The Jodi Picoult Collection #4

by Jodi Picoult

  “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 poison 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.

  I took Gracie’s journal back to the station, and I Xeroxed it twice. It was covered with blood, because while she was writing, she was cutting herself. One copy I gave to the medical examiner. The second I brought to the chief. Someone in this family needs to know what was going on, I told him.

  After Gracie was buried, I called her mother and asked to meet with her. We sat down in the living room, in front of a blazing fire. At that appointment, I gave her a copy of the journal and told her I’d marked the pages that she really needed to read. She stared at me with glassy eyes and told me the family was starting fresh. She thanked me, and then, while I was watching, she threw the journal into the flames.

  I am thinking of Gracie Cheever now as I move gingerly around the culvert where Jess Ogilvy’s body has been located. She is wrapped in a quilt, and fully dressed. There’s a fine sheen of frost on her clothes and her skin. Wayne Nussbaum snaps off the latex gloves he’s been using to examine the body and instructs his assistants to wait for the CSIs to finish their photographs of the scene before moving the victim back to the hospital for an autopsy.

  “First impression?” I ask.

  “She’s been dead awhile. Days, I’m thinking, although it’s hard to say. The cold weather made a nice makeshift morgue.” He tucked his bare hands under his armpits. “I doubt she was killed here. The scrapes on her back look like they were caused by being dragged postmortem.” As an afterthought, he asks, “Did any of your guys find a tooth?”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s missing one.”

  I make a mental note to tell my investigators to search for th
at. “Knocked out with a punch? Or taken as a trophy after death?”

  He shakes his head. “Rich, you know I’m not playing a guessing game with you at four in the morning. I’ll call you with my report.”

  As he walks off, the flash of a CSI photographer illuminates the night.

  In that instant, we all look like ghosts.

  * * *

  Mark Maguire swallows when he sees the backpack that has been returned from the lab. “That’s the one her aunt gave her,” he murmurs.

  He is shell-shocked. Not only has he been told his girlfriend is dead but, seconds afterward, he was arrested for her murder. It was 7:00 A.M. when the officers went to his apartment to pick him up. Now, during the interrogation, he is still wearing the clothes he wore to bed last night: sweatpants and a faded UVM tee. From time to time he’s shivered in the drafty conference room, but that only makes me think of Jess Ogilvy’s blue-cast skin.

  My time line is shaping up. The way I see it, Maguire was fighting with Jess, punched her—knocking out her tooth and inadvertently killing her. Panicking, he cleaned up the evidence and then tried to cover his tracks by making it look like a kidnapping: the cut screen, the overturned CD rack and kitchen stools, the mailbox note, the backpack full of Jess’s clothes.

  I take the clothes out of the backpack—mostly plus-sizes far too big for Jess’s tiny frame. “A smarter criminal who was leaving a red herring would have picked clothes that actually still fit her,” I muse. “But then again, Mark, you aren’t very smart, are you?”

  “I already told you, I had nothing to do with—”

  “Did you knock out her tooth when you were fighting with her?” I ask. “Is that the way a guy like you gets off? By beating up his girlfriend?”

  “I didn’t beat her up—”

  “Mark, you can’t win here. We’ve got her body, and there are bruises clear as day on her arms and her neck. How long do you think it’s going to take us to tie them to you?”