The Hidden Man (2 page)

The first order of business here was to get that little girl back home safe. Didn’t matter how. He was giving Perlini an out, the opportunity to pretend that the child had simply wandered off, that Perlini had done what any good citizen might do. From Perlini’s perspective, it was a way to stop this right now, with the possibility of avoiding a criminal charge.

Perlini didn’t answer.

“She’s real young,” Carruthers elaborated. “Probably too young to even say her name. So we figured, maybe someone was hanging on to her. To be safe.”

It was going to work now or never. The suspect couldn’t hesitate on the answer. Either he had her or he didn’t. If he had her, and he was going to buy this out Carruthers was offering, he’d have to purchase that ticket now.

“I was just sleepin’.” Perlini scratched his head, gathered a bunch of his thick red hair in his hand.

“How ’bout we step inside and talk a minute.” Carruthers wasn’t asking.

Perlini scratched his head again and looked back over his shoulder. He had a small frame. He was skinny and below-average height. The neighbor’s description wasn’t much, but it generally fit this guy.

“What do ya say, Griffin? A quick talk.”

“Um—well—my lawyer is Reggie Lionel.”

His lawyer.
Carruthers felt a rush.

Perlini pointed behind him. “I could call him, but it’s early—”

“Your lawyer needs his beauty sleep, Griffin.” Carruthers grabbed the handle to the screen door, but it wouldn’t move.

Perlini’s eyes moved up to the detective’s, reading pure fear.

“You’ll need to unlock this door, Griffin. Right now.
Right
now.”

“O—okay. Okay.” He pushed the door open.

Carruthers took the door handle. “Take two steps back, please.”

Carruthers, Gooden, and the uniform stepped in. Perlini suddenly looked lost in his own house, unsure of what to do, where to stand or where to go. Carruthers thought he’d let Perlini make the call. Surely, Perlini would try to direct them away from anything telltale.

The detective’s pulse was racing. She might be here in the house. She might still be alive. Behind him, Detective Gooden was strolling casually beyond the foyer, looking for anything in plain view.

“Is anyone else in this house, Griffin?”

Perlini shook his head, no.

“Griffin, you know a girl named Audrey Cutler?”

Perlini’s eyes were once again downcast, in anticipation of unwanted questioning, like a child expecting a scolding. On mention of the girl’s name, his eyes froze. His posture stiffened.

The answer was yes.

“No,” Perlini said.

“Griffin,” Gooden called out, “you don’t mind I look around a little?”

He did mind; it was all over his face. But pedophiles, they didn’t have a spine, not with adults. It wasn’t exactly textbook consent, but Perlini hadn’t said no. Carruthers was pretty sure he’d be able to reflect back on this moment and remember Perlini nodding his head.

“Eyes up, Griffin. Look at me.” Carruthers gestured to his own eyes, his fingers forked in a peace sign.

Perlini did the best he could, his eyes sweeping back and forth past Carruthers like a searchlight.

“If there was a misunderstanding here, Griffin—if maybe you thought about doing something but changed your mind—hey, let’s get that girl back home. No harm, no foul—”

“No. No.” Perlini shook his head, the insolent child, and gripped his tomato-red hair in two fists.

Carruthers heard a noise outside. A voice, yelling. He looked through the door and saw a man pointing at the house, talking to a gathering crowd. Something about a child molester.

The detective turned back to Perlini, who was beginning to dissolve. He was shaking his head with a childlike fury, tears forming in his eyes.

“This won’t get any better, Griffin,” Carruthers told him. “Every minute you stiff-arm me, it gets worse.”

“
Vic!”

Gooden’s voice sounded distant.

“Take that seat over there, Griffin.” He pointed to a small living room, a beat-up love seat with a torn cushion. He nodded to the officer, who clearly understood his direction to keep an eye on the suspect.

Carruthers moved quickly down a small tiled hallway, turned into a carpeted room with a television and fireplace, and found the back door to the place ajar. He stepped outside, into a yard of neglected grass and some old lawn furniture.

“Vic!”

His partner was calling from the detached garage behind the house. No—it wasn’t a garage at all, just a small coach house within the fenced property.

“I’m here,” Carruthers said, opening the door. “Jesus Christ.”

The room was filled with black-and-white photos on the walls and hung from clotheslines. Children. Toddlers. Dozens of them, looked to be ages two or three at best. Some of them were taken indoors—maybe a shopping mall, probably the one a couple miles away. Most of them were photos from a park.

Gooden walked along one of the clotheslines and fingered a series of photos taken of a small girl in a sandbox. Carruthers had seen the face very recently. For confirmation he did not need, he removed the photograph of Audrey Cutler from his jacket pocket, her innocent serenity lighting a deepening rage within him.

He marched into the main house, his body on fire, his hands balled in fists. He thought of Mary Cutler, hours ago, clutching her seven-year-old son Sammy in her arms, bursting out words breathlessly as she gave a physical description of Audrey.

He thought of that little boy, Sammy Cutler, the confused expression on his tiny face, not comprehending the situation entirely but understanding, on some level, that something bad had happened to his baby sister.

Griffin Perlini sat motionless in the chair, his head in his hands. The officer snapped to attention when he saw Carruthers, the officer’s expression confirming the look on Carruthers’s face.

Carruthers brushed past the officer. He grabbed Griffin Perlini by the shoulders and pushed him hard against the back cushion.

“You tell me where she is,” he said in a controlled whisper, “before I rip your throat out.”

TWENTY-SIX YEARS LATER SEPTEMBER 2006

3

P
ACK A MARLBORO LIGHTS, box. Make it two.” Sammy Cutler fished a crumpled twenty out of his pocket. He threw a container of Tic-Tacs onto the conveyer as well, joining a couple of frozen dinners. The grocery store clerk, a young Latina woman with soft skin and hair as dark as coal, looked as bored and tired as Sammy felt. Sammy had just finished a double shift on the new highway being built. He figured he had another month, tops, of good weather before the construction trade shut down for the long winter. He didn’t have a backup plan at the moment. Employers weren’t knocking down the door for ex-cons.

He slipped one pack of cigarettes into the pocket of his flannel shirt, the other in his leather jacket. He noticed his hands, big and rough and hairy and swollen from another day of manual labor.

“Where the hell is Manny?”

Sammy glanced at the complaining man, standing in the next grocery line over, wearing a starched white shirt and a name tag that indicated some authority. Top grocery guy. He grabbed a plastic bag and began packing groceries that were piling up in the area past the register.

“Griffin,” the man said. “Griffin!”

Sammy felt his body go cold.

“—your change, mister.”

Sammy looked down at the green bills and silver coins placed into his hands. Then back up, at a man who entered his sight line, approaching the grocery store manager. The man was small, hunched, with small green eyes and cropped hair, grayed at the sides but mostly a dark red.

“Work this aisle, Griffin. Where is Manny?”

“
I
don’t know.”

Sammy bristled at hearing the voice. He’d never heard the man speak. Never even laid eyes on the man. He’d been so young.

Griffin
.

And surely there were other people with the name, however unusual it may be.

But he looked the part. Sammy had served with some of them, the ones who liked little kids. You could spot them from a mile away. Meek and squirrelly. Like they carried an inner shame that never left them.

Yes. This was the man that had killed his sister twenty-six years ago.

Sammy felt himself move, his focus on the grocery clerk named
Griffin
shifting from front to profile.

“Don’t forget your groceries, mister.”

Sammy’s trembling hand reached out. His grip closed over the plastic handle of the bag.

“Don’t worry,” he said slowly. “I haven’t forgotten.”

ONE YEAR LATER OCTOBER 2007

4

H
E CALLED an hour ahead for an appointment, and he called himself Mr. Smith. Over the phone to my assistant, he didn’t specify the reason for the visit other than saying he had a “legal matter,” which distinguished him from absolutely no one else who entered my law office.

From the moment my assistant Marie showed him in, he felt wrong. He presented, frankly, better than most potential clients. He was thin, precisely dressed in an Italian wool suit, a deep dimple in his shiny blue tie, gray hair immaculately combed. It was clear that whatever he wanted from me, he’d be able to afford the freight. So far, so good.

But still—wrong. His hand was moist when I shook it, and he didn’t make eye contact. As I retreated behind my desk, he closed the office door behind him. It wasn’t uncommon for visitors to want discretion with their lawyer, but still—it was my office, not his. It was a power move, establishment of control.

“Mr. Smith,” I said, wondering if that was his real name. I was assuming this was a criminal matter, and I like to guess the crime before the client tells me. A slick guy like him made me think of financial crimes or pedophilia. If it was the latter, this was going to be a very short conversation.

Smith didn’t seem too impressed with the surroundings. I wasn’t, either. I had a couple of diplomas on the walls and some pieces of art picked up at an estate sale and some bookcases filled with law books I never use. My brother had given me a couch that I put near the back of my office, though I wasn’t sure if that made the place look too cramped.

In his thousand-dollar suit, Smith looked like a fish out of water. He had one of those pocket squares that matched his tie. I never owned a pocket square in my life. I hate pocket squares.

“We’ll require your services, Mr. Kolarich. Can you tell me your hourly fee?”

In my recent reincarnation as a solo practitioner, I find that I have three categories of clients. Category one is a flat fee to handle a small criminal matter, like a DUI or misdemeanor. Category two pays me by the hour, with an up-front retainer. Category three is the client who promises to pay but stiffs me instead.

My hourly fee, where applicable, is usually a buck fifty. But I decided, then and there, that it was time to have an escalating fee schedule, depending on whether my client wears a pocket square.

“Three hundred,” I answered. It felt nice just saying it.

Smith seemed amused. Well-bred as he was—or was trying to appear—he stifled any comment. He was getting a mark-up, and he wanted me to know that he knew.

It usually took me a full half hour to dislike someone, but this guy was narrowing that window considerably.

“Three hundred an hour would be acceptable,” said he.

Then again, maybe I was being too hard on the guy.

“You’re young,” Smith said to me. “Young for a case like this.”

“Mozart composed a symphony before the age of ten.”

“I see.” I didn’t get the impression that Smith was placing me in the same category as the prodigy Amadeus.

“You came to me, friend,” I reminded him.

He didn’t offer a response, but I could see that he wasn’t here by choice. Why, then,
was
he here?

“The man you’ll be representing is charged with first-degree murder, Mr. Kolarich.”

That sounded like something important, so I reached for my pen and notepad. I wrote,
pocket square = big fee
.

“The man he killed was a sexual predator,” Smith told me.

My would-be client killed a pedophile? Well, if you’re going to pick a victim, there’s none better.

“And who are you to this guy?” I asked Smith.

He thought about that for a while. It didn’t seem like a hard question to me.

Typically, if it’s not the defendant himself reaching out for counsel, it’s a family member on his behalf. I didn’t get the sense that Smith fell into that category.

“As you can imagine,” Smith finally said, “sex offenders usually count their victims in the multiple, not the singular.”

Right, but he was being vague. Talking around the subject. I do that all the time, but I don’t trust people who remind me of myself.

It didn’t feel like Smith, or someone he loved, had been victimized by this pedophile, which was what he was suggesting. He wasn’t carrying that emotion. I like to think I can read a guy, and his face wasn’t registering that kind of pain. I was getting disdain, though it seemed to be directed more at me than anything else.

“You’ll take the case at three hundred dollars an hour,” he informed me. “Or someone else will gladly handle it.”

With that, Smith pushed himself out of the chair and remained standing before me. I’m not a big fan of ultimatums, unless I’m the one giving them. It’s been said that I have a problem with people telling me what to do. I think I was the one who said that.

Smith checked his watch. He’d obviously figured that I would jump at the chance for a case like this, but I hadn’t. In his mind, I was either stubborn or stupid.

But, I noted, he hadn’t walked away. He didn’t like bidding against himself, but for some reason he was set on hiring me for this case, and he knew he needed to give me more.