David Ellis - The Hidden Man

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 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.

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.