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The voice in his head was mine: Never mind how weak your case is. Stick to the system.
lure, trap, fuck.
What was I if not Jacob’s father?
But Ben Rifkin lay in a refrigerated drawer in the M.E.’s office while my son lay in his warm bed, with nothing but luck to separate the one from the other.
such a good quote
Somebody stitched three holes in a line across that boy’s chest and left nothing to indicate who or why.
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.
Does that sound awful to you? I hear the little voice in your head: Destruction of evidence! Obstruction of justice! You are naive. You imagine the courts are reliable, that wrong results are rare, and therefore I ought to have trusted the system. If he truly believed Jacob was innocent, you are thinking, he would have simply let the police sweep in and take whatever they liked. Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free—those “errors” we recognize and accept.
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That was the part that broke my heart, I think, the way he struggled to hold it together, to keep that storm of emotion—panic, anger, sorrow—all siloed up inside himself.
