Free Defending Jacob by William Landay Page A

3:07pm on April 15th, 2007
ANYbody could say ANYthing about ANYbody. maybe YOU have a knife derek? how does it feel when somebody starts a rumor about YOU?

    Then this:
Derek Yoo (McCormick Middle School) wrote at 2:25pm on April 15th, 2007
Jake, everyone knows you did it. You have a knife. I’ve seen it.

    I could not move. Could not budge my eyes from the message. I stared at it until the letters broke down into pixels. Derek Yoo was a friend of Jacob’s, a good friend. He had been to our house a hundred times. The two boys had been in kindergarten together. Derek was a good kid.
    I’ve seen it
.
    The next morning I let Laurie and Jacob both leave before me. I told them I had a meeting at the Newton police station and did not want to drive back and forth to Cambridge. When they were safely gone, I went up to Jacob’s room and searched.
    The search did not take long. In the top drawer of the bureau, I found something hard, lazily hidden in an old white T-shirt. I unrolled the T-shirt until it spilled onto the bureau a folding knife with a black rubberized handle. I picked it up daintily, tweezed the blade between my thumb and index finger, and pulled it open.
    “Oh my God,” I murmured.
    It might have been a military knife or a hunting knife, but then it seemed too small for that. Unfolded, it was about ten inches long. The handle was black, grippy, shaped to accept four fingers. The blade was hook-shaped, with an intricately serrated cutting edge—a ripping blade—and it came to a lethal gothic point. The flat sides of the blade had been drilled out, presumably to save weight. The knife was sinister and beautiful, the shape of the blade, its curve and taper. It was like one of those lovely deadly things in nature, a lick of flame or the claw of an enormous cat.

Chapter VI
Descent
    One year later
.
    TRANSCRIPT OF GRAND JURY INVESTIGATION .
    Mr. Logiudice: When you discovered the knife, what did you do? I presume you reported it immediately.
Witness: No, I did not.
Mr. Logiudice: No? You discovered the murder weapon in an ongoing murder investigation and you did not tell anyone? Why not? You made such a pretty speech earlier this morning about how you believed in the system.
Witness: I did not report it because I did not believe that it was the murder weapon. I certainly did not know it for a fact.
Mr. Logiudice: You didn’t know it for a fact? Well, how could you? You kept it hidden! You didn’t submit the knife for forensic testing, for blood, fingerprints, comparison with the wound, and so forth. That would be the ordinary procedure, wouldn’t it?
Witness: It would be if you genuinely suspected it was the weapon.
Mr. Logiudice: Ah. So you didn’t even suspect it was the weapon?
Witness: No.
Mr. Logiudice: The thought never crossed your mind?
Witness: This was my son. A father does not think, can’t even imagine his child in those terms.
Mr. Logiudice: Really? Can’t even imagine it?
Witness: That’s right.
Mr. Logiudice: The boy had no history of violence? No juvenile criminal record?
Witness: No. None.
Mr. Logiudice: No behavioral problems? No psychological problems?
Witness: No.
Mr. Logiudice: He had never hurt a fly, is that fair to say?
Witness: Something like that.
Mr. Logiudice: And yet when you found the knife, you covered it up. You behaved exactly as if you thought he was guilty.
Witness: That is not accurate.
Mr. Logiudice: Well, you didn’t report it.
Witness: I was slow to realize—in hindsight, I admit—
Mr. Logiudice: Mr. Barber, how could you be slow to realize when, in fact, you’d been waiting for this moment for fourteen years, from the day your son was born?
[The witness did not respond.]
Mr. Logiudice: You’d been waiting for this moment. Fearing it, dreading it. But expecting it.
Witness: That’s not true.
Mr. Logiudice: Isn’t it? Mr. Barber, isn’t it fair to say that violence runs in your family?
Witness: I object. That is a completely improper question.
Mr. Logiudice: Your