Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

The locker room was a rectangle. The door that led into it, from the gym, was in the middle of one long wall. A wooden bench sat directly opposite, and a line of metal lockers. In the far left corner of the locker room was a small doorway that opened into a communal shower stall. In this corner, Matt’s body had been found, with Josie lying beside him; thirty feet away in the far right corner of the locker room, Peter had been crouching. The blue backpack had fallen just to the left of the doorway.

If Patrick believed Josie, then Peter had come running into the locker room, where Josie and Matt had gone to hide. Presumably, he was holding Gun A. He dropped his backpack, and Matt-who would have been standing in the middle of the room, close enough to reach it-grabbed Gun B. Matt shot at Peter-the bullet that had never been found, the one that proved Gun B was fired at all-and missed. When he tried to shoot again, the gun jammed. At that moment, Peter shot him, twice.

The problem was, Matt’s body had been found at least fifteen feet away from the backpack where he’d grabbed the gun.

Why would Matt have backed up, and then shot at Peter? It didn’t make sense. It was possible that Peter’s shots had sent Matt’s body recoiling, but basic physics told Patrick that a shot fired from where Peter was standing would still not have landed Matt where he’d been found. In addition, there had been no blood-spatter pattern to suggest that Matt had been standing anywhere near the backpack when he was hit by Peter. He’d pretty much dropped where he’d been shot.

Patrick walked toward the wall where he’d apprehended Peter. He started at the upper corner and methodically ran his fingers over every divot and niche, over the edges of the lockers and inside them, around the bend of the perpendicular walls. He crawled beneath the wooden bench and scrutinized the underside. He held his flashlight up to the ceiling. In such close quarters, any bullet fired by Matt should have made enough serious damage to be noticeable, and yet, there was absolutely no evidence that any gun had been fired-successfully-in Peter’s direction.

Patrick walked to the opposite corner of the locker room. There was still a dark bloodstain on the floor, and a dried boot print. He stepped over the stain and into the shower stall, repeating the same meticulous investigation of the tiled wall that would have been behind Matt.

If he found that missing bullet here, where Matt’s body had been found, then Matt clearly hadn’t been the one to fire Gun B-it would have been Peter wielding that weapon, as well as Gun A. Or in other words: Josie would have been lying to Jordan McAfee.

It was easy work, because the tile was white, pristine. There were no cracks or flakes, no chips, nothing that would suggest a bullet had gone through Matt’s stomach and struck the shower wall.

Patrick turned around, looking in places that didn’t make sense: the top of the shower, the ceiling, the drain. He took off his shoes and socks and shuffled along the shower floor.

It was when he’d just scraped his little toe along the line of the drain that he felt it.

Patrick got down on his hands and knees and felt along the edge of the metal. There was a long, raw scuff on the tile that bordered the drainage grate. It would have easily gone unnoticed because of its location-techs who saw it had probably assumed it was grout. He rubbed it with his finger and then peered with a flashlight into the drain. If the bullet had slipped through, it was long gone-and yet, the drainage holes were tiny enough that this shouldn’t have been possible.

Opening a locker, Patrick ripped a tiny square of mirror off with his hands and set it face-up on the floor of the shower, just where the scuff mark was. Then he turned off the lights and took out a laser pointer. He stood where Peter had been apprehended and pointed the beam at the mirror, watched it bounce onto the far wall of the showers, where no bullet had left a mark.

Circling around, he continued to point the beam until it ricocheted up-right through the center of a small window that served as ventilation. He knelt, marking the spot where he stood with a pencil from his pocket. Then he dug out his cell phone. “Diana,” he said when the prosecutor answered. “Don’t let that trial start tomorrow.”

“I know it’s unusual,” Diana said in court the next morning, “and that we have a jury sitting here, but I have to ask for a recess until my detective gets here. He’s investigating something new on the case…possibly something exculpatory.”

“Have you called him?” Judge Wagner asked.

“Several times.” Patrick was not answering his phone. If he was, then she could have told him directly how much she wanted to kill him.

“I have to object, Your Honor,” Jordan said. “We’re ready to go forward. I’m sure that Ms. Leven will give me that exculpatory information, if and when it ever arrives, but I’m willing at this point to take my chances. And since we’re all here at the bench, I’d like to add that I have a witness who’s prepared to testify right now.”

“What witness?” Diana said. “You don’t have anyone else to call.”

He smiled at her. “Judge Cormier’s daughter.”

Alex sat outside the courtroom, holding tight to Josie’s hand. “This is going to be over before you know it.”

The great irony here, Alex knew, was that months ago when she’d fought so hard to be the judge on this case, it was because she felt more at ease offering legal comfort to her daughter than emotional comfort. Well, here she was, and Josie was about to testify in the arena Alex knew better than anyone else, and she still didn’t have any grand judicial advice that could help her.

It would be scary. It would be painful. And all Alex could do was watch her suffer.

A bailiff came out to them. “Judge,” he said. “If your daughter’s ready?”

Alex squeezed Josie’s hand. “Just tell them what you know,” she said, and she stood up to take a seat in the courtroom.

“Mom?” Josie called after her, and Alex turned. “What if what you know isn’t what people want to hear?”

Alex tried to smile. “Tell the truth,” she said. “You can’t lose.”

To comply with discovery rules, Jordan handed Diana a synopsis of Josie’s testimony as she was walking up to the stand. “When did you get this?” the prosecutor whispered.

“This weekend. Sorry,” he said, although he really wasn’t. He walked toward Josie, who looked small and pale. Her hair had been gathered into a neat ponytail, and her hands were folded in her lap. She was studiously avoiding anyone’s gaze by focusing on the grain of the wood on the rail of the witness stand.

“Can you state your name?”

“Josie Cormier.”

“Where do you live, Josie?”

“45 East Prescott Street, in Sterling.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m seventeen,” she said.

Jordan took a step closer, so that only she would be able to hear him. “See?” he murmured. “Piece of cake.” He winked at her, and he thought she might even have smiled back the tiniest bit.

“Where were you on the morning of March 6, 2007?”

“I was at school.”

“What class did you have first period?”

“English,” Josie said softly.

“What about second period?”

“Math.”

“Third period?”

“I had a study.”

“Where did you spend it?”

“With my boyfriend,” she said. “Matt Royston.” She looked sideways, blinking too fast.

“Where were you and Matt during third period?”

“We left the cafeteria. We were going to his locker, before the next class.”

“What happened then?”

Josie looked into her lap. “There was a lot of noise. And people started running. People were screaming about guns, about someone with a gun. A friend of ours, Drew Girard, told us it was Peter.”