Defending Jacob(95)

Witness: Yes. A little later. But she was very upset at that moment. You have no idea what this sort of pressure is like.

Mr. Logiudice: What about you? Weren’t you upset too?

Witness: Of course I was. I was terrified.

Mr. Logiudice: Terrified because you were finally beginning to consider the possibility Jacob might be guilty?

Witness: No, terrified because the jury might convict him whether he was actually guilty or not.

Mr. Logiudice: It still hadn’t crossed your mind that Jacob might actually have done it?

Witness: No.

Mr. Logiudice: Not once? Not for a single second?

Witness: Not once.

Mr. Logiudice: “Confirmation bias,” is that it, Andy?

Witness: Fuck you, Neal. Heartless prick.

Mr. Logiudice: Don’t lose your temper.

Witness: You’ve never seen me lose my temper.

Mr. Logiudice: No. I can just imagine.

[The witness did not respond.]

Mr. Logiudice: All right, let’s continue.





30 | The Third Rail


Trial day four.

Paul Duffy on the stand. He wore a blue blazer, rep tie, and gray flannel pants, which was about as formal as he ever managed to dress. Like Jonathan, he was one of those men it is easy to imagine as boys, men whose appearance almost forces you to see the boy inside. It was nothing particular about his physical features, but a boyish quality in his manner. Maybe it was just the effect of my long friendship with him. To me, Paul remained twenty-seven years old forever, his age when I met him.

For Logiudice, of course, that friendship made Duffy a slippery witness. At the start, Logiudice’s manner was tentative, his questions overly cautious. If he had asked, I could have told him that Paul Duffy was not going to lie, even for me. It just wasn’t in him. (I would have told him also to put down his ridiculous yellow pad. He looked like a goddamn amateur.)

“Would you state your name for the record, please?”

“Paul Michael Duffy.”

“What do you do for work?”

“I’m a lieutenant detective with the Massachusetts State Police.”

“How long have you been employed by the state police?”

“Twenty-six years.”

“And what is your current assignment?”

“I am in a public relations unit.”

“Directing your attention to April 12, 2007, what was your assignment on that date?”

“I was in charge of a special unit of detectives assigned to the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office. The unit is called CPAC, for Crime Prevention and Control. It consists of fifteen to twenty detectives at any given time, all with the special training and experience required to assist the ADAs and local departments in the investigation and prosecution of complex cases of various kinds, particularly homicides.” Duffy recited this little speech in a drone, from rote memory.

“And had you participated in many homicide investigations prior to April 12, 2007?”

“Yes.”

“Approximately how many?”

“Over a hundred, though I was not in charge of all of them.”

“Okay, on April 12, 2007, did you receive a phone call about a murder in Newton?”

“Yes. Around nine-fifteen A.M. I got a call from a Lieutenant Foley in Newton informing me there had been a homicide involving a child in Cold Spring Park.”

“And what was the first thing you did?”

“I called the district attorney’s office to inform them.”

“Is that standard procedure?”

“Yes. The local department is required by law to inform the state police of all homicides or unnatural deaths, then we inform the DA immediately.”

“Who specifically did you call?”

“Andy Barber.”

“Why Andy Barber?”

“He was the First Assistant, which means he was the second in command to the district attorney herself.”

“What was your understanding about what Mr. Barber would do with that information?”

“He would assign an ADA to run the investigation for their office.”

“Might he keep the case for himself?”

“He might. He handled a lot of homicides himself.”

“Did you have any expectations that morning as to whether Mr. Barber would keep the case for himself?”

Jonathan lifted his butt six inches from his chair. “Objection.”

“Overruled.”

“Detective Duffy, what did you think Mr. Barber would do with the case at that point?”

“I did not know. I suppose I figured he might keep it. It looked like it might be a big case right from the get-go. He kept those sorts of cases a lot. But if he put someone else on it, that would not have surprised me either. There were other good people there besides Mr. Barber. To be honest, I did not really think about it much. I had my own job to do. I let him worry about the DA’s office. My job was to run CPAC.”

“Do you know whether the district attorney, Lynn Canavan, was informed right away?”

“I don’t know. I presume so.”

“All right, after telephoning Mr. Barber, what did you do next?”

“I went to the location.”

“What time did you arrive there?”