The Hidden Man

by David Ellis

  It took me a second before it took hold, the reference to Emerson Construction. When I was quizzing Tommy Butcher about his prior criminal history—the false bid application he’d filed—I hadn’t focused on the company for which he was working at the time. But Lester Mapp had mentioned it in his cross-examination of Butcher at the hearing. Butcher, back in 1982, had worked for Emerson Construction Company. I’d been so caught up in the possibility of losing that hearing that I hadn’t focused.

  I recalled it, then, the celebration picnic held by the construction company following the successful completion of the Mansbury library project, which I had attended with Sammy’s family. It had been my last vivid memory of Audrey, scampering across the grassy park, holding the candy in her hands. Emerson M&M’s, we tried to get her to say, laughing when she couldn’t navigate the tongue-twister. Emoson-ems.

  I remembered Sammy’s mother, so content that day, trying to contain her hair blowing in the wind. A good moment, for her, her loser husband notwithstanding, as she watched her children run and play. As I thought about it, I realized that it was my last good memory not only of Audrey but of Mrs. Cutler, too—before the loss of her daughter sapped her spirit, before a terminal disease claimed her life.

  They want Sammy to win this case, and win it now.

  “Oh my God,” I said. I sprung up from my chair and let the whole thing wash over me, every little piece finally fall into place.

  Then I ran for my car.

  59

  IRAN FROM THE ELEVATOR out of the building, across the street to the parking garage. I turned over the whole thing in my mind, gaining speed as it became clearer and clearer to me. I didn’t bother with the elevator, taking the stairs two at a time up to the third floor. I clicked the remote to unlock my car but it didn’t beep back to me. I opened the car door, threw the key in the ignition, and suddenly realized why the car hadn’t responded to my remote.

  The car had already been opened.

  An arm strangled me from behind, from the left, pinning my head to the headrest. The butt of a gun sunk into my right temple.

  “Don’t fuckin’ breathe.”

  My mind raced, considering my options, but with the gun to my head, there were no options that would prevent the gun from discharging into my brain.

  “Is this Nino, Johnny, or one of the other stooges?” I asked.

  “Oh, that was my brother you cold-cocked, Kolarich. I’m the one who sliced off your brother’s finger. If you hadn’t heard, he cries like a little girl. I just want you to be real clear, Kolarich. Your brother’s next on my list, and I’m gonna enjoy it.”

  An image of Pete at age thirteen, watching me catch the football at a high school practice. I remember the look in his eyes, the admiration, and how much it meant to me, wondering if I ever conveyed to him how much it meant to me. The first time I met Talia, my heart doing a leap as her eyes swept across mine, the subtle smile that told me so much about her, that made me want her love. And my little angel, my beautiful Emily, her tiny hands opening and closing, her unfocused eyes dancing, swelling me with an indescribable love.

  I closed my eyes as I heard the click of the trigger.

  Then I opened them again.

  “Shit!”

  I shot up my right arm, gripping my attacker’s wrist and forcing the gun butt upward. He’d lost his left-arm grip around my throat now, leaving me with the advantage of being in the front seat, both arms going for the misfired gun, while my attacker was forced to reach over from the backseat.

  It was no contest, but he wouldn’t let go. I grabbed for the gun and his wrist with both hands and used my weight to fall forward into the front passenger seat, taking his arm with me. It was hard to tell what I’d done to my attacker—the sounds of bones snapping and joints ripping left me with a guess that I’d broken his arm horribly and dislocated his collar-bone. The garbled cries of my attacker confirmed that his arm had ended up in a position where no arm had been built to go.

  I had the gun now, which had misfired once and could go off for any or no reason at this point, so I put it on the floorboard of my car. Then I turned to my attacker, his head between the car seats, his broken arm dangling helplessly. “You scream like a girl, too,” I said. I popped him a couple times around the nose—once or twice, or it could have eight or ten—until his eyes seemed firmly closed. I went around to the passenger side of the car and dragged his prone body out of my car.

  I removed his cell phone, wallet, and keys as souvenirs. Just to make it that much harder for him, I removed his shoes, too, and dropped them down to the next ramp level of the parking garage. I would have loved to stick around and interrogate him, but that wasn’t necessary anymore. I knew where I needed to go.

  I started my car, backed out of the spot, and drove down the ramp and out of the building. When I got outside into traffic, I looked back down at the backfiring gun, then up at the sky.

  I PARKED IN THE GARAGE of St. Agnes Hospital and walked up toward the front entrance of the building. Several smokers lingered at the hospital’s front doors, some in scrubs or white uniforms, and a few others presumably visiting someone here. I held my breath and passed through them. I got to reception, signed in, and asked for directions. As I was fastening my visitor tag to my jacket and approaching the elevators, my cell phone buzzed. But I soon realized that it wasn’t my cell phone. It was the cell phone I had taken off the man who jumped me in my car.

  I paused, looked at a caller ID that was blocked, and opened up the cell phone. I couldn’t do much of an impression of the man who attacked me, so I chose a whisper. “Yeah?” I said, keeping it short to make it harder to discern a difference.

  “Is it done?” It was Smith’s voice.

  I thought for a moment, then said, “Call back in two minutes.” Then I jumped in the elevator and hit the button for six.

  I got out on six and looked around. The sixth floor of St. Agnes Hospital was the intensive care unit. Visitation was restricted, according to the signs everywhere. I walked up to the receptionist and said I was here to visit the Butcher patient.

  “Your name?”

  I thought about that for a moment. I had the driver’s license of the guy who’d just jumped me in my car—Nick Ramsey—but I was done playing games.

  “Jason Kolarich,” I said.

  SMITH SAT IN THE CHAIR outside Patricia’s room, waiting out the two minutes. He couldn’t tell if Nick had succeeded, or if he was still lying in wait for Kolarich. He’d just received a call from one of the other men, who had reported successfully on Denny DePrizio. DePrizio had been taken easily, a bullet through the forehead upon walking into his garage.

  Kolarich, hopefully, would be just as easy.

  An orderly approached the room and stepped inside. “You have a visitor,” the young man said to Carlo and Carlo’s daughter, Marisa.

  “Who?” he heard Carlo say.

  “Jason Kola—Kola-something?”

  Smith’s head whipped around. He popped out of his chair and walked into the room. “Who?” Smith asked. “Jason Kolarich?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Wait. Wait just a second.” Smith moved back into the hallway and dialed the cell phone number again for Nick Ramsey.

  “Hello, Smith.”

  Smith felt his stomach sink. “Where are you?”

  “I think you know where I am, Smith. And judging from your reaction, I know where you are.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Either you let me in, or I bring the police. You have exactly one minute to decide.”

  The phone cut out. Smith’s heart was rattling against his chest. He walked back into the hospital room. Carlo sat passively in a chair by the window. “Marisa, sweetheart,” Carlo said. “You and Raymond, go take a walk, would you? Would you do that? I need to speak with someone.”

  “No,” Smith said.

  Carlo dropped his chin and stared at Smith. He cupped his hand and motioned Smith over. He pu
shed himself out of the chair and whispered into Smith’s ear. “Marisa can’t see this. Get her out of the hospital and take her home. And keep your phone nearby. I will take care of this.”

  Carlo pushed Smith away and turned to his daughter, Marisa. “Come here, sweetie,” he said. Marisa looked terrible. She wasn’t sleeping at night, worrying about her daughter, who lay in the bed clinging to life. It was tough enough to cope for someone with all their faculties, but Marisa’s disabilities, her mild retardation, left her wholly unequipped for this.

  Carlo cupped his hand around Marisa’s chin. “Marisa, you know how much I love you, don’t you?”

  “I know, Daddy.”

  Carlo kissed her cheek and held her for a long time. He stroked her hair and whispered into her ear. “Now, Raymond is going to take you home for a little while. I’ll stay and watch Patricia, don’t you worry. Run along now, sweetheart.”

  Marisa picked up her bag. She went over to the bed, stroked Patricia’s hair, kissed her forehead, and whispered something to her. Smith took her arm and looked back at Carlo. Carlo nodded and turned to the orderly.

  “You can show Mr. Kolarich in,” Carlo said to the orderly.

  I STAYED ON HIGH ALERT as I was walked down a corridor filled with customary hospital smells, soft voices and moans, laughter at the nurses’ desk. It was hard to imagine anyone jumping out at me under the circumstances, but I’d just survived someone putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger, so I figured I had used up all my good luck for the day.

  “Right here, sir.” The orderly pointed to a room that was designated by the tag PATRICIA BUTCHER. I looked in before I entered. An older man, probably in his seventies, was sitting in a chair by a window. Sun streamed in and hit the floor near his feet.

  “Carlo,” I gathered.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, son.”

  “All of it good, I hope.” The private bathroom was to my left, Carlo straight forward. “Let my brother go.”

  He nodded. “I will. Give me your phone and it will be done.”

  I remained motionless at the threshold of the room.

  “Well? Aren’t you going to come in?”

  I took a deep breath and entered the room, past the bathroom, and saw the patient lying in the bed. Tubes passed from her wrist to a device that looked like an ATM machine on a diet. Her chest lightly rose and fell. The coloring of her skin was closer to yellow than to human flesh.

  “This is my granddaughter,” he said. “She can’t hear us.”

  I started to walk over to her but froze in place. Her hair was matted against her head. She was breathing with assistance. It felt inappropriate to stare at her, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  “Her name is Patricia,” said Carlo.

  I rested my hand on the post at the foot of the bed. So much adrenaline flowed through my body, I almost couldn’t get the words out.

  “Her name,” I said, “is Audrey.”

  60

  THANK YOU, RAYMOND.”Carlo handed me back the cell phone. “Your brother is on his way.”

  I closed the door to the room and placed a chair against it. I wasn’t expecting an ambush but I wasn’t going to make assumptions.

  “Good,” I said. “Now give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you.”

  “I only have one. Because you’re not a killer. And you don’t want to become one. Trust an old man on that.” Carlo, still seated, rested his head against the wall.

  “She was the best thing to ever happen to Marisa,” he continued. “The best thing to ever happen to us. My only regret is that my wife, Patricia, never knew her. We named her after my wife.”

  “That’s very touching, Carlo.”

  He shook his head but didn’t look at me. “Marisa, my daughter—do you know about her? She’s as beautiful a creature as God ever put on this earth, I’ll tell you that, Jason. But she’s a little slow. They used to say ‘retarded.’ Now they say ‘developmentally disabled.’ I say ‘slow.’ Just a little slow, is all. A good mother. A loving mother. She just needs some help, is all.

  “Well, it’s not easy being in that condition. She wanted to have a life. She wanted boyfriends, you know, everything a young woman wants. And she wanted to have a child of her own. Especially after Marisa’s mother—my Patricia—died. She became so fixated on it. She had to have a child. She had to. I guess she thought it was some way to cope with the loss of her mother.”

  “Circle of life.”

  “That’s just it. Yeah. Circle of life.” He sighed. “But try telling an adoption agency that you’re a single, mentally retarded woman. Try telling them that. Jason, do you have any idea what it’s like to see your daughter in so much—” Carlo’s eyes fixed on me. “Well, now I guess you do have some idea, don’t you?”

  “Let’s leave me out of this,” I said. “I think you’re getting to the part where you decided to kidnap Audrey for Marisa.”

  Carlo inclined his head. “She saw the girl at that picnic. She followed her around, watching her. I wasn’t aware at the time. But she was fixated. She kept talking about Audrey, Audrey, that kind of thing.” He shook his head. “And this man, Frank Cutler, he was no kind of a good man. He was a drunk, is what he was. Half the time, he showed up to the job in the bag. The other half, he didn’t show at all.”

  “Hold up,” I said. “You’re justifying this?”

  He stared at me, a whisper of a smile across his face. “It’s what you do. You justify. You tell yourself that you can give this girl a better life than she’d have with a loser for a father. Yes, you justify.”

  “You made sure he was away from the house the night you took her. You had some of your people keep him out and drunk at a bar.”

  “Yes. That’s true. But they didn’t know about this,” Carlo said. “This was all my idea. All my doing.”

  “You took her? You were the one who took her from her bed?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  I didn’t believe it. But I couldn’t prove otherwise. At this point, there was no way I could prove whether it was Carlo, one of his sons, or even his daughter who pulled Audrey Cutler out of her room. But it was very clear that Carlo, the patriarch, was going to take the fall for everyone else.

  “I told the family she was adopted,” he went on. “My daughter? Bless her heart, but how would she know different?”

  “And your boys?”

  “Your father tells you something, you believe it.”

  I looked again at Audrey, hooked up to tubes and machines. “She got her mother’s genes,” I said, recalling similar machines hooked up to Mary Cutler while she was on her deathbed. “Her kidneys are failing.”

  “She’s dying. The donor lists won’t cut it. It’s a genetic thing. She needs her brother’s kidney. And she needs it fast.”

  But by the time they found her brother, Sammy, he was under arrest for the murder of Griffin Perlini. They couldn’t very well waltz into the Department of Corrections and announce themselves. It would be copping to kidnapping.

  Correction: They could have done that. But they didn’t want to get caught.

  So they needed Sammy to beat the rap—and to do so quickly. Carlo sent his boy Tommy to tell the police that he saw a black man fleeing the murder scene. Keeping it in the family, of course, because this kind of a secret was too sacred.

  Then they sent Smith to offer Sammy the best legal representation money could buy. When he insisted on me, they had no choice. And then I started getting creative. I helped find a burial site of young girls, among other things, and Carlo and Smith began to worry that I was going to drag this case out. They knew I’d want DNA testing on those bodies to confirm that one of them was Audrey, and even though that test would obviously come out negative, there would be a delay of the trial. A delay that could cost Audrey—Patricia—her life. That’s when they started lowering the boom on me, using Pete.

  Stick to the script, they told me, after they’d pinched Pete in that drug bust. Sure
. Don’t get creative, in other words. Don’t worry about the witnesses against Sammy. Don’t cause a delay. Don’t do much of anything, in fact, while they went to work on the case, offering Tommy’s perjured testimony, finding Kenny Sanders as a fall guy, strong-arming the witnesses against Sammy.

  “Out of curiosity,” I said. “How did you expect this to play out? You get Sammy off the charges, and then you just tell him, ‘By the way, your long-lost sister is still alive, and could she please have one of your kidneys?’”

  “You say these things as if there were many options. But there were no options.” He looked at me. “What would we have done? I don’t know. Offer him money for his kidney and for his silence, I guess. Would we have killed him afterward? You want me to tell you that wasn’t a possibility? I don’t know.” He shook his head. “None of that mattered until we got him out of jail.”

  That stood to reason, which is to say, there was no reason. From his perspective, his only hope, short of confessing, was to get Sammy free and then think of something.

  “You need to know, Jason,” Carlo said, wagging an insistent finger at me. “You need to know, this girl has been loved every day of her life. She was given everything, but most of all our—our love,” he managed, choking out the words. “Extreme actions. We took extreme actions, yes. But it was a matter of life and death. I would rip”—he grabbed at his midsection—“I would rip every organ out of my body to save her. So would my boys. We would do anything.”

  “Everything but confess to a crime. This could have been all over months ago.”

  “Yes. I admit it. I’ll confess now. Call the police. Have an officer come to this room.”

  “I’m going to do just that.” I opened my cell phone, searched through the directory, and made the call. “Detective Carruthers,” I said. “Jason Kolarich. You won’t have to keep that photo of Audrey Cutler any more.”