House Rules: A Novel Read online

  “Fine. Take five minutes,” the judge says, and he leaves the bench.

  The minute he’s gone, Emma steps over the bar. “Jacob, listen to me.”

  But Jacob’s not listening; he’s emitting a high-pitched hum that has Helen Sharp covering her ears. “Jacob,” Emma repeats, and she puts her hands on either side of his face, forcing him to face her. He closes his eyes.

  “I shot the sheriff,” Emma sings, “but I didn’t shoot the deputy. I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy. Reflexes got the better of me … and what is to be must be.”

  The bailiff standing in the room shoots her a dirty glance, but the tension melts out of Jacob’s shoulders. “Every day the bucket a-go a well,” he sings, in his flat monotone. “One day the bottom a-go drop out.”

  “That’s it, baby,” Emma murmurs.

  Helen is watching every move, her mouth slightly agape. “Gee,” she says, “my kid only knows the words to ‘Candy Man.’”

  “Hell of a song to be singing when you’re on trial for murder,” the bailiff mutters.

  “Do not listen to him,” Emma says. “You listen to me. I believe you. I believe you didn’t do it.”

  Interestingly, she doesn’t look Jacob in the eye when she says this. Now, he’d never have noticed—since he’s not looking her in the eye, either. But by Emma’s own reasoning with the detective, if you assume that someone who doesn’t look you in the eye is either lying or on the autism spectrum—and Emma isn’t on the autism spectrum—what does that imply?

  Before I can interpret this any further, the judge comes back, and Helen and Rich Matson take their places again. “Your only job here is to stay cool,” I whisper to Jacob, as I lead him back to the defense table. And then I watch him take a piece of paper, fold it into an accordion pleat, and begin to fan himself.

  “How did Jacob get to the police station?” Helen asks.

  “His mother brought him down.”

  Jacob fans a little faster.

  “Was he placed under arrest?”

  “No,” the detective says.

  “Was he brought in a cruiser?”

  “No.”

  “Did a police officer accompany his mother to the police department?”

  “No. She brought her son in voluntarily.”

  “What did you say when you saw him there?”

  “I asked if he could help me with some cases.”

  “What was his response?”

  “He was extremely excited and very willing to go with me,” Matson says.

  “Did he indicate that he wanted to have his mother in the room, or that he wasn’t comfortable without her?”

  “To the contrary—he said he wanted to help me.”

  “Where did the interview take place?”

  “In my office. I started to ask him about the crime scene he’d crashed a week earlier, which involved a man who died of hypothermia. Then I told him I’d really like to pick his brain about Jess Ogilvy’s case, but that it was a little trickier, since it was still an open investigation. I said he’d have to waive his rights to not discuss it, and Jacob quoted me Miranda. I read along as he recited it verbatim, and then I asked him to read over it and initial it and sign at the bottom so that I knew he understood, and hadn’t just memorized some random words.”

  “Was he able to answer your questions intelligibly?” Helen asks.

  “Yes.”

  Helen offers the Miranda form into evidence. “No further questions, Your Honor,” she says.

  I stand up and button my suit jacket. “Detective, the very first time you met with Jacob, his mother was there, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she stay the entire time?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Great,” I say. “How about the second time you met with Jacob? Was his mother there?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, she’s the one who brought him to the station at your request, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But when she asked you if she could stay with him, you refused?”

  “Well, yeah,” Matson says. “Since her son is eighteen.”

  “Yes, but you were also aware that Jacob is on the autism spectrum, isn’t that true?”

  “It is, but nothing he’d said previously had led me to believe he couldn’t be interrogated.”

  “Still, his mother told you he had a hard time with questions. That he got confused under pressure, and that he couldn’t really understand subtleties of language,” I say.

  “She explained something about Asperger’s syndrome, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. He seemed perfectly capable to me. He knew every legal term imaginable, for God’s sake, and he was more than happy to talk.”

  “Detective, when you told Jacob what happens during an autopsy, didn’t he quote Silence of the Lambs to you?”

  Matson shifts in his chair. “Yes.”

  “Does that indicate that he really understood what he was doing?”

  “I figured he was trying to be funny.”

  “It’s not the first time Jacob’s used a movie quote to answer one of your questions, is it?”

  “I can’t recall.”

  “Let me help you, then,” I say, grateful to Jacob for his verbatim memory of the conversation. “When you asked him if Jess and her boyfriend, Mark, fought, he said ‘Hasta la vista, baby,’ didn’t he?”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “And he quoted a third movie line to you at one point during your interrogation, didn’t he, Detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was that?”

  “I asked him why he’d done it.”

  “And he said?”

  “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

  “The only crime Jacob Hunt committed,” I argue, “is quoting from a movie as sappy as Love Story.”

  “Objection,” Helen says. “Are we doing closings now? Because nobody sent me the memo.”

  “Sustained,” the judge answers. “Mr. Bond, save the editorial commentary for yourself.”

  I turn back to Matson. “How did that third interview, at the station, end?”

  “Abruptly,” the detective replies.

  “In fact Ms. Hunt arrived with me, saying that her son wanted a lawyer, didn’t she?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And once she made that announcement, what did Jacob say?”

  “That he wanted a lawyer,” Matson answers. “Which is when I stopped questioning him.”

  “Nothing further,” I say, and I sit down beside Jacob again.

  Freddie Soto is a former cop whose oldest son is profoundly autistic. After working for the state police in North Carolina for years, he went back to school and got his master’s in psychology. Now, he specializes in teaching law enforcement professionals about autism. He’s written articles for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin and for Sheriff magazine. He was a consultant for ABC News on a 20/20 special about autism and the law and false confession. He helped develop the state of North Carolina’s 2001 curriculum about why law enforcement needs to recognize autism, a curriculum now in use in police departments around the globe.

  His fee for expert testimony is $15,000 plus first-class plane fare, which I didn’t have. But we started talking on the phone, and when he heard that I had been a farrier, he divulged that he had partial ownership of a racehorse that wound up with flat feet. The horse meant everything to his son, so he had fought to keep the animal from being euthanized. When I suggested pads to keep the soles from bruising and wedges on the hooves with integral frog supports and a soft packing material underneath to realign the hoof pasterns by reducing the weight on the heels without crushing the horns and deforming the heels, he said he’d testify for free if I agreed to fly down to North Carolina and take a look at his horse when the trial was through.

  “Can you tell us, Mr. Soto, would someone with Asperger’s syndrome have the same difficult