Joseph P.A.M.J. McGee Novella Series
WEDNESDAY’S CHILD
McGee Confronts a Murderous Cult
Carl Douglass
Neurosurgeon Turned Author Writes With Gripping Realism
PO Box 221974 Anchorage, Alaska 99522-1974
[email protected]—www.publicationconsultants.com
ISBN 978-1-59433-584-6
eBook ISBN 978-1-59433-585-3
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2015960047
Copyright 2015 Carl Douglass
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in any form, or by any mechanical or electronic means including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, in whole or in part in any form, and in any case not without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Dedication
To those who work to save the children
Disclaimer
All of the six novellas in the McGee Series are works of fiction and should not be construed as representing real persons, places, or events. Some names of real persons and places appear but only for the purpose of creating a setting in the real world or as a mention of historical circumstances. None of the real people or the real places is actually involved in the fictional portrayals found in these short books. All of the events described are created from the author’s imagination.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter One
May 4, 2020
There are words that are never uttered in Saint Anne’s Mother of Mary Orphanage in the area of Brooklyn known as Red Hook—originally the Dutch “Roode Hoek.” One of those words is “unadoptable.” Even the more genteel phrase, “Wednesday’s Child,” is spoken only among the staff out of earshot of the children. In the early days of the orphanage—then known as “The Famine Church Children’s Home”—the entrance lobby carried a large framed inscription intended to show the home’s caring for children:
Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
Wednesday’s Child
But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.
Several decades later, during a renovation, the sign was changed to reflect the sincere desire to promote the adoption of “unadoptables,” then euphemistically called “Wednesday’s Children.” For a time, the visitor was greeted with the inscription:
Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe, But Very
Soon Her Joy Will Grow.
In the 1960s, the orphanage—responding to political correctness, which eschewed the negative connotation that “Wednesday’s Child” suggested—did away with any designation for special children between the ages of six and sixteen whose lifelong dream of being part of a loving family in a stable home seemed never to be fulfilled. During that time, the orphanage and its patron parish, changed its name to Saint Anne’s—knowing that no one could find fault with the blessed name of the mother of Saint Mary, the Mother of Jesus.
Brigid O’Hanlon—age thirteen—is one of the “Wednesday’s Children.” She is a foundling left on the doorstep of the yellow brick Catholic church dedicated to Saint Anne. Many babies began their lives in the boat-shaped church built by the area’s dockworkers, and then the orphanage during the time of the Great Irish Famine when hordes of impoverished Irish immigrants flooded the poor neighborhoods of New York from 1850 onwards. Her exact birthday is unknown, but the nuns reckoned it to be very close to June 3, 2007, when she was found. She had no known name; so, the warm-hearted sisters named her after the favorite Irish saint, Saint Brigid, and the parish priest at the time, Father O’Hanlon, who dedicated his life and ministry to caring for the poor and unwanted children.
Sister Ophelia, abbess of Saint Anne’s nunnery and senior sister of the orphanage, decides to begin a small publicity blitz to bring the older children in the orphanage to the attention of the good citizens of New York in hopes of stimulating interest in adoption. She decides to focus first on the lovely, attractive, and obedient girls, and selects Brigid O’Hanlon as the first girl to be presented to the public in a series of birthday announcements. The announcements are set to come out on the first Wednesday in June 2020—coincidence intended—and her smiling image is posted in churches, on two billboards, and in a special interest section donated by the New York Times.
Brigid O’Hanlon’s angelic face becomes the poster image for teenagers needing to be adopted, and for a short time, hers is the most well-known face in the city. Capitalizing on Brigid’s popularity, Sister Ophelia announces a birthday celebration to be held at the orphanage on that Wednesday. The public is invited; the girls are decked out in brand new modest dresses; and the orphanage undergoes a spring cleaning like never before.
Chapter Two
May 11, 2020, midevening
Detective Sergeant Mary Margaret MacLeese and Detective First Grade Martin Redworth are promoted to their present ranks after their stellar work in the Decklin Marcus murder case, which brought down a Cosa Nostra/al-Qaeda/Russian Mafia/US banking criminal conspiracy that saved hundreds of lives, trillions of dollars, and proved that Decklin’s socialite mother was part of the murder conspiracy. Their reward—besides the rank promotion—is to be given a plum assignment to the new NYPD elite Organized Crime Human Trafficking Unit. To celebrate their assignments, McGee & Associates Investigations hosts a black-tie dinner and fund-raiser in their honor. McGee and his partners earned enough money in their most recent major success—“The Only True Church of Christ Crime Syndicate Murder Case”—to become financially independent and to enjoy the luxury of pursuing only cases they feel personally passionate about. The organized crime networks of human trafficking have become that passion, and they are more than happy to work with the NYPD to halt the heinous industry—especially where it involves children.
McGee’s full name is Joseph Patrick Aloysius Michael John McGee—unique as that would seem to twenty-first-century Americans. That moniker was a gift from his religiously and Irishly eccentric mother who was more Irish than the Fenians and more Catholic than the pope. She was very young when McGee was born, and could not make up her mind what to call her firstborn, so she used all the names from some Irish ditty. Mostly in his youth, while she was still living, Athracht Baga Gaudentia Tóibín McGee—whose Christian names were all those of early Irish Catholic saints—called him Joseph Patrick. Having the highly unusual identity as the boy with five first names, McGee learned to fight in the first grade and earned a crooked nose and the right to be known only as McGee to everyone but his mother thereafter.
McGee is a private investigator who came by his profession in an unlikely way. Most PIs are former cops who either became unfit for further NYPD service or retired with a nice letter, a nice plaque, and a meager pension, and chose being a PI over being a security guard. McGee, on the other hand, knew what he wanted to be from his mid-teens on. He got a degree in criminology at CUNY—graduating with honors after three years
—and a law degree from Columbia. His first job was as a CSI for NYPD. That lasted three years, and he quit because the pay was too low and the promotions too slow. He then worked as a criminalist for the FBI specializing in ballistics and then banking fraud for a total of five years. He quit the FBI on reasonably good terms and maintained firm friendships with agent friends despite no longer being able to stomach the bureaucracy. PI work is not all that lucrative for most people, probably because they are just not suited for high-end work. McGee’s firm—McGee & Associates Investigations—does its share of nasty divorce dirt digging and embezzlement work, but their real money comes from surveillance in corporate espionage cases, forensic accountancy, and in-depth investigations for the defense in highprofile criminal cases—usually murders. Since the Only True Church of Christ fraud, embezzlement, and murder case, the firm has been able to pick and choose from hundreds of cases to pursue only those of real interest and importance.
The office of McGee & Associates Investigations in midtown Manhattan is clean and presentable with chrome and glass fixtures and no hand-painted signs by the proprietor—another set of differences between McGee’s and the lower class of PIs whom the real cops refer to as “bottom feeders.” Especially since the huge True Church case, McGee & Associates do not advertise on TV or on billboards. Their clients are largely rich—but sometimes just compelling—have serious issues with opponents, and often have important secrets to keep. The firm’s policy has always been to provide the truth. The clients who pay the bills are informed up front that McGee’s will not lie for them in or out of court, and the firm will give them all of what they discover and let them be the judge of how to use the information. They have never taken bribes; anyone who does such a thing will be kicking rocks down the road half a minute after McGee learns that he or she does. Sometimes the clients balk at such pristine morality, but it has paid off over the two decades the eminent firm has been in business.
McGee has two partners. Caitlin O’Brian has been with him for nearly two years. Her former occupation was as one of New York’s finest—a homicide detective in the Central Investigation and Resource Division, Homicide Analysis Unit—who ran afoul of her precinct captain. It seems that there was a disagreement about who had the right to do what with which and to whom, and she decked him. To avoid unpleasantness of separation with its attendant negative publicity, Catlin accepted a full pension and a nice letter of recommendation. She is a tough black Irish girl from the Bronx who has four brothers—a condition that lends itself to an early education in fighting. After finishing the academy and doing her rookie year, she obtained an associate degree in criminology specializing in bank fraud and handwriting analysis. That proved to be boring; so, the feisty colleen moved to the homicide division of midtown Manhattan where McGee first met her.
The other partner is Ivory White, an unlikely name for the blackest man you ever met. He has something of a murky past about which McGee knows everything, and no one else knows anything. He is—in the vernacular—the muscle of the organization. He is tall, athletic, bald, arrogant, and mean if needs be—and that is often the case in his line of work, perhaps best known by its euphemism—”special investigations.” He does all of the personal security for high profile clients. For all of his martial arts and other physical skills sets, Ivory is extremely intelligent. He is a remarkable linguist who speaks six of the most useful languages of the 800 used by the citizens of the most densely populated city in the country if not the world.
The invitees and potential donors in the McGee-hosted fête for the newly promoted detectives and long-time friends of all of the McGee partners include the firm of Rasmussen, O’Herligy, Rodriguez, and Applewhite, which brought in multiple millions of dollars for their part in a civil suit that grew out of the church case, and the Carlisle family—the three, Devon, Katrina, and Ruth—who survived the murders and attempted murders perpetrated by the church, and won a multibillion dollar civil case that rendered the church bankrupt and emasculated. The glitterati of New York Society, the officials of law enforcement, city and state governments, university administrators and professors, and several major captains of industry—healthcare, entertainment, transportation, unions, and construction—are in attendance, along with more than a hundred affluent citizens from all of the five boroughs. Expectations for a landslide in donations run high.
Director of the FBI William Crutchfield speaks first about the width, breadth, and depths of the criminal industry, which profits from human trafficking.
“The bureau has evidence indicating that some three thousand Russian mobsters control gangs in our American cities that involve forced prostitution of more than nine thousand women—many of whom are of Slavic origination—and almost as many boys and girls. According to our estimates, a minimum of two and a half million persons live a life of forced labor—including sexual exploitation—at any given time as a result of human trafficking. According to the World Disasters Report 2020 published by the International Federation of the Red Cross and IFRC [Islamic Red Crescent Societies], there are more than ninety million people classified as forced migrants across the globe, and a significant number of the crime syndicates use American cities as destinations, transit points, and to hold slave auctions. There are some sixty-five million irregular migrants believed to have used the services of smugglers at some stage of their journey.
“The vast majority of trafficked persons are women, accounting for fifty-five to sixty percent of victims detected globally. However, the total proportion of women and girls together soars to about seventy-five percent, with men constituting about fourteen percent of the total of detected victims. Those observations are perhaps skewed since one in four detected victims is a male.
“Not that there can be any excuse for slavery or forced labor or forced prostitution, there is—of late—an even more heinous form of trafficking in humans. Men, women, and children from desperately poor places on the planet, defenseless prisoners—including those whose sentences actually require organ donation—are more and more frequently being sacrificed for the purpose of using their organs—in particular kidneys—for illicit transportation. This is a rapidly growing field of criminal activity in America and around the world. We are fortunate in the United States that our system provides a reasonable number of legitimate donors; but even then, people die while waiting. In many countries, waiting lists for transplants are impossibly long, and organized criminals—including doctors and nurses—have capitalized on this misery to exploit the desperation of patients and potential donors.
“Victims—both donors and recipients—are put at serious risk; operations are often carried out in dirty, unsupervised, and clandestine conditions by unskilled practitioners and with no decent protective medical follow-up. The population of the world is aging, and with that aging comes an increased incidence of diabetes in many developed countries. It follows that there will likely be a sharp increase in the requirement for organ transplants. Criminals will find this type of crime even more lucrative as time increases and our bad dietary habits worsen.
Traffickers make an estimated fifty-two billion dollars annually; with that kind of money coming in, they are immune to any kind of moral, ethical, and even legal persuasion—much like our ever-escalating illicit drug problem.
“An associated area of crime is child pornography—please don’t say ‘kiddie porn’; that trivializes the problem or makes it sound cute. It is anything but cute; child pornography destroys the lives of our most vulnerable citizens and wrecks the lives of many families. The monsters who make this hideous footage have the children hold homemade placards bearing the pseudonyms of the makers of the films. What follows is ghastly: children pleading for help, being sexually tortured, infants being used as sex toys, and on and on beyond any imagination you and I might have. Every bit of it is vile, and every bit of it is lucrative.
“These are the commodities of the Dark Web. In 2013, we made 7,386 arrests. Last year it was 8,992. That figure cli
mbs every year, and we only catch a small percentage of the criminals involved so far as our nation’s sixty-one Internet Crimes Against Children task forces and the NCMEC [Exploited Children Division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children] can determine. Every day, parents report with pride and photographs—even images of sonograms—that they have ‘another baby to add to the game.’ Our best estimate is that there are well over 50,000 adults in America who trade such horrifying images among each other at any given point in time. The traffickers in this filth have national—even global—encrypted IP addresses, password-protected sites, and huge hidden clearinghouses.
“Law enforcement has cyber-policing tools, such as IACA [Internet Crimes Against Children cops], used to break distribution rings and to track the child victims. We can now virtually map the locations of suspects and follow their Internet transactions in some cases. We can often zero in 24/7 on suspects who are actively downloading material at the moment to their individual computers. We have disrupted rings of as many as two thousand distributors with our electronic policing capacities. All of this comes at a huge cost, not the least of which is the terrible emotional impact on the investigators, many of whom have young children of their own. There is a very large turnover. Many people we train simply cannot bear to see the images any longer; and no one can blame them; but the costs of training them go to waste. We try to teach them to look without looking; but that is probably naïve; and many of our best people become alcoholics or need treatment for depression.”
DFBI Crutchfield describes in detail the massive effort the bureau and other American law enforcement agencies are putting into the interdiction of trafficking of all kinds. He applauds the efforts of everyone in the room and all of the police forces around the world who are involved, but…
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