The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “Find anything?”

  “A wallet and a cell phone. There could be more, but the snow’s pretty deep.” Jerry glanced up from his collection of blood on the body. “You see the kid play in the exhibition game last night in town?”

  “I was on duty.”

  “I heard he was hammered . . . and that he was still a hell of a player.” Jerry shook his head. “Damn shame, if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t,” Bartholemew said, and he stood up. He had already been to the Underhill house, to bring them the news of their son’s death. Greta Underhill had opened the door, looked at his face, and burst into tears. Her husband had been only superficially composed. He thanked Bartholemew for bringing the information and said he’d like to see Jason now. Then he’d walked outside into the snow, without a coat, barefoot.

  Bartholemew’s own boss had brought him the news about Holly. He’d known that the worst had happened when he saw the chief of police standing on his porch in the middle of the night. He remembered demanding to be driven to the scene, where he stood at the guardrail her car had smashed through. He remembered, too, going to identify Holly’s body in the hospital morgue. Bartholemew had pulled aside the sheet to see the tracks on her arms, the ones he’d been blind to as a parent. He’d put his hand over Holly’s heart, just to make sure.

  The Underhills wanted to see Jason; they’d be given that privilege before the autopsy began. In this sense, accidents, suicides, and murders were all the same—any death that occurred without someone there to witness it was automatically brought to the medical examiner for a determination of cause. It wasn’t police procedure as much as human nature. We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn’t really an answer to that question.

  • • •

  The Monday after Jason Underhill’s suicide, two psychologists were called to the high school to help students who needed to grieve. The hockey team took to wearing black armbands and won three straight, vowing to take the state title in homage to their fallen team-mate. One entire page of the Portland paper’s sports section was devoted to a memorial of Jason’s athletic achievements.

  That same day, Laura went out for groceries. She moved aimlessly through the store, picking up things like ugli fruit and bags of pitted prunes, slivered almonds, and balls of buffalo mozzarella. Somewhere in her purse she knew she had a list—ordinary items like bread and milk and dishwashing detergent—but there was a part of her that felt normal things didn’t apply anymore and therefore there was no point in buying them. Eventually, she found herself in front of the freezer section, the door open and the cold spilling over the toes of her boots. There must have been a hundred different ice cream flavors. How could you pick, knowing that you’d have to go home and live with the choice you’d made?

  She was reading the ingredients on a peach sorbet when she heard two women talking one aisle over, hidden by the freezers. “What a tragedy,” one said. “That boy was going places.”

  “I heard that Greta Underhill can’t get out of bed,” the second woman added. “My pastor was told by her pastor that she might not even make it to the funeral.”

  A week ago, in spite of the rape accusations, Jason had still been a hero to most of this town. But now death had swelled him to mythic proportions.

  Laura curled her hands around the front bar of her grocery cart. She navigated around the corner, until she was face to face with the women who’d been talking. “Do you know who I am?” The ladies glanced at each other, shook their heads. “I’m the mother of the girl Jason Underhill raped.”

  She said it for the shock value. She said it on the off chance that these ladies might, out of sudden shame, apologize. But neither of them said a word.

  Laura guided her shopping cart around the corner and toward an empty checkout line. The cashier had a skunk-streak of blue hair and a ring through her bottom lip. Laura reached into the basket and held up a box of plastic knives—when had she taken those off a shelf? “You know,” she said to the cashier, “I actually don’t need those.”

  “No biggie. We can reshelve them.”

  Six packets of powdered hollandaise sauce, suntan lotion, and wart remover medicine. “Actually,” Laura said, “I’m going to pass on these, too.”

  She emptied the rest of her shopping cart: bacon bits and baby food and Thai coconut milk; a sippy cup and hair elastics and two pounds of green jalapeños; the peach sorbet. She stared at the items on the conveyor belt as if she were seeing them for the first time. “I don’t want any of this,” Laura said, surprised, as if it were anyone’s fault but her own.

  • • •

  Dr. Anjali Mukherjee spent most of her time in the morgue, not just because she was the county medical examiner but also because when she ventured abovestairs at the hospital, she was continually mistaken for a med student or, worse, a candy striper. She was five feet tall, with the small, delicate features of a child, but Mike Bartholemew had seen her elbow-deep in a Y-shaped incision, determining the cause of death of the person who lay on her examination table.

  “The subject had a blood alcohol level of point one two,” Anjali said, as she rifled through a series of X-rays and headed toward the light box on the wall.

  Legal intoxication was .10; that meant Jason Underhill was considerably trashed when he went over the railing of the bridge. At least he wasn’t driving, Bartholemew thought. At least he only killed himself.

  “There,” the medical examiner said, pointing at an X-ray. “What do you see?”

  “A foot?”

  “That’s why they pay you the big bucks. Come over here for a second.” Anjali cleared off a lab table and patted it. “Climb up.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “Climb up, Bartholemew.”

  Grudgingly, he stood on top of the table. He glanced down at the top of Anjali’s head. “And I’m doing this why?”

  “Jump.”

  Bartholemew hopped a little.

  “I meant jump off.”

  He swung his arms, then went airborne, landing in a crouch. “Goddamn, I still can’t fly.”

  “You landed on your feet,” Anjali said. “Like most people who jump. When we see suicides like this, the X-rays show heel fractures and vertical compressions of the spine, which aren’t present on this victim.”

  “Are you telling me he didn’t fall?”

  “No, he fell. There’s contrecoup damage to the brain that suggests acceleration. When someone lands on the back of the skull, you’ll see injury to the front of the brain, because it continues to fall after the skull stops and hits it hard.”

  “Maybe he jumped and landed on his head,” Bartholemew suggested.

  “Interestingly, I didn’t see the types of fractures associated with that either. Let me show you what I did find, though.” Anjali handed him two photographs, both of Jason Underhill’s face. They were identical, except for the black eye and bruising along the temple and jaw of the second one.

  “You been beating up the subjects, Angie?”

  “That only works premortem,” Anjali replied. “I took these ten hours apart. When you brought him in, he didn’t have bruises . . . except for a subtle hemorrhage in the facial area that could have been caused by the fall. But he was lying on that side of his face when found, and the pooling of the blood might have obscured the contusions. When he was brought to the morgue and placed sunny-side up, the blood redistributed.” She removed the X-ray they’d been examining. “When I was doing an FP fellowship, we had a Jane Doe come in with no apparent external trauma, except for a slight hemorrhage in the strap muscles of the neck. By the time the autopsy was over, there were two obvious handprints on her throat.”

  “Couldn’t he have banged himself up when he fell?”

  “I thought you’d say that. Take a look at this.” Anjali slid another X-ray onto the light box.

  Bartholemew whistled softly. “That’s his face, huh?”

  “It was.”

  He pointed to a crac