Defending Jacob

Most days I was at my desk by seven-thirty or eight, before the phones really got going, before first call at nine-thirty. But with Jacob’s school reopening that morning, I did not get in till after nine. Anxious to see the Rifkin file, I immediately closed my office door, sat down, and arrayed the murder scene photos across my desk. I propped one foot on an open drawer and leaned back, staring at them.

At the corners of my desk, the photo-wood laminate had begun to peel away from the pressboard desk. I had a nervous habit of picking at these corners unconsciously, prying up the flexy laminate surface with my finger like a scab. I was sometimes surprised to hear the rhythmic clicking sound it made as I lifted and snapped it. It was a sound I associated with deep thought. That morning, I’m sure, I was ticking like a bomb.

The investigation felt wrong. Strange. Too quiet, even after five long days of digging. It is a cliche but it is true: most cases break quickly, in the frantic hours and days right after a murder, when the noise is everywhere, evidence, theories, ideas, witnesses, accusations-possibilities. Other cases take a little longer to sort out, to pick out the right signal in that noisy environment, the true story among many plausible ones. A very few cases never get solved. The signal never does emerge from the static. Possibilities abound, all plausible, none confirmable, none provable, and that is how the case ends. But in every case there is always noise. There are always suspects, theories, possibilities to consider. Not in the Rifkin murder. Five days of silence. Somebody stitched three holes in a line across that boy’s chest and left nothing to indicate who or why.

The tantalizing anxiety this caused-in me, in the detectives working the case, even in the town-was begi

In the murder scene photos spread out before me, the body lay in the brown leaves, twisted, face up toward the sky, eyes open. The images themselves were not especially grisly-a boy lying in the leaves. Anyway, gore itself did not usually faze me. Like many people who have been exposed to violence, I confined my emotions within a narrow range. Never too high, never too low. Since I was a kid, I have always made sure of that. My emotions ran on steel rails.

Benjamin Rifkin was fourteen years old, in eighth grade at the McCormick School. Jacob was a classmate but barely knew him. He told me Ben had a reputation at school as “kind of a slacker,” smart but not much of a student, never in the advanced classes that filled Jacob’s schedule. He was handsome, even a little flashy. He often wore his short hair swept up in front with something called hair wax. Girls liked him, according to Jacob. Ben liked sports and was a decent athlete, but he was more into skateboarding and skiing than team sports. “I didn’t hang out with him,” Jacob said. “He had his own crew. They were all a little too cool.” He added, with the casual acid of adolescence, “Everybody’s all into him now, but before, it was like nobody even noticed him.”

The body was found on April 12, 2007, in Cold Spring Park, sixty-five acres of pine woods that bordered the school grounds. The woods were veined with jogging paths. They crisscrossed one another and led, through many branchings, to a main trail that ringed the perimeter of the park. I knew these trails pretty well; I jogged there most mornings. It was along one of the smaller trails that Ben’s body had been flung facedown into a little gully. It slid to a stop at the foot of a tree. A woman named Paula Gia

The boy had been stabbed three times in the chest. One strike punctured the heart and would by itself have been fatal. The knife was driven straight in and jerked straight out again, one-two-three, like a bayonet. The weapon had a jagged edge, evidenced by shredding at the left edge of each wound and in the torn shirt fabric. The angle of entry suggested an attacker about Ben’s size, five foot ten or so, although the sloping ground in the park made this projection unreliable. The weapon had not been found. There were no defensive wounds: the victim’s arms and hands were unmarked. The best clue, perhaps, was a single pristine fingerprint, stamped in the victim’s own blood, cleanly preserved on a plastic tag on the inside of the victim’s unzipped sweatshirt, where his murderer might have grabbed him by the lapels and tossed him down the slope into the gully. The print did not match either the victim or Paula Gia

The bare facts of the crime had developed very little in the five days since the murder. Detectives had canvassed the neighborhood and twice swept the park, immediately after the discovery and again twenty-four hours later to find witnesses who frequented the park at that hour of the day. The sweeps had yielded nothing. To the newspapers and, increasingly, to the terrified parents at the McCormick School, the murder looked like a random strike. As the days passed with no news, the silence from the cops and the DA’s office seemed to confirm parents’ worst fears: a predator lurked in the woods of Cold Spring Park. Since then, the park lay abandoned, though a Newton Police cruiser idled in the parking lot all day to reassure the joggers and power-walkers. Only the dog owners continued to come, to let their dogs off the leash on a meadow designated for this purpose.

A state trooper in plain clothes named Paul Duffy slipped into my office with a familiar perfunctory knock and sat down opposite my desk, evidently excited.

Lieutenant Detective Paul Duffy was a policeman by birth, a third-generation cop, son of a former Boston P. D. homicide chief. But he did not look the part. Soft-spoken, with a receding hairline and fine features, he might have been in some gentler profession than policing. Duffy headed a state police unit detailed to the DA’s office. The unit was known by its acronym, CPAC (pronounced sea pack). The initials stood for Crime Prevention and Control, but the title was essentially meaningless (“crime prevention and control” is ostensibly what all cops do) and hardly anyone knew what the letters actually meant. In practice, CPAC’s charge was simple: they were the district attorney’s detectives. They worked cases that were unusually complex, long term, or high profile. Most important, they handled all the county’s murders. In homicide cases, CPAC detectives worked alongside the local cops, who for the most part welcomed the assistance. Outside Boston itself, homicides were rare enough that the locals could not develop the necessary expertise, particularly in the smaller towns where murders were rare as comets. Still, it was a politically delicate situation when the staties swept in to take over a local investigation. A light touch like Paul Duffy’s was required. To lead the CPAC unit, it was not enough to be a smart investigator; you had to be supple enough to satisfy the different constituencies whose toes it was CPAC’s job to step on.