Defending Jacob (23 page)

“So why would he be violent with Ben Rifkin if he met him in the park?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But I know Lenny had a knife and he took it with him when he thought he might be meeting people, because he said sometimes, you know, if you’re like a fag and you go up to the wrong guy, it can be bad.”

“You saw the knife?”

“Yeah, he had it with him the day I met him.”

“What did it look like?”

“Just, I don’t know, it was a knife.”

“Like a kitchen knife?”

“No, more like a fighting knife, I guess. It had, like, teeth. I almost took it from him. It was pretty cool.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell anyone about this? You knew that kid got murdered.”

“I’m on probation too. I couldn’t really tell anyone I was, like, getting money out of him or, like, that I lied about him grabbing me in the library. That’s like a crime.”

“Stop saying ‘like.’ It’s not
like
a crime. It
is
a crime.”

“Right. Exactly.”

“Matt, how long were you going to go before you told anyone this? Were you going to let my son get convicted of a murder he didn’t commit just so you wouldn’t have to be embarrassed you were letting some guy grab your nuts every week? Were you going to just keep your mouth shut while they sent my son off to Walpole?”

The kid did not answer.

The anger I felt was of an old, familiar kind now. A simple, righteous, soothing anger I knew like an old friend. I was not angry at this smart-ass punk. Life tends to punish fools like Matt Magrath anyway, sooner or later. No, I was angry at Patz himself, because he was a murderer—and the worst kind of murderer, a child murderer, a category for which cops and prosecutors reserve a special contempt.

“I figured no one would believe me. ’Cuz my whole problem was, like, I couldn’t tell about the kid that got killed because I already lied about the thing in the library. So if I told the truth, they were just going to say, ‘Well, you already lied once. Why should we believe you now?’ So what would be the point?”

He was right, of course. Matt Magrath was about as bad a witness as you could dream up. An admitted liar, no jury would ever trust him. The only trouble was, like the boy who cried wolf, he happened to be telling the truth this time.

F
acebook froze Jacob’s account, probably because of a subpoena compelling the production of everything he had ever posted. But with suicidal persistence, he opened a new Facebook account under the name “Marvin Glasscock” and began friending his inner circle again. He made no secret of this, and I roared about it. To my surprise, Laurie took Jacob’s side. “He’s all alone,” she said. “He needs
people
.” Everything Laurie did—everything she ever did—was to help her son. She insisted that Jacob was completely isolated now and his “online life” was such a necessary, integral, “natural” part of how kids socialize that it would be cruel to deny him even this minimal human contact. I reminded her that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts intended to deprive him of a hell of a lot more than that, and we agreed at least to place some limits on the new account. Jacob was not to change the password, which would deny us access and the ability to edit him; he was not to post anything that touched on the case even remotely; and he was strictly forbidden to post photos or video, which were impossible to keep from squirting around the Internet once they got loose and which could easily be misconstrued. Thus began a cat-and-mouse game in which an otherwise intelligent child endeavored to make jokes about his own situation in terms just vague enough that his father would not censor what he wrote.

I made it a part of my morning rounds on the Internet to check what Marvin Glasscock had written on Facebook the night before. Every morning: first stop Gmail, second Facebook. Then Google “Jacob Barber” for news of the case. Then, if all was clear, I would disappear down the rabbit hole of the Internet for a few minutes to forget the raging shit-storm I was standing in.

What I found most amazing about my son’s reincarnation on Facebook was that anyone was willing to “friend” him at all. In the real world, he had no friends. He was now utterly alone. No one ever called him or visited. He had been suspended from school and, come September, the town would be obliged to hire a tutor for him. The law required it. Laurie had been negotiating with the school department for weeks, haggling over how much in-home tutoring Jake was entitled to. In the meantime, he seemed to be utterly friendless. The same kids who were willing to link to Jacob online refused to acknowledge him in person. Granted, there were only a handful who accepted “Marvin Glasscock” into their online circle. Before the Rifkin murder, Jacob’s Facebook network—the number of kids who read Jacob’s dashed-off comments and whose comments Jacob followed in turn—numbered 474, mostly classmates, mostly kids I had never heard of. After the murder, he had only four, one of whom was Derek Yoo. I wonder if those four, or Jacob, ever quite understood that their every move online created a record, every keyboard click was recorded and stored on a server somewhere. Nothing they did on the Web—nothing—was private. And unlike a phone call, this was a written form of communication: they were generating a transcript of every conversation. The Web is a prosecutor’s fantasy, a monitoring and recording device that hears the most intimate, lurid secrets, even those never spoken out loud. It is better than a wire. It is a wire planted inside everyone’s head.

It was a matter of time, of course. Sooner or later, typing into his laptop late one night in the stoned-out bliss of Web surfing, Jacob would make a dumb-shit teenage slipup. It finally came in mid-August. Early on a Sunday morning I glanced at Marvin Glasscock’s Facebook page to find an image of Anthony Perkins in
Psycho
, the famous silhouetted figure with a knife raised over his shoulder to stab Janet Leigh in the shower, now with Jacob’s face Photoshopped onto it—Jacob as Norman Bates. The face was clipped from a snapshot of Jacob, apparently at a party. It showed Jacob grinning. Jacob had posted the mash-up photo with the caption “What people think of me.” His friends responded with these comments: “Dude looks like a lady.” “Awesome job. You should make this your new profile pic.” “Wee-wee-wee [
Psycho
music].” “Marvin Glasscock! Dude comes in with the total facemelter!!!”

I did not immediately delete the photo. I wanted to confront Jacob with it. I carried the laptop upstairs with me, the machine humming in my hand.

He was in his room, still asleep. One of his young-adult novels lay open, pages down, on the night table. These were invariably futuristic science fiction or military fantasies about ultrasecret Army units with names like “Alpha Force.” (No broody teen vampires for Jacob: not escapist
enough
.)

It was around seven. The shades were down, the light in the room was muted.

As I tromped barefoot to the side of his bed, Jacob woke up and twisted to look at me. No doubt I was scowling. I turned the computer around to show the screen to him, the evidence of his crime.

“What is this?”

He groaned, not quite awake.

“What is this?”

“What?”

“This!”

“I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

“This picture on Facebook. From last night? Did you put this up?”

“It’s a joke.”

“A joke?”

“It’s just a joke, Dad.”

“A joke? What’s wrong with you?”

“Do we have to make a big deal—”

“Jacob, do you know what they’re going to do with this picture? They’re going to wave it around in front of the jury and do you know what they’re going to say? They’re going to say it shows consciousness of guilt. That’s just the phrase they’ll use,
consciousness of guilt
. They’ll say, ‘This is how Jacob Barber sees himself. Psycho. When he looks in the mirror, this is the reflection he sees: Norman Bates.’ They’ll use the word
psycho
over and over, and they’ll hold this picture up and the jury will stare at it. They’ll stare at it and guess what? They’ll never be able to forget it, they’ll never be able to quite get it out of their minds. It’ll stick in their heads. It’ll affect them. It’ll twist them, it’ll stain them. Maybe not all of them, maybe not much. But it will move the needle just a little further against you. That’s how it works. That’s what you did with this: you gave them a gift. A gift. For no good reason. If Logiudice finds this, it will never go away. Don’t you get that? Don’t you know what’s at stake, Jacob?”

“Yes!”

“Do you know what they want to do to you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why? Tell me. Because it doesn’t make any sense. Why would you do this?”

“I already told you, it was a joke. It means the opposite of what you’re saying. It’s how other people see me. It’s not how I see myself. It’s not even about me.”

“Oh. Well, that’s perfectly reasonable. You were just being clever and ironic. And of course the DA and the jury, they’ll all understand that too. Jesus. Are you stupid?”

“I’m not stupid.”

“Then what’s wrong with you?”

Laurie’s voice, behind me: “Andy! Enough.” Her arms were crossed, eyes still sleepy.

Jacob said mournfully, “Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“Then what possessed you to—”

“Andy, stop.”

“Why, Jacob? Just tell me why?” My anger had peaked. Still, I was feeling wild enough to spray a few bullets Laurie’s way too. “Can I ask him that? Can I ask him why? Or is that too much?”

“It was just a joke, Dad. Can we just delete it?”

“No! We can’t just delete it. That’s the whole point! It doesn’t go away, Jacob. We can delete it but it doesn’t go away. When your buddy Derek goes to the DA and tells him you have a Facebook account named Melvin Glasscock or whatever and you put this picture up, all the DA has to do is send them a subpoena and he gets it. Facebook will just give it to him, all of it. This stuff sticks to you. It’s like napalm. You can’t do this. You can’t do it.”

“Okay.”

“You can’t do stuff like this. Not now.”

“O-
kay
, I said. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Sorry won’t fix the problem.”

“Andy, stop already. You’re scaring me. What do you want him to do? It’s done. He said he’s sorry. What do you keep haranguing him for?”

“I keep haranguing him because it’s important!”

“It’s done. He made a mistake. He’s a kid. Please calm down, Andy. Please.”

She came across the room, took the laptop from my hands—I was barely aware I was still holding it—and she examined the photo closely. She held the laptop with one hand on each edge, like a cafeteria tray.

“All right.” She shrugged. “So let’s just delete it and be done with it. How do I delete it? I don’t see a button.”

I took the laptop and searched the screen. “I don’t see it either. Jacob, how do you delete this thing?”

He took the laptop and, now seated on the edge of his bed, he clicked it a few times. “There. Gone.” He closed the lid, handed it to me, then lay down and rolled over, turning his back to me.

Laurie gave me a look, like
I
was the crazy one. “I’m going back to bed, Andy.” She padded out of the room, then I heard our bed rustle as she climbed back into it. Laurie had always been an early riser, even on Sundays, until this happened to us.

I stood there a moment, the laptop by my side now, held at my hip like a closed book.

“I’m sorry I yelled.”

Jacob sniffed. I could not tell what that sniff signaled, whether he was near tears or angry with me. But it struck something in me and made me sentimental. I remembered Baby Jake, our little precious beautiful blond wide-eyed baby. That this boy, this child-man, was one and the same person as that baby—it came to me like a new idea, something I had never known. The baby did not become the boy; the baby
was
the boy, the same creature, unchanged at the core. This was the very baby I had held in my arms.

I sat down on the bed beside him and laid my hand on his bare shoulder. “I’m sorry I yelled. I shouldn’t lose my temper. I’m just trying to look out for you. You know that, don’t you?”

“I’m going back to sleep.”

“Okay.”

“Just leave me alone.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, so go away.”

I nodded, rubbed his shoulder a few times as if I could press the thought into him through his skin,
I love you
, but he lay there like a stone and I stood up to leave.

The shape in the bed said, “There’s nothing wrong with me. And I know exactly what they’re going to do to me. I don’t need you to tell me.”

“I know, Jake. I know.”

And then, with the bravado and heedlessness of a child, he fell asleep.

O
ne Tuesday morning near summer’s end, Laurie and I sat in Dr. Vogel’s office for our weekly meeting under the eyes of those howling African masks. The session had not begun—we were still settling ourselves in our familiar chairs, making ritualistic comments about the warm weather outside, Laurie shivering a little in the air-conditioning—when the doctor announced, “Andy, I have to tell you, I think this is going to be a difficult hour for you.”

“Yeah? Why is that?”

“We need to talk about some of the biological issues involved in this case, the genetics.” She hesitated. Dr. Vogel studiously maintained an impassive expression during our sessions, presumably to keep her own emotions from influencing ours. But this time her mouth and jaw clenched visibly. “And I need to take a
DNA
sample from you. It’s just a quick swab of your mouth. No needles, nothing intrusive. I just use a sterile Q-tip to wipe your gums and take a sample of your saliva.”

“A
DNA
sample? You’ve got to be kidding me. I thought we were going to exclude all that.”

“Andy, look, I’m a doctor, not a lawyer; I can’t tell you what’s going to be allowed into evidence or what will be excluded. That’s between you and Jonathan. What I can tell you is that behavioral genetics—and by that I mean the science of how behavior is influenced by our genes—cuts two ways. The prosecution may want to introduce this sort of evidence to show that Jacob is violent by nature, a born killer, because obviously it makes it more likely that Jacob committed this murder. But we may want to introduce it too. If it gets to the point where the DA has likely proven Jacob actually killed this boy—I’m saying
if;
I’m not predicting, I’m not saying this is what I believe, just
if
—then we may want to bring in the genetic evidence as mitigation.”