only five were found to have tainted capsules. What were the odds of Stella having two of those?
While examining the Excedrin capsules, the FBI lab found an essential clue: green crystals were mixed in with the cyanide. These turned out to be Algae Destroyer--a product used in fish tanks. Stella Nickell had an aquarium and had bought Algae Destroyer at a local fish store. According to the police, Stella had crushed some algae tablets for her beloved fish in a bowl and then, later, used the same bowl to mix the cyanide. Stella's estranged daughter subsequently went to the police and testified that her mother had planned to kill Bruce Nickell for years.
Talk about the mother of all headaches.
4
Rich
Sometimes I'm just too damn late.
Last year, the day after Christmas, a thirteen-year-old girl named Gracie Cheever never came downstairs. She was found hanging from a closet rack. When I arrived with the CSIs who were photographing the scene, the first thing I noticed was what a mess Gracie's room was--cereal bowls stacked high and papers and dirty laundry thrown on the floor--no one ever asked this kid to clean up. I looked through her journals and learned that Gracie was a cutter; Gracie hated her life and herself; Gracie hated her face and thought she was fat, and wrote down every morsel she ate and every time she cheated on her diet. And then, on one page: I miss my mom. I asked one of the patrol officers if the mother was dead, and he shook his head. --She's in the kitchen,|| he said.
Gracie was the older child of two. She had a younger sister with Down syndrome, and boy, did her mom live for that kid. She home-schooled her; she did the girl's physical therapy on mats in the family room. And while her mother was busy being a saint, Gracie's dad was molesting her.
