The Jodi Picoult Collection #4

by Jodi Picoult

  “Captain? Sorry to bug you on your night off . . .”

  It’s Joey Urqhart, a rookie patrolman. I’m sure it’s my imagination, but the new officers get younger every year; this one’s probably still wearing a Pull-Up at night. No doubt, he’s calling to ask me where we keep the extra Kleenex down at the station or something equally inane. The new kids know better than to bother the chief, and I’m the second in command.

  “. . . it’s just that we got a report of a dead body and I figured you’d want to know.”

  Immediately, I’m on alert. I know better than to ask him questions—like if there are signs of foul play, or if we’re talking suicide. I’ll figure that out myself.

  “Where?”

  He gives me the address of a state highway, near a stretch of conservation land. It’s a popular place for cross-country skiers and snowshoers this time of year. “I’m on my way,” I say, and I hang up.

  I take one last, longing look at the beer I didn’t drink and spill it down the drain. Then I grab Sasha’s coat from the front hallway and rummage through the mudroom for her boots. They’re not there; they’re not on the floor of her bedroom, either. I sit down on the edge of her bed and gently shake her out of sleep. “Hey, baby,” I whisper. “Daddy’s got to go to work.”

  She blinks up at me. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  Technically, it’s only 9:30 P.M., but time is relative when you’re seven years old. “I know. I’m going to take you over to Mrs. Whitbury’s.”

  Mrs. Whitbury probably has a first name, but I haven’t ever used it. She lives across the street and is the widow of a guy who’d been on the job for thirty-five years, so she understands that emergencies happen. She babysat Sasha back when Hannah and I were together, and nowadays when Sasha is staying with me and I get an unexpected call.

  “Mrs. Whitbury smells like feet.”

  She does, actually. “Come on, Sash. I need you to get moving.” She sits up, yawning, as I pull on her coat, tie her fleece hat under her chin. “Where are your boots?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, they’re not downstairs. You’d better find them, because I can’t.”

  She smirks. “Wow, and you’re a detective?”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I lift her into my arms. “Wear your slippers,” I say. “I’ll carry you to the car.”

  I buckle her into her car seat even though we’re only going twenty yards, and that’s when I see them—the boots, lying on the rubber mats in the backseat. She must have kicked them off on the way home from Hanover, and I didn’t notice, since I’d carried her into the house.

  If only all mysteries were that easy to solve.

  Mrs. Whitbury opens the door as if she’s been expecting us. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” I begin, but she waves me off.

  “Not at all,” she says. “I was just hoping for a little company anyway. Sasha, I can’t remember, are you a fan of chocolate ice cream or cookie dough?”

  I set Sasha down inside the threshold. “Thanks,” I mouth to Mrs. Whitbury, and I turn to leave, already mentally mapping out the fastest route to the crime scene.

  “Daddy!”

  I turn back to find Sasha with her arms outstretched.

  For a long time after the divorce, Sasha couldn’t stand to have anyone leave her. We came up with a ritual that somehow, along the way, turned into a good-luck charm. “Kiss, hug, high five,” I say, kneeling down and putting the motions to the words. Then we press our thumbs together. “Bag of peanuts.”

  Sasha leans her forehead against mine. “Don’t worry,” we say in unison.

  She waves to me as Mrs. Whitbury closes the door.

  I stick a magnetic light on top of my car and drive twenty miles over the speed limit before realizing that the dead guy won’t be getting any deader if I’m five minutes late, and that there’s black ice all over the roads.

  Which reminds me.

  I never turned off the hose, and by the time I get home, Sasha’s rink might well have spread to the entirety of my back lawn.

  Dear Auntie Em, I think.

  I had to second-mortgage my house to pay my water bill. What should I do?

  Troubled in Townsend

  Dear Troubled,

  Drink less.

  I’m still smiling when I pull up to the spot where police tape is marking a crime scene. Urqhart meets me as I am checking out the abandoned vehicle, a Pontiac. I brush off a bit of snow from the window and peer inside with a flashlight to see a backseat full of empty gin bottles.

  “Captain. Sorry to call you in,” he says.

  “What have you got?”

  “A jogger found a body in the woods. Guy’s half naked and there’s blood all over him.”

  I start to follow him along a marked trail. “Who the hell goes jogging at night in the dead of winter?”

  The victim is half dressed and frozen. His pants are pooled around his ankles. I do a quick canvass of the other officers to see what evidence they’ve found—which is minimal. Except for all the blood on the man’s extremities, there’s no hint of an altercation. There are footprints that match the victim’s one remaining sneaker, and another set that apparently were made by the jogger (whose alibi already eliminated him as a suspect)—but the perp either brushed his own footprints away or flew in for the kill. I crouch down and am examining the crosshatch abrasions on the victim’s lower left palm when the chief arrives. “Jesus H.,” he says. “Suicide or homicide?”

  I’m not sure. If it’s homicide, where are the signs of a struggle? Or the defense wounds on the hands? It’s almost as if the skin’s been rubbed off raw instead of scratched, and there’s no trauma to the forearms. If it’s suicide, why is the guy in his underwear, and how did he kill himself? The blood is on his knuckles and knees, not his wrists. The truth is, we just don’t see this often enough in Townsend, Vermont, to make a quick judgment call.

  “I don’t know yet,” I hedge. “Sexual assault seems like a given, though.”

  Suddenly a teenager steps out of the edge of the woods. “Actually, you’re both wrong,” he says.

  “Who the hell are you?” the chief asks, and two of the patrolmen take a step forward to flank the boy.

  “Not you again,” Urqhart says. “He showed up at a robbery about a month ago. He’s some kind of crime scene groupie. Get lost, kid. You don’t belong here.”

  “Wait,” I say, vaguely remembering the teenager from that robbery scene. Right now, I’m laying odds that this kid’s the perp, and I don’t want him to bolt.

  “It’s really very simple,” the boy continues, staring at the body. “On episode twenty-six of Season Two, the whole CrimeBusters team got hauled up to Mount Washington to investigate a naked guy who was found at the summit. No one could figure out what a naked guy was doing on top of a mountain, but it turned out to be hypothermia. The same thing happened to this man. He became disoriented and fell down. As his core body temperature rose, he took off his own clothes because he felt hot . . . but in reality, that’s what made him freeze to death.” He grins. “I can’t believe you guys didn’t know that.”

  The chief narrows his eyes. “What’s your name?”

  “Jacob.”

  Urqhart frowns. “People who freeze to death don’t usually bleed all over the place—”

  “Urqhart!” the chief snaps.

  “He didn’t bleed all over the place,” Jacob says. “Blood spatter would show up in the snow, but instead, there’s just transfer. Look at the wounds. They’re abrasions on the knuckles, the knees, and the lower hands. He fell down and he scraped himself up. The blood on the snow came from him crawling around before he lost consciousness.”

  I look at Jacob carefully. One major flaw with his theory, of course, is that you don’t spontaneously start bleeding when you crawl around on the snow. If that were the case, there would be hundreds of elementary school children exsanguinating at recess during the winters in Vermont.

&
nbsp; There’s something just the tiniest bit . . . well . . . off about him. His voice is too flat and high; he won’t make eye contact. He’s bouncing on the balls of his feet and I don’t even think he realizes it.

  On the spot where he’s been bouncing, the snow has melted, revealing a patch of briars. I kick at the ground beneath my boots and shake my head. That poor, drunk, dead bastard had the misfortune to fall down in a field of brambles.

  Before I can say anything else, the regional medical examiner arrives. Wayne Nussbaum went to clown college before getting his medical degree, although I haven’t seen the guy crack a smile in the fifteen years I’ve been on the job. “Greetings, all,” he says, coming into the clearing of artificial light. “I hear you have a murder mystery on your hands?”

  “You think it could be hypothermia?” I ask.

  He considers this, carefully rolling the victim forward and examining the back of his head. “I’ve never seen it firsthand . . . but I’ve read about it. It certainly would fit the bill.” Wayne glances up at me. “Nice work—but you didn’t need to pull me away from the Bruins in overtime for death by natural causes.”

  I glance to the spot where Jacob was standing moments before, but he’s disappeared.

  Jacob

  I pedal home as fast as I can. I can’t wait to transcribe my notes from the crime scene into a fresh notebook. I plan to draw pictures, using colored pencils and scaled maps. I slip into the house through the garage, and I am just taking off my sneakers when the door opens behind me again.

  Immediately, I freeze.

  It’s Theo.

  What if he asks me what I’ve been doing?

  I have never been a very good liar. If he asks, I’m going to have to tell him about the scanner and the dead body and the hypothermia. And that makes me angry because right now I want to keep it all to myself instead of sharing it. I tuck my notebook into the back of my pants and pull my sweater down over it and then cross my hands behind my back to hide it.

  “What, now you’re going to spy on me?” Theo says, kicking off his boots. “Why don’t you get your own life?”

  It isn’t until he’s halfway up the stairs that I look at him and see how red his cheeks are, how his hair is windblown. I wonder where he’s been, and if Mom knows, and then the thought is gone, replaced by the vision of the dead man’s bare skin, blue underneath the floodlights, and the pink, stained snow all around him. I will have to remember all that, the next time I set up a crime scene. I could use food coloring in water, and spray it on the snow outside. And I’ll draw with red Sharpie on my knuckles and my knees. Although I am not too keen on lying in the snow in my underwear, I am willing to make the sacrifice for a scenario that will totally stump my mother.

  I am still humming under my breath when I get to my room. I take off my clothes and put on my pajamas. Then I sit down at my desk and carefully cut the page out of the old, used notebook so that I don’t have to hear the sound of paper being crumpled or torn. I take out a fresh spiral notebook and begin to sketch the crime scene.

  Go figure. On a scale of one to ten, this day’s turned out to be an eleven.

  CASE 2: IRONY 101

  Imette St. Guillen was an honors student pursuing a degree in criminal justice in New York. One winter night in 2006, she went out drinking with her friends, eventually splitting from them and heading to SoHo, where she called a friend to say she was at a bar. She never returned home. Instead, her naked body was found fourteen miles away, in a deserted area off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, wrapped in a flowered bedspread. Her hair had been cut off on one side, her hands and feet were secured with plastic ties, she’d been gagged with a sock, and her face was wrapped in packaging tape. She had been raped, sodomized, and suffocated.

  Blood was found on one of those plastic ties, but DNA evidence revealed that it didn’t belong to the victim. Instead, it was matched to Darryl Littlejohn, a bouncer who had been asked to remove the drunk young woman from the bar at around 4:00 A.M. Witnesses said they argued before leaving the bar.

  Fibers were also found in Littlejohn’s residence that matched those on the packing tape on the victim’s body.

  Littlejohn was also arraigned for a second kidnapping and assault of another college student who managed to get away from him after he impersonated a police officer, handcuffed her, and threw her into his van.

  And Imette St. Guillen, tragically, went from being a student of criminal justice to being the lesson taught by professors of forensic DNA analysis.

  2

  Emma

  I used to have friends. Back before I had children, when I was working at a textbook publishing company outside of Boston, I’d hang out with some of the other editors after hours. We’d go for sushi, or to see a movie. When I met Henry—he was a technical consultant on a computer programming textbook—my friends were the ones who encouraged me to ask him on a date, since he seemed too shy to ask me. They leaned over my cubicle, laughing, asking if he had a Superman side underneath all that Clark Kent. And when Henry and I got married, they were bridesmaids.

  Then I got pregnant, and suddenly the people I could relate to were enrolled in my birthing class, practicing their breathing and talking about the best deals on Diaper Genies. After we had our babies, three of the other mothers and I formed a casual playgroup. We rotated hosting duties. The adults would sit on the couch and gossip while the babies rolled around on the floor with a collection of toys.

  Our children got older and started to play with each other instead of beside each other. All of them, that is, except Jacob. My friends’ boys zoomed Matchbox cars all over the carpet, but Jacob lined them up with military precision, bumper to bumper. While the other kids colored outside the lines, Jacob drew neat little blocks in a perfect rainbow spectrum.

  I didn’t notice, at first, when my friends forgot to mention at whose house the next playgroup was taking place. I didn’t read between the lines when I hosted and two of the mothers begged off because of previous engagements. But that afternoon, Jacob got frustrated when my friend’s daughter reached for the truck whose wheels he was spinning, and he hit her so hard that she fell against the edge of the coffee table. “I can’t do this anymore,” my friend said, gathering up her shrieking child. “I’m sorry, Emma.”

  “But it was an accident! Jacob didn’t understand what he was doing!”

  She stared at me. “Do you?”

  After that, I didn’t really have friends anymore. Who had time, with all the early intervention specialists that were occupying every minute of Jacob’s life? I spent the entire day on the carpet with him, forcing him to interact, and at night I stayed up reading the latest books about autism research—as if I might find a solution that even the experts couldn’t. Eventually, I met families at Theo’s preschool—who were welcoming at first but distanced themselves when they met Theo’s older brother; when they invited us for dinner and all I could talk about was how a cream of transdermal glutathione had helped some autistic kids, who couldn’t produce enough of the substance themselves to bind to and remove toxins from the body.

  Isolation. A fixation on one particular subject. An inability to connect socially.

  Jacob was the one diagnosed, but I might as well have Asperger’s, too.

  * * *

  When I come downstairs at seven in the morning, Jacob is already sitting at the kitchen table, showered and dressed. An ordinary teenager would sleep in till noon on a Sunday—Theo will, certainly—but then again, Jacob isn’t ordinary. His routine of getting up for school trumps the fact that it’s a weekend and there’s no urgency to leave the house. Even when it is a snow day and school is canceled, Jacob will get dressed instead of going back to bed.

  He is poring over the Sunday paper. “Since when do you read the paper?” I ask.

  “What kind of mother doesn’t want her son to be aware of current events?”

  “Yeah, I’m not falling for that one. Let me guess—you’re clipping Staples coupons for Kra
zy Glue?” Jacob goes through that stuff like water; it’s part of the process used to get fingerprints off objects, and it’s a common occurrence in this household for something to go missing—my car keys, Theo’s toothbrush—and then to resurface beneath the overturned fish tank Jacob uses to fume for prints.

  I measure out enough coffee into the automatic drip to make me human and then get started on breakfast for Jacob. It’s a challenge: he doesn’t eat glutens and he doesn’t eat caseins—basically, that means no wheat, oat, rye, barley, or dairy. Since there’s no cure yet for Asperger’s, we treat the symptoms, and for some reason, if I regulate his diet his behavior improves. When he cheats, like he did at Christmas, I can see him slipping backward—stimming or having meltdowns. Frankly, with 1 in 100 kids in the United States being diagnosed on the spectrum, I bet I could have a top-rated show on the Food Network: Alimentary Autism. Jacob doesn’t share my culinary enthusiasm. He says that I’m what you’d get if you crossed Jenny Craig with Josef Mengele.

  Five days of the week, in addition to having a limited diet, Jacob eats by color. I don’t really remember how this started, but it’s a routine: all Monday food is green, all Tuesday food is red, all Wednesday food is yellow, and so on. For some reason this helped with his sense of structure. Weekends, though, are free-for-alls, so this morning my breakfast spread includes defrosted homemade tapioca rice muffins, and EnviroKidz Koala Crisp cereal with soy milk. I fry up some Applegate Farms turkey bacon and set out Skippy peanut butter and gluten-free bread. I have a three-inch binder full of food labels and toll-free numbers that is my chef’s Bible. I also have grape juice, because Jacob mixes it with his liposome-enclosed glutathione—one teaspoon, plus a quarter teaspoon of vitamin C powder. It still tastes like sulfur, but it’s better than the previous alternative—a cream he rubbed on his feet and covered with socks because it smelled so bad. The downside of the glutathione, though, pales in comparison to its upside: binding and removing toxins that Jacob’s body can’t do itself, and leaving him with better mental acuity.