5 | Everyone Knows You Did It
The student interviews began right after school. For the kids, it had been a long day filled with class meetings and grief counseling. CPAC detectives in plain clothes had gone from classroom to classroom encouraging kids to share tips with the investigators, anonymously if necessary. The kids stared back dully.
The McCormick was a middle school, which in this town meant it covered grades six through eight. The building was an arrangement of plain rectangular boxes. Inside, the walls were painted thick with many layers of teal. Laurie grew up in Newton and went to the McCormick in the 1970s; she said the school had hardly changed except for the illusion, as she walked down the halls, that the whole structure had shrunk.
As I had told Canavan, these interviews were a contentious subject. At first, the school principal flatly refused to allow us to “storm in” and talk to any kid we pleased. Had the crime happened in another place—in the urb rather than the suburb—we would not have bothered to ask permission. Here, the school board and even the mayor intervened directly with Lynn Canavan to slow us down. In the end, we were allowed to talk to the kids on school grounds but only on certain conditions. Kids who were not in Ben Rifkin’s homeroom were off limits unless we had a specific reason to believe they might know something. Any student could have a parent and/or a lawyer present and could end the interview at any time, for any reason or no reason. Most of this was easy to concede. They were entitled to a lot of it anyway. The real point of stipulating so many rules was to send the cops a message: treat these kids with kid gloves. Which was fine, but precious time was lost while we diddled around negotiating.
At two o’clock, Paul and I commandeered the principal’s office and together we interviewed the highest-priority witnesses: the victim’s close friends, a few kids who were known to walk to school through Cold Spring Park, and those who specifically requested to speak with the investigators. Two dozen interviews were scheduled for the two of us. Other CPAC detectives would conduct interviews at the same time. Most we expected to be brief and yield nothing. We were trawling, dragging our net along the sea bottom, hoping.
But something odd happened. After just three or four interviews, Paul and I had the distinct impression we were being stonewalled. At first we thought we were seeing the usual repertoire of adolescent tics and evasions, the shrugs and y’knows and whatevers, the wandering eyes. We were both fathers. We knew that walling out adults was what all teenagers did; it was the whole point of these behaviors. In itself, there was nothing suspicious about it. But as the interviews went on, we realized something more brazen and purposeful was going on. The kids’ answers went too far. They were not content to say they knew nothing about the murder; they denied even knowing the victim. Ben Rifkin seemed to have had no friends at all, only acquaintances. Other kids never spoke to him, had no idea who did. These were transparent lies. Ben had not been unpopular. We already knew who most of Ben’s friends were. It was a betrayal, I thought, for his buddies to disown him so quickly and completely.
Worse, the eighth-graders at the McCormick were not especially competent liars. Some of them, the more shameless ones, seemed to believe that the way to pass off a lie convincingly was to oversell it. So, when they got ready to tell a particularly tall one, they would stop all the foot-shuffling and y’knows, and deliver the lie with maximum conviction. It was as if they had read a manual on behaviors associated with honesty—eye contact! firm voice!—and were determined to display them all at once, like peacocks fanning their tail feathers. The effect was to reverse the behavior patterns you might expect to see in adults—the teens seemed evasive when honest and direct when lying—but their shifting manner set off alarm bells just the same. The other kids, the majority, were too self-conscious to begin with and lying only made them more so. They were tentative. The truth inside them made them squirm. This obviously did not work either. I could have told them, of course, that a virtuoso liar slips the false statement in among the true ones without a flutter of any kind, like a magician slipping the bent card into the middle of the deck. I have had an education in virtuosic lying, believe me.
Paul and I began to exchange suspicious glances. The pace of the interviews slowed as we challenged some of the more obvious lies. Between interviews, Paul joked about a code of silence. “These kids are like Sicilians,” he said. Neither of us said what we were truly thinking. There is a plummeting feeling, as if the floor has fallen away beneath you. It is the happy vertigo you feel when a case opens up and lets you in.
Apparently we had been wrong—there was no other way to say it. We had considered the possibility that a fellow student was involved, but we had discounted it. There was no evidence pointing that way. No sullen outcasts among the students, no sloppy schoolboy trail of evidence to follow. Nor was there an apparent motive: no grandiose adolescent fantasies of outlaw glory, no damaged, bullied kids out for revenge, no petty classroom feud. Nothing. Now, neither of us had to say it. That vertiginous feeling was the thought: these kids knew something.
A girl sloped into the office and dropped into the chair opposite us, then, with great effort, she refused to acknowledge us.
“Sarah Groehl?” Paul said.
“Yes.”
“I’m Lieutenant Detective Paul Duffy. I’m with the state police. This here is Andrew Barber. He’s the assistant district attorney in charge of this case.”
“I know.” She looked up at me finally. “You’re Jacob Barber’s dad.”
“Yes. You’re the sweatshirt girl. From this morning.”
She smiled shyly.
“Sorry, I should have remembered you. I’m having a tough day, Sarah.”
“Yeah, why’s that?”
“Nobody wants to talk to us. Now, why is that, you have any idea?”
“You’re cops.”
“That’s it?”
“Sure.” She made a face: Duh!
I waited a moment, hoping for more. The girl returned a look of exquisite boredom.
“Are you a friend of Jacob’s?”
She looked down, considered, shrugged. “I guess so.”
“How come I haven’t heard your name?”
“Ask Jacob.”
“He doesn’t tell me anything. I have to ask you.”
“We know each other. We’re not, like, friends, Jacob and me. We just know each other.”
“How about Ben Rifkin? Did you know him?”
“Same. I knew him but I didn’t really know him.”
“Did you like him?”
“He was okay.”
“Just okay?”
“He was a good kid, I guess. Like I said, we weren’t really close.”
“Okay. So I’ll stop asking stupid questions. Why don’t you just tell us, Sarah? Anything at all that might help us, anything you think we ought to know.”
She shifted in her seat. “I don’t really know what you—I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Well, tell me about this place, this school. Start with that. Tell me something about McCormick that I don’t know. What’s it like to go to school here? What’s funny about this place? What’s strange about it?”
No response.
“Sarah, we want to help, you know, but we need some of you kids to help us.”
She shifted around in her seat.
“You owe that much to Ben, don’t you think? If he was your friend?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have anything to say, I guess. I don’t know anything.”
“Sarah, whoever did this, he’s still out there. You know that, don’t you? If you can help, then you have a responsibility. A real responsibility. Otherwise this same thing is going to happen again to some other kid. Then it would be on you. If you didn’t do everything—absolutely everything you could—to make it stop, then the next one would be on you, wouldn’t it? How would that make you feel?”
“You’re trying to guilt me. It won’t work. My mom does that too.”
“I’m not trying to guilt you. I’m just telling you the truth.”
No response.
Bang! Duffy smacked the table with his open palm. Some papers drifted with the breeze he created. “Jesus! This is bullshit, Andy. Just put a subpoena on these kids already, would you? Put ’em in the grand jury, swear ’em in, and if they don’t want to say anything, just lock ’em up for contempt. This is a waste of time. For Christ’s sake!”
The girl’s eyes dilated.
Duffy took his cell phone from a holster on his belt and looked at it, though it had not rung. “I have to make a call,” he announced. “I’ll be right back,” and out he marched.
The kid said, “Is he supposed to be the bad cop?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s not very good at it.”
“You jumped. I saw you.”
“Only ’cause he startled me. He banged the table.”
“He’s right, you know. If you kids don’t start helping us out, we’ll have to do this another way.”
“I thought we didn’t have to say anything if we didn’t want to.”
“That’s true today. Tomorrow, maybe not.”
She thought it over.
“Sarah, it’s true, what you said before. I’m a DA. But I’m also a dad, okay? So I’m not going to just let this thing go. Because I keep thinking of Ben Rifkin’s dad. I keep thinking of how he must be feeling. Can you even imagine how your mom or dad would feel if this happened to you? How devastated they’d be?”
“They’re split up. My dad’s out of the picture. I live with my mom.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“Well, Sarah, look, you’re all our kids, you know. All you kids in Jacob’s class, even the ones I don’t know, I care about. All of us parents feel that way.”
She rolled her eyes.
“You don’t believe that?”
“No. You don’t even know me.”
“That’s true. Still, I care what happens to you just the same. I care about this school, this town. I’m not going to just let this happen. This isn’t going away. You understand that?”
“Is anyone talking to Jacob?”
“You mean my son Jacob?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course.”
“Okay.”
“Why do you say that?”
“No reason.”
“There must be a reason. What is it, Sarah?”
The girl studied her lap. “The cop who came to our class said we could tell you things anonymously?”
“That’s right. There’s a tip line.”
“How do we know you won’t try to, like, figure out who gave a tip? I mean, that’s something you’d want to know, right? Who said something?”
“Sarah, come on. What is it you want to say?”
“How do we know it will stay anonymous?”
“You just have to trust us, I guess.”
“Trust who? You?”
“Me. Detective Duffy. There’s a lot of people working on this case.”
“What if I just …” She looked up.
“Look, I’m not going to lie to you, Sarah. If you tell me something here, it’s not anonymous. My job is to catch the guy who did this, but it’s also to try him in court and for that I’ll need witnesses. I’d be lying if I told you any different. I’m trying to be honest with you here.”
“Okay.” She considered. “I really don’t know anything.”
“You sure about that?”