Текст книги "The Hidden Man"

Автор книги: David Ellis

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

25

I TURNED TO MY COMPUTER and finished drafting a motion I would file in Sammy’s case. It was a motion for expedited DNA testing of the four bodies found behind Hardigan Elementary School. In the alternative to expedited testing, I would ask for a continuance of the trial until DNA testing could be completed. That continuance, any veteran attorney like Smith would know, could last up to six months, maybe even a year. This ran directly against Smith’s adamant desire that the trial proceed as scheduled.

Then I ran through the list of Griffin Perlini’s known victims, in particular the two for whom Perlini went to prison. I made a couple of calls to set up meetings. This, too, ran counter to Smith’s instructions.

I wasn’t wasting any time testing the limits of my leverage.

I noticed that Shauna was in, which wasn’t unusual for a late Sunday afternoon. As a one-person shop, she had to handle the business end of things, too, and she often came in on the weekend to handle payroll, revenue projections, and other nonlegal tasks. I walked down the hall to her office and poked my head in. She was on the phone, so I waited, as Shauna spoke authoritatively to a client, assuring them that she was giving it hard to the “idiots” on the other side of the litigation. Clients like it when you call the other side disparaging names. It shows an attorney’s investment in the case.

When she got off the phone, I closed the door behind me.

“I need your help, Shauna,” I said.

I SPENT the evening at home with Pete. We ordered in pizza and drank cheap beer. Pete was wearing one of my sweatshirts, too large for him, and a haggard expression. His sleepy, bloodshot eyes kept drifting off, maybe thinking back to the arrest, or thinking forward to many years in the pen.

I was kicking around what to tell him. He’d told me he thought he’d been set up, and now I had information that he was probably right. What good would it do to tell him what I knew? On the other hand, he had a right to know.

We ate mostly in silence, Pete enjoying the comfort of my house, contrasted with the jail cell. He was placing his faith in me. He was making the assumption that I’d come to his rescue, the big brother with the Midas touch, not realizing that I was probably the reason for his problems in the first place.

I’d never been comfortable in that position—the hero, the celebrity. I’d always felt like an imposter. People give you a status based on a physical accomplishment, something you do in a game. Plenty of women flocked to the athletes in high school, and even more so at State. I was no priest. I freely accepted the accoutrements. But I never mistook it for reality. The truth was, it was a lonely existence, questioning the motives of everyone around you—the coaches, the boosters, the women—not trusting anyone with your feelings. State used me and I used State, getting a college degree and heading to law school.

Talia was not one for idol worship. Nor did she know the first thing about football. We’d met in the last year of college, and she couldn’t have cared less about sports. That, I assumed, was one of the many things that drew me to her. She’d listen with interest to the accounts of my accomplishments, but it seemed more of an information-gathering process, just another piece of a puzzle that was Jason Kolarich.

I never knew, precisely, what that puzzle looked like with all the pieces in place. The only thing I knew for sure was that, whatever it used to look like, it would never be the same. I would never fully recover from the loss of Talia and Emily. The raw, gaping wounds would close but they’d always be sensitive to the touch.

I watched Pete, boyish in his messy hair and oversized sweatshirt, drink one beer too many. I watched his expression occasionally deteriorate as he pondered what lay before him. I watched him, and I knew that I would stop at nothing now.

I wasn’t a football player at heart, and I sure as hell wasn’t a team player. I was a competitor. I wanted to win and I enjoyed the thrill of the battle.

But now it was personal. Smith and his friends had invaded what was left of my family. I would make sure he’d regret that decision.

MONDAY MORNING—twenty-one days until trial—I was in the office by nine. Marie buzzed me just as I was opening some files to review. “Arrelius Jackson from Reynard Penitentiary?”

I didn’t know the name. An inmate, obviously, doing state time.

“Take a message,” I said.

A moment later, Marie buzzed again. “He says it’s urgent. He says Mr. Smith referred him?”

I felt my blood go cold. “I’ll take it.” I punched the lit button. “Jason Kolarich.”

“Yeah, I need to talk to you.” There was heavy background noise. An inmate using a pay phone.

“So talk.”

“Nah. Face to face, man.”

“I’m busy.”

“Not too busy for this, man. You know where Reynard is?”

“I know where it is,” I said. “I sent a lot of people there.”

I thought he laughed. “You better come, man, you know what’s smart.”

The line went dead. I stared at the phone, as if it could give me some answers. I had a pretty good idea what this was about.

Smith, it seemed, wasn’t taking no for an answer.

My cell phone buzzed. I looked at the face and it was Joel Lightner. I took a moment to decelerate from my conversation with Mr. Arrelius Jackson and answered.

“I’ve got something on John Dixon. Ready?”

“When you are,” I said.

“Black kid, age twenty-eight. Seven pops, all drug-related. Three of them dismissed, three pleaded down, some community service, one stint inside. He was affiliated for a time, a Warlord, but as you know, the War-lords don’t have much going on anymore. Anyway, he’s a Lone Ranger now, he lives down south in Marion Park and works as a courier for an investment banking firm.”

“A courier.”

“Yeah, ain’t that rich? He probably has half his clientele right in that damn firm. Anyway, 4554 West Elvira is the addy. He’s single but has a kid that lives with the mother. The firm he works at is McHenry Stern, downtown. The Hartz Building.”

“Sure.” I continued to scribble. “Awesome, Joel. You’re a peach.”

“You want a tail?”

“I don’t think it would look good on me.”

“Hey, smart guy? What’s it gonna be? Do I tail him? Interview him?”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

“Yeah? You’re making me nervous, kid.”

“Any luck on this ‘Mace’?”

Joel used silence to express his disapproval. Hell, he found people for a living. Why would he assume the worst about my intentions?

“No luck,” he finally said. “Nickname isn’t much to go on, right? And cops don’t usually advertise their CI’s.”

Fair enough. John Dixon was the one I wanted, anyway.

26

REYNARD PENITENTIARY was a maximum-security prison out in rural country, a good fifty miles northwest of the city. It took me more than an hour to get there, which put me at about half past one. Visiting hours began at two, if memory served, though as a prosecutor we could get access to inmates whenever need be. I’d been out here a few times in my stint as an assistant county attorney, usually flipping witnesses through a combination of sticks and carrots.

The place was a brick fortress with several acres surrounding it on all sides, covered with the usual barbed-wire fencing and in-ground sensors. I was stopped no less than three times on my way in, always checking my identification against the visitor sheet. Arrelius Jackson had put me down as an “A” visit—meaning an attorney-client visit, which entitled us to special rooms where, allegedly, we could speak in confidence. I say “allegedly” because the Department of Corrections, on occasion, had been known to overlook this special privilege and eavesdrop on attorney-client conversations, too. There had been a scandal about five years ago with a downstate penitentiary, resulting in a handful of resignations and typical reactionary reforms.

I didn’t really care. I didn’t have the slightest impression that Arrelius Jackson was looking for a lawyer. I’d done a search on him back at my office. Age thirty-four, African American, unmarried, a sheet starting when he was seventeen. Mr. Jackson was serving consecutive life sentences for a triple homicide in the city about a decade ago. His appeals had long dried up.

I was searched, seized, X-rayed, poked and prodded. I gave my autograph a couple of times and passed through two metal gates before I was finally ensconced in a small room of concrete walls, painted green, and a metal table at which I sat. The single door to the room popped open with a hydraulic whoosh and in walked the man of the hour, none other than Mr. Arrelius Jackson, in an orange body suit, accompanied by two of Reynard Penitentiary’s finest.

Inmates used the phrase stone cold to describe the nastiest, scariest of the prison population. The term was typically reserved for the sexual predators and the enforcers. I didn’t know if Jackson was either of those but I figured if I looked up the phrase in the dictionary, I would find a picture of the man now standing before me.

Jackson had several scars on his forehead, followed by braided hair pulled tightly over his skull. Uneven facial hair straggled along his jaw line. His eyes were small and cold, and fixed on me from the moment he walked in the room.

One guard—unarmed—bolted Jackson’s handcuffs to the metal clip on the table while another armed guard observed from a safe distance. The protocol had been established a couple of decades ago, after a manacled inmate managed to lift the handgun out of a guard’s holster during this very process. The guards left us, closing the thick metal door. They could monitor us from a camera posted in the corner of the room but they couldn’t listen—allegedly.

Throughout this entire process, Jackson never took his eyes off me, not showing a trace of emotion. He had raped and killed. He had no hope for release. His life would be spent in this Darwinian hellhole, where the only hope for survival was to be meaner and tougher than everyone else.

Arrelius Jackson hated me. He hated every man associated in any marginal way with the criminal justice system, with authority, a cop, a lawyer, a judge, the people who felt entitled to lock him in a cage. Undoubtedly he hated his own lawyer, part of the same system, in his mind probably equally corrupted, in cahoots with the prosecution all along. Given the chance, he would come over the table right now and pummel me, smash every tooth in my mouth, use my skull for a punching bag, probably piss on my dead corpse.

Usually that didn’t happen until people got to know me.

I leaned back in my uncomfortable chair and stared back at him. I wasn’t going to speak first. It was his dime. His call.

“Bitch,” he said, then he chuckled to himself, amused.

That cleared up any minute possibility that he was seeking my legal assistance. He was here to intimidate me. Smith had reached this guy. I had a pretty good idea of his sales pitch from here on out.

“Is that what your mama used to call you?” I asked.

“Say again?”

“I mean, Arrelius—that’s a girl’s name, right? Did your mama dress you up in pretty pink doll outfits and call you ‘bitch’?”

He didn’t engage. His face balled up in rage, then eased. His mouth was a tight, straight line.

“Your brother,” he said. “Nice white boy like that. Nice little bitch. Be my bitch, he come here. Don’t matter where, man. Be someone’s bitch. We’ll be sure a that. Time we’re done, he be beggin’ for the blade.” He made a motion, a finger tracing across his throat. “We gonna slice that white boy wide open,” he said.

I had expected this. I’d prepared for this. Still, it was all I could do—it took every mental muscle I could flex—to look disinterested, bored, unaffected, as this lifer inmate threatened to commit every conceivable felony on my brother. Smith was telling me he had a wide reach. He could get to Pete inside. Pete would never make it out of the penitentiary, and his time inside, while still alive, would be worse than death.

I bottled the rage, ignored the hammering inside my brain, and slowly nodded at Arrelius Jackson. “Is that it? Anything else?”

He took a moment, then smiled at me. “I’ll keep a spot warm for him, man.”

I got up and picked up my briefcase. I walked past Jackson and stopped behind him, positioning myself so that, chained as his hands were to the table, he could not reach me. I leaned into him and whispered into his ear.

“Redgrave Park,” I said. “That’s where your brother lives, right? Arrelius, one thing happens to my brother, I’ll castrate yours. And I’ll send you a picture.”

I left him, straining against his restraints, unsure of whether I was bluffing or telling the truth.

I drove away from Reynard Penitentiary with electricity flowing through my limbs. I told myself to focus on solving the problem but couldn’t stifle unimaginable images, courtesy of Arrelius Jackson. As a prosecutor, you hear that prison rape happens but not as often as they say. Still, a scrawny, good-looking white boy like Pete? He wouldn’t stand a chance.

Solve the problem.

Smith’s people had connections, all right. He’d managed to frame Pete and to get an inmate to threaten Pete’s well-being inside. He was flexing his muscle for me, and it was working.

“McHenry Stern on South Walter,” I said to the automated voice. I was driving back to my office, calling information on my cell phone. “Connect me,” I answered when the robot asked me my preference. I was all for technological advancement, but Christ, can’t I get a human being on the phone once in a while?

A woman answered the phone and spoke so quickly, I wasn’t even sure I had the right number. “I’m looking for John Dixon,” I said. “He works in the mail room.”

“Please hold for the mail room.”

Apparently the mail room was in another country, because it took a painfully long period of time to connect me, to the point that I was about to hang up, call information again, and start over with the speed-talking receptionist, when a gruff male voice answered. “Yeah.”

“Looking for John Dixon,” I said.

“He’s—hang on.” The man moved the phone from his mouth and called out behind him, but I had no trouble hearing him. “J.D.’s off this week, right?”

“—be off for a while—”

“—visit his family or something—”

“He’s not here,” the man said, returning to me. That was a bit more succinct than the dialogue I’d just overheard.

“Do you know when you expect him back?”

“No.”

“Will he call in for messages?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I leave a message with you?”

“Um—we don’t really do that.”

“You’ve been a tremendous help.” I closed the cell phone.

So J.D. had taken a powder from work for the time being. Maybe this had been some time off he’d been planning, but I’m not a big believer in coincidences.

The Buick came back into my focus, several car lengths behind me. I drove to my parking garage, across the street from my office building, where I have a monthly pass. I approached the entry gate, which popped up when its sensor clicked with the module attached to my dashboard, and found a place to park on the fourth floor. I took the elevator down and slowly walked across the street to my building—slow enough for anyone watching to see me. I didn’t actually see the Buick or its occupant and didn’t want to be obvious in looking. I had to assume that they didn’t know I was on to them.

The building has a north and south exit. I figured they had someone on each side, should I choose to move on foot, with the Buick positioned to be near the parking garage if I were to travel by car.

In my building, I took an elevator, but it was an elevator down. Shauna, who had rented space in this building for a few years now, had become eligible for in-building parking, meaning she got to park her car underground. I found her fancy foreign car where she’d described it to me and used the spare key she’d lent me. From my briefcase, I removed a baseball cap and windbreaker. I replaced my suit coat with the jacket and threw on the cap. None of Smith’s people would be looking for a two-door Lexus, but the light cover gear would help in the event they happened to glance at the car, anyway.

It seemed like I made it out of the building, up the ramp, and toward the highway without incident. I had to be prepared for the possibility that Smith’s people were following me now. In the end, while I preferred to conduct my investigation without his knowledge, I was going to do it either way. I agreed with Joel Lightner—I couldn’t assume that Smith wanted Sammy to win his case. I had to make it happen on my own.

Griffin Perlini had been convicted of molesting two girls in the summer of 1988, crimes which had landed him in the penitentiary until 2005. The girls had enrolled in a summer program run by the city’s park district. The two families were from a south-side neighborhood. According to my files, one of the families still lived in the same house and the other had moved to a nearby suburb.

I started with the people who hadn’t moved. Robert and Sarah Drury lived in a modest home in the middle of a very clean, well-kept, middle-class neighborhood. It was dusk by the time I reached the house, and the temperatures had fallen sharply with a promise of snow. The cold and early darkness of winter lent an appropriate cast to this visit. I was going to talk to these people about the man who molested their daughter some twenty years ago.

Robert answered the door in a sweater vest, khakis, and loafers. My gut told me this late-fifties guy was more likely to host a bingo game at a church fund-raiser than kill a pedophile. Then again, I’d prosecuted harmless-looking people who raped and murdered.

He showed me in and I met his wife, who was possibly a tad younger than him, somewhat overweight and graying. They didn’t know why I was here. I’d only told them I was an attorney.

I trust my gut, my first impression, and what I’d hoped to do with these people was inform them of Griffin Perlini’s death and monitor the reaction. But the news accounts of the bodies found behind Hardigan Elementary had stolen my best line. They obviously would have heard the news.

“I’m representing Sammy Cutler,” I said.

It only took a beat before Robert’s genial expression hardened. He lifted his chin slowly. “Yes, all right.”

Sarah looked at her husband, then at me. “How is he?”

“As good as someone can be, staring at life in prison.” I looked at each of them, alternatively. “You know Sammy?”

“We talked once,” Robert said. “Before the trial started.” He meant Perlini’s trial, for molesting his daughter. “We knew about his sister, and—I guess I can’t say why—we wanted to meet him.”

That wasn’t uncommon. Victims of a common perpetrator often form bonds.

“You want us to testify?” asked Sarah.

That wasn’t why I was here. I was auditioning them for the part of Griffin Perlini’s killers, someone to show the jury. So far, the only audition for which they could compete would be as the parents in a 1950s sitcom. I began to hear the musical theme to Leave It to Beaver.

“I’m trying to get some background,” I explained. “I’m painting a picture here.”

The husband’s eyes narrowed. “Char was five when it happened,” he said. “She was scared and confused while it was happening. She thought she was doing something wrong. Later, after we discovered what had happened and that man was arrested, Char seemed moody, prone to anger. But she developed into a very ambitious and successful student and woman. Is she still scarred by what happened? Probably. But she’s moved on. She’s getting a master’s at Oregon State.”

“Great.”

“We’ve moved on,” said Robert. “And we’d prefer to keep it that way. But if we have to testify to help Sammy Cutler, then we’ll do it.”

“Did you ever have contact with Perlini after his conviction?”

“No, of course not.”

“Did you testify at Perlini’s parole hearing in 2005?” I asked.

“No.” He shook his head. “I mentioned it to Char, but she was in Oregon, and she didn’t want to come back. And I wrote a letter but never sent it.” He looked at his wife. “I think Archie might have testified.”

“I think he did,” she agreed.

They were talking about Archie Novotny, father of the other victim in that park district summer program. Perlini was convicted of crimes against both the Drury and Novotny daughters in the same trial. Archie was next on my list.

“I know of five victims, not counting the bodies discovered at the school,” I said. “There was Sammy’s sister, though he wasn’t convicted of that crime. Your daughter and Jody Novotny were the two involving actual—actual contact. There were two girls earlier in time, in the late seventies, but as I understand it, it was just lewd exposure. There was no physical contact.”

“That’s my understanding as well,” said Robert.

And those victims—well, their families had had plenty of opportunities to kill Griffin Perlini before he was charged with the Drury and Novotny abuse. I could think of no particular reason that those two families would suddenly seek vengeance, so much later in time, when they didn’t feel the need earlier.

And I didn’t see the Drurys as plausible suspects. No chance.

That left me with only one other possibility—my next stop, Archie Novotny.