by Jodi Picoult
“Did you recognize that statement?”
“I believe it’s attributed to the former governor of California,” I say. “Before he entered politics.”
“Did you ask the defendant anything else at that meeting?”
“No, I was . . . dismissed. It was four-thirty, and at four-thirty he watches a television show.”
“Did you see the defendant again?”
“Yes. I received a call from Emma Hunt, his mother, indicating that Jacob had something else to tell me.”
“What did Jacob say during that second conversation?”
“He presented me with Jess Ogilvy’s missing backpack, and some of her clothing. He admitted that he had gone to her house and found signs of a struggle, which he cleaned up.”
“Cleaned up?”
“Yes. He righted stools and picked up the mail, which had been thrown on the floor, and restacked the CDs and alphabetized them. He took the backpack, because he thought she might need it. He then proceeded to show me the backpack and the items inside.”
“Did you take Jacob into custody at that time?”
“I did not.”
“Did you take the clothes and backpack with you?”
“Yes. We tested them, and the results were negative. There were no prints, no blood, no DNA.”
“Then what happened?” Helen asks.
“I met the CSI team at Jess Ogilvy’s home. They had found trace evidence of blood in the bathroom, and a cut screen in the kitchen window, as well as a broken window sash. They also found a boot print outside the house that seemed to match the boots worn by Mark Maguire.”
“What happened after that?”
I face the jury. “Early Monday morning, January eighteenth, shortly after three A.M., Townsend Dispatch received a 911 call. All 911 calls are traced through GPS technology so responders can reach whoever is making the call. This call originated from a culvert approximately three hundred yards from the home where Jess Ogilvy was residing. I responded to the call. The victim’s body—and her phone—were found there, and she was wrapped in a blanket. There’s a video clip from the midday news that aired on WCAX—” I hesitate, waiting for Helen to take the tape and enter it as evidence, to pull the television monitor closer to the jury so that they can see it.
There is utter silence as the reporter’s face fills the screen, her eyes watering in the cold, while crime scene investigators move along behind her. The reporter shifts her feet, and Helen freezes the image.
“Do you recognize that blanket, Detective?” she asks.
It is a multicolored quilt, definitely hand-sewn. “Yes. It was wrapped around Jess Ogilvy’s body.”
“Is this the same blanket?”
She holds up the quilt, with its bloodstains ruining the pattern here and there. “That’s it,” I say.
“What happened after that?”
“With the discovery of the body, I had several officers arrest Mark Maguire for the murder of Jess Ogilvy. I was interrogating him when I received another call.”
“Did the caller identify him- or herself?”
“Yes. It was Jacob Hunt’s mother, Emma.”
“What was her demeanor?” Helen asks.
“She was frantic. Extremely upset.”
“What did she tell you?”
The other lawyer, the one who looks like he’s still in high school, objects. “That’s hearsay, Your Honor,” he says.
“Counsel, approach,” the judge says.
Helen speaks quietly. “Judge, I would make an offer of proof that the mother called because she had just seen the news clip with that quilt on the screen and was able to link it to her son. Therefore, Your Honor, it’s an excited utterance.”
“The objection’s overruled,” the judge says, and Helen approaches me again.
“What did the defendant’s mother tell you?” she repeats.
I don’t want to look at Emma. I can already feel the heat of her gaze, the accusations. “She told me that the quilt belonged to her son.”
“Based on the results of your conversation, what did you do?”
“I asked Ms. Hunt to bring Jacob down to the station, so that we could speak further.”
“Did you place Jacob Hunt under arrest for the murder of Jess Ogilvy?”
“Yes.”
“Then what happened?”
“I dismissed all charges against Mr. Maguire. I also executed a search warrant for the defendant’s house.”
“What did you find there?”
“We found Jacob Hunt’s police scanner, a self-constructed fuming chamber for fingerprinting, and hundreds of black-and-white composition notebooks.”
“What was in those notebooks?”
“Jacob used them to record information about CrimeBusters episodes he watched. He’d write down the date the episode aired, and the evidence, and then whether or not he solved the crime before the television detectives did. I saw him writing in one the first time I came to his house to speak to him.”
“How many did you find?”
“A hundred and sixteen.”
The prosecutor enters one into evidence. “Do you recognize this, Detective Matson?”
“It’s one of those notebooks. The one with the most recent entries.”
“Can you turn to the fourteenth page of this notebook and tell us what you find there?”
I read aloud the subject heading.
At Her House. 1/12/10.
Situation: Girl reported missing by her boyfriend.
Evidence:
Clothes in pile on bed
Toothbrush missing, lip gloss missing
Victim’s purse and coat remain
Cell phone missing
Luminol bathroom—blood detected
Knapsack taken with clothing & mailbox note—red herring for kidnapping
Cut screen—boot prints outside match up with boyfriend’s footwear
Cell phone traced by 911 call to location of body in culvert
“Is there anything intriguing about this entry in particular?”
“I don’t know if it’s a CrimeBusters episode, but it’s the exact crime scene we found at Jess Ogilvy’s residence. It’s the exact way we found Jess Ogilvy’s body. And all this information is information nobody should have had,” I say. “Except for the police . . . and the killer.”
Oliver
I knew that Jacob was going to have trouble when those journals were presented as evidence. I wouldn’t want the equivalent of my diary being read to a jury. Not that I keep a diary, or not that I would recount the evidence at a murder scene in one. So I am expecting it when he starts rocking a little bit as Helen enters the journal into evidence. I can feel the stiffening of his spine, the way he is breathing hard, the fact that he barely blinks.
When Jacob leans toward the table, I meet Emma’s gaze over his head. Now, she mouths, and sure enough, Jacob shoves a piece of paper into my hands.
F#, it reads.
It takes me a moment to realize that he’s passed me a note, just like I told him to do if he needed a sensory break.
“Your Honor,” I say, standing up. “Could we take a short recess?”
“We just had a recess, Mr. Bond,” Judge Cuttings says, and then he looks at Jacob, whose face is bright red. “Five minutes,” he announces.
With me on one side and Emma locked on the other, we hustle Jacob up the aisle to the sensory break room. “Just hold it together for another thirty seconds,” Emma soothes. “Ten more steps. Nine . . . eight . . .”
Jacob ducks inside and spins around to face us. “Oh my God!” he shrieks, a smile splitting his face. “Wasn’t that awesome?”
I just stare at him.
“I mean, that was the whole point. They finally got it. I set up a crime scene and the cops figured the whole thing out, even the red herrings.” He pokes me in the chest with his finger. “You,” Jacob says, “are doing a great job.”
Behind me, Emma bursts into tears.
&nbs
p; I don’t look at her. I can’t. “I’ll fix it,” I say.
* * *
There is a moment when I stand up to do the cross-examination of Detective Matson that I think we might have a pissing contest instead. He takes a look at Emma—her eyes still red, her face still puffy—and narrows his gaze at me, as if her condition is my fault instead of his. And that only makes me want to sink him even more.
“The first time you met with Jacob at his house, Detective,” I begin, “he quoted the movie Terminator to you, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And the second time you met with Jacob . . . he recommended a variety of tests for you to run on the backpack?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Several.”
I grab the legal pad that’s in front of Jacob. “Did he recommend a DNA test on the straps of the backpack?”
“Yes.”
“And an AP test on the underwear inside.”
“I guess.”
“Luminol?”
“That sounds about right.”
“And what about ninhydrin on the card inside?”
“Look, I don’t remember them all, but that’s probably true.”
“In fact, Detective,” I say, “Jacob seemed to know your job better than you do.”
He narrows his eyes. “He certainly knew the crime scene better than I did.”
“Those composition notebooks that you found. Did you read them all?”
“Yes.”
“What did the other hundred and fifteen notebooks contain?”
“Synopses,” he says. “Of episodes of CrimeBusters.”
“Do you know what CrimeBusters is, Detective?”
“I think you’d have to be living under a rock to not know,” he says. “It’s a police procedural television show that’s probably syndicated on Mars by now.”
“You ever watch it?”
He laughs. “I try not to. It’s not exactly realistic.”
“So the cases aren’t true crime.”
“No.”
“Then is it fair to say that the hundred and sixteen journals you seized from Jacob’s room are full of descriptions of fictional crime scenes?”
“Well, yes,” Matson says, “but I don’t think the one he wrote in the hundred and sixteenth journal was fictional at all.”
“How do you know?” I take a few steps toward him. “In fact, Detective, there was media coverage of Jess Ogilvy’s disappearance before you got hold of this notebook, wasn’t there?”
“Yes.”
“Her name was on the news, her parents were asking for help solving the crime?”
“Yes.”
“You testified that Jacob would show up at crime scenes looking to help, correct?”
“Yes, but—”
“Did he ever offer up information that was surprising to you?”
Matson hesitates. “Yes.”
“So isn’t it possible, especially given that he knew this particular victim, that he wasn’t using the notebook to brag about a murder . . . but rather, like he did with every CrimeBusters episode, using it to help solve the case?”
I turn to the jury before he can even answer. “Nothing further,” I say.
Helen stands up at the prosecutor’s table. “Detective Matson,” she says, “can you read the notation at the bottom of the first page of the notebook?”
“It says SOLVED: ME, twenty-four minutes.”
“What about the notation at the bottom of the entry on page six?”
“SOLVED: THEM, fifty-five minutes . . . Good one!”
She walks toward Matson. “Do you have any idea what that notation indicates?”
“Jacob told me, when I first saw him writing in the journals. He marks down whether he solved the crime before the TV detectives did, and how long it took.”
“Detective,” Helen says, “can you read the notation at the bottom of page fourteen, the entry entitled ‘At Her House’ that you read for us earlier?”
He glances down at the page. “It says SOLVED: ME.”
“Anything else notable about that line?”
Matson looks at the jury. “It’s underlined. Ten times.”
Theo
At dinner, I’m the one who sees my brother stealing the knife.
I don’t say anything at first. But it’s perfectly clear to me, the way he pauses in the middle of his yellow rice and scrambled eggs to carve the kernels off an ear of corn—and then pushes the knife with his thumbs to the edge of the table, so that it falls into his lap.
My mother yammers on about the trial—about the coffee machine at the courthouse which only dispenses cold coffee; about what Jacob is going to wear tomorrow; about the defense, which will present its case in the morning. I don’t think either of us is listening, because Jacob is trying to not move his shoulders while he wraps the knife in a napkin and I am trying to study his every move.
When he starts to get up from the table and my mother cuts him off with a sharp, forced cough, I am sure she’s going to call him on his stolen cutlery. But instead, she says, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“May I be excused?” Jacob mutters, and a minute later he’s scraped his plate and heads upstairs.
“I wonder what’s the matter,” my mother says. “He hardly ate.”
I shovel the rest of my food into my mouth and then mumble a request to be excused. I hurry upstairs, but Jacob’s not in his room. The bathroom door is wide open, too. It’s like he’s just vanished.
I walk into my own bedroom, and all of a sudden I’m grabbed and pulled against the wall, and there’s a knife at my throat.
Okay, I’m just going to say it’s pretty depressing that this is not the first time I’ve found myself in this scenario with my brother. I do what I know works: I bite his wrist.
You’d think he’d see it coming, but he doesn’t; the knife clatters to the floor, and I elbow him in his soft gut. He doubles over, grunting. “What the fuck are you doing?” I yell.
“Practicing.”
I reach for the knife and stick it inside my desk drawer, the one I keep locked, where I’ve learned to keep the things I don’t want Jacob to get. “Practicing murder?” I say. “You crazy motherfucker. This is why you’re going to get convicted.”
“I wasn’t going to actually hurt you.” Jacob sits down heavily on my bed. “There was someone looking at me funny today.”
“I’d think a lot of people in that courtroom were looking at you funny.”
“But this one guy followed me to the bathroom. I have to be able to protect myself.”
“Right. And what do you think is going to happen tomorrow morning when you walk into the courthouse and the metal detectors start beeping? And the stupid reporters all watch you pull a steak knife out of your sock?”
He frowns. This is one of those harebrained Aspie schemes of his, the ones he never thinks through. Like when he called the cops on my mom two months ago. To Jacob, I’m sure it seemed perfectly logical. To the rest of the free world, not so much.
“What if there’s nothing wrong with me?” Jacob says. “What if the reason I act like I do and think like I do is that I’m left out all the time? If I had friends, you know, maybe I wouldn’t do things that look strange to everyone else. It’s like bacteria that only grows in a vacuum. Maybe there’s no such thing as Asperger’s. Maybe all there is is what happens to you when you don’t fit in.”
“Don’t go telling your lawyer that. He needs Asperger’s to exist big-time right now.” I look at Jacob’s hands. His cuticles are bitten down to the skin; often he draws blood. My mother used to have to wrap Band-Aids around all his fingers before she sent him to school. Once, in the hallways, I heard two girls calling him the Mummy. “Hey, Jacob,” I say quietly. “I’ll tell you something no one else knows.”
His hand flutters on his thigh. “A secret?”
“Yeah. But you can’t tell Mom.”
I want to tell him. I�
��ve wanted to tell someone for so long now. But maybe Jacob is right: in the absence of having space in the world, the thing that’s left behind just gets bigger and more unrecognizable. It swells in my throat; it steals all the air in the room. And suddenly, I’m blubbering like a baby; I’m wiping my eyes with my sleeves and trying to pretend that my brother isn’t in court; my brother isn’t going to jail; that this isn’t karmic payment for all the bad things I’ve done and all the bad thoughts I’ve had.
“I was there,” I blurt out. “I was there the day Jess died.”
Jacob doesn’t look at me, and maybe that’s easier. He flutters his hand a little faster and then brings it up to his throat. “I know,” he says.
My eyes widen. “You do?”
“Of course I do. I saw your footprints.” He stares just over my shoulder. “That’s why I had to do it.”
Oh my God. She told Jacob that I’d been spying on her naked and that she was going to go to the cops, and he shut her up. Now I’m sobbing; I can barely catch my breath. “I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t touch me or hug me or comfort me, the way my mom would. The way any other human would. Jacob just keeps fanning his fingers, and then he says I’m sorry I’m sorry like I did, an echo that’s been stripped of its music, like rain on tin.
It’s prosody. It’s part of Asperger’s. When Jacob was little, he would repeat questions I asked and throw them back at me like a baseball pitch instead of answering. My mother told me this was like his movie quotes, a verbal stim. It was Jacob’s way of feeling the words in his mouth when he had nothing to say in return.
But all the same, I let myself pretend it’s his robotic, monotone way of asking for my forgiveness, too.
Jacob
That day when we come home from court, instead of watching CrimeBusters, I choose a different video instead. It is a home movie of me when I was a baby, only one year old. It must be my birthday because there is a cake, and I am clapping and smiling and saying things like Mama and Dada and milk. Every time someone says my name I look up, right into the camera.
