his shoulder.
Guiltily he laid his hands flat on his lap, where he had gone back to picking the raw skin on his right thumb and had managed to pry up a new sliver.
Directly behind me, Laurie sat alone on the front bench. She sat alone every day of the trial. We were friendless in Newton, of course. I wanted to enlist Laurie’s parents to sit with her in the courtroom. I am sure they would have done it. But Laurie would not allow it. She was being a bit of a martyr here. She had brought down catastrophe on her own family by marrying into mine; now she was determined to pay the price alone. In court, people tended to leave a foot or so on either side of her. Whenever I turned, she was alone in that zone of isolation on the bench, distracted, her arms half folded, her chin resting in one hand, listening, looking down at the floor rather than at the witness. The night before, Laurie had been so shaken by Dr. Vogel’s diagnosis that she begged one of my Ambiens and still could not sleep. Lying in bed in the dark, she said, “If he is guilty, Andy, what do we do?” I told her there was nothing to do at the moment but wait until the jury decided if he was guilty or not. I tried to snuggle with her to comfort her, which seemed like the husbandly thing to do, but my touch rattled her even more and she wriggled away from me to the very edge of the bed, where she lay as still as she could but quite obviously awake, her sniffles and little movements betraying her. Back in her teaching days, Laurie had been (to me) a miraculous sleeper. She turned off the light as early as nine o’clock because she had to wake up so early, and she was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. But that was another Laurie.
Meanwhile, in the courtroom Logiudice apparently had decided to ride it out to the end with this witness, even as she gave every sign of imploding. It is hard to justify Logiudice’s decision in strategic terms, so I imagine he just wanted to prevent Jonathan from having the honor of eliciting her final recantation. Or maybe he still hoped, desperately, that she would come around in the end. But he would not give up, the stubborn bastard. It was actually sort of noble, in a weird way, like a captain going down with his ship or a monk dousing himself with gasoline and setting himself on fire. By the time Logiudice got to his last question-he had scripted the whole examination on his yellow legal pad and stuck to the script even as the witness improvised freely-Jonathan had put down his pen and was watching through his fingers.
Question: “Is the boy you saw in Cold Spring Park that morning sitting here in the courtroom today?”
Answer: “I can’t be sure.”
“Well, do you see a boy matching the description you gave of the boy from the park?”
Answer: “I don’t-I’m really not sure anymore. It was a kid. That’s all I know for sure. It was a long time ago. The more I think about it, I just don’t want to say. I don’t want to send some kid to prison for life if there’s a chance I might be wrong. I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.”
Judge French blew out a long, droll sigh. He arched his eyebrows and removed his glasses. “Mr. Klein, I take it you have no questions?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Things did not improve much for Logiudice the rest of that day. He had organized his witnesses into logical groups, and today was devoted to the civilian witnesses. They were passersby. None had seen anything especially damning from Jacob’s point of view. But then, it was a weak case, and Logiudice was right to throw everything he had into the pot. So we heard from two more people, a man and a woman, who each testified they saw Jacob in the park, albeit not near the murder scene. Another witness saw a figure running from the general area of the murder. She could not say anything about this person’s age or identity, but the clothes roughly matched what Jacob was wearing that day, even if jeans and a light jacket were not exactly a distinctive uniform, especially in a park filled with kids walking to school.
Logiudice did end on a harrowing note. His last witness was a man named Sam Studnitzer who was walking his dog through the park that morning. Studnitzer had a very short haircut, narrow shoulders, a gentle manner.
“Where were you going?” Logiudice asked.
“There is a field where dogs can run around off the leash. I take my dog most mornings.”
“What kind of dog is he?”
“A black Lab. His name is Bo.”
“What time was it?”
“Around eight-twenty. I’m usually earlier.”
“Where in the park were you and Bo?”
“We were on one of the paths through the woods. The dog had gone on ahead, sniffing around.”
“And what happened?”
Studnitzer hesitated.
The Rifkins were in the courtroom, on the front bench behind the prosecution table.
“I heard a little boy’s voice.”
“What did the little boy say?”
“He said, ‘Stop, you’re hurting me.’ ”
“Did he say anything else?”
Studnitzer slumped, frowned. Quietly: “No.”
“Just ‘Stop, you’re hurting me’?”
Studnitzer did not answer, but clamped fingers over his temples, covering his eyes.
Logiudice waited.
The courtroom was so dead quiet, Studnitzer’s sniffly breathing was clearly audible. He took his hand away from his face. “No. That’s all I heard.”
“Did you see anyone else around you?”
“No. I couldn’t see very far. The sight lines are limited. That part of the park is hilly. The trees grow thick. We were coming down a little slope. I couldn’t see anyone.”
“Could you tell which direction the cry came from?”
“No.”
“Did you look around, did you investigate? Did you try to help the little boy in any way?”
“No. I didn’t know. I thought it was just kids. I didn’t know. I didn’t think anything of it. There are so many kids in that park every morning, laughing, fooling around. It sounded like just… roughhousing.” His eyes fell.
“What did the boy’s voice sound like?”
“Like he was hurt. He was in pain.”
“Were there any other sounds after the cry? Pushing, sounds of a struggle, anything at all?”
“No. I didn’t hear anything like that.”
“What happened next?”
“The dog was alert, hyper, strange. I didn’t know what his problem was. I kind of pushed him along, and we kept on walking through the park.”
“Did you see anyone as you were walking?”
“No.”
“Did you observe anything else unusual that morning?”
“No, not until after, when I heard the sirens and cops started streaming into the park. That’s when I found out what happened.”
Logiudice sat down.
Everyone in the courtroom was hearing those words in a loop in their heads: Stop, you’re hurting me. Stop, you’re hurting me. I have not gotten them out of my head yet. I doubt I ever will. But the truth is, even this detail did not point to Jacob.
To underscore that fact, Jonathan stood up on cross to ask a single perfunctory question: “Mr. Studnitzer, you never saw this boy, Jacob Barber, in the park that morning, did you?”
“No.”
Jonathan took a moment to shake his head in front of the jury and say, “Terrible, terrible,” to demonstrate that we too were on the side of the angels.
There it stood. Despite everything-Dr. Vogel’s awful diagnosis and Laurie’s shell shock and the hauntingly ordinary words of the boy as he was stabbed-after three days we were still up, way up. If this were a Little League game, we might be talking about the mercy rule. As it turned out, it was our last good day. Mr. Logiudice: Let me stop you there for just a moment. I understand your wife was upset. Witness: We were all upset. Mr. Logiudice: But
