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 that. “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?”
He winces. “I told you-we were having a fight, and I did grab her arms. I pinned her up against the wall. I wanted… I wanted to teach her a lesson.”
“And this lesson went a little too far, didn’t it?”
“I never killed her. I swear to God.”
“Why did you bring her body out into the woods?”
He looks up at me. “Please. You have to believe me.”
I rise to my feet and loom over him. “I don’t have to believe anything you say, you little prick. You already lied to me once about fighting with her on the weekend, when it turns out you fought with her on Tuesday, too. I’ve got your boots outside the window with a cut screen, your handprints on her throat, and a dead girl who was cleaned up and moved. You ask any jury in this country, and that looks a hell of a lot like a guy who killed his girlfriend and wanted to conceal it.”
“I never cut that screen. I don’t know who did. And I didn’t beat her up. I got mad, and I shoved her… and I left.”
“Right. And then you came back, and you killed her.”
Maguire’s eyes fill with tears. I wonder if he really is sorry about Jess Ogilvy’s death, or just sorry that he’s been caught. “No,” he says, his voice thick. “No, I loved her.”
“Did you cry this much when you were cleaning up her blood in the bathroom? How about when you had to wipe all the blood off her face?”
“I want to see her,” Maguire begs. “Let me see Jess.”
“You should have thought of that before you murdered her,” I say.
As I walk away from him, intending to let him stew in his own guilt for a few minutes before I come back in to break his confession, Maguire buries his face in his hands. That’s when I realize that they are completely uninjured-no bruising, no cuts, which you’d expect if you hit someone hard enough to make her lose a tooth.
By the time I was five, I knew that there were differences between Jacob and me.
I had to eat everything on my plate, but Jacob was allowed to leave behind things like peas and tomatoes because he didn’t like the way they felt inside his mouth.
Whatever kids’ tape I was listening to in the car while we drove took a backseat to anything by Bob Marley.
I had to pick up all my toys after I was done playing, but the six-foot line of Matchbox cars that Jacob had spent the day arranging perfectly straight was allowed to snake down the hallway for a month until he got tired of it.
Mostly, though, I was aware of being the odd guy out. Because the minute Jacob had any kind of crisis-and that happened constantly-my mom would drop everything and run to him. And usually the thing she dropped was me.
Once, when I was about seven, my mother had promised me she’d take us to see Spy Kids 3-D on a Saturday afternoon. I had been excited all week, because we didn’t often see movies, much less 3-D ones. We didn’t have the extra money for it, but I had gotten a free pair of glasses in our cereal box and begged and begged until my mother said yes. However-big surprise-it turned out to be a nonissue. Jacob had read all of his dinosaur books and started flapping and rocking at the thought of not having something new to read for bedtime, and my mother made an executive decision to take us to the library instead of the theater.
Maybe I would have been okay with this, but at the library, there was a big honking display case taking advantage of the movie tie-in with reading in general. BE A SPY KID! it said, and it was full of books like Harriet the Spy and stories about the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I watched my mother take Jacob to the nonfiction section-567 in the world of Dewey decimals, which even I knew meant dinosaurs. They sat down right in the aisle, as if dragging me to the library and ruining my day didn’t matter at all. They started to read a book about ornithopods.
Suddenly, I realized what I had to do.
If my mother only noticed Jacob, then that’s what I would become.
It was probably seven years of frustration that boiled over just then, because I can’t really explain why else I did what I did. I mean, I knew better.
Libraries are places where you are supposed to be quiet.
Library books are sacred, and don’t belong to you.
One minute I had been sitting in the children’s room, in the comfy green chair that looked like a giant’s fist, and the next, I was screaming my head off and yanking books off the shelves and ripping out the pages, and when the librarian said Whose child is this? I kicked her in the shins.
I was gifted at throwing a fit. I’d been watching a master, after all, my whole life.
A crowd gathered. Other librarians ran in to see what was going on. I only hesitated once during my tantrum, and that was when I saw my mother’s face hovering at the edge of the group that was staring at me. She had gone white, like a statue.
Obviously, she had to get me out of there. And obviously, that meant Jacob couldn’t check out the books he wanted to bring home. She grabbed him by the wrist as he started to have his own meltdown, and lifted me with her free arm. My brother and I both kicked and screamed the whole way into the parking lot.
When we reached the car, she set me down. I did what I’d seen Jacob do a thousand times; I went boneless as spaghetti and collapsed on the pavement.
All of a sudden, I heard something I’d never heard before. It was louder than both my yelling and Jacob’s combined, and it was coming out of my mother’s mouth.
She screamed. She stamped her feet. Aaaaaauuuurrrrrgggh, she cried. She flopped her arms and kicked and tossed her head back and forth. People stared at her from all the way across the parking lot.
I stopped right away. The only thing worse than having the whole world looking at me going crazy was having the whole world look at my mother going crazy. I closed my eyes, feverishly wishing that the ground would open up and just swallow me.
Jacob, on the other hand, kept shrieking and throwing his fit.
“Do you think I don’t want to lose it every now and then?” my mother shouted, and then she pulled herself together and buckled a squirming Jacob into his seat in the car. She dragged me up from the asphalt and did the same with me.
But none of that is the reason I’m telling you this story. It’s because that day was the first day my mother cried in front of me, instead of bravely trying to hold it all inside.
From Auntie Em’s column:
When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes?
When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit’s face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end.
I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA.
Here’s a secret: Those mothers don’t exist. Most of us-even if we’d never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring.
I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone.
Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping-and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press-seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood.
Real mothers don’t just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady’s cart, and say, “Great. Maybe you can do a better job.”
Real mothers know that it’s okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast.
Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.
If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt.
Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they’d chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal.
Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they’ll be looking and looking for ages.
Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.
During a short fit of writer’s block, I make myself a tuna sandwich and listen to the midday news. The local station is so awful that I like to watch it for the entertainment value. If I were still in college, I’d play a drinking game and take a swig of beer every time the anchors mispronounced a word or dropped their notes. My favorite recent mistake was when the anchor reported on a Vermont senator’s proposed overhaul of Medicaid. Instead of cutting to the video of his speech, they showed a clip of a polar bear plunge by a bunch of local octogenarians.
Today’s top story, however, is not funny at all.
“Early Monday morning,” the anchor reads, “the body of Jessica Ogilvy was found in the woods behind her residence. The twenty-three-year-old UVM student had gone missing last Tuesday.”
The plate on my lap falls to the floor as I stand up, tears in my eyes. Although I’d known this was a possibility-a probability, really, as days went by and she wasn’t found-that doesn’t make her death any easier.
I had often wondered what the world would have looked like if there were more people like Jess around, young men and women who could see someone like Jacob and not laugh at his quirks and flaws but instead celebrate the ways they made him interesting and worthy. I imagined the boys who would one day be in a class Jess taught and who would not have to struggle with the self-esteem and bullying issues that Jacob had struggled with in grade school. And now, none of that would happen.
The story cuts to a reporter, whose segment has been filmed close to the spot where Jess’s body was found. “In this very sad turn of events,” she says soberly, “investigators responded to a 911 call placed from Ogilvy’s cell phone and traced the call here, to a culvert behind Ogilvy’s home.”
This was taped near dawn; the sky is striped with pink. In the background are the crime scene investigators, setting up markers and taking measurements and photos. “Shortly afterward,” the reporter continues, “authorities took Ogilvy’s boyfriend, twenty-four-year-old Mark Maguire, into custody. An autopsy report is still pending…”
If I had blinked, I probably would never have seen it. If the reporter had not shifted her feet, I would never have seen it. The image was that quick-the tiniest flash on the side of the screen before it was gone.
A quilt with rainbow patchwork, ROYGBIV over and over.
I freeze the frame-a newfangled feature of the satellite system we use-and run the clip backward before letting it play again. This time maybe I will see that it was only a trick of the eye, a flutter of the reporter’s scarf that I mistook for something else.
It is still there, so I run the tape backward a second time.
I once saw madness defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. My heart is pounding so fiercely now that I can feel it beating at the base of my throat. I race upstairs to Jacob’s closet, where I’d found Jess’s backpack a few days earlier, wrapped in the rainbow quilt.
Which is missing.
I sink down on his bed and smooth my hand over his pillow. Right now, at 12:45, Jacob is in physics class. He told me this morning that they are doing a lab on Archimedes’ principle, trying to determine the density of two unknown materials. What mass, when inserted into a medium, causes it to displace? What floats, and what sinks?
I will go to the school and pick the boys up, making up an excuse-a dentist’s visit, a haircut appointment. But instead of coming home we will drive and drive until we cross the border into Canada. I will pack suitcases for them, and we will never come back here.
Even as I am thinking this, I know it could never happen. Jacob would not understand the concept of never coming back home. And somewhere, in a police station, Jess’s boyfriend is being blamed when he might be innocent.
Downstairs, with numb fingers, I pick through the stack of bills that I haven’t sorted. I know it’s in here somewhere… and then I find it, beneath the second notice from the phone company. Rich Matson’s business card, with his cell phone number scrawled on the back.
Just in case, he had said.
Just in case you happen to think that your son might be involved in a murder. Just in case you are confronted with the glaring evidence that you have failed as a mother. Just in case you are caught between what you want and what you should do.
Detective Matson has been honest with me; I will be honest with him.
His voice mail picks up immediately after I dial the number. The first time, I hang up, because all of my intended words have become jammed together like putty. The second time, I clear my throat. “This is Emma Hunt,” I say. “I… I really need to speak with you.”
Still holding the phone like an amulet, I wander into the living room again. The news program is over; now there is a soap opera on. I rewind the action until the segment about Jess Ogilvy plays again. I deliberately keep my eyes trained to the other side of the screen, but it’s still there: a flag on the field, a nanosecond of truth in all the shades of the color spectrum.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t unsee that damn quilt.
Jess is dead.
My mother tells me after school. She stares at me when she says it, as if she’s trying to find clues in my expression, the same way I scrutinize the tilt of someone’s eyebrows and the position of their mouth and the size of their pupils and try to connect them with an emotion. For a moment I think, Does she have Asperger’s, too? But then, just when it seems that she is analyzing my features, hers change, and I can’t tell what she’s feeling. Her eyes look tight at the edges, and her mouth is pinched. Is she mad at me, or is she just upset about Jess being dead? Does she want me to react to news I already know? I could act like I’m shocked (jaw dropped, eyes round), but that would also mean I’m lying, and then my lying face (eyes looking up at ceiling, teeth biting down on bottom lip) would do a hostile takeover of my shocked face. Besides, lying is right up there on the House Rules list. To recap:
1. Clean up your own messes.
2. Tell the truth.
Regarding Jess’s death: I have done both.
Imagine what it would be like if you were suddenly dropped from America into England. Suddenly bloody would be a swear word, not a description of a crime scene. Pissed would be not angry but drunk. Dear would mean expensive, not beloved. Potty isn’t a toilet but a state of mind; public school is private school, and fancy is a verb.
If you were dropped into the UK and you happened to be Korean or Portuguese, your confusion would be expected. After all, you don’t speak the language. But if you’re American, technically, you do. So you’re stuck in conversations that make no sense to you, in which you ask people to repeat themselves over and over, in the hope that eventually the unfamiliar words will fall into place.
This is what Asperger’s feels like. I have to work so hard at the things that come naturally to others, because I’m just a tourist here.
And it’s a trip with a one-way ticket.
Here are the things I will remember about Jess:
1. For Christmas she gave me a piece of malachite the exact size and shape of a chicken egg.
2. She is the only person I’ve ever met who was born in Ohio.
3. Her hair looked different indoors than it did outdoors. When the sun was shining, it was less yellow and more like fire.
4. She introduced me to The Princess Bride, which is possibly one of the greatest movies in the history of filmmaking.
5. Her mailbox at UVM was number 5995.
6. She fainted at the sight of blood, but she still came to my presentation this fall in physics about spatter patterns, and she listened with her back to the PowerPoint presentation.
7. Even though there were times when she probably was sick of hearing me talk, she never, ever told me to shut up.
I am the first person to tell you that I do not really understand love. How can you love your new haircut, love your job, and love your girlfriend all at once? Clearly the word doesn’t mean the same thing in different situations, which is why I have never been able to figure it out with logic.
The physical side of love terrifies me, to be honest. When you are already hypersensitive to the feeling of anything against your skin or to people standing close enough to touch you, there is absolutely nothing about a sexual relationship that makes it an experience you look forward to attempting.
I mention all this as a disclaimer to the last thing I will remember about Jess:
8. I could have loved her. Maybe I already did.
If I were going to create a science fiction series on television, it would be about an empath-a person who can naturally read the auras of people’s emotions and, with a single touch, can take on their feelings, too. It would be so easy if I could look at someone who was happy, touch him on the arm, and suddenly fill with the same bubbles of joy that he’s feeling, instead of anguishing over whether I’d misinterpreted his actions and reactions.
Anyone who cries at a movie is a closet empath. What’s happening on that screen bleeds through the celluloid, real enough to evoke emotion. Why else would you find yourself laughing at the hijinks of two actors who, offscreen, can’t stand each other? Or crying over the death of an actor who, when the camera is turned off, will dust himself off and grab a burger for dinner?
When I watch movies, it’s a little different. Each scene becomes a catalog card of possible social scenarios in my mind. If you ever find yourself arguing with a woman, try kissing her to throw her off guard. If you are in the middle of a battle and your buddy is shot, friendship means you have to go back under fire to rescue him. If you want to be the life of the party, say, “Toga!”
Later, if I find myself in that particular situation, I can shuffle through my file cards of movie interactions and mimic the behavior and know, for once, that I will be getting it right.
Incidentally, I have never cried at a movie.
Once, I was telling Jess everything I knew about dogs.
1. They evolved from a small mammal called miacis, a tree dweller that lived 40 million years ago.
2. They were first domesticated by Paleolithic cavemen.
3. No matter the breed, a dog has 321 bones and 42 permanent teeth.
4. Dalmatians are born all white.
5. The reason they turn in a circle before lying down is because when they were wild animals, this helped mat the long grass into a bed.
6. Approximately one million dogs have been named the primary beneficiaries in their owners’ wills.
7. They sweat through the pads of their feet.
8. Scientists have found that dogs can smell the presence of autism in kids.
You’re making that up, she said.
No. Really.
How come you don’t have a dog?
There were so many answers to that question, I didn’t really know where to begin. My mother, for one, who said that anyone who could not remember to brush his teeth twice daily did not have the fortitude to take care of another living creature. My brother, who was allergic to nearly anything with hair on it. The fact that dogs, which had been my passion after dinosaurs but before crime scene analysis, had fallen out of favor.
The truth is that I would probably never want a dog. Dogs are like the kids in school I cannot stand: the ones who hang around and then leave when they realize they are not getting what they want or need from the conversation. They travel in packs. They lick you and you think it’s because they like you, but it’s really just because your fingers still smell like your turkey sandwich.
On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger’s.
Like me, they’re very smart.
And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone.
Once I leave Mark Maguire to steep in his own conscience for a few minutes, I grab a cup of coffee in the break room and check my voice mail. I have three new messages. The first is from my ex, reminding me that tomorrow is Open School Night for Sasha-an event that, by the looks of things, I’m going to have to miss yet again. The second is from my dentist, confirming an appointment. And the third is from Emma Hunt.
“Emma,” I say, returning her call. “What can I do for you?”
“I… I saw that you found Jess.” Her voice is husky, full of tears.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I know you were close to her.”
There are sobs on the other end of the line.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “Do you need me to call someone for you?”
“She was wrapped in a quilt,” Emma chokes out.
Sometimes, when you do what I do for work, it gets easy to forget that, after you close the file on a case, there are people who suffer with the fallout for the rest of their lives. They’ll remember one little detail about the victim: a single shoe lying in the middle of the road, a hand still clutching a Bible, or-in this case-the juxtaposition between being tenderly tucked into a quilt and being murdered. But there’s nothing I can do for Jess Ogilvy now except bring the person who killed her to justice.
“That quilt,” Emma sobs, “belongs to my son.”
I freeze in the act of stirring cream into my coffee. “Jacob?”
“I don’t know… I don’t understand what that means…”
“Emma, listen. It might not mean anything at all, and if it does, Jacob will have an explanation.”
“What do I do?” she cries.
“Nothing,” I tell her. “Let me. Can you bring him down here?”
“He’s in school-”
“Then after school,” I say. “And, Emma? Relax. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
As soon as I hang up, I take my full mug of coffee and empty it in the sink; that’s how distracted I am. Jacob Hunt admitted to being at the house. He had a backpack full of Jess Ogilvy’s clothes. He was the last person known to see her alive.
Jacob may have Asperger’s syndrome, but that doesn’t preclude his being a murderer.
I think of Mark Maguire’s flat-out denials about hurting his girlfriend, his unscarred hands, his crying. Then I think of Jacob Hunt, who cleaned up Jess’s house when it looked like it had been vandalized. Had he left out the intrinsic detail that he was the one who’d wrecked it?
On the one hand, I have a boyfriend who’s a jackass but who’s grief-stricken. I have his boot prints outside a cut screen.
On the other hand, I have a kid who’s obsessed with crime scene analysis. A kid who doesn’t like Mark Maguire. A kid who’d know how to take a murder and make it look like Mark Maguire did it and then attempted to cover his tracks.
I have a kid who’s been known to hang out at crime scenes in the past.
I have a homicide, and I have a blanket that links Jacob Hunt to it.
The division between an observer and a participant is nearly invisible; you can cross it before you even know you’ve stepped over the line.
On the way home from school, I am gripping the steering wheel so hard that my hands are shaking. I keep looking in the rearview mirror at Jacob. He looks like he did this morning-wearing a faded green T-shirt, his seat belt snugly fastened over his chest, his dark hair falling into his eyes. He is not stimming or withdrawn or exhibiting any of the other hallmarks of behavior that flag the fact something is upsetting him. Does that mean he didn’t have anything to do with Jess’s death? Or he did, and it simply doesn’t affect him the way it would affect someone else?
Theo has been talking about math-a problem he did that no one else in the class understood. I am not absorbing a single word. “Jacob and I have to swing by the police station,” I say, training my voice to be as level as possible. “So Theo, I’m just going to drop you off at home first.”
“What for?” Jacob asks. “Did he get back the results on the backpack?”
“He didn’t say.”
Theo looks at me. “Mom? Is something going on?”
For a moment I want to laugh: I have one child who cannot read me at all, and another who reads me too well. I don’t answer but pull up to our mailbox instead. “Theo, hop out and get the mail, and you can let yourself into the house. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I leave him standing in the middle of the road and drive off with Jacob.
But instead of heading to the police station, I stop off at a strip mall and park. “Are we getting a snack?” Jacob asks. “Because I’m actually quite hungry.”
“Maybe later.” I get out of the driver’s seat and sit beside him in the back of the car. “I have something to tell you. Some very bad news.”
“Like when Grandpa died.”
“Yes, a lot like that. You know how Jess has been gone for a while, so you couldn’t have your meeting on Sunday? The police found her body. She’s dead.” I watch him carefully as I speak, ready to mark a flicker of his eye or a twitch of his hand that I might read as a clue. But Jacob, completely impassive, just looks at the headrest in front of him.
“Okay,” he says after a moment.
“Do you have any questions?”
Jacob nods. “Can we get a snack now?”
I look at my son, and I see a monster. I’m just not sure if that’s his real face or if it’s a mask made of Asperger’s.
Honestly, I’m not even sure it matters.
By the time I reach the police station with Jacob, my nerves are strung as tight as the strings on a violin. I feel like a traitor, bringing my own son to Detective Matson, but is there an alternative? A girl is already dead. I couldn’t live with myself, with this secret, if I didn’t acknowledge Jacob’s involvement.
Before I can even ask for him to be paged by dispatch, the detective walks into the station lobby. “Jacob,” he says, and then he turns to me. “Emma. Thanks for bringing him in.”
I don’t have any words left to say. Instead, I look away.
Just like Jacob.
The detective puts a hand on my shoulder. “I know this isn’t easy… but you did the right thing.”
“Then why doesn’t it feel that way?” I murmur.
“Trust me,” Matson says, and because I want to-because I need someone else to take the wheel for just a moment while I struggle to breathe-I nod.
He turns back to Jacob. “The reason I asked your mom to bring you here,” Matson says, “is because I want to talk to you. I could really use your help with some cases.”
My jaw drops open. That is a blatant lie.
Predictably, Jacob swells with pride. “I suppose I have time for that.”
“That’s great,” Matson replies, “because we’re stumped. We’ve got some cold cases-and a few active ones-that have us scratching our heads. And after seeing you draw conclusions about the hypothermic guy, I know that you’re incredibly well-versed in forensic criminology.”
“I try to keep up-to-date,” Jacob says. “I subscribe to three journals.”
“Yeah? Impressive.” Matson opens up the door that leads into the bowels of the police station. “Why don’t we go somewhere a little more private?”
Using his love of CSI to entrap Jacob into giving a statement about Jess’s death is like holding out a syringe of heroin to an addict. I am furious at Matson for being so underhanded; I am furious at myself for not realizing that he would have his priorities, just like I had mine.
Flushed with anger, I start to follow them through the doorway but am stopped by the detective. “Actually, Emma,” he says, “you’ll have to wait here.”
“I have to go with him. He won’t understand what you’re asking him.”
“Legally, he’s an adult.” Matson smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Really, Mom,” Jacob adds, his voice brimming with self-importance. “It’s fine.”
The detective looks at me. “Are you his legal guardian?”
“I’m his mother.”
“That’s not the same thing,” Matson says. “I’m sorry.”
For what? I wonder. For seducing Jacob into believing he’s on his side? Or for doing the same to me?
“Then we’re leaving,” I insist.
Matson nods. “Jacob, it’s your decision. Do you want to stay with me, or do you want to go home with your mom?”
“Are you kidding?” Jacob beams. “I want to talk to you, one hundred percent.”
Before the door closes behind them, I have already taken off at a dead run toward the parking lot.
All is fair in love, war, and interrogation. By that I mean that if I can convince a suspect I’m the second coming of his long-dead grandma and the only way to salvation is to confess to me, so be it. None of which accounts for the fact that I cannot get Emma Hunt’s face out of my mind, the minute she realized that I had betrayed her and was not going to allow her to sit in on my little chat with her son.
I can’t bring Jacob into the interrogation room, because Mark Maguire is still there cooling his heels. I’ve left him with a sergeant who’s currently doing a six-month stint with me to figure out whether or not he wants to take the test to make detective. I can’t unarrest Mark until I know for sure I’ve got the right suspect in my sights.
So instead, I lead Jacob to my office. It’s not much bigger than a closet, but it has boxes of case files all over the place and a few crime scene photos tacked up on the corkboard behind my head-all of which should get his adrenaline flowing. “You want a Coke or something?” I ask, motioning to the only other spare seat in the room.
“I’m not thirsty,” Jacob says. “I wouldn’t mind something to eat, though.”
I rummage through my desk drawers for emergency candy-if I’ve learned anything on the job it’s that when everything seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, a pack of Twizzlers can help you gain some perspective. I toss him some from my stash of last year’s leftover Halloween candy, and he frowns.
“They’re not gluten-free,” Jacob says.
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Do you have any Skittles?”
I cannot believe we’re negotiating candy, but I rummage through the bowl and come up with a packet of Skittles.
“Sweet!” Jacob says. He tears a corner and tips the edge right into his mouth.
I lean back in my chair. “You mind if I tape this? That way, I can have it typed up just in case we come up with any terrific insights.”
“Oh, sure. If that’s helpful.”
“It will be,” I say, and I hit the button on the tape recorder. “So how’d you know that guy died of hypothermia, anyway?”
“Easy. There weren’t any defense wounds to his arms; there was blood but no overt trauma… and of course the fact that he was in his underwear was a dead giveaway.”
I shake my head. “You made me look like a genius in front of the medical examiner,” I say.
“What’s the most bizarre case you’ve ever heard about?”
I think for a moment. “A young guy jumps off the top of a building, intending to commit suicide, but sails past an open window at the exact moment a gunshot is fired through it.”
Jacob grins. “That’s an urban legend. It was debunked by the Washington Post in 1996 as part of a speech given by a former president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, to show the legal complications of forensic analysis. But it’s a good one, all the same.”
“How about you?”
“The Texas Eyeball Killer. Charles Albright-who taught science-killed prostitutes and surgically removed their eyeballs as trophies.”
He grimaces. “Obviously that’s the reason I never really liked my bio teacher.”
“There are a lot of people in this world you’d never suspect as murderers,” I say, watching Jacob carefully. “Don’t you think?”
For just the tiniest flicker of a moment, a shadow crosses over his face. “You’d know better than me,” he says.
“Jacob, I’m sort of in a predicament. I’d like to pick your brain about a current case.”
“Jess’s,” he states.
“Yes. But that’s tricky, because you knew her. So if we’re going to talk openly, you’ll have to waive your rights to not discuss it. You get what I’m saying?”
He nods and begins to recite Miranda. “I have the right to remain silent. Anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law. I have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If I cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for me…”
“Exactly,” I murmur. “I actually have a copy of that here. If you can initial it here, and sign at the bottom, then I can prove to my chief that you didn’t just memorize it-you understood what it meant.”
Jacob takes a pen from me and quickly scrawls his name across the paper I’ve prepared. “Now can we talk about it?” he asks. “What have you got?”
“Well, the backpack was a disappointment.”
“No prints?”
“Only ones we could match to Jess herself,” I say. “Something else interesting turned up at the house-a screen was cut and the window jimmied open.”
“You think that’s how the perp got inside?”
“No, because the door wasn’t locked. We did, however, find boot prints under the window that matched footwear Jess’s boyfriend owns.”
“There was a great CrimeBusters episode once where the exterior footprints didn’t show up until it snowed-” Jacob breaks off, editing himself. “So Mark kills Jess and then tries to make it look like something else-a break-in-by cutting the screen and knocking over the stools and the mail and the CDs?”
“Something like that.” I glance down at his hands-like Maguire’s, they are injury-free. “What’s your take? How hard would it be to reorganize a crime scene to mislead the investigators?”
Before he can answer, my cell phone rings. I recognize the number; it’s Basil, who’s accompanied the medical examiner back to the hospital. “Could you excuse me for a minute?” I ask Jacob, and I step into the hall and close the door behind me before answering the phone. “What have you got?”
“In addition to the scrapes on her back and contusions on the throat and upper arms, there are some more in the periorbital region-”
“English, Basil.”
“Raccoon eyes,” he says. “She’s got a broken nose and a skull fracture. Cause of death is subdural hematoma.”
I try to imagine Jacob Hunt throwing a right hook to Jess Ogilvy’s face, hard enough to crack her skull. “Great. Thanks.”
“That’s not all,” Basil answers. “Her underwear was on backward, but there’s no evidence of sexual assault. Her face was washed clean-there were traces of blood in the hairline. And that missing tooth? We found it.”
“Where?”
“Wrapped up in toilet paper, and tucked into the front pocket of her sweatpants,” Basil says. “Whoever did this didn’t just dump Jess Ogilvy. He cared about her.”
I hang up the phone and immediately think of Sasha, who lost a tooth just a month ago when she was staying at my place. We wrapped it in tissue paper and put it in an envelope with the Tooth Fairy’s name on it, for good measure. Naturally, I had to call my ex to ask her what the going rate was-$5, if you can believe it, which means my whole mouth is worth $160. After Sasha was asleep and I swapped the envelope for a nice crisp Lincoln, I held it, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do with a baby tooth. I imagined the Tooth Fairy to have those empty glass jar lamps that hold seashells, only hers would hold thousands of tiny cuspids. Since I didn’t subscribe to that kind of décor, I figured I’d just toss the damn thing, but at the last minute, I couldn’t do it. This was my daughter’s childhood, sealed in an envelope. How many chances would I have to hold on to a piece of her life?
Had Jacob Hunt felt the same way when he held Jess’s tooth?
With a deep breath, I walk back into my office. The gloves are off. “You ever been to an autopsy, Jacob?”
“No.”
I settle back down behind my desk. “The first thing the ME does is take a huge needle and stick it into the jelly of the eye so he can draw out the vitreous humor. If you run a tox screen on it, you can see what was in the victim’s system at the moment of death.”
“What kind of toxicity test?” Jacob asks, not fazed at all by the gruesome image I just presented. “Alcohol? Prescription meds? Or illegal drugs?”
“Then the medical examiner cuts the torso open with a Y incision and peels back the skin. He’ll saw through the ribs to make a little dome that he can lift up like the top of a jar, and then he starts pulling out the organs, one by one… weighing them… cutting slices he can look at under a microscope.”
“A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
“Then the medical examiner takes his saw and cuts off the whole top of the skull and pops it open with a chisel. He reaches in, and he pulls her brain out. You know the sound a brain makes when it’s being pried out of a skull, Jacob?” I imitate it, like a seal breaking.
“Then it gets weighed, right?” Jacob asks. “The average human brain weighs three pounds, but the biggest one on record was five pounds, one-point-one ounces.”
“All that stuff I just described,” I say, leaning forward. “All of that just happened to your friend Jess. What do you think about that?”
Jacob sinks deeper in his chair. “I don’t want to think about that.”
“I want to tell you some of the things that were found at Jess’s autopsy. Maybe you can tell me how they might have happened.”
He brightens considerably, ready to play the game.
“There were bruises that showed someone had grabbed her by the arms, and choked her around the neck.”
“Well,” Jacob muses, “were they fingertip bruises or handprints?”
“You tell me, Jacob. You’re the one who grabbed Jess by the arms, aren’t you?”
His face, when he realizes he is trapped, looks a great deal like his mother’s. Jacob’s hands curl over the arms of his chair, and he shakes his head. “No.”
“What about choking her? You’re not going to lie to me about doing that, are you?”
He closes his eyes and winces, as if he’s in pain. “No…”
“So what made you choke her?”
“Nothing!”
“Was it a fight? Did she say something you didn’t like?” I press.
Jacob moves to the edge of his chair and starts rocking. He won’t look me in the eye, no matter how loud my voice gets. I wish I’d had the foresight to videotape this conversation instead of audiotaping it. If this kid’s demeanor isn’t a Hallmark card for guilt, frankly, I don’t know what is. “Nothing made me choke Jess,” Jacob says.
I ignore this completely. “Did you choke her till she stopped breathing?”
“No-”
“Did you hit her in the face?”
“What? No!”
“Then how did her tooth get knocked out?”
He looks at me, and that takes me by surprise. His stare is direct, open, with emotion so raw that I feel compelled to turn away, like he usually does. “That was an accident,” Jacob confesses softly, and only then do I realize I have been holding my breath.
This morning, I managed to teach Thor to balance a paper clip on top of his nose. “All right,” I say, “let’s give it another whirl.” The way I figure it, if I can get him to balance and multitask-roll over, maybe, or bark to the tune of “Dixie”-we can get on Letterman.
I have just placed the paper clip on top of his nose again when a crazy woman bursts in. “I need a lawyer,” she announces, breathless.
She’s probably in her late thirties or early forties-there are some lines around her mouth and her dark hair has a few strands of gray in it-but her eyes make her look younger. They’re like caramel, or butterscotch, and why the hell am I looking at a potential client and channeling ice cream toppings? “Come right in!” I stand up, offering her a chair. “Sit down and tell me what the problem is.”
“We don’t have time for that. You have to come with me right now.”
“But I-”
“My son is being interrogated at the police station, and you have to stop it. I’m retaining you on his behalf.”
“Awesome,” I say, and Thor drops the paper clip. I pick it up so he doesn’t swallow it in my absence and grab my coat.
I know it’s totally mercenary of me, but I’m hoping that she’s going to lead me to the BMW parked outside the pizza place. Instead, she veers to the right, to the battered Volvo that probably has 300,000 miles on it. So much for asking for my retainer in cash. I slide into the passenger seat and stick out my hand. “I’m Oliver Bond.”
She doesn’t shake it. Instead, she slips the key into the ignition and peels out of the parking spot with a recklessness that makes my jaw drop. “Emma Hunt,” she says.
She takes a corner, and the back wheels spin. “You, um, should probably tell me a little more about what’s going on…” I gasp as she runs a red light.
“Do you watch the news, Mr. Bond?”
“Oliver, please.” I tighten my seat belt. The police station is only a mile or two away, but I’d like to be alive when we reach it.
“Have you followed the story about the UVM student who went missing?”
“The one whose body was just found?”
The car screeches to a stop in front of the police station. “I think my son might be responsible,” she says.
Alan Dershowitz, the famous Jewish lawyer, was once asked if he’d defend Adolf Hitler. “Yes,” he said. “And I’d win.”
When I fell asleep during my torts class, the professor-who spoke in a monotone and made law slightly less exciting than watching paint dry-poured a bottle of water over my head. “Mr. Bond,” he intoned, “you strike me as the kind of student on whom admission should not have been wasted.”
I sat up, sputtering and soaked. “Then with all due respect, sir, you should be struck harder,” I suggested, and I got a standing ovation from my classmates.
I offer these anecdotes to the proverbial jury as examples of the fact that I have never lived my life by shirking a challenge, and I’m not about to start right now.
“Let’s go.” Emma Hunt turns off the ignition.
I put my hand on her arm. “Maybe you should start by telling me your son’s name.”
“Jacob.”
“How old is he?”
“Eighteen,” she says. “He has Asperger’s syndrome.”
I’ve heard the term, but I’m not about to pretend I’m an expert. “So he’s autistic?”
“Technically, yes, but not in a Rain Man kind of way. He’s very high-functioning.” She looks longingly at the police station. “Can’t we discuss this later?”
“Not if you want me to represent Jacob. How did he get here?”
“I drove him.” She takes a long, shaky breath. “When I was watching the news today, and they were reporting from the crime scene, I saw a quilt that belongs to Jacob.”
“Is it possible that other people have it, too? Like, anyone who happened to shop at Kohl’s last season?”
“No. It’s handmade. It was upstairs in his closet, or so I thought. And then I heard the reporter say that they’d arrested Jess’s boyfriend for the murder.”
“Was Jacob her boyfriend?”
“No. That’s someone named Mark. I don’t know him, but I couldn’t stand the thought of him going to jail for something he didn’t do. I called the detective in charge of the case, and he said if I brought Jacob down here, he’d talk to him and take care of everything.” She buries her face in her hands. “I didn’t realize that meant he’d ambush Jacob. Or tell me I couldn’t sit in on the interview.”
“If he’s eighteen, that’s true,” I point out. “Did Jacob agree to talk to him?”
“He practically raced into the police station, once he was told he could help analyze a crime scene.”
“Why?”
“It would be like you getting a high-profile celebrity murder case after years of practicing property law.”
Oh. Well, that I could understand. “Did the police tell you Jacob was under arrest?”
“No.”
“So you just brought him down here voluntarily?”
She crumples in front of me. “I thought they were going to talk to him. I didn’t know he would be considered a suspect right away.” Emma Hunt is crying now, and I know less about what to do with a crying woman than I would with a greased piglet on a New York City subway. “I was just trying to do the right thing,” she sobs.
When I was a farrier, I worked with a mare that had a fracture in the pedal bone. Weeks of rest hadn’t helped her; the owners were talking about putting her down. I convinced them to let me hot-fit a straight bar shoe to the hoof, and I wrapped it instead of nailing it. At first, the mare didn’t want to walk, and who could blame her? It took a week of coaxing to get her to take a step from her stall, and then I worked with her for thirty minutes a day, until a year later, I led her out to a field and watched her fly across the open space, fast as a rumor.
Sometimes, you need someone else to help you take the first step.
I put my hand on her shoulder; she jumps at the contact and stares up at me with those crazy molten eyes of hers. “Let’s see what we can do,” I say, and I hope like hell she cannot tell that my knees are shaking.
At the dispatch desk, I clear my throat. “I’m looking for an officer…”
“Which one?” the bored sergeant asks.
My face floods with heat. “The one who’s doing the interview with Jacob Hunt,” I say. Why hadn’t I thought to ask her the guy’s name?
“You mean Detective Matson?”
“Yes. I’d like you to interrupt that interview he’s doing.”
The sergeant shrugs. “I’m not interrupting anything. You can wait. I’ll let him know you’re here when he’s done.”
Emma isn’t listening. She’s edged away from me, toward a door that leads down the hallway of the police department. It’s on a locked mechanism controlled by dispatch. “He’s down there,” she murmurs.
“Well, I think right now the best course of action is to play by their rules until-”
Suddenly the door buzzes and opens. A secretary wanders into the waiting area carrying a FedEx box for pickup.
“Now,” Emma says. She grabs my wrist and pulls me through the windfall of that open doorway, and in tandem, we start to run.
I am here as living proof to tell you that dreams really do come true.
1. I am sitting with Detective Matson, shooting the shit.
2. He’s sharing details of an open investigation with me.
3. Not once has he yawned or checked his watch or in any way indicated that he is not enjoying speaking to me at length about crime scene investigation.
4. He wants to talk to me about the crime scene surrounding Jess’s disappearance-a crime scene that I orchestrated.
Seriously, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Or so I think until he begins firing questions at me that feel like bullets. And his mouth is smiling halfway, and I cannot remember if that means he’s happy or not. And the conversation moves from the practical-the weight of the human brain, the nature of postmortem toxicity tests-to the personal.
The fascination of creating a liver slide to look at microscopically loses some of its entertainment value when Detective Matson forces me to remember that the liver in question belonged to someone I actually knew, someone I laughed with and looked forward to seeing, which is far from how I feel about most social interactions. As theoretical as I would like death to be, it turns out there is a significant difference when it’s corn syrup and food coloring instead of the real McCoy. Although I can logically understand that Jess is gone, which therefore means there’s no point wishing she weren’t since she’s not able to reverse the situation, it doesn’t account for the fact that I feel like a helium balloon is caught inside me, and that it keeps inflating, and that it might actually tear me apart.
Just when I think things cannot get any worse, Detective Matson accuses me of being the one to hurt Jess.
You’re the one who grabbed Jess by the arms, aren’t you?
I wasn’t. And I tell him so.
What about choking her? You’re not going to lie to me about doing that, are you?
I know the answer, of course, but it’s bogged down in the syntax. It’s like when someone asks you at dinner, You don’t want that last piece of steak, do you? when of course you do. If you say yes, are you saying that you want the last piece of steak? Or that you don’t want it?
So what made you choke her?
Was it a fight? Did she say something you didn’t like?
If Jess were here, she’d tell me to take a deep breath. Tell the person you need him to speak more slowly, she’d say. Tell him you don’t understand.
Except Jess isn’t here.
“Nothing made me choke Jess,” I finally manage to say, which is the absolute truth. But my face is red, and my breath feels like sawdust spilling out of me.
Once, when we were little and Theo called me a mental midget, I threw a couch pillow at him and, instead, it knocked over a lamp my mother had gotten from her grandmother. How did this happen? my mother asked, when she retained the power of speech again.
A pillow knocked it off the table.
It was unequivocally the truth, but my mother’s hand came down and swatted me. I don’t remember it hurting. I remember being so embarrassed that I thought my skin might melt off. And even though she apologized later, there was always a disconnect for me: telling the truth was supposed to set you free, wasn’t it? So how come it got me in trouble when I told a new mother that her baby looked like a monkey? Or when I read another kid’s paper in class during a peer edit and said it was abysmal? Or when I told my mother that I felt like an alien who’d been sent down to analyze families, since I never really seemed to be a part of ours?
Or now?
Did you choke her until she stopped breathing? Did you hit her in the face?
I think of Lucy and Ethel at that candy factory. Of one time when I went into the ocean and could not get out of the oncoming waves before the previous one drove me to my knees. On CrimeBusters, at the end, the CSIs interrogate the suspects and the suspects always crack in the face of cold, hard evidence.
None of this is happening the way I planned it to.
Or maybe it’s just that my plan is working a little too well.
I never meant to hurt Jess, and that’s why the next question spears me like a javelin. “Then how did her tooth get knocked out?” Detective Matson asks.
I watch it unfolding in front of me, an instant invisible replay. Lugging Jess down the stairs, dropping her on the final riser. I’m sorry! I had cried, even though that was not necessary; she could not hear me anymore.
Whatever words I am using, though, are falling short, since Detective Matson doesn’t understand me. So I decide to take a drastic step, to show him the inside of my mind right here and right now. I take a deep breath, and then I stare directly into his eyes.
It’s like having strips of my skin pulled off from the inside. Like needles in every nerve center of the brain.
God, it hurts.
“That was an accident,” I whisper. “But I saved it. I put it in her pocket.”
Another truth, but one that makes him jump in his seat. I’m sure he can hear my pulse as loudly as I can. That’s a sign of arrhythmia. I hope I do not die right here in Detective Matson’s office.
My eyes slide to his left, his right, and then up-anywhere so that I don’t have to see him directly again. That’s when I notice the clock, and realize that it’s 4:17.
Without any traffic it takes sixteen minutes to get from the police station to my house. That means we will not get home till 4:33, and CrimeBusters begins at 4:30. I stand up, both of my hands fluttering in front of my chest like hummingbirds, but I don’t even care anymore about trying to stop them. It feels like the moment on the TV show when the perp finally caves in and falls to the metal table, sobbing with guilt. I want to be watching that TV show, instead of living it. “Are we done now?” I ask. “Because I really have to go.”
Detective Matson gets up, and I think he might open the door for me, but instead he blocks my exit and leans closer, until he is too close for me to breathe, because what if I wind up with some of the air that he exhaled? “Did you know you fractured her skull?” he says. “Did that happen at the same time you knocked out her tooth?”
I close my eyes. “I don’t know.”
“What about her underwear? You put it on backward, didn’t you?”
At that, my head whips up. “It was on backward?” How was I supposed to know? There were no labels, like there are in my boxer shorts. Shouldn’t the graphic of the butterfly have gone on the front, rather than back?
“Did you take her underwear off her, too?”
“No, you just said it was on her…”
“Did you try to have sex with her, Jacob?” the detective asks.
I am utterly silent. Just thinking about that makes my tongue swell up like a monkey’s fist knot.
“Answer me, goddammit!” he yells.
I scramble for words, any words, because I do not want him to yell at me again. I will tell him that I had sex with Jess eighty times that night if that’s what he needs to hear, if that makes him open the door.
“You moved her after she died, Jacob, didn’t you?”
“Yes! Of course I moved her!” Isn’t that obvious?
“Why?”
“I needed to set up the crime scene, and that’s where she had to be.” He, of all people, should understand.
Detective Matson tilts his head. “Is that why you did this? You wanted to commit a crime and see if you could get away with it?”
“No, that’s not why-”
“Then what is?” he interrupts.
I try to find a way to put into words all the reasons I have done what I did. But if there is one subject I do not understand-not internally, much less externally-it’s the ties that bind us to each other. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” I mutter.
“Is this a joke to you? Some big joke? Because I don’t see it that way. A girl’s dead, and there’s nothing funny about that.” He comes closer, until his arm is brushing mine, and I can barely concentrate because of the buzzing in my head. “Tell me, Jacob,” he says. “Tell me why you killed Jess.”
Suddenly the door slams open, striking him in the shoulder. “Don’t answer that,” a strange man yells. Behind him stands my mother, and behind her are two uniformed officers, who have just raced down the hall, too.
“Who the hell are you?” Detective Matson asks.
“I’m Jacob’s attorney.”
“Oh, really,” he says. “Jacob, is this your lawyer?”
I glance at the man. He’s wearing khaki pants and a dress shirt but no tie. He has sandy hair that reminds me of Theo’s and looks too young to be a real lawyer. “No,” I reply.
The detective smiles triumphantly. “He’s eighteen years old, Counselor. He says you’re not his lawyer, and he hasn’t asked for one.”
I am not stupid. I’ve watched enough CrimeBusters to know where this is headed. “I want a lawyer,” I announce.
Detective Matson throws up his hands.
“We’re leaving now.” My mother elbows her way closer. I reach for my coat, which is still draped over the back of the chair.
“Mr… what’s your name?” the detective asks.
“Bond,” my new lawyer says. “Oliver Bond.” He grins at me.
“Mr. Bond, your client is being charged with the murder of Jessica Ogilvy,” Detective Matson says. “He’s not going anywhere.”