I can’t remember what I said first; my heartbeat hammered in my ears, erasing the words as I spoke them. I do know that the surface of the desk suddenly seemed very far away. If I faint, I thought, will anyone hear it?
Walt first asked if the man’s name was familiar to me: “Have you ever heard of a Michael—Mike—Hutchinson?” I hadn’t. But as Walt explained, this was most certainly not another false lead. The sickening feeling of disappointment did not come. My pulse gradually slowed to normal.
Walt was sure. And the evidence sounded good. I lowered the pen’s fine point and wrote: “Michael Hutchinson.” I still have those notes. The handwriting is tight and cramped, unlike my usual scrawl, as though tentative or disbelieving. But the period after “Hutchinson” is large and sure, his name a sentence unto itself, a complete idea. I’d let the pen tip sit there for a second or two, flooding the paper with ink.
Walt told me that Hutchinson had matched the DNA samples taken from the murder scene. He had been convicted of a felony—kidnapping, plus criminal threatening with a firearm—in late 2003, and so he’d had to submit to a cheek swab for entry into the FBI’s criminal database. The typing of each sample can take years, Walt said, because of a long backlog. Violence outpaced lab funding everywhere. Maine’s delay at the time was two years; in some states it was up to ten. But Maine had recently received some federal funding, to catch up. Well, the lab had finally gotten to Hutchinson’s sample just a week before, two and a half years after his kidnapping conviction, and as soon as they entered it into the database, there was a match to the blood samples that had been waiting twelve years, that had failed to match with nearly thirty other men. A solid match; no doubt about it. Hutchinson was now thirty-one years old. On that day, I was twenty-four, had lived without Mom for half my life.
The typing would be repeated, as was standard, but Walt had already spoken with Hutchinson—twice—in the county jail, where he’d been incarcerated after violating his probation. I listened closely, made a few more carefully inscribed notes, trying to retain each detail. I seized the most surreal one and asked, “You talked to him?” Someone I knew had sat down with this man, just the day before. He was no longer an abstract concept, a blank space behind the explosion of the long silver gun in my mind. He was real, a person upon the earth.
“Yeah,” Walt said, and here his excitement broke through; he was thrilled to tell me the story. He sped up, and his sentences were scattered with little laughs: the happiness of victory. “I sat him down and I said, ‘Do you know Crystal Perry? Were you ever in Crystal Perry’s house?’ And he up-and-down denied it, absolutely denied it. I came back the next day, I gave him another chance! And he denied it again. And that’s going to be really good when it’s time for the trial, because he won’t be able to make up some story about knowing your mother—he’ll be out of a lot of alibis for why we found his DNA all over the place.”
Trial, I thought. Trial, oh my God. It’s going to happen.
“And, y’know, too: we knew all along this guy had cut his hand. That he must have had a wicked gash across his palm, from the knife—that was the reason his blood was all over. Happens all the time in cases like this: they slip. And as soon as I saw him, Hutchinson, I asked to see his hand, and he has this big scar, right across his palm. He claims it’s from a car wreck, but I just knew it—I always knew this guy would have this old injury.”
Walt told me that if we got a conviction, the attorney general’s office was considering pursuing a life sentence—as Maine does not have the death penalty. He explained that Maine was one of the few states where a life sentence carries no possibility of parole, and because judges can be hesitant to apply such an absolute punishment, the AG’s office rarely suggested it. But in this case, it seemed more than warranted.
It turned out Hutchinson had been living right there in Bridgton all along; I hadn’t been unreasonable when I’d imagined him walking down Main Street. He had a wife, two kids. Worked as a mason for his father’s company, sometimes. Sold drugs, often.
I stopped writing and took a deep breath. “The thing is . . . I have to admit that at some point, I just thought I was never going to get this call.”
Now Walt’s tone got more serious. “You know, Sarah. I never wanted to say this, but sometimes, especially when there’d be months with just nothing, sometimes I thought I’d never be making this call.”
Walt said that he and his colleagues were rushing to collect the facts they needed for the upcoming indictment, when charges would officially be brought and Hutchinson’s identity would be made public. Walt had been promoted to a supervisory position but had stayed on the case, assisting the new primary investigator, Chris Harriman, and now they were tying up a twelve-year investigation, making sure that all the evidence was solid. They had to talk to a few more people, Walt said, to check up on some things. It would take a couple more days. I was the only person they’d told—they hadn’t yet called the rest of my family.
“Should I tell them?” I said. “I mean . . . when should I call?”
“Well,” Walt said, “it’s totally up to you. You absolutely can do whatever feels best. If you want to tell them, that makes sense, and of course you can. But you should know that we really do need to keep things quiet—just for a few more days. We are going to do these interviews as quickly as possible, before word spreads—you know how it gets there in Bridgton. We need to surprise certain people. So you guys need to not tell anyone outside the family. We’re expecting the indictment to be next Thursday; I’ll call again on Monday or Tuesday to update you. And you can call me anytime.”
I thought about my nine aunts and uncles. Their children and friends and neighbors. Groups of women sitting around kitchen tables, smoking and drinking coffee and talking for hours on long Sunday afternoons. I thought about how this news would alter reality for all of us, how impossible it would be to know this and then talk to a friend and not mention it. How quickly news flew from Oxford County, where most of them lived, to Cumberland County, where Bridgton was, to the south. My grandmother was desperate to know who the killer was; she would never be able to keep quiet once she knew. Word would leak as soon as she went to her hairdresser’s, as soon as the Avon lady came. The Avon lady, incidentally, was my old babysitter, Peggy.
I decided to wait on word from Walt. I just had to lay low for one week.