The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  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.

  Oliver

  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 h