Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

After he got off the stand, Patrick talked with Diana for a moment about what would happen tomorrow. The double doors of the courtroom were open, and through them, Patrick could see reporters sucking the stories out of any angry parent who was willing to give an interview. He recognized the mother of a girl-Jada Knight-who’d been shot in the back while she was running from the cafeteria. “My daughter won’t go to school this year until eleven o’clock, because she can’t handle being there when third period starts,” the woman said. “Everything scares her. This has ruined her whole life; why should Peter Houghton’s punishment be any less?”

He had no desire to run the media gauntlet, and as the only witness for the day, he was bound to be mobbed. So instead, Patrick sat down on the wooden railing that separated the court professionals from the gallery.

“Hey.”

He turned at the sound of Alex’s voice. “What are you still doing here?” He would have assumed she was upstairs, springing Josie out of the sequestered witness room, as she had done yesterday.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

Patrick nodded toward the doorway. “I wasn’t in the mood to do battle.”

Alex came closer, until she was standing between his legs, and wrapped her arms around him. She buried her face against his neck, and when she took a deep, rattling breath, Patrick felt it in his own chest. “You could have fooled me,” she said.

Jordan McAfee was not having a good day. The baby had spit up on him on his way out the door. He had been ten minutes late for court because the goddamn media were multiplying like jackrabbits and there were no parking spots, and Judge Wagner had reprimanded him for his tardiness. Add to this the fact that for whatever reason, Peter had stopped communicating with Jordan except for the odd grunt, and that his first order of the morning would be to cross-examine the knight in shining armor who’d rushed into the school to confront the evil shooter-well, being a defense attorney didn’t get much more fabulous than this.

“Detective,” he said, approaching Patrick Ducharme on the witness stand, “after you finished with the medical examiner, you went back to the police department?”

“Yes.”

“You were holding Peter there, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“In a jail cell…with bars and a lock on it?”

“It’s a holding cell,” Ducharme corrected.

“Had Peter been charged with any crime yet?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t actually charged with anything until the following morning, is that right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Where did he stay that night?”

“At the Grafton County Jail.”

“Detective, did you speak to my client at all?” Jordan asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“What did you ask him?”

The detective folded his arms. “If he wanted some coffee.”

“Did he take you up on the offer?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ask him at all about the incident at the school?”

“I asked him what had happened,” Ducharme said.

“How did Peter respond?”

The detective frowned. “He said he wanted his mother.”

“Did he start crying?”

“Yes.”

“In fact, he didn’t stop crying, not the whole time you tried to question him, isn’t that true?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Did you ask him any other questions, Detective?”

“No.”

Jordan stepped forward. “You didn’t bother to, because my client was in no shape to be going through an interview.”

“I didn’t ask him any more questions,” Ducharme said evenly. “I have no idea what kind of shape he was in.”

“So you took a kid-a seventeen-year-old kid, who was crying for his mother-back to your holding cell?”

“Yes. But I told him I wanted to help him.”

Jordan glanced at the jury and let that statement sink in for a moment. “What was Peter’s response?”

“He looked at me,” the detective answered, “and he said, ‘They started it.’”

Curtis Uppergate had been a forensic psychiatrist for twenty-five years. He held degrees from three Ivy League medical schools and had a CV thick enough to serve as a doorstop. He was lily-white, but wore his shoulder-length gray hair cornrowed, and had come to court in a dashiki. Diana nearly expected him to call her Sista when she questioned him.

“What’s your field of expertise, Doctor?”

“I work with violent teenagers. I assess them on behalf of the court to determine the nature of their mental illnesses, if any, and figure out an appropriate treatment plan. I also advise the court as to what their state of mind may have been at the time a crime has been committed. I worked with the FBI to create their profiles of school shooters, and to examine parallels between cases at Thurston High, Paducah, Rocori, and Columbine.”

“When did you first become involved in this case?”

“Last April.”

“Did you review Peter Houghton’s records?”

“Yes,” Uppergate said. “I reviewed all the records I received from you, Ms. Leven-extensive school and medical records, police reports, interviews done by Detective Ducharme.”

“What, in particular, were you looking for?”

“Evidence of mental illness,” he said. “Physical explanations for the behavior. A psychosocial construct that might resemble those of other perpetrators of school violence.”

Diana glanced at the jury; their eyes were glazing over. “As a result of your work, did you reach any conclusion with a reasonable degree of medical certainty as to Peter Houghton’s mental state on March 6, 2007?”

“Yes,” Uppergate said, and he faced the jury, speaking slowly and clearly. “Peter Houghton was not suffering from any mental illness at the time he started shooting at Sterling High School.”

“Can you tell us how you reached that conclusion?”

“The definition of sanity implies being in touch with the reality of what you are doing at the time you do it. There’s evidence that Peter had been planning this attack for a while-from stockpiling ammunition and guns, to making lists of targeted victims, to rehearsing his Armageddon through a self-designed video game. The shooting was not a departure for Peter-it was something he had been considering all along, with great premeditation.”

“Are there other examples of Peter’s premeditation?”

“When he first reached the school and saw a friend in the parking lot, he tried to warn him off, for safety. He lit a pipe bomb in a car before going into the school, to serve as a diversion so that he could enter unimpeded with his guns. He concealed weapons that were preloaded. He targeted areas in the school where he himself had been victimized. These are not the acts of someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing-they’re the hallmarks of a rational, angry-perhaps suffering, but certainly not delusional-young man.”

Diana paced in front of the witness stand. “Doctor, were you able to compare information from past school shootings to this one, in order to support your conclusion that the defendant was sane and responsible for his actions?”

Uppergate flipped his braids over his shoulder. “None of the shooters from Columbine, Paducah, Thurston, or Rocori had status. It’s not that they’re loners, but in their minds, they perceive that they are not members of the group to the same degree as anyone else in that group. Peter was on the soccer team, for example, but was one of two students never put in to play. He was bright, but his grades didn’t reflect that. He had a romantic interest, but that interest went unreturned. The only venue where he did feel comfortable was in a world of his own creation-computer games where Peter was not only comfortable…he was God.”