David Ellis - The Hidden Man

Hello, Audrey , you say with mock formality. Nice to meet you .

Sammy isn’t outside as much that summer. He spends a good deal of time with her. By July, Audrey is eating food. You watch Sammy feed her, putting one hand delicately behind her tiny, bobbing head and inserting a lime-colored spoon full of food into her mouth. There you go , he says, mimicking his mother’s words and tone. It’s not exactly the same between you and Sammy now. He reserves a part of himself for his little sister. He measures himself in her presence, keeping a watchful eye, springing forth at her cry, or if she loses balance and falls to the side.

You’re like my little sister, too , you tell her that winter. She makes a noise- eh-bah -and grabs a handful of your hair and pulls hard. You don’t mind. You laugh. She doesn’t mean to hurt you , Sammy tells you. You know that. You know you’re special to Audrey, too. She is still too young to appreciate strangers. She breaks into a cry around anyone other than the Cutlers and your family. She lets go of your hair and you get your face up close to hers. She breaks into a big smile, and you feel something light up inside you. The word “beautiful” comes to mind and you think you have found a new definition of that word.

I GOT TO my car and navigated the escalating traffic as the hordes continued to flock toward Hardigan Elementary School. This would be all over the news, and Sammy probably would learn of it, so I needed to pay him a visit.

Sammy. He needed his lawyer. As the duly appointed same, my first concern was how quickly they could identify the remains. DNA testing could take months, especially for bodies that had probably been buried for years. There would be no sense of urgency, no crime to solve when the perpetrator was already dead. This would not go to the front of the line. I would need to see what I could do about that.

I had to admit it-after talking with Mrs. Thomas and Perlini’s mother, I’d had some doubts about Perlini as Audrey’s killer. One of the things that had bothered me was that pedophilia and murder were very different things, and Perlini hadn’t had any history of killing little girls. Or so we’d thought, before today.

So much of solving crimes is luck. Nobody would have bothered to question Griffin Perlini’s mother after his death, yet it was precisely because he was gone-because there was no need to protect him anymore-that his mother gave me the tip about the hill behind this school. Now, there was no doubt that Griffin Perlini had escalated several of his crimes.

“Audrey,” I said aloud. My voice cracked, betraying emotion I hadn’t acknowledged. There is something unspeakable about a child’s death under any circumstances; I didn’t know if the time would ever come that I could fully comprehend the loss of Emily. But the murder of a child exposes something so hideous that anger is not even the appropriate response. We despair. We lose hope. We lose faith.

Audrey Cutler had a plot of land in the Catholic cemetery, next to which her mother, Mary, was buried. We would have a proper funeral, I decided. Sammy and I would bury his sister.

I picked up my cell phone, dialed the number, and got voice mail. “Pete,” I said into the phone. “Pete, I-I-just give me a call when you can.”

YOUR LAST GOOD MEMORY of her, the weekend before she was abducted, the picnic held after the successful construction of the new wing to the university library. You are with the Cutlers, trying to throw a Frisbee with Sammy, while little Audrey tries to partake, tries in vain to intercept the flying disk. My turn , she keeps saying.

Let her have her turn . Mrs. Cutler is happy today. She is wearing a sun-dress, and the wind is playing with her bangs. Mr. Cutler is off drinking beers with some of the other guys involved in the construction. He does that a lot, always with a beer in his hand at home. You heard Sammy’s mom describe the work at the library as “good work,” saying it to Mr. Cutler-you thought they were fighting about that, about how many absences were allowed by the union before you were kicked off the job. Mr. Cutler is a plumber, but he only works sometimes; you don’t know why or when. Some days, Mr. Cutler just stays home, drinking beer and yelling at the television.

Audrey has tired of Frisbee and wants candy. They are passing it out, the company that sponsored the picnic, M &M’s candies with the company name, Emerson, on them. They’re Emerson M &M’s , Sammy says to Audrey. She tries to say it back but it ties her tongue. Something like Em-o-son-em’s comes out, and you and Sammy laugh. She keeps trying and you keep laughing, until Sammy tells her it’s okay, she did a good job, and he picks her up and puts her on his shoulders. He runs around as Audrey yells, Em-o-son-em’s and squeals with delight.

I SPENT the afternoon in my office, going through the files in Sammy’s case. Included in those files was the criminal history of Griffin Perlini. That gave me a list of people whose daughters had been victimized in some way by Perlini. It felt indecent, morosely ironic, that this list of victimized families was, for my purposes, a list of potential suspects.

It wasn’t much of a list, really. Two girls were part of his initial foray into sexual predation, which as far as anyone could tell did not reach the level of sexual contact with the children. Perlini had been convicted only of exposing himself to these children.

The other two girls had been part of the case that put Perlini in prison until 2005. Over one summer, while working at a park district, Perlini had abused these girls, who had enrolled in a summer program. The case had gone to trial, which presumably meant the children had to testify. These would not be fun conversations, both because of the obviously uncomfortable subject matter and because I might have to argue, at trial, that one of these sets of parents should be suspects in Griffin Perlini’s murder. I wasn’t sure I had the stomach to do it, to throw salt on already gaping wounds, but it would be irresponsible not to explore it. That’s the kind of thing that makes the general public hate lawyers, especially the criminal defense bar. Much of what we do, to a layperson, is counterintuitive. A guy gets caught with a kilo of cocaine in his basement and the first thing we argue is that the evidence should not be admitted, because of a Fourth Amendment violation. A guy confesses to a crime and the first thing we argue is that the jury shouldn’t hear the confession, courtesy of the Fifth Amendment. We try shaky defenses like temporary insanity or play the race card, anything plausible to free our client. People will carp and moan about every single attorney on the face of the earth except for one-their own, if they ever need one, in which case their view of the Bill of Rights becomes infinitely more expansive.

I was tired, and thinking about a cup of coffee from the shop downstairs, when my intercom buzzed. Marie, through the speaker: “Mr. Smith to see you.”

Smith. The last person I felt like seeing. But something inside me told me that I wanted to take this meeting.

My door, which I’d uncharacteristically closed, opened, and Smith walked in. “Afternoon, Jason.” He looked as polished as last time, a gray double-breasted suit with a charcoal tie, hair sharply parted. But as he moved across my small office, seating himself in front of my desk, I sensed that he was less tentative, more self-assured, than he was at our last meeting.

“Tell me your name,” I said. “Your real name.”

“I was hoping for an update on the case,” he said, not answering my question.