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--I have three words for you,|| Jacob says. --Doctor! Henry! Lee!||

  --The forensic scientist?|| I am completely not following.

  --He's speaking at UNH tomorrow, and she says I can't go.||

  Emma looks at me. --Do you see what I'm dealing with?||

  I purse my lips, thinking. --Let me talk to him alone for a minute.||

  --Seriously?|| Her eyes widen. --Were you not in the same courtroom I was in three hours ago, when the judge told you accommodations should have been made when you questioned Jacob?||

  --I'm not questioning him now,|| I tell her. --Not professionally, anyway.||

  She throws up her hands. --I don't care. Do what you want. Both of you.||

  When her last footstep fades down the stairs, I sit down beside Jacob. --You know you're not supposed to call 911 unless you're in serious trouble.||

  He snorts. --So arrest me. Oh, wait, you already did.||

  --You ever hear of the boy who cried wolf?||

  --I didn't say anything about wolves,|| Jacob replies. --I said I was being abused, and I am. This is the one chance I have to meet Dr. Lee and she won't even consider it. If I'm old enough to be tried as an adult, how come I'm not old enough to walk to the bus stop and travel down there on my own?||

  --You're old enough. You'll just wind up with your ass in jail again. Is that what you want?|| From the corner of my eye, I spy a laptop peeking out of a pillowcase. --Why is your computer under the covers?||

  He pulls it free and cradles it in his arms. --I thought you'd steal it from me. Just like you took my other stuff.||

  --I didn't steal that, I had a warrant to seize it. And you'll get it back, one day.|| I glance at him. --You know, Jacob, your mother is only protecting you.||

  --By locking me up in here?||

  --No, the judge did that. By not letting you break your bail requirements.||

  We are both quiet for a second, and then Jacob glances at me from the corner of his eye. --I don't understand your voice.||

  --What do you mean?||

  --It should be angry because I made you come all the way out here. But it's not angry. And it wasn't angry when I talked to you at the police station, either. You treated me like I was just a friend of yours, but then you arrested me at the end, and people don't arrest their friends.|| He clasps his hands between his knees. --Frankly, people don't make sense to me.||

  I nod in agreement. --Frankly, people don't make sense to me, either,|| I say.

  Theo

  Why do the cops keep coming to our stupid house?

  I mean, given that they've already arrested Jacob, shouldn't they let justice take its course?

  Okay, I get that Jacob was the one to summon them this time. But surely a phone call would have been just as effective to get him to call off his request for help. And yet, the police--this one guy in particular--keeps showing up. He chats up my mother, and now I can hear him yapping with Jacob about maggots that land on bodies within ten minutes of death.

  Tell me how, exactly, this has any bearing on the 911 call, hmm?

  Here's what I think: Detective Matson isn't even here to talk to Jacob.

  He's certainly not here to talk to my mother.

  He's come because he knows that in order to get to Jacob's room, he has to pass mine, and that means at least two glimpses inside.

  Maybe someone has reported missing the Wii game I took.

  Maybe he's just waiting for me to crack, to fall at his feet and confess that I was at Jess Ogilvy's place shortly before my brother, so that he can tell that bitch prosecutor to put me on the witness stand to testify against Jacob.

  For these reasons and a dozen more I haven't thought of yet, I close my door and lock it, so that when Detective Matson passes by again, I don't have to look him in the eye.

  Jacob

  I would not have thought it possible, but Rich Matson is not a complete and utter ass.

  For example, he told me that you can tell the sex of an individual by looking at the skull, because a male skull has a square chin and a female chin is rounded. He told me that he's been to the Body Farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, where an acre of land is covered with corpses rotting in all different stages, so that forensic anthropologists can measure the effects of weather and insects on human decay. He has pictures and promised to mail me a few.

  This is still not Dr. Henry Lee-worthy, but it makes a decent consolation prize.

  I learn that he has a daughter who, like Jess, faints at the sight of blood. When I tell him that Jess used to do this, too, his face twists, as if he's smelled something awful.

  After a while I promise him not to call the police on my mother again, unless she is causing me dire bodily harm. And he convinces me that an apology to her might go a long way right now.

  When I walk him downstairs, my mother is pacing in the kitchen. --Jacob has something to tell you,|| he announces.

  --Detective Matson is going to send me photographs of decomposing bodies,|| I say.

  --Not that. The other thing.||

  I push my lips out and then suck them in. I do it twice, as if I'm melting the words in my mouth. --I shouldn't have called the cops. Asperger's impulsiveness.||

  My mother's face freezes, and so does the detective's. Only after I've said it do I realize that they're probably assuming Jess's death was Asperger's impulsiveness, too.

  Or in other words, talking about my Asperger's impulsiveness was a bit too impulsive.

  --I think we're all set here,|| the detective says. --You two have a nice evening.||

  My mother touches his sleeve. --Thank you.||

  He looks at her as if he is about to tell her something important, but instead he says,

  --You have nothing to thank me for.||

  When he leaves, a lick of cold air from outside wraps around my ankles.

  --Would you like me to make you something to eat?|| my mother asks. --You never had lunch.||

  --No thanks. I'm going to lie down,|| I announce, although I really just want to be alone. I've learned that when someone invites you to do something and you really don't want to, they don't particularly want to hear the truth.

  Her eyes fly to my face. --Are you sick?||

  --I'm fine,|| I tell her. --Really.||

  I can feel her staring at me as I walk up the stairs.

  I don't plan to lie down, but I do. And I guess I fall asleep, because all of a sudden Dr. Henry Lee is there. We are crouched down on either side of Jess's body. He examines the tooth in her pocket, the abrasions on her lower back. He looks up the cavities of her nostrils.

  Oh yes, he says, crystal clear. I understand.

  I can see why you had to do what you did.

  CASE 8: ONE IN SIX BILLION

  In the 1980s and '90s, over fifty women in the Seattle-Tacoma, Washington, area were murdered. Most of the victims were prostitutes or teen runaways, and most of the bodies were dumped in or near the Green River. Dubbed the Green River Killer, the murderer was unknown until science managed to catch up to crime.

  In the early 1980s, while performing autopsies on the victims, pathologists and medical technologists were able to recover small amounts of DNA in semen left behind by the killer.

  These were retained as evidence, but then-current scientific techniques proved worthless, since there wasn't enough material for testing.

  Gary Ridgway, who was arrested in 1982 on a prostitution charge, was a suspect in the Green River killings, but there wasn't any evidence to formally link him to the crimes.

  In 1984, he passed a polygraph test. In 1987, while searching his home, the King County Sheriff's department took a saliva sample from Ridgway.

  By March 2001, improvements in DNA typing technology had identified the source of the semen on the victims' bodies. In September 2001, the lab received results: they were able to get a comparative match between the DNA in that semen and the DNA in Ridgway's saliva. A warrant was issued for his arrest.

  The DNA results linked Ridgway to three of