Nineteen Minutes

by Jodie Picoult

  She took another sip of her coffee and tiptoed from her bedroom to Josie’s. But the door stood wide open, and her daughter was not inside.

  “Josie?” Alex called, panicking. “Josie, are you all right?”

  “Down here,” Josie said, and Alex felt the knot inside her unravel again. She walked downstairs to find Josie sitting at the kitchen table.

  She was dressed in a skirt and tights and a black sweater. Her hair was still damp from a shower, and she had tried to cover the bandage on her forehead with a swath of bangs. She looked up at Alex. “Do I look all right?”

  “For what?” Alex asked, dumbfounded. She couldn’t be expecting to go to school, could she? The doctors had told Alex that Josie might never remember the shooting, but could she erase the fact that it had ever happened from her mind, too?

  “The arraignment,” Josie said.

  “Sweetheart, there is no way you’re going near that courthouse today.”

  “I have to.”

  “You’re not going,” Alex said flatly.

  Josie looked as if she were unraveling at the seams. “Why not?”

  Alex opened her mouth to answer, but couldn’t. This wasn’t logic; it was gut instinct: she didn’t want her daughter to relive this experience. “Because I said so,” she finally replied.

  “That’s not an answer,” Josie accused.

  “I know what the media will do if they see you at the courthouse today,” Alex said. “I know that nothing’s going to happen at that arraignment that’s going to be a surprise to anyone. And I know that I don’t want to let you out of my sight right now.”

  “Then come with me.”

  Alex shook her head. “I can’t, Josie,” she said softly. “This is going to be my case.” She watched Josie pale, and realized that until that moment, Josie hadn’t considered this. The trial, by default, would put an even thicker wall between them. As a judge, there would be information she couldn’t share with her daughter, confidences she couldn’t keep. While Josie was struggling to move past this tragedy, Alex would be knee-deep in it. Why had she put so much thought into judging this case, and so little into how it would affect her own daughter? Josie didn’t give a damn if her mother was a fair judge right now. She only wanted-needed-a mother, and motherhood, unlike the law, was something that had never come easily to Alex.

  Out of the blue, she thought of Lacy Houghton-a mother who was in a whole different level of hell right now-who would have simply taken Josie’s hand and sat with her and somehow made it seem sympathetic, instead of contrived. But Alex, who had never been the June Cleaver type, had to reach back years to find some moment of connection, something she and Josie had done once before that might work again now to hold them together. “Why don’t you go upstairs and change, and we’ll make pancakes. You used to like that.”

  “Yeah, when I was five…”

  “Chocolate chip cookies, then.”

  Josie blinked at Alex. “Are you on crack?”

  Alex sounded ridiculous even to herself, but she was desperate to show Josie that she could and would take care of her, and that her job came second. She stood up, opening cabinets until she found a Scrabble game. “Well, then, how about this?” Alex said, holding out the box. “I bet you can’t beat me.”

  Josie pushed past her. “You win,” she said woodenly, and then she walked away.

  The student who was being interviewed by the CBS affiliate out of Nashua remembered Peter Houghton from a ninth-grade English class. “We had to write a story with a first-person narrator, and we could pick anyone,” the boy said. “Peter did the voice of John Hinckley. From the things he said, you think he’s looking out from hell, but then at the end you find out it’s heaven. It freaked out our teacher. She had the principal look at the paper and everything.” The boy hesitated, scratching his thumb along the seam of his jeans. “Peter told them it was poetic license, and an unreliable narrator-which we’d been studying, also.” He glanced up at the camera. “I think he got an A.”

  At the traffic light, Patrick fell asleep. He dreamed that he was running through the halls of the school, hearing gunshots, but every time he turned a corner he found himself hovering in midair-the floor having vanished beneath his feet.

  At a honk, he snapped alert.

  He waved in apology to the car that pulled up alongside him to pass and drove to the state crime lab, where the ballistics tests had been given priority. Like Patrick, these techs had been working around the clock.

  His favorite-and most trusted-technician was a woman named Selma Abernathy, a grandmother of four who knew more about cutting-edge technology than any technogeek. She looked up when Patrick came into the lab and raised a brow. “You’ve been napping,” she accused.

  Patrick shook his head. “Scout’s honor.”

  “You look too good for someone who’s exhausted.”

  He grinned. “Selma, you’ve really got to get over your crush on me.”

  She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Honey, I’m smart enough to fall for someone who doesn’t make my life a pain in the ass. You want your results?”

  Patrick followed her over to a table, on which were four guns: two pistols and two sawed-off shotguns. They were tagged: Gun A, Gun B-the two pistols; Gun C and Gun D-the shotguns. He recognized the pistols-they were the ones found in the locker room-one held by Peter Houghton, the other one a short distance away on the tile floor. “First I tested for latent prints,” Selma said, and she showed the results to Patrick. “Gun A had a print that matches your suspect. Guns C and D were clean. Gun B had a partial print on it that was inconclusive.”

  Selma nodded to the rear of the laboratory, where enormous barrels of water were used for test-firing the guns. She would have test-fired each weapon into the water, Patrick knew. When a bullet was fired, it spun through the barrel of a gun, which caused striations on the metal. As a result, you could tell, by looking at a bullet, exactly which gun it had been fired from. This would help Patrick piece together Peter Houghton’s rampage: where he’d stopped to shoot, which weapon he’d used.

  “Gun A was the one primarily used during the shooting, Guns C and D were left in the backpack retrieved at the crime scene. Which is actually a good thing, because they most likely would have done more damage. All of the bullets retrieved from the bodies of victims were fired from Gun A, the first pistol.”

  Patrick wondered where Peter Houghton had gotten his armory. And at the same time, he realized that it wasn’t hard in Sterling to find someone who hunted or went target shooting at the site of an old dump in the woods.

  “I know, from the gunpowder residue, that Gun B was fired. However, there hasn’t been a bullet recovered yet that confirms this.”

  “They’re still processing-”

  “Let me finish,” Selma said. “The other interesting thing about Gun B is that it jammed after that one discharge. When we examined it we found a double-feed of a bullet.”

  Patrick crossed his arms. “There’s no print on the weapon?” he clarified.

  “There’s an inconclusive print on the trigger…probably smudged when your suspect dropped it, but I can’t say that for certain.”

  Patrick nodded and pointed to Gun A. “This is the one he dropped, when I drew down on him in the locker room. So, presumably, it’s the last one he fired.”

  Selma lifted a bullet with a pair of tweezers. “You’re probably right. This was retrieved from Matthew Royston’s brain,” she said. “And the striations are consistent with a discharge from Gun A.”

  The boy in the locker room, the one who’d been found with Josie Cormier.

  The only victim who’d been shot twice.

  “What about the bullet in the kid’s stomach?” Patrick asked.

  Selma shook her head. “Went through clean. It could have been fired from either Gun A or Gun B, but we won’t know until you bring me a slug.”

  Patrick stared at the weapons. “He’d used Gun A all over the rest of the school. I ca
n’t imagine what made him switch to the other pistol.”

  Selma glanced up at him; he noticed for the first time the dark circles under her eyes, the toll this overnight emergency had taken. “I can’t imagine what made him use either of them in the first place.”

  Meredith Vieira stared gravely into the camera, having perfected the demeanor for a national tragedy. “Details continue to accumulate in the case of the Sterling shootings,” she said. “For more, we go to Ann Curry at the news desk. Ann?”

  The news anchor nodded. “Overnight, investigators have learned that four weapons were brought into Sterling High School, although only two were actually used by the shooter. In addition, there is evidence that Peter Houghton, the suspect in the shootings, was an ardent fan of a hard-core punk band called Death Wish, often posting on fan websites and downloading lyrics onto his personal computer. Lyrics that, in retrospect, have some people wondering what kids should and should not be listening to.”

  The green screen behind her shoulder filled with text:

  Black snow falling

  Stone corpse walking

  Bastards laughing

  Gonna blow them all away, on my Judgment Day.

  Bastards don’t see

  The bloody beast in me

  The reaper rides for free

  Gonna blow them all away, on my Judgment Day.

  “The Death Wish song ‘Judgment Day’ includes a frightening foreshadowing of an event that became all too real in Sterling, New Hampshire, yesterday morning,” Curry said. “Raven Napalm, lead singer for Death Wish, held a press conference late last night.”

  The footage cut to a man with a black Mohawk, gold eye shadow, and five pierced hoops through his lower lip, standing in front of a group of microphones. “We live in a country where American kids are dying because we’re sending them overseas to kill people for oil. But when one sad, distraught child who doesn’t see the beauty in life goes and wrongly acts on his rage by shooting up a school, people start pointing a finger at heavy metal music. The problem isn’t with rock lyrics, it’s with the fabric of this society itself.”

  Ann Curry’s face filled the screen again. “We’ll have more on the continuing coverage of the tragedy in Sterling as it unfolds. In national news, the Senate defeated the gun control bill last Wednesday, but Senator Roman Nelson suggests that it’s not the last we’ve seen of that fight. He joins us today from South Dakota. Senator?”

  Peter didn’t think he’d slept at all last night, but all the same, he didn’t hear the correctional officer coming toward his cell. He startled at the sound of the metal door scraping open.

  “Here,” the man said, and he tossed something at Peter. “Put it on.”

  He knew that he was going to court today; Jordan McAfee had told him so. He assumed that this was a suit or something. Didn’t people always get to wear a suit in court, even if they were coming straight from jail? It was supposed to make them sympathetic. He thought he’d seen that on TV.

  But it wasn’t a suit. It was Kevlar, a bulletproof vest.

  In the holding cell beneath the courthouse, Jordan found his client lying on his back on the floor, an arm shielding his eyes. Peter was wearing a bulletproof vest, an unspoken nod to the fact that everyone packing the courtroom that morning wanted to kill him. “Good morning,” Jordan said, and Peter sat up.

  “Or not,” he murmured.

  Jordan didn’t respond. He leaned a little closer to the bars. “Here’s the plan. You’ve been charged with ten counts of first-degree murder and nineteen counts of attempted first-degree murder. I’m going to waive the readings of the complaints-we’ll go over them individually some other time. Right now we just have to go in there and enter not-guilty pleas. I don’t want you to say a word. If you have any questions, you whisper them to me. You are, for all intents and purposes, mute for the next hour. Understand?”

  Peter stared at him. “Perfectly,” he said, sullen. But Jordan was looking at his client’s hands.

  They were shaking.

  From the log of items removed from the bedroom of Peter Houghton:

  Dell laptop computer.

  Gaming CDs: Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

  Three posters from gun manufacturers.

  Assorted lengths of pipe.

  Books: The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger; On War, Clausewitz; graphic novels by Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman.

  DVD-Bowling for Columbine.

  Yearbook from Sterling Middle School, various faces circled in black marker. One circled face x’d out with words LET LIVE beneath picture. Girl identified in caption as Josie Cormier.

  The girl spoke so softly that the microphone, hanging on a boom over her head like a piñata, had trouble picking up the unraveled threads of her voice. “Mrs. Edgar’s classroom is right next to Mr. McCabe’s, and sometimes we could hear them moving their chairs around or shouting out answers,” she said. “But this time we heard screaming. Mrs. Edgar, she took her desk and shoved it up against the door and told us all to go to the far end of the classroom, near the windows, and sit on the floor. The gunshots, they sounded like popcorn. And then…” She stopped and wiped her eyes. “And then there wasn’t any more screaming.”

  Diana Leven hadn’t expected the gunman to look so young. Peter Houghton was shackled and chained, wearing his orange jumpsuit and bulletproof vest, but he still had the apple cheeks of a boy who hadn’t come through the far side of puberty yet, and she would have bet money he didn’t have to shave. The glasses, too, upset her. The defense would play that to the hilt, she was certain, claiming some myopia that would have made sharpshooting an impossibility.

  The four cameras that the district court judge had agreed on to represent the networks-ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN-hummed to life like a barbershop quartet as soon as the defendant was led into the room. Since it had gotten so quiet in the room that you could hear the sound of your own doubts, Peter turned immediately toward them. Diana realized that his eyes were not all that different from those of the cameras: dark, blind, empty behind the lenses.

  Jordan McAfee-a lawyer Diana didn’t like very much on a personal level but grudgingly admitted was damn good at his job-leaned toward his client the moment Peter reached the defense table. The bailiff stood. “All rise,” he bellowed, “the Honorable Charles Albert presiding.”

  Judge Albert hustled into the courtroom, his robes whispering. “Be seated,” he said. “Peter Houghton,” he began, turning to the defendant.

  Jordan McAfee stood. “Your Honor, we waive the reading of the charges. We’d like to enter not-guilty pleas for all of them, and we request that a probable cause hearing be scheduled in ten days.”

  This wasn’t a surprise to Diana-why would Jordan want the whole world to hear his client being indicted on ten separate counts of first-degree murder? The judge turned to her. “Ms. Leven, the statute requires that a defendant charged with first-degree murder-multiple counts, at that-be held without bail. I assume you have no problem with this.”

  Diana hid a smile. Judge Albert, God bless him, had managed to slip in the charges anyway. “That’s correct, Your Honor.”

  The judge nodded. “Well then, Mr. Houghton. You’re remanded back into custody.”

  The whole procedure had taken less than five minutes, and the public wouldn’t be happy. They wanted blood; they wanted revenge. Diana watched Peter Houghton stumble between the hold of two sheriff’s deputies and turn back to his lawyer one last time with a question on his lips that he didn’t utter. Then the door closed behind him, and Diana gathered her briefcase and walked out of the courtroom to the cameras.

  She stood in front of a thrust of microphones. “Peter Houghton was just arraigned on ten counts of first-degree murder and nineteen counts of attempted first-degree murder, and various accompanying charges involving illegal possession of explosives and firearms in this recent tragedy. The rules of professional responsibility prevent us from commenting on the evidence at this point, but the community can
rest assured that we are prosecuting this case vigorously, that we have been working around the clock with our investigators to make sure that the evidence is collected, preserved, and appropriately handled so that this unspeakable tragedy will not go unanswered.” She opened her mouth to continue but realized that there was another voice speaking, just across the hallway, and that reporters were defecting from her impromptu press conference to hear Jordan McAfee instead.

  He stood sober and penitent, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, as he stared right at Diana. “I grieve with the community for its losses, and will represent my client to the fullest. Peter Houghton is a seventeen-year-old boy; he’s very scared. And I ask you to please have respect for his family and to remember that this is a matter to be determined in court.” Jordan hesitated, ever the showman, and then made eye contact with the crowd. “I ask you to remember that what you see is not always all it seems to be.”