“This is my granddaughter,” he said. “She can’t hear us.”

I started to walk over to her but froze in place. Her hair was matted against her head. She was breathing with assistance. It felt inappropriate to stare at her, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

“Her name is Patricia,” said Carlo.

I rested my hand on the post at the foot of the bed. So much adrenaline flowed through my body, I almost couldn’t get the words out.

“Her name,” I said, “is Audrey.”

60

THANK YOU, RAYMOND.”Carlo handed me back the cell phone. “Your brother is on his way.”

I closed the door to the room and placed a chair against it. I wasn’t expecting an ambush but I wasn’t going to make assumptions.

“Good,” I said. “Now give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you.”

“I only have one. Because you’re not a killer. And you don’t want to become one. Trust an old man on that.” Carlo, still seated, rested his head against the wall.

“She was the best thing to ever happen to Marisa,” he continued. “The best thing to ever happen to us. My only regret is that my wife, Patricia, never knew her. We named her after my wife.”

“That’s very touching, Carlo.”

He shook his head but didn’t look at me. “Marisa, my daughter—do you know about her? She’s as beautiful a creature as God ever put on this earth, I’ll tell you that, Jason. But she’s a little slow. They used to say ‘retarded.’ Now they say ‘developmentally disabled.’ I say ‘slow.’ Just a little slow, is all. A good mother. A loving mother. She just needs some help, is all.

“Well, it’s not easy being in that condition. She wanted to have a life. She wanted boyfriends, you know, everything a young woman wants. And she wanted to have a child of her own. Especially after Marisa’s mother—my Patricia—died. She became so fixated on it. She had to have a child. She had to. I guess she thought it was some way to cope with the loss of her mother.”

“Circle of life.”

“That’s just it. Yeah. Circle of life.” He sighed. “But try telling an adoption agency that you’re a single, mentally retarded woman. Try telling them that. Jason, do you have any idea what it’s like to see your daughter in so much—” Carlo’s eyes fixed on me. “Well, now I guess you do have some idea, don’t you?”

“Let’s leave me out of this,” I said. “I think you’re getting to the part where you decided to kidnap Audrey for Marisa.”

Carlo inclined his head. “She saw the girl at that picnic. She followed her around, watching her. I wasn’t aware at the time. But she was fixated. She kept talking about Audrey, Audrey, that kind of thing.” He shook his head. “And this man, Frank Cutler, he was no kind of a good man. He was a drunk, is what he was. Half the time, he showed up to the job in the bag. The other half, he didn’t show at all.”

“Hold up,” I said. “You’re justifying this?”

He stared at me, a whisper of a smile across his face. “It’s what you do. You justify. You tell yourself that you can give this girl a better life than she’d have with a loser for a father. Yes, you justify.”

“You made sure he was away from the house the night you took her. You had some of your people keep him out and drunk at a bar.”

“Yes. That’s true. But they didn’t know about this,” Carlo said. “This was all my idea. All my doing.”

“You took her? You were the one who took her from her bed?”

“Yes,” he answered.

I didn’t believe it. But I couldn’t prove otherwise. At this point, there was no way I could prove whether it was Carlo, one of his sons, or even his daughter who pulled Audrey Cutler out of her room. But it was very clear that Carlo, the patriarch, was going to take the fall for everyone else.

“I told the family she was adopted,” he went on. “My daughter? Bless her heart, but how would she know different?”

“And your boys?”

“Your father tells you something, you believe it.”

I looked again at Audrey, hooked up to tubes and machines. “She got her mother’s genes,” I said, recalling similar machines hooked up to Mary Cutler while she was on her deathbed. “Her kidneys are failing.”

“She’s dying. The donor lists won’t cut it. It’s a genetic thing. She needs her brother’s kidney. And she needs it fast.”

But by the time they found her brother, Sammy, he was under arrest for the murder of Griffin Perlini. They couldn’t very well waltz into the Department of Corrections and announce themselves. It would be copping to kidnapping.

Correction: They could have done that. But they didn’t want to get caught.

So they needed Sammy to beat the rap—and to do so quickly. Carlo sent his boy Tommy to tell the police that he saw a black man fleeing the murder scene. Keeping it in the family, of course, because this kind of a secret was too sacred.

Then they sent Smith to offer Sammy the best legal representation money could buy. When he insisted on me, they had no choice. And then I started getting creative. I helped find a burial site of young girls, among other things, and Carlo and Smith began to worry that I was going to drag this case out. They knew I’d want DNA testing on those bodies to confirm that one of them was Audrey, and even though that test would obviously come out negative, there would be a delay of the trial. A delay that could cost Audrey—Patricia—her life. That’s when they started lowering the boom on me, using Pete.

Stick to the script, they told me, after they’d pinched Pete in that drug bust. Sure. Don’t get creative, in other words. Don’t worry about the witnesses against Sammy. Don’t cause a delay. Don’t do much of anything, in fact, while they went to work on the case, offering Tommy’s perjured testimony, finding Kenny Sanders as a fall guy, strong-arming the witnesses against Sammy.

“Out of curiosity,” I said. “How did you expect this to play out? You get Sammy off the charges, and then you just tell him, ‘By the way, your long-lost sister is still alive, and could she please have one of your kidneys?’”

“You say these things as if there were many options. But there were no options.” He looked at me. “What would we have done? I don’t know. Offer him money for his kidney and for his silence, I guess. Would we have killed him afterward? You want me to tell you that wasn’t a possibility? I don’t know.” He shook his head. “None of that mattered until we got him out of jail.”

That stood to reason, which is to say, there was no reason. From his perspective, his only hope, short of confessing, was to get Sammy free and then think of something.

“You need to know, Jason,” Carlo said, wagging an insistent finger at me. “You need to know, this girl has been loved every day of her life. She was given everything, but most of all our—our love,” he managed, choking out the words. “Extreme actions. We took extreme actions, yes. But it was a matter of life and death. I would rip”—he grabbed at his midsection—“I would rip every organ out of my body to save her. So would my boys. We would do anything.”

“Everything but confess to a crime. This could have been all over months ago.”

“Yes. I admit it. I’ll confess now. Call the police. Have an officer come to this room.”

“I’m going to do just that.” I opened my cell phone, searched through the directory, and made the call. “Detective Carruthers,” I said. “Jason Kolarich. You won’t have to keep that photo of Audrey Cutler any more.”

I gave a little taste of the details and signed off.

“You tried to kill me today,” I said to Carlo. I thought it deserved mention.

He nodded. “I knew it was over. I was ready to go to the cops. I just wanted to protect the rest of my family. This was my doing. It should be me who pays. Me. Just me.” Carlo rose from the chair with some effort and approached me. He took my arm as he began to lose composure, his body trembling, tears falling. “I beg you, Jason. I beg you. The brother—he’ll hate me. He’ll hate all of us. He has every right to. But please, son—please convince the brother to donate a kidney.”