The Hidden Man

by David Ellis

  She listened carefully, her facial expressions deteriorating further into sadness with each new development I laid on her, a quick intake of air with each twist to the plot. It’s never fun to hear of a murder, even if it was a scumbag child predator like Griffin Perlini. It’s even worse to think of a sweet, if troubled, young boy from the neighborhood pulling the trigger.

  “Oh, my.” Her small frame seemed to turn into itself, as if trying to shield her from the memory of what happened to Audrey Cutler. “You know, Jason, every day I pray for forgiveness that I didn’t say something. That I didn’t call out after that man or call your mother or Mary right away.”

  “You had no way of knowing.” It was, in fact, much like the conversation I’d had with Tommy Butcher—there’s no crime against running. That was all she’d seen that night that Audrey was abducted.

  Mrs. Thomas nibbled at a couple of fingernails, her haunted expression telling me she was reliving the whole thing. “If I could have been more sure,” she said. “I—I just couldn’t be sure. And Lord help me, I couldn’t say something if I wasn’t sure.”

  She was talking about the identification. As the only witness to the abduction, Mrs. Thomas had been asked to identify Griffin Perlini in a lineup. And obviously, she’d been unable to do so, or Griffin Perlini might have stood trial. In her mind, then, she’d failed the Cutlers a second time.

  “It would have been almost impossible for you to identify him,” I told her. From my trip back to the neighborhood, I’d estimated that Mrs. Thomas was looking at someone running with his back to her, in the middle of the night, from the distance of maybe half a football field.

  Detective Carruthers had sent over copies of his files on Audrey’s abduction for my review. I hadn’t had the chance to look through them save for the file on Mrs. Thomas, so I would know what she’d said back then before this visit. In those files was a lineup report indicating that Mrs. Thomas “could not conclusively identify” Griffin Perlini as the man who had taken Audrey.

  From my years as both a prosecutor and defense attorney, I knew that cops had a way of taking literary license with their view of events. Could not conclusively identify left an amount of interpretation that could fill an airplane hangar.

  “Can you tell me how that happened?” I asked. “The police lineup?”

  Mrs. Thomas gathered her sweater, currently around her shoulders, as if to stifle a chill in a room that was anything but drafty.

  “I know it’s hard to remember—”

  Her eyes shot to mine, surprising me in their swiftness. “Oh, Jason, it’s not hard to remember that. No, no, no.”

  She laid it out like I would expect. A couple of suits—a prosecutor and Griffin Perlini’s lawyer—a couple of cops, and Mrs. Thomas, looking through a window into a lineup of, in this case, six male Caucasians holding numbered cards. “I—I told them I didn’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t be sure. He was number two.”

  “Griffin Perlini was number two.” I could only imagine how she’d known that. My guess was, Detective Carruthers had scratched his face with two fingers, or maybe crossed his arms and rested a peace sign on his bicep for her to see—something that would escape the notice of Perlini’s defense lawyer. Prosecutors don’t like to think about how witnesses can be coached.

  She shook her head, but not in response to me. “He was so—such a small man,” she said.

  Perlini was about five-seven and scrawny. So she was right, but I didn’t catch the significance. Or maybe the problem was, I did.

  “Too small?” I asked.

  My question seemed to snap her out of the memory. She was silent for a long time. I hated the fact that I was taking this sweet elderly woman back to that time, but I hated even more that I’d pulled her away now. Finally, she looked at me. “I don’t fool myself that my memory is strong enough now,” she said. “A man—a figure—running very fast. I honestly have trouble remembering what I saw.”

  I nodded. Accurately summoning memories is tricky, far more difficult than most people realize. It’s not that you don’t recall a vision, it’s that the vision is probably not what you actually saw at the time.

  “But you remember what you felt,” I said.

  She nodded solemnly.

  Could not conclusively identify. “What did you tell the police, Mrs. Thomas?”

  “Oh, Jason.” She crossed a leg with some difficulty, turning her body slightly away from me, a classic defensive response. “The man was running so fast, and he was—he was—”

  She leaned forward slightly. She didn’t want to come out and acknowledge the horrible truth that he was cradling little Audrey in his arms, but I got the point.

  “He was running fast and he was hunched over,” I said.

  “So you can see why it would be hard for me to know.”

  Sure. But I didn’t have an answer yet. “Please tell me what you told the police,” I said.

  Mrs. Thomas stared out the window of her apartment, her expression now a forced stoicism. “Please tell Peter that I’d love to see him some time, Jason,” she said. “And please, take some of this food with you. I swear I’ll never eat it all.”

  16

  THE COP, BRADY, walks you down the hall to the room where they have Sammy. You find him inside, sitting in a chair in handcuffs, his head hung low.

  Hey, you say, trying to be encouraging.

  He shakes his head.

  Hey, you repeat.

  You don’t want no part of this, Koke.

  But we’re—it was both—

  What’s the point? He gestures in your direction. Better me than you. You got your whole football thing and all. What do I got?

  It hits you hard, the distance Sammy has suddenly put between the two of you.

  You got me, you say.

  Tears well in his eyes, but he shakes his head. Go, he says, his voice growing hoarser.

  You admit it to yourself, a sense of relief accompanied by resulting shame. You don’t want to get arrested. You want to survive this.

  Go! he shouts. He still won’t look up, but you see his eyes nonetheless, filled with fire and pain.

  The cop walks into the room and takes your arm. Sammy drops his head again. C’mon, the cop says to you. You turn one last time, as the door is closing, to see that Sammy is watching you leave.

  I STOPPED at a pub a few blocks from my house and ate dinner. The restaurants within a two-mile radius of my house were probably the only ones that benefited from the death of my wife and daughter. I wasn’t much of a cook so I either ordered in or ate out almost every night. This night, I read through the newspaper and ate a cheeseburger. I called Pete on his cell, but he didn’t answer. Five minutes later I got a text message from him saying: No sermons.

  He was still being defensive, which meant I was on to something. He was telling himself, no doubt, that his use of drugs was recreational, ignoring how easy the slide would be to addiction, not to mention the danger of onetime use alone.

  It hadn’t helped Pete that we grew up poor, or that our old man put Pete down every chance he got, but he didn’t have much of an example from his older brother, either. Pete knew that Sammy and I sold weed, and he knew that the only thing that got me off the wrong track and onto the right one—football—was not available to him. He was like me—the screwup—but minus the athletic ability. It had left him free, I guess, to justify his own foray into drugs.

  A Ford Taurus had been following me today, from my trip to see the witness, Tommy Butcher, to my visit with Mrs. Thomas, but I didn’t see it now. They probably figured I was eating close to home and then heading there for the night. I thought I might find the car on the block where I lived, but I didn’t. I went inside and ran on the treadmill for about half an hour before picking up a paperback mystery. By page fifty-six, I had figured out that the serial killer was the priest, and by ten o’clock I had confirmed as much.

  At half past midnight, I fell asleep to an episode of MacGyver, the one where o
ur hero finds himself in a jam and uses his knowledge of science to extricate himself. At three in the morning, I woke up to Emily’s phantom cry. I stopped shaking at about four; then I liberated my stomach of all of its contents in the bathroom and went back to bed. At five, I tried one of my mental games, imagining Talia and Emily living happily ever after, but it didn’t work for some reason. I read another paperback until eleven, showered, went to the cemetery, came back home and slept until dinner. I ordered in a pizza but lost my appetite, so I walked it down the street to the park and gave it to a homeless guy. Having done my good deed for the day, I retired for the evening and read some more until I fell asleep to a rerun of Hogan’s Heroes, the one where our indefatigable hero manages to sneak several American POWs to safety under the nose of the hapless commandante and to the bewilderment of the incompetent sergeant.

  I awoke at half past three from the dream I’d had many times since Talia’s and Emily’s deaths. When I’m awake, I constantly replay the events in such a way that I am driving them to Talia’s parents’ house that night, and everything turns out fine—we are still together. In my dream, too, I am behind the wheel, but I miss the curve just like Talia did. I lace my hands with Talia’s as we come upon the dark, slick curve along the bluffs, and my eyes pop open as the SUV crashes through the guardrail.

  I took a moment to orient myself: It was Friday, October 5. The trial would start in twenty-four days. I had a lot of work ahead, but my brain was fuzzy, my heartbeat slowly decelerating from my dream. I finished a mystery paperback by about ten in the morning and dozed off. I woke up again to the phone ringing. I looked at the caller ID but it was blocked so I answered it.

  “This is Vic Carruthers. We did the dig, like you said.”

  “Okay?” I sat up in bed.

  “We found some bodies,” he said.

  I COULDN’T GET anywhere near the burial site behind Hardigan Elementary School. The media had caught wind, so trucks had lined up all around the barricades, with news copters flying overhead. I parked on Hudson, about three blocks away, and walked as far as I could go. I wasn’t accomplishing anything by being here, but I thought if I could catch Detective Carruthers, he might give me some skinny.

  Bodies, he’d said. Plural. A cemetery of toddlers behind a school. Griffin Perlini had taken a lot of secrets with him to the grave.

  Around me, it was bedlam. Beautiful women and average-looking men were posing before cameras and speaking with urgency into microphones. Parents were parking wherever they could find an open space and hustling into the school to pick up their children. Law enforcement—local cops, sheriff ’s deputies, technical-unit agents—were scurrying about.

  One of those bodies, no doubt, was Audrey Cutler. I didn’t know how to feel about that. She was dead, of course, long gone, but maybe now whatever remained of her could be laid to rest next to her mother. Maybe it would give some closure to Sammy, though I couldn’t imagine why—I just knew it was true. Families always want to find the physical remains, as if that earthly need to collect the tangible body has any relevance after death.

  My cell phone rang, a blocked call.

  “Four bodies,” Carruthers told me, slightly out of breath, probably a combination of exertion and excitement. “Four children.”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Go back to work. There’s nothing for you here now. I’ll be in touch.”

  I hadn’t come from work, but it seemed like a good idea to go there now. It seemed like a good time to wake up.

  As I worked my way slowly through the ever-expanding population of people who rushed to the school to witness the carnage, I thought about this development. Four children, presumably molested and definitely murdered by Griffin Perlini. I hoped at that moment for a God, which meant a Satan, too. Like my overall belief in the Almighty, I struggled as a child with the idea of the pearly gates and the devil. The whole thing seemed far too black-and-white for me. I remember lobbing questions at the priests: What if you were on your way to confession when you got hit by a truck? You don’t get into Heaven? What if you think you did the right thing but God doesn’t? Are you supposed to repent anyway? Those priests, who preferred black-and-white to gray, really loved having me in class. Me, I was still waiting for answers to those questions.

  YOU SEE HER for the first time wrapped in a pink blanket with a tiny bow somehow fastened to the scant hair that covers her tiny, egg-shaped head. Her skin is a slight yellow—jaundiced, they say—and the only sounds that escape her mouth are throaty cries. She cries, she feeds from her mother, and she poops and pees. The adults let you close to her—Don’t touch her, they say—and you put your face close to hers. Her eyes are not focused. She smells like lotion. They say she looks like Mary—Mrs. Cutler—but you think she looks more like a shrunken old man.

  Hello, Audrey, you say with mock formality. Nice to meet you.

  Sammy isn’t outside as much that summer. He spends a good deal of time with her. By July, Audrey is eating food. You watch Sammy feed her, putting one hand delicately behind her tiny, bobbing head and inserting a lime-colored spoon full of food into her mouth. There you go, he says, mimicking his mother’s words and tone. It’s not exactly the same between you and Sammy now. He reserves a part of himself for his little sister. He measures himself in her presence, keeping a watchful eye, springing forth at her cry, or if she loses balance and falls to the side.

  You’re like my little sister, too, you tell her that winter. She makes a noise—eh-bah—and grabs a handful of your hair and pulls hard. You don’t mind. You laugh. She doesn’t mean to hurt you, Sammy tells you. You know that. You know you’re special to Audrey, too. She is still too young to appreciate strangers. She breaks into a cry around anyone other than the Cutlers and your family. She lets go of your hair and you get your face up close to hers. She breaks into a big smile, and you feel something light up inside you. The word “beautiful” comes to mind and you think you have found a new definition of that word.

  I GOT TO my car and navigated the escalating traffic as the hordes continued to flock toward Hardigan Elementary School. This would be all over the news, and Sammy probably would learn of it, so I needed to pay him a visit.

  Sammy. He needed his lawyer. As the duly appointed same, my first concern was how quickly they could identify the remains. DNA testing could take months, especially for bodies that had probably been buried for years. There would be no sense of urgency, no crime to solve when the perpetrator was already dead. This would not go to the front of the line. I would need to see what I could do about that.

  I had to admit it—after talking with Mrs. Thomas and Perlini’s mother, I’d had some doubts about Perlini as Audrey’s killer. One of the things that had bothered me was that pedophilia and murder were very different things, and Perlini hadn’t had any history of killing little girls. Or so we’d thought, before today.

  So much of solving crimes is luck. Nobody would have bothered to question Griffin Perlini’s mother after his death, yet it was precisely because he was gone—because there was no need to protect him anymore—that his mother gave me the tip about the hill behind this school. Now, there was no doubt that Griffin Perlini had escalated several of his crimes.

  “Audrey,” I said aloud. My voice cracked, betraying emotion I hadn’t acknowledged. There is something unspeakable about a child’s death under any circumstances; I didn’t know if the time would ever come that I could fully comprehend the loss of Emily. But the murder of a child exposes something so hideous that anger is not even the appropriate response. We despair. We lose hope. We lose faith.

  Audrey Cutler had a plot of land in the Catholic cemetery, next to which her mother, Mary, was buried. We would have a proper funeral, I decided. Sammy and I would bury his sister.

  I picked up my cell phone, dialed the number, and got voice mail. “Pete,” I said into the phone. “Pete, I—I—just give me a call when you can.”

  17

  YOUR LAST GOOD MEMORY of
her, the weekend before she was abducted, the picnic held after the successful construction of the new wing to the university library. You are with the Cutlers, trying to throw a Frisbee with Sammy, while little Audrey tries to partake, tries in vain to intercept the flying disk. My turn, she keeps saying.

  Let her have her turn. Mrs. Cutler is happy today. She is wearing a sun-dress, and the wind is playing with her bangs. Mr. Cutler is off drinking beers with some of the other guys involved in the construction. He does that a lot, always with a beer in his hand at home. You heard Sammy’s mom describe the work at the library as “good work,” saying it to Mr. Cutler—you thought they were fighting about that, about how many absences were allowed by the union before you were kicked off the job. Mr. Cutler is a plumber, but he only works sometimes; you don’t know why or when. Some days, Mr. Cutler just stays home, drinking beer and yelling at the television.

  Audrey has tired of Frisbee and wants candy. They are passing it out, the company that sponsored the picnic, M&M’s candies with the company name, Emerson, on them. They’re Emerson M&M’s, Sammy says to Audrey. She tries to say it back but it ties her tongue. Something like Em-o-son-em’s comes out, and you and Sammy laugh. She keeps trying and you keep laughing, until Sammy tells her it’s okay, she did a good job, and he picks her up and puts her on his shoulders. He runs around as Audrey yells, Em-o-son-em’s and squeals with delight.

  I SPENT the afternoon in my office, going through the files in Sammy’s case. Included in those files was the criminal history of Griffin Perlini. That gave me a list of people whose daughters had been victimized in some way by Perlini. It felt indecent, morosely ironic, that this list of victimized families was, for my purposes, a list of potential suspects.

  It wasn’t much of a list, really. Two girls were part of his initial foray into sexual predation, which as far as anyone could tell did not reach the level of sexual contact with the children. Perlini had been convicted only of exposing himself to these children.