David Ellis - The Hidden Man

“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.”

PACK 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.”

HE 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.