The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  It smelled of smoke. Meredith watched him walk to the driver’s side. His hair was long—all one length, nearly to his shoulders; he wore a short-sleeved bowling shirt open over a man’s tank-style T-shirt; his jeans had a hole on the left thigh. He looked like the kind of guy you’d find strumming a guitar for tips in a subway hollow, or writing bad poetry in the rear of a rundown café. The kind of guy who scribbled notes to himself on gum wrappers and stuck them in the pocket of his jacket, only to forget what they were about in the first place. The kind of guy who drove taxis while people like her were busy getting their doctorates. The kind of guy she would never have given a second glance.

  The car started right up, a small miracle. “So,” he said, smiling. “Where to?”

  “Somewhere close.” Meredith gave him directions to the first Starbucks that came to mind, and when he turned away she told herself that she had imagined the flash of disappointment in his eyes.

  Those eyes. She’d give him that. They made her think of the sort of pool you’d stumble across in a rain forest, so jewel green and rich that once you fell in, you’d be immediately over your head and unable—unwilling—to drag yourself out.

  He held up a pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind?”

  She did, greatly, but this was his car. She unrolled the window as he lit a cancer stick and drew deeply. It hollowed out his cheekbones even more, casting the planes of his face in stark relief. “Just so you know,” Meredith announced, “I am not in the habit of being fixed up by my grandmother.”

  “Of course not.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Ross blew a stream of smoke out his window. “That someone like you can get her own dates.”

  In spite of herself, Meredith felt heat rise up from her neck. “Like me,” she repeated, immediately putting up her guard. “How do you know anything about me?”

  “I don’t,” Ross admitted.

  “Then why don’t you just stop making assumptions.” And yet, Meredith thought, hadn’t she been doing the very same thing about him?

  He drove with his right hand, the cigarette in his left. The end glowed like a game-show buzzer, an evil eye. “It’s only that you remind me of someone I used to know. She was just as beautiful as you are.”

  In her lifetime, Meredith could count on one hand the number of times she had been complimented on her looks. Accomplished, intelligent, groundbreaking—those were all adjectives that had often been tethered to her name. But she’d set her physical attributes on a back burner, choosing instead to play up her mental acuity, and the world had followed her lead. Beautiful, she thought again.

  She wondered what had happened to this woman he used to know, if she had died or gotten into a fight with him or walked out of his life. Meredith looked at Ross again across the front seat of the car and this time, instead of seeing a loser, she saw someone who had a story to tell.

  To her great surprise, she wanted to hear it.

  “So?” Ross asked, and she thought maybe he could read minds, too.

  “So what?”

  “So . . . are we going in?” He glanced out the window, and she realized that they had pulled into the parking lot of Starbucks. He had a dimple in his left cheek when he smiled.

  “Yes. Right.” Ross came around to her side of the car and opened the door for her. They walked into the café to find several people in line in front of them. “Do you know what you’d like?” he asked.

  For the first time in years, Meredith didn’t have a ready answer.

  Bruno Davidovich had been a pro linebacker, a bouncer, and, in one career aberration, a television chef, before getting into lie detection work. The trick, he’d told Eli, was to never take your eyes off your subject. He kept time with Swiss precision, and always arrived at the exact scheduled hour to perform his tests, which was one reason Eli liked to employ him. The other was that Bruno’s sheer size often scared people into telling the truth.

  “Try to relax,” Bruno said to Spencer Pike, as the old man sat trussed up to the polygraph. Pike had agreed to the test when Eli asked, saying he wanted this over and done with, already. Now two pneumograph tubes were attached to his chest and abdomen, two metal plates hooked onto his ring and index finger, a blood pressure cuff around his thin upper arm. “Is today Wednesday?” Bruno asked.

  Pike rolled his eyes. “Yes.”

  “Is your name Spencer Pike?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a healthy man?”

  A pause. “No.”

  “Have you ever told a lie?” Bruno asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever told a lie about something serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever lied to get out of trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  Eli listened to Bruno continue through the questions, working his way up to the relevant ones. It was not as if this polygraph test would be used in court, nor was it considered accurate enough to acquit or condemn Pike. But Eli needed to know for his own peace of mind why Spencer Pike seemed to think that he was responsible for the death of a child that hadn’t been killed, yet innocent of the murder of his wife.

  “Was the baby born dead?” Bruno was asking.

  “No.”

  “Did you hold the baby after it was born?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you kill the baby after it was born?”

  Pike’s breath left his body in a thin stream. “Yes,” he said.

  “Did you have a fight with your wife before the baby was born?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you fight with your wife after the baby was born?”

  “No.”

  “Did you harm your wife?”

  Pike bowed his head. “Yes.”

  Bruno stared at Pike. “Did you hang your wife?”

  “No,” he answered.

  “Thanks,” Bruno said. He pulled the printout from the polygraph and walked into the hallway, Eli following.

  While Eli waited, Bruno scored the charts. “So?”

  “Look here. When I asked him if he hurt his wife, and he replied affirmatively . . . that was the control question. Then I asked him if he killed his wife, and his physiological response wasn’t as strong as it was to the previous question.”

  “He didn’t do it,” Eli said softly.

  “Seems that way.” Bruno hesitated. “You want me to scare him up a little bit, see if we get something different?”

  Eli glanced through the door. Pike’s watery eyes were fixed on something outside the window. His hands flexed on the arms of his wheelchair. “No,” Eli said. “He’s done.”

  It was not until the clerk from behind the Starbucks counter took off his apron and began to swish a mop around the table where Ross and Meredith had settled that she realized they had been sitting there for five hours. “Designer babies are the norm in nature,” she argued. “Look at gorillas, okay? Grayback males are the ones all the ladies go for, because they’ve lived long enough to go gray. So when it comes time to pick your mate, you choose someone who’s going to give your offspring the best chance for longevity.” Meredith felt her brain snapping with the challenge of defending her work, and she knew it wasn’t only because this was her fourth caramel macchiato. “All we’re doing in the lab is making nature run a little more smoothly.”

  “But how big a leap is it from discarding embryos because they carry cystic fibrosis,” Ross countered, “to getting rid of anything that doesn’t have blue eyes?”

  Meredith thought for a moment. “Well, technically, blue eyes are a one-gene defect, so that would be possible. But most traits that parents would consider undesirable involve hundreds of genes acting in tandem. That was where Hitler was categorically wrong. You can’t pinpoint stupidity or frailty or ugliness at one place on the DNA strand.”

  “Not yet,” Ross qualified. “But once you figure that out, it’s only a matter of time before stem cell therapy is used to get rid of those . . . undesirable t