Defending Jacob(76)

As the trial approached, I felt a familiar battlefield euphoria. It never crossed my mind that we would lose. I was energized, optimistic, confident, pugnacious. All of it in hindsight seems strangely disconnected from reality. But it is not so strange, if you think about it. Treat a man like an anvil and he will long to hit back.


The trial began in mid-October 2007, at the height of leaf season. Soon the trees would release their leaves all at once, but for the moment the foliage was in its final brilliant efflorescence of red, orange, and mustard.

On the eve of the trial, a Tuesday night, the air was unseasonably warm. The overnight temperature did not fall much below sixty degrees, and the air was dense, humid, agitated. I woke up in the middle of the night, sensing something wrong in the atmosphere, as I always do when Laurie cannot sleep.

She was lying on her side, up on one elbow, head propped in her hand.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered to her.

“Listen.”

“To what?”

“Sh. Just wait, listen.”

Outside, the night rustled.

There was a loud screech. It began as an animal’s yelp then quickly rose into a piercing high-pitched shriek, like the screel of a train’s brakes.

“What on earth is that?” she said.

“I don’t know. A cat? A bird maybe? Something is killing it.”

“What would be killing a cat?”

“A fox, a coyote. Raccoon, maybe.”

“It’s like we live in the woods, all of a sudden. This is the city! I’ve lived here all my life. We never had foxes and coyotes. And those huge wild turkeys we get in the yard? We never had any of that.”

“There’s a lot of new development. The town’s getting built up. Their natural habitats are disappearing. They’re getting flushed out into the open.”

“Listen to that sound, Andy. I can’t even tell what direction it’s coming from or how far away it is. It’s like it’s right next to us. It must be one of the neighbors’ cats.”

We listened. It came again. This time the dying animal’s screeches definitely sounded like a cat. The cry began recognizably as a cat’s mewling before the wild, electrified shrieks began.

“Why is it taking so long?”

“Maybe it’s toying with its prey. Cats do that with mice, I know.”

“It’s awful.”

“It’s nature.”

“To be cruel? To torture your prey before you kill it? How is that natural? What evolutionary advantage does cruelty give?”

“I don’t know, Laurie. It’s just the way it is. Whatever would attack a cat like that—some starving coyote or wild dog or whatever—I’m sure it’s desperate. It can’t be easy to hunt around here.”

“If he’s desperate, then he should kill it and eat it already.”

“Why don’t we try to get some sleep. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

“How can I sleep with that?”

“You want one of my Ambien?”

“No. They knock me out all the next morning. I want to be alert tomorrow. I don’t know how you take those things.”

“Are you kidding? I eat them like Tic Tacs. They don’t knock me out enough.”

“I don’t need pills, Andy. I just want that sound to stop.”

“Come on, lie down.”

She let her head down. I folded my body against her back, and she seated herself against me.

“You’re just nervous, Laurie. It’s understandable.”

“I don’t know if I can do this, Andy. Really, I don’t have the strength.”

“We’ll get through it.”

“It’s easier for you. You’ve seen the whole process before. And you’re not a mother. Not that this is easy for you. I know it’s not. But it’s different for me. I just can’t do it. I’m not going to make it.”

“I wish I could make it go away for you, Laurie, but I can’t.”

“No. This helps, anyway, what you’re doing now. We’ll just lie here. It has to stop soon.”

The shrieks went on for another fifteen minutes or so. Neither of us slept much even after they stopped.


When we emerged from our house at eight o’clock the next morning, a Fox 25 news van idled across the street, smoke wisping from the tailpipe. A cameraman filmed us as we walked to the car. He was faceless behind his shoulder-held camera. Or rather, the camera was his face, his one-eyed insect head.

Outside the courthouse in Cambridge, we made our way to the front entrance on Thorndike Street, where reporters swarmed. Again they bumbled against one another as we came up the block. Again the cameras jostled for a clear shot, again the microphones probed the air in front of us. The crush of reporters was much easier to deal with this time, having been through it once before at the arraignment. Jacob’s presence excited them most, but I was oddly thankful that Jacob had to run this gauntlet. I had a theory that it was always better for a defendant to be bailed and out on the street than to be held in the pretrial lockup, as most of my own murder defendants had been. Defendants who did not make bail seemed to leave the building only one way, via the prisoners’ exit—heading for Concord, not home. Those prisoner-defendants moved down through the courthouse, like meat through a grinder or like the steel balls that bounce down a pachinko machine: from the jail on the top floors, down through the various courtrooms, finally out through the basement-level garage, where the sheriff’s vans carted them off to the various prisons. Better that Jacob walk in through the front door, better that he retain his freedom and dignity as long as possible. Once this building caught you in its gears, it did not like to let go.