Defending Jacob(16)

At two o’clock, Paul and I commandeered the principal’s office and together we interviewed the highest-priority witnesses: the victim’s close friends, a few kids who were known to walk to school through Cold Spring Park, and those who specifically requested to speak with the investigators. Two dozen interviews were scheduled for the two of us. Other CPAC detectives would conduct interviews at the same time. Most we expected to be brief and yield nothing. We were trawling, dragging our net along the sea bottom, hoping.

But something odd happened. After just three or four interviews, Paul and I had the distinct impression we were being stonewalled. At first we thought we were seeing the usual repertoire of adolescent tics and evasions, the shrugs and y’knows and whatevers, the wandering eyes. We were both fathers. We knew that walling out adults was what all teenagers did; it was the whole point of these behaviors. In itself, there was nothing suspicious about it. But as the interviews went on, we realized something more brazen and purposeful was going on. The kids’ answers went too far. They were not content to say they knew nothing about the murder; they denied even knowing the victim. Ben Rifkin seemed to have had no friends at all, only acquaintances. Other kids never spoke to him, had no idea who did. These were transparent lies. Ben had not been unpopular. We already knew who most of Ben’s friends were. It was a betrayal, I thought, for his buddies to disown him so quickly and completely.

Worse, the eighth-graders at the McCormick were not especially competent liars. Some of them, the more shameless ones, seemed to believe that the way to pass off a lie convincingly was to oversell it. So, when they got ready to tell a particularly tall one, they would stop all the foot-shuffling and y’knows, and deliver the lie with maximum conviction. It was as if they had read a manual on behaviors associated with honesty—eye contact! firm voice!—and were determined to display them all at once, like peacocks fanning their tail feathers. The effect was to reverse the behavior patterns you might expect to see in adults—the teens seemed evasive when honest and direct when lying—but their shifting manner set off alarm bells just the same. The other kids, the majority, were too self-conscious to begin with and lying only made them more so. They were tentative. The truth inside them made them squirm. This obviously did not work either. I could have told them, of course, that a virtuoso liar slips the false statement in among the true ones without a flutter of any kind, like a magician slipping the bent card into the middle of the deck. I have had an education in virtuosic lying, believe me.

Paul and I began to exchange suspicious glances. The pace of the interviews slowed as we challenged some of the more obvious lies. Between interviews, Paul joked about a code of silence. “These kids are like Sicilians,” he said. Neither of us said what we were truly thinking. There is a plummeting feeling, as if the floor has fallen away beneath you. It is the happy vertigo you feel when a case opens up and lets you in.

Apparently we had been wrong—there was no other way to say it. We had considered the possibility that a fellow student was involved, but we had discounted it. There was no evidence pointing that way. No sullen outcasts among the students, no sloppy schoolboy trail of evidence to follow. Nor was there an apparent motive: no grandiose adolescent fantasies of outlaw glory, no damaged, bullied kids out for revenge, no petty classroom feud. Nothing. Now, neither of us had to say it. That vertiginous feeling was the thought: these kids knew something.

A girl sloped into the office and dropped into the chair opposite us, then, with great effort, she refused to acknowledge us.

“Sarah Groehl?” Paul said.

“Yes.”

“I’m Lieutenant Detective Paul Duffy. I’m with the state police. This here is Andrew Barber. He’s the assistant district attorney in charge of this case.”

“I know.” She looked up at me finally. “You’re Jacob Barber’s dad.”

“Yes. You’re the sweatshirt girl. From this morning.”

She smiled shyly.

“Sorry, I should have remembered you. I’m having a tough day, Sarah.”

“Yeah, why’s that?”

“Nobody wants to talk to us. Now, why is that, you have any idea?”

“You’re cops.”

“That’s it?”

“Sure.” She made a face: Duh!

I waited a moment, hoping for more. The girl returned a look of exquisite boredom.

“Are you a friend of Jacob’s?”

She looked down, considered, shrugged. “I guess so.”

“How come I haven’t heard your name?”

“Ask Jacob.”

“He doesn’t tell me anything. I have to ask you.”

“We know each other. We’re not, like, friends, Jacob and me. We just know each other.”

“How about Ben Rifkin? Did you know him?”

“Same. I knew him but I didn’t really know him.”

“Did you like him?”

“He was okay.”

“Just okay?”

“He was a good kid, I guess. Like I said, we weren’t really close.”

“Okay. So I’ll stop asking stupid questions. Why don’t you just tell us, Sarah? Anything at all that might help us, anything you think we ought to know.”

She shifted in her seat. “I don’t really know what you—I don’t know what to tell you.”