Jodi Picoult - House Rules

“You’re losing me,” Marcy says.

“Jacob Hunt doctored his crime scene to look like it had been committed by someone else-someone who would doctor a crime scene to hide his involvement. It’s fucking brilliant.” I sigh.

“So what are you thinking?” Basil asks. “Lovers’ quarrel?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.” Yet.

Marcy shrugs. “Too bad perps never seem inclined to talk.”

“Good thing victims do,” I say.

Wayne Nussbaum is up to his elbows in the chest cavity of a dead man from Swanton when I snap on a mask and booties and enter the room. “I can’t hang around anymore,” I say. For the past forty-five minutes I’ve been cooling my heels in Wayne’s office.

“Neither can he,” Wayne replies, and I notice the ligature marks around the guy’s neck. “Look, it’s not like I could have predicted a murder-suicide would throw me off schedule.” He lifts a gleaming red organ in his palm, his eyes dancing. “Come on, Detective. Have a heart.”

I don’t crack a smile. “That the kind of stuff you learn at clown college?”

“Yeah. It comes after Pie Throwing 101.” He turns to his diener, a young woman who assists him during autopsies. Her name is Lila, and she once tried to hit on me by inviting me to a rave in South Burlington. Instead of flattering me, it just made me feel really old.

“Lila,” he says, “give me ten minutes.”

He strips off his gloves and jacket and booties as soon as we’re out of the sterile atmosphere and walks beside me down the hall to his office. He shuffles files on his desk until I see one with Jess Ogilvy’s name on the tab. “I don’t know what else I can tell you that my report didn’t already spell out, crystal clear,” Wayne says, sitting down. “The cause of death was a subdural hematoma, due to a basilar skull fracture. He popped her so hard he drove her skull into her brain and killed her.”

I knew that. But it wasn’t really why Jess Ogilvy had died. That was because she’d said something to Jacob Hunt that had set him off. Or maybe she had refused to say something to him-such as I feel the same way about you.

It would be simple enough to assume that a boy who fell for his tutor-and was rebuffed-might lash out at her.

Wayne skims through his report. “The lacerations on her back-drag marks-were made postmortem. I’d assume they occurred when the body was moved. There were bruises, however, that were made premortem. The facial ones, of course. And a few on her upper arms and throat.”

“No semen?”

Wayne shook his head. “Nada.”

“Could he have worn a condom?”

“Highly unlikely,” the medical examiner says. “We didn’t get any pubic hairs or any other physical evidence concurrent with rape.”

“But her underwear was on backward.”

“Yeah, but that only proves that your perp hasn’t shopped for lingerie-not that he’s a rapist.”

“Those bruises,” I say. “Can you tell how old they are?”

“Within a day or so,” Wayne replies. “There’s not really a reliable technique to determine the age of a bruise beyond color and immunohistochemical methods. Bottom line is, people heal at different rates, so although I could look at two bruises and say one occurred a week before the other, I can’t look at two bruises and say one occurred at nine A.M. and the other occurred at noon.”

“So conceivably, the choke marks around her throat-and the fingerprint bruises on her arms-those could have happened minutes before she died?”

“Or hours.” Wayne tosses the folder to a pile on the side of his desk. “He could have threatened her and then come back to beat her to death.”

“Or it could have been two different people at two different times.” My gaze meets his.

“Then Jessica Ogilvy truly did have the shittiest day on record,” the coroner says. “I suppose you could charge the boyfriend with assault. It seems like an unnecessary complication, though, if your perp already confessed to moving the body.”

“Yeah. I know.” I just didn’t understand why that bothered me so much. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why did you stop being a clown?”

“It wasn’t fun anymore. Kids screaming in my face, barfing their birthday cake in my lap…” Wayne shrugs. “My clients here are much more predictable.”

“I guess.”

The coroner looks at me for a long moment. “You know the hardest case I ever did? Motor vehicle accident. Woman rolls her SUV on the highway, and her baby pops right out of the car seat and suffers severe spinal injuries and dies. They brought the whole car seat into the morgue. I had to put that dead baby back into the seat and show how the mother didn’t buckle it the right way, which is why the kid fell out.” Wayne stands up. “Sometimes you have to keep reminding yourself that you’re in this for the victim.”

I nod. And wonder why that label makes me think not of Jess Ogilvy but of Jacob Hunt.

The boy who answers the door at the Hunt household looks nothing like his brother, but the minute I show my badge, the color drains from his face. “I’m Detective Matson,” I say. “Is your mother home?”

“I, uh… I plead the Fifth,” the kid says.

“That’s great,” I tell him. “But it wasn’t a particularly probing question.”

“Who’s at the door?” I hear, and then Emma Hunt steps into my line of sight. The minute she recognizes me, her eyes narrow. “Did you come to check up on me? Well, I’m here, with the boys, just like the judge ordered. Close the door, Theo. And you, ” she says, “can talk to our lawyer.”

I manage to wedge my foot in the door just before it closes. “I have a search warrant.” I hold up the piece of paper that will allow me to comb through Jacob’s bedroom and take away what might constitute evidence.

She takes the paper out of my hand, scans it, and then lets the door swing open again. Without speaking, she turns on her heel. I follow her into the house, pausing when she picks up the phone in the kitchen and calls her baby-faced lawyer. “Yes, he’s here now,” she says, cupping her hand around the receiver. “He gave the paper to me.”

She hangs up a moment later. “Apparently I don’t have a choice.”

“I could have told you that,” I say cheerfully, but she turns away and walks upstairs.

I keep a few steps behind until she opens a door. “Jacob? Baby?” I stand in the hallway and let her talk softly to her son. I hear words like required and legal, and then she reappears with Jacob at her side.

It takes me by surprise. The kid’s whole face is black and blue; a butterfly bandage disappears into his hairline. “Jacob,” I say. “How are you doing?”

“How does it look like he’s doing?” Emma snaps.

I’d been told by Helen Sharp that Jacob was released into his mother’s custody pending the competency hearing. She had said that, apparently, Jacob couldn’t handle jail well. We had laughed about it. Who can handle jail well?

My job, as a detective, is to go behind the scenes and see what strings are controlling the puppets. Sometimes that means collecting evidence, or swearing out arrest warrants, or getting background information, or conducting interrogations. But it usually also means I miss what is going on onstage. It was one thing to arrest Jacob and send him off to his arraignment; it is another thing entirely to see this boy in front of me again in this condition.

He doesn’t look like the kid I interviewed a week ago. No wonder his mother wants my head.

She takes Jacob’s hand to lead him down the hallway, but we are all stopped by the thin, reedy sound of the boy’s voice. “Wait,” Jacob whispers.