The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “So?”

  “So in Maine, if you take a blood sample from a suspect for one case, you can indeed use it for subsequent tests in a different case,” Marita said. “The problem is that when you took blood from Trixie Stone, she consented because she was a victim, and that’s very different from consenting because she’s a suspect.”

  “Isn’t there some kind of loophole?”

  “Depends,” Marita said. “There are three situations when you’re talking about an individual sample that was given based on consent, as opposed to based on a warrant. In the first, the police tell the individual the sample will be used for any investigation. In the second, the police tell the individual the sample will be used only for a certain investigation. In the third, the police obtain consent after saying that the sample will be used to investigate one particular crime, but they don’t make any mention of other uses. You with me so far?”

  Bartholemew nodded.

  “What exactly did you tell Trixie Stone about her rape kit?”

  He thought back to the night he’d met the girl and her parents in the hospital. Bartholemew could not be entirely sure, but he imagined that he said what he usually did with a sexual assault victim: that this was going to be used for the purposes of the rape case, that it was often the DNA evidence that a jury would hang their hat on.

  “You didn’t mention using it for any other potential case, did you?” Marita asked.

  “No,” he scowled. “Most rape victims have enough trouble with the current one.”

  “Well, that means the scope of consent was ambiguous. Most people assume that when the police ask for a sample to help solve a crime, they aren’t going to use the sample indefinitely for other purposes. And a pretty strong argument could be made that in the absence of explicit consent, retaining the sample and reusing it is constitutionally unreasonable.” She pulled off her glasses. “It seems to me you have two choices. You can either go back to Trixie Stone and ask for her permission to use the blood sample you’ve got in the rape kit for a new investigation, or you can go to a judge and get a warrant for a new sample of her blood.”

  “Neither one’s going to work,” Bartholemew said. “She’s missing.”

  Marita glanced up. “Are you kidding?”

  “I wish.”

  “Then get more creative. Where else would there be a sample of her DNA? Does she lick envelopes for the drama club or Teen Democrats?”

  “She was too busy carving up her arms for any other extracurriculars,” Bartholemew said.

  “Who treated her? The school nurse?”

  No, this had been Trixie’s big secret; she would have gone to great pains to hide it, especially if she was cutting herself during school hours. But it did beg the question: What did she use to stanch the flow of blood? Band-Aids, gauze, tissue?

  And was any of that in her locker?

  • • •

  The bush pilot from Arctic Circle Air had been hired to fly in a veterinarian headed to Bethel for the K300 sled dog race. “You going there too?” the vet asked, and although Trixie had no idea where it was, she nodded. “First time?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  The vet looked at her backpack. “You must be a JV.”

  She was; she’d played junior varsity soccer this fall. “I was a striker,” Trixie said.

  “The rest of the JVs headed up to the checkpoints yesterday,” the pilot said. “You miss the flight?”

  He might as well have been speaking Greek. “I was sick,” Trixie said. “I had the flu.”

  The pilot hauled the last box of supplies into the belly of the plane. “Well, if you don’t mind riding with the cargo, I don’t mind giving a pretty girl a lift.”

  The Shorts Skyvan hardly looked airworthy—it resembled a Winnebago with wings. The inside was crammed with duffels and pallets.

  “You can wait for the commuter flight out tomorrow,” the pilot said, “but there’s a storm coming. You’ll probably sit out the whole race in the airport.”

  “I’d rather fly out now,” Trixie said, and the pilot gave her a leg up.

  “Mind the body,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m okay.”

  “Wasn’t talking about you.” The pilot reached in and rapped his knuckles against a pine box.

  Trixie scrambled to the other side of the narrow cargo hold. She was supposed to fly to Bethel next to a coffin?

  “At least you know he won’t talk your ear off.” The pilot laughed, and then he sealed Trixie inside.

  She sat on the duffels and flattened herself against the riveted metal wall. Through the mesh web that separated her from the pilot and the vet, she could hear talking. The plane vibrated to life.

  Three days ago, if someone had told her she’d be riding in a flying bus beside a dead body, she would have flat-out denied it. But desperation can do amazing things to a person. Trixie could remember her history teacher telling the class about the starving man in a Virginia settlement who’d killed, salted, and eaten his wife one winter before the rest of the colonists ever noticed she was missing. What you’d deem impossible one day might look promising the next.

  As the plane canted off the ground, the pine box slid toward Trixie, jamming up against the soles of her shoes. It could be worse, she thought. He might not be in a coffin but in a body bag. He might not be some random dead guy but Jason.

  They climbed into the night, a rich batter mixed with stars. Up here, it was even colder. Trixie pulled down the sleeves of her jacket.

  Oooooh.

  She leaned toward the mesh to speak into the front of the cockpit. The vet was already asleep. “Did you say something?” she called to the pilot.

  “Nope!”

  Trixie settled back against the side of the plane and heard it again: the quiet long note of someone singing his soul.

  It was coming from underneath the lid of the pine box.

  Trixie froze. It had to be the engine. Or maybe the veterinarian snored. But even louder this time, she could trace the origin to the coffin: Ohhhhh.

  What if the person wasn’t dead at all? What if he’d been stapled into this box and was trying to get out? What if he was scratching at the insides, splinters under his fingernails, wondering how he’d ever wound up in there?

  Ohhh, the body sighed. Noooo.

  She came up on her knees, grabbing through the mesh at the bush pilot’s shoulder. “Stop the plane,” she cried. “You have to stop right now!”

  “You should have gone before we left,” the pilot yelled back.

  “That body . . . it’s not dead!”

  By now, she’d awakened the vet, who turned around in the passenger seat. “What’s the matter—”

  Trixie couldn’t look back at the coffin; if she did there would be an arm reaching out of that box, a face she couldn’t lose in her nightmares, a voice telling her that he knew the secret she hadn’t told anyone else.

  Ooooh.

  “There,” Trixie said. “Can’t you hear that?”

  The vet laughed. “It’s the lungs expanding. Like when you take a bag of potato chips on a plane and it puffs up after liftoff? That’s all you’re hearing—air going over the vocal cords.” He grinned at her. “Maybe you ought to lay off the caffeine.”

  Mortified, Trixie turned back toward the coffin. She could hear the pilot and the vet bonding over her stupidity, and her cheeks burned. The body—dead as could be, dead as the wood it was surrounded by—continued to sing: one lonely note that filled the hold of the plane like a requiem, like the truth no one wanted to hear.

  • • •

  “This really is a shock,” said Jeb Aaronsen, the principal of Bethel High. “Trixie seemed to be getting along so well in school.”

  Bartholemew didn’t even spare him a sideways glance. “Before or after she stopped coming altogether?”

  He didn’t have a lot of patience for this principal, who hadn’t noticed any change in his own daughter’s behavior, either, when she’d been a student here