“All right. These guys will go with you to your office.”
In my office I tossed a few things into a cardboard box, papers and desk-debris, pictures plucked off the wall, the little souvenirs of years of work. An axe handle, evidence from a case I had never been able to push through the grand jury. It all fit into one cardboard box, all the years, the work, the friendships, the respect I had accumulated by little spoonfuls in case after case. All gone now, no matter how Jacob’s case turned out. For even if Jacob was cleared, I would never escape the stain of the accusation. A jury could only declare my son “not guilty,” never “innocent.” The stink would never leave us. I doubted I would ever walk into a courtroom again as a lawyer. But things were racing too fast to linger over the past or future. There was only now.
I was not panicked, oddly. I never did lose my nerve. Jacob’s homicide charge was a grenade—we would all inevitably be destroyed by it; only the details remained to be worked out—but a strange, calm urgency came over me. Surely a search warrant team was already on its way to my home. That may even have been why the DA had brought me all the way down here: to keep me out of that house before it could be searched. It was exactly what I would have done.
I bolted out of the office.
I called Laurie’s cell from the car. No answer. “Laurie, it’s very, very important. Call me back right away, the second you get this message.”
I called Jacob’s cell phone too. No answer.
I got home too late: four Newton cruisers were already parked outside, watching, freezing the house while they waited for the warrant to arrive. I continued around the block and parked.
My house is adjacent to a train stop on the suburban commuter-train line. An eight-foot fence separates the platform from my backyard. I spidered over it easily. There was so much adrenaline in me, I could have clambered up Mount Rushmore.
In my yard, I pushed through the arbor vitae at the edge of the lawn. The leaves flicked and needled across me as I bodied through the bushes.
I ran across my backyard. My neighbor was in his backyard, gardening. He waved to me, and out of neighborly reflex I waved back as I sprinted by.
Inside, I called out quietly for Jacob. To prepare him for what was coming. No one was home.
I bolted up the stairs, into Jacob’s room, where I yanked open drawers, the closet, tossed up the laundry piles on the floor, desperate to find anything remotely incriminating and get rid of it.
Does that sound awful to you? I hear the little voice in your head: Destruction of evidence! Obstruction of justice! You are naive. You imagine the courts are reliable, that wrong results are rare, and therefore I ought to have trusted the system. If he truly believed Jacob was innocent, you are thinking, he would have simply let the police sweep in and take whatever they liked. Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free—those “errors” we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants’ favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge—do not even think about—because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail, eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable, even the best-intentioned cops are subject to failures of judgment and recall. The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to it. Not because I believed he was guilty, I assure you, but precisely because he was innocent. I was doing what little I could to ensure the right result, the just result. If you do not believe me, go spend a few hours in the nearest criminal court, then ask yourself if you really believe it is error-free. Ask yourself if you would trust your child to it.
In any event, I did not find anything even remotely worrisome in Jake’s room, just the usual teenage junk, dirty laundry, sneakers molded to the shape of his enormous feet, schoolbooks, video-gamer mags, charging cables for his various electronics. I don’t know what I expected to find, really. The trouble was that I did not know what the DA had yet, what made them so anxious to charge Jacob, and it made me crazy wondering what that missing piece could be.
I was still tossing the room when my cell phone rang. It was Laurie. I told her to get home right away—she was visiting a friend in Brookline, twenty minutes away—but I did not tell her anything more. She was too emotional. I did not know how she would react and I did not have time to deal with her. Help Jacob now, fix Laurie later. “Where’s Jacob?” I asked. She did not know. I hung up on her.
I took a last glance around the room. I was tempted to hide Jacob’s laptop. God only knew what was on his hard drive. But I worried that stashing the computer would hurt him either way: if the computer went missing, that would be suspicious, given his online presence; on the other hand, if found it might contain devastating evidence. In the end I left it—unwisely, maybe, but there was no time to consider. Jacob knew he had been publicly accused on Facebook; presumably he had been wily enough to scrub his hard drive if need be.
The doorbell rang. Game over. I was still breathing heavily.
At the door, none other than Paul Duffy was there to hand me the search warrant. “Sorry, Andy,” he said.
I stared. The troopers in their blue windbreakers, the cruisers with their flashers on, my old friend extending the trifolded warrant toward me—I simply did not know how to react, so I barely reacted at all. I stood there, mute, as he pressed the paper into my hand.
“Andy, I have to ask you to wait outside. You know the drill.”
It took a few seconds to rouse myself, to come back into the moment and accept that this was really happening. But I was determined not to make the amateur’s mistake, not to stumble and give them anything. No dumb statements blurted out under pressure in the critical early moments of the case. That is the mistake that puts people in Walpole.
“Is Jacob here, Andy?”
“No.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No idea.”
“Okay, come on, buddy, step out, please.” He put his hand gently on my upper arm to encourage me, but he did not pull me out of the house. He seemed willing to wait till I was ready. He leaned in and said confidentially, “Let’s do this the right way.”
“It’s okay, Paul.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Just do your job, okay? Don’t fuck it up.”
“Okay.”
“You dot those i’s and cross those t’s, or Logiudice’ll throw you under the bus. He’ll make you look like Barney Fife at the trial, mark my words. He’ll do what he has to do. He won’t protect you like I would.”
“Okay, Andy. It’s all right. Come on out.”
I waited on the sidewalk in front of the house. Gawkers accumulated across the street, drawn by the cruisers out front. I would have preferred to wait in the backyard, out of view, but I had to be there when Laurie or Jacob got home, to comfort them—and to coach them.
Laurie arrived just a few minutes into the search. She wobbled when she heard the news. I steadied her and whispered into her ear not to say anything, not even to show any emotion, not fear or sadness. Give them nothing. She made a scornful sound, then she cried. Her sobbing was honest, uninhibited, as if no one was watching. She did not care what people thought, because no one had ever thought badly of her, not for one moment in her life. I knew better. We stood together in front of the house, I with my arm around her in a protective, possessive way.
When the search stretched into its second hour, we retreated to the back of the house and sat on the deck. There Laurie cried softly, gathered herself, cried again.
At some point Detective Duffy came around back and climbed the stairs to the deck. “Andy, just so you know, we found a knife this morning in the park. It was in the muck next to a lake.”
“I knew it. I knew it would show up. Are there any prints, blood, anything on it?”
“Nothing obvious. It’s at the lab. There was this dried algae all over it, like green powder.”
“It’s Patz’s.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What kind of knife was it?”
“Just, like, a regular kitchen knife.”
Laurie said, “A kitchen knife?”
“Yeah. You guys got all yours?”
I said, “Come on, Duff, be serious. What are you asking a question like that for?”
“All right, sorry. It’s my job to ask.”
Laurie glared.
“You guys heard from Jacob yet, Andy?”
“No. We can’t find him. We’ve been calling everyone.”
Duffy stifled a skeptical look.
“He’s a kid,” I said, “he disappears sometimes. When he gets here, Paul, I don’t want anyone talking to him. No questions. He’s a minor. He has a right to have a parent or guardian present. Don’t try and pull anything.”
“Jesus, Andy, nobody’s going to pull anything. We would like to talk to him, though, obviously.”
“Forget it.”
“Andy, it might help him.”
“Forget it. He’s got nothing to say. Not one word.”
In the middle of the yard, something caught our eyes and all three of us turned. A rabbit, tree-bark gray, sniffed the air, twitched its head, alerted, relaxed. It hopped a few feet, stopped. Motionless, it blended into the grass and the gloomy light. I almost lost sight of it until it hopped a little more, a gray ripple.
Duffy turned back to Laurie. Only a few Saturdays before, we had all gone out to a restaurant for dinner, Duffy and his wife and Laurie and I. It seemed like another lifetime. “We’re just about done here, Laurie. We’ll be out of here soon.”
She nodded, too pissed off and heartbroken and betrayed to tell him it was all right.
“Paul,” I told him, “he did not do it. I want to say that to you in case I don’t get another chance. You and I aren’t going to talk for a while, probably, so I want you to hear it right from me, okay? He did not do it. He did not do it.”
“Okay. I hear you.” He turned to go.
“He’s innocent. As innocent as your kid.”
“Okay,” he said, and he left.
Over by the arbor vitae, the rabbit hunched, jaws munching.
We waited until after dark for Jacob, until the cops and the voyeurs had all drifted away. He never came.