“Or it could have been two different people at two different times.” My gaze meets his.

“Then Jessica Ogilvy truly did have the shittiest day on record,” the coroner says. “I suppose you could charge the boyfriend with assault. It seems like an unnecessary complication, though, if your perp already confessed to moving the body.”

“Yeah. I know.” I just didn’t understand why that bothered me so much. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why did you stop being a clown?”

“It wasn’t fun anymore. Kids screaming in my face, barfing their birthday cake in my lap…” Wayne shrugs. “My clients here are much more predictable.”

“I guess.”

The coroner looks at me for a long moment. “You know the hardest case I ever did? Motor vehicle accident. Woman rolls her SUV on the highway, and her baby pops right out of the car seat and suffers severe spinal injuries and dies. They brought the whole car seat into the morgue. I had to put that dead baby back into the seat and show how the mother didn’t buckle it the right way, which is why the kid fell out.” Wayne stands up. “Sometimes you have to keep reminding yourself that you’re in this for the victim.”

I nod. And wonder why that label makes me think not of Jess Ogilvy but of Jacob Hunt.

The boy who answers the door at the Hunt household looks nothing like his brother, but the minute I show my badge, the color drains from his face. “I’m Detective Matson,” I say. “Is your mother home?”

“I, uh… I plead the Fifth,” the kid says.

“That’s great,” I tell him. “But it wasn’t a particularly probing question.”

“Who’s at the door?” I hear, and then Emma Hunt steps into my line of sight. The minute she recognizes me, her eyes narrow. “Did you come to check up on me? Well, I’m here, with the boys, just like the judge ordered. Close the door, Theo. And you,” she says, “can talk to our lawyer.”

I manage to wedge my foot in the door just before it closes. “I have a search warrant.” I hold up the piece of paper that will allow me to comb through Jacob’s bedroom and take away what might constitute evidence.

She takes the paper out of my hand, scans it, and then lets the door swing open again. Without speaking, she turns on her heel. I follow her into the house, pausing when she picks up the phone in the kitchen and calls her baby-faced lawyer. “Yes, he’s here now,” she says, cupping her hand around the receiver. “He gave the paper to me.”

She hangs up a moment later. “Apparently I don’t have a choice.”

“I could have told you that,” I say cheerfully, but she turns away and walks upstairs.

I keep a few steps behind until she opens a door. “Jacob? Baby?” I stand in the hallway and let her talk softly to her son. I hear words like required and legal, and then she reappears with Jacob at her side.

It takes me by surprise. The kid’s whole face is black and blue; a butterfly bandage disappears into his hairline. “Jacob,” I say. “How are you doing?”

“How does it look like he’s doing?” Emma snaps.

I’d been told by Helen Sharp that Jacob was released into his mother’s custody pending the competency hearing. She had said that, apparently, Jacob couldn’t handle jail well. We had laughed about it. Who can handle jail well?

My job, as a detective, is to go behind the scenes and see what strings are controlling the puppets. Sometimes that means collecting evidence, or swearing out arrest warrants, or getting background information, or conducting interrogations. But it usually also means I miss what is going on onstage. It was one thing to arrest Jacob and send him off to his arraignment; it is another thing entirely to see this boy in front of me again in this condition.

He doesn’t look like the kid I interviewed a week ago. No wonder his mother wants my head.

She takes Jacob’s hand to lead him down the hallway, but we are all stopped by the thin, reedy sound of the boy’s voice. “Wait,” Jacob whispers.

Emma turns, her face lighting up. “Jacob? Did you say something?”

I get the sense that, if he has been saying anything, it’s not a lot. He nods, his mouth working for a moment before another syllable is forced out. “I want…”

“What do you want, baby? I’ll get it for you.”

“I want to watch.”

Emma faces me, her eyebrows raised in a question.

“Not possible,” I tell her flatly. “He can stay in the house, but he can’t be anywhere near the room.”

“Can I speak to you for a moment?” she asks evenly, and she walks into Jacob’s bedroom, leaving him in the hallway. “Do you have any idea what kind of hell it is to watch your child become completely unresponsive?”

“No, but-”

“Well, this is the second time for me. I haven’t even been able to get him out of his bed,” she says. “And as I recall, the last thing you said to me was that I should trust you. I did, and you stabbed me in the back and arrested my son, after I offered him up to you on a silver platter. From where I’m standing, my son wouldn’t be hanging on by a thread if it weren’t for you. So if watching you load up your goddamn boxes with his possessions is what brings him back to the world of the living, then I would hope for the sake of common decency you’d simply let him.”

By the time she finishes, her eyes are glittering and her cheeks are flushed. I open my mouth, about to talk about search and seizure cases and the Supreme Court, but then change my mind. “Jacob?” I stick my head out the door. “Come on in.”

He sits down on the bed, and Emma leans against the doorjamb with her arms crossed. “I’m, uh, just going to take a look around,” I say.

Jacob Hunt is a wicked neat freak. One weekend with Sasha and I’m forever finding tiny socks wedged into the couch or cereal underfoot in the kitchen or books left strewn across the living room floor. But something tells me this isn’t the case with Jacob. His bed is made with military precision. His closet is so organized it looks like an advertisement. I’d assume he has a full-blown case of OCD, except for the fact that there are exceptions to the rule: his math notebook, lying open, is a disaster-loose-leaf pages haphazardly stuffed, papers falling out, handwriting so messy it looks like modern art. The same goes for a bulletin board on one wall, which is overstuffed with papers and pictures and photographs overlapping each other. Dirty dishes and mugs litter his desk.

Directly across from the desk is a small table with an overturned fish tank that has been kitted out like a fuming chamber. Jacob sees me looking at it. “What do you get prints off?” I ask.

“Don’t answer that, Jacob,” Emma interjects.

“Toothbrushes,” he replies. “Mugs. I once got a great partial off a manila folder with magnetic powder.”

His mother and I both stare at him-Emma because he’s probably said more in the last second than in the past three days; and I because there are CSIs who don’t even know that technique for getting prints off a porous surface.

I pick up the trash bin beside the desk and begin to leaf through it. There are several drafts of an English essay. There’s a gum wrapper. What’s extraordinary about the contents is not what they are but how they are: instead of being balled up or crumpled, each piece of garbage has been folded into crisp eighths. Even the tiny gum wrapper. The trash is stacked, like laundry.

The first item I take is Jacob’s police scanner-now I know how he managed to get to the crime scene for the hypothermic guy. Jacob’s hand begins to flap a little harder. “That… that’s mine.”

Emma puts her hand on his shoulder. “Remember what I said?”

I quickly procure the items that are in the fuming chamber: a mug, a mirror, the tank itself. I look under Jacob’s bed, but there is only a pair of slippers and two plastic bins-one filled with back issues of the Journal of Forensic Sciences, the other filled with Legos. From his bookshelf I take the complete DVD series of CrimeBusters, and then I see the composition notebooks. He told me he has more than a hundred, and he wasn’t lying. I pull the first one down.