The Hidden Man (12 page)

I felt that weird symphony of happiness and sympathy, poignant childhood memories fusing with the pain of realizing they’re gone, that life marches onward, trampling everything in its path. Mrs. Thomas was at that stage where hope meant something new and different. I startled myself with the recognition that hope had meant something different to me, too, four months ago.

I played defense to her questioning for a good hour, like I used to when I’d come home from school and my mother would interrogate me. It was annoying at the time, though I wonder how it would have felt had she not inquired. You know you’re a good parent when your child takes you for granted.

I bobbed and weaved, though I tried to fill in as much of the blanks as I could to satiate Mrs. Thomas, who kept insisting that I call her “Lilly” but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. She knew my mother had died and she notably did not raise the subject of my father, currently serving time in prison, so we talked much about Pete—I left out the part about him having a couple of drug-related scrapes with the law, or his inability to find a direction to his life—and mostly about me.

There, too, I edited, letting her take joy in my brief turn as a celebrity athlete, and my scholarship to State. She didn’t seem to be aware—or she’d forgotten—that I’d been kicked off the team for fighting with a teammate, after I’d used up all of my goodwill, even in a sport where violence is prized. She knew about law school and asked me about my law practice. She didn’t know the details beyond that, and when she hit the real sore spot, I decided it best to just tell her that “No one’s tied me down yet,” rather than burden her mind with my misfortune, particularly when I was about to raise another tragedy. She beat me to it, asking after Sammy, and however old she may be, her eyes still worked behind those substantial bifocals, and she knew she’d hit on something dark and messy.

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

T
HE 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.

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 our 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.