“Jacob, I don’t know if you’ve been listening to yourself the last few minutes. You cannot take the stand.”
“Then what’s my defense?”
Jonathan said, “We don’t have to present a defense. We have no burden. The burden is entirely on the prosecution. We’re going to attack their case at every turn, Jacob, until there’s nothing left of it. That’s our defense.”
“Dad?”
I hesitated. “I’m not sure it’s going to be enough, Jonathan. We can’t just throw a few spitballs at Logiudice’s case. He has the thumbprint, he has the witness who puts a knife in Jacob’s hand. We’re going to have to do more. We have to give those jurors something.”
“So what do you suggest I do, Andy?”
“I just think maybe we need to consider presenting a real, affirmative defense.”
“Love to. What do you have in mind? As far as I can see, all the evidence points one way.”
“What about Patz? The jury should at least hear about him. Give them the real killer.”
“The real killer? Oh, my. How do we prove that?”
“We’ll hire a detective to dig into it.”
“Dig into what? Patz? There’s nothing there. When you were in the DA’s office, you had the state police, every local police department, the FBI, CIA, KGB, NASA.”
“We always had less resources than you defense guys imagined.”
“Maybe. But you had more than you have now, and you never found anything. What’s a private detective going to do that a dozen state police detectives couldn’t?”
I had no answer.
“Andy, look, I know you understand that the defense has no burden of proof. You know it, but I’m not entirely sure you believe it. This is how the game is played from the other side. We don’t get to pick our clients, we don’t get to just drop a case if the evidence isn’t there. So this is our case.” He gestured toward the papers in front of him. “We play the cards we’re dealt. We have no choice.”
“Then we have to find some new cards.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Up our sleeves.”
“I note,” Jonathan drawled, “that you are wearing a short-sleeve shirt.”
15
At the Starbucks in Newton Centre, Sarah Groehl had plugged herself into a MacBook. Seeing me, she disengaged herself from the computer, canting her head left then right to remove her earphones, just as women do when they take off earrings. She looked at me sleepily, blinking, rousing herself from a Web-trance.
“Hi, Sarah. Am I disturbing you?”
“No, I was just… I don’t know.”
“Can I talk to you?”
“About what?
I gave her a look: Come on. “We can go somewhere else if you want.”
She did not immediately answer. The tables were crowded together, and people pretended not to be listening, obeying the etiquette of coffee shops. But the ordinary awkwardness of having a conversation within others’ hearing was multiplied by my family’s infamy and by Sarah’s own awkwardness. She was embarrassed to be seen with me. She may have been afraid of me too, after all she had heard. With so much to consider, she seemed unable to answer. I suggested we sit on the park bench across the street, where I figured she would feel safe in the sight of others yet out of hearing range, and she made a sweeping motion with her head to swing her bangs off her forehead, away from her eyes, and said okay.
“Can I buy you another coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
We sat side by side on the green-slatted bench across the street. Sarah held herself royally erect. She was not fat, but she was not thin enough for the tight T-shirt she wore. A little roll of flesh blossomed over her shorts-a “muffin top,” the kids called it without embarrassment. I thought she might be a nice girl for Jacob when all this was over.
I held my Starbucks paper cup. I’d lost interest in it but there was no place to dump it now. I turned it in my hands.
“Sarah, I’m trying to find out what really happened to Ben Rifkin. I need to find the guy who really did this.”
She gave me a skeptical sidelong gaze. “What do you mean, ‘the guy who really did this’?”
“Jacob didn’t do it. They have the wrong guy.”
“I thought that wasn’t your job anymore. You’re playing detective?”
“It’s my job as a father now.”
“O — kay.” She smirked and shook her head.
“Does that sound crazy, to say he’s innocent?”
“No. I guess not.”
“I think maybe you know Jacob is innocent too. The things you said…”
“I never said that.”
“Sarah, you know we adults don’t really have any idea what’s going on in your lives. How could we? But somebody has to open up to us a little bit. Some of you kids have to help.”
“We have.”
“Not enough. Don’t you see, Sarah? A friend of yours is going to go to prison for a murder he didn’t commit.”
“How do I know he didn’t commit it? Isn’t that, like, the whole thing? It’s like, how would anyone know that? Including you.”
“Well, do you think he’s guilty?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you have doubts.”
“I just said, I don’t know.”
“I do know, Sarah. Okay? I’ve been doing this for a long time and I know: Jacob did not do it. I promise you. He didn’t do it. He’s completely innocent.”
“Of course you think that. You’re his father.”
“I am, it’s true. But I’m not just his father. There’s evidence, Sarah. You haven’t seen it but I have.”
She looked at me with a beneficent little smile, and briefly she was the adult and I was a foolish child. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Mr. Barber. What do I know? It’s not like I was tight with either one of them, Jacob or Ben.”
“Sarah, you were the one who told me to look on Facebook.”
“I did not.”
“Okay, well, let’s just say if- if you were the one who told me to look on Facebook. Why did you do that? What did you want me to find?”
“Okay, I’m not saying it was me that told you anything, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Because I don’t want to be, like, involved, okay?”
“Okay.”
“It was just, you know, there were these rumors going around and I thought you should know what kids were saying. ’Cause nobody seemed to know, you know? Like, nobody who was in charge. No offense, but you all seemed
