Defending Jacob(29)

“I can’t be with my family, Andy, that’s the f*cking point! My family is dead.”

“Okay.” I looked down at the ground, at his white sneakers spattered with mud and pine needles.

“I’ll tell you something,” Rifkin added. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me now. I could become a … a drug addict or a thief or a bum. It just doesn’t matter what happens to me from here. Why should it? Why should I care?”

He said this with a bitter snarl.

“Call your office, Andy.” A beat. “Go on, call. It’s over. You’re out.”

I took out my cell phone and called Lynn Canavan directly on her cell. It rang three times. I could imagine her reading the caller ID window, preparing herself to answer.

“I’m at the office,” she said. “Why don’t you come down here right away.”

I told her, as Rifkin looked on with satisfaction, that if she had something to say, she could say it right then and save me the trip.

“No,” she insisted. “Come to the office, Andy. I want to talk to you face-to-face.”

I snapped the phone shut. I wanted to say something to Rifkin, good-bye or good luck or some valedictory bullshit, who knew what? Something told me he was right and this was good-bye. But he did not want to hear it. His posture announced as much. He had already assigned me a villain’s role. Probably he knew more than I did, anyway.

I left him on that green field and drove across the river to Cambridge in a defeated reverie. I was resigned to the fact that I would be removed from the case; it simply did not make sense that Rifkin would have come up with that on his own. Somebody had tipped him off, probably Logiudice, whose Iago whispers in the district attorney’s ear had finally won the day. Okay, then. I would be removed for a conflict of interest, a technicality. I had been outmaneuvered, that was all. It was office politics, and I was an apolitical guy, always had been. So Logiudice would have his high-profile case, and I would move on to the next file, the next body, the next case to enter the funnel. I still believed all this, foolish or delusional or rationalizing as I was. I still did not see what was coming. There was so little evidence pointing to Jacob—a schoolgirl with a secret, some kids gossiping on Facebook, even the knife. As evidence these were nothing. Any semicompetent defense lawyer would swipe them aside like cobwebs.

At the courthouse, there were no fewer than four plainclothes troopers waiting at the front door to meet me. I recognized them all as CPAC guys but I knew only one very well, a detective named Moynihan. They escorted me like a Praetorian guard through the courthouse lobby to the district attorney’s office, then through cubicles and hallways abandoned on a Sunday morning, to Lynn Canavan’s corner office.

There were three people there, seated at the conference table, Canavan, Logiudice, and a press guy named Larry Siff, whose constant presence at Canavan’s side for the past year or so had been a discouraging sign of the permanent campaign. I had no beef with Siff personally, but I despised his intrusion into a sacred process to which I had devoted my life. Most of the time he did not even have to speak; his mere presence ensured that political implications would be considered.

District Attorney Canavan said, “Sit down, Andy.”

“Did you really think you needed all this, Lynn? What did you think I was going to do? Jump out the window?”

“It’s for your own good. You know how it goes.”

“How what goes? I feel like I’m under arrest.”

“No. We just have to be careful. People get upset. They react unpredictably. We don’t want any scenes. You’d have done the same thing.”

“Not true.” I sat down. “So what am I going to be upset about?”

“Andy,” she said, “we have some bad news. On the Rifkin case? The print on the victim’s sweatshirt? It’s your son Jacob’s.” She slid a stapled report toward me.

I scanned the report. It was from the State Police Crime Lab. The report identified a dozen points of comparison between the latent found at the murder scene and one of the knowns on Jacob’s print card, much more than the standard eight required for a positive match. It was the right thumb: Jacob had reached out and grabbed the victim by his unzipped sweatshirt, leaving the print on that inside tag.

I said, bewildered, “I’m sure there’s some explanation.”

“I’m sure there is.”

“They go to the same school. Jacob is in his class. They knew each other.”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t mean—”

“We know, Andy.”

They looked at me with pity. All except for the younger troopers, now standing by the window, who did not know me and could still despise me as they would any other bad guy.

“We’re putting you on paid leave. It’s partly my fault: it was a mistake to let you have the case in the first place. These guys”—she gestured toward the troopers—“will go to your office with you. You can take your personal belongings. No papers, no files. You’re not to touch the computer. Your work product belongs to the office.”

“Who’s taking the case?”

“Neal is.”

I smiled. Of course he is.

“Andy, do you object to Neal trying the case for some reason?”

“Does it matter what I think, Lynn?”