by Jean Heller
The Hunting Ground
Deuce Mora Mystery Series, Vol. 2
Jean Heller
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Note from the Author
This is a work of fiction.
Similarities to real people, places, or events
are entirely coincidental
The Hunting Ground
Copyright 2016 Jean Heller
Second Edition October 2018
Acknowledgments
All authors say they couldn’t have written their books without the help of others: expert sources, editors, story geniuses, friends, and fact-checkers. I’m proud that I had the good sense to call on my stable of wonderful resources to help me improve my books, and I would like to recognize them here.
Win Blevins, a magnificent writer of his own books and a professional manuscript editor, read my story with a highly critical eye and suggested changes and additions that helped immeasurably.
Meredith Blevins, a superb writer of delightful mysteries, gave freely of very helpful advice on bringing this book to the finish line.
David Ehrman, a dear friend and a veteran television writer/producer in Hollywood, is one of the best story developers I know, and he brought all that talent to the game for me.
Linda Wagy McGinty, a friend since grade school, grew up to become my Comma Queen, and did her best to help me avoid looking like a punctuation illiterate.
Kathaleen Porter, a fine surgeon, was more than generous with her time in answering critical medical questions.
And Jean Gonzales gave her support tirelessly.
Without these folks, and others, this book never would have happened.
This book is dedicated to a street kid named Charles,
who wandered into my life one day and captured my heart.
He was in foster care and separated from a little brother he adored.
Yet he never stopped smiling.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Charles planted the seeds for this story.
1
A mid-winter thaw in Chicago had transformed the Dan Ryan Woods nature trails into sucking bogs of wintry sludge. Any misstep could yank off a boot and morph a casual stroll into a frigid mud bath. But the sun was out, the temperature had mounted a frenzied climb into the upper-forties, and the day dictated some quality time outdoors.
I had no inkling that a simple woodland walk would hurl me into a personal and professional train-wreck.
Mark Hearst and I stepped around the worst of the muck—large soupy, brown puddles fringed with sparkling beards of ice. Our progress was slow, but we didn’t care. We were out to get some exercise on a nice Saturday in January and let Mark’s Irish setter Murphy run off the cobwebs of winter.
Watery sunlight filtered through barren trees down to the floor of the sprawling forest preserve deep on Chicago’s South Side. The trees cast long shadows to the north, elongated silhouettes in haphazard formations falling across the snow crust. The branches looked like the scrawny outstretched arms of old men, ending in impossibly twisted arthritic twig-fingers.
Tree shadows—long and sharply defined—were among the sights I cherished most about winter. Had I chosen to be a painter instead of a writer, this was the sort of scene I would put to canvas. Perhaps I would try it someday.
The sun’s meager heat barely penetrated our layered clothing. But the dark bark of the trees absorbed the scant warmth and radiated it back into the surrounding air. It created circles of snowmelt that girdled the base of each trunk as though the ground had sunk away with perfect symmetry.
Mark and I held hands and listened for the occasional crashing of Murphy’s large body as he careened through underbrush chasing squirrels he would never catch. The fun was in the hunt.
The Dan Ryan Woods were named for an early Chicago Democratic Machine politician who died in 1923 after serving as the president of the Cook County Board—and little else. But this inner-city parkland paradise, with ball fields and soccer fields at the north end and wilderness over the rest of its expanse, was a treasure in a part of the city most people associated with gangs and violence. It was an oasis of peace and quiet and a wonderful way to hike off stress.
An assortment of wintering birds—cardinals, nuthatches, chickadees, downy woodpeckers, even a flock of cedar waxwings feeding on thawing wild berries—went about the business of survival as if we weren’t there. It was too early for the onset of their nest-building instincts. Their only concerns this day were finding sufficient food and shelter.
Not to mention adult bird beverages.
The berries wolfed down by the waxwings had fermented on their trees all winter, and more than a few of the birds displayed highly erratic flying behavior.
“Somebody should have carded them before letting them in here,” Mark said.
I grimaced. “I hope they don’t get hurt.”
Mark circled me with his right arm and hugged me to his side. We fit together perfectly. He said, “You want to round ‘em up and take ‘em home until they sober up? Make ‘em teeny, tiny cups of black coffee and give ‘em a place to sleep it off?”
He looked down at me and grinned. “Deuce Mora, famous newspaper columnist, notorious lover of fur and feathers.”
In my own defense I replied, “Friends don’t let friends fly drunk.”
“They’ll be fine,” Mark assured me. “They’ve been doing this since the species evolved. I don’t see little waxwing bodies all over the ground.”
We moved on and saw three coyotes, a species that had spread its range into Chicago in recent years. A red fox paused briefly to scout what we were doing, then evaporated back into the cover of the woods.
“Are they any danger to Murphy?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Murphy’s b
igger than the wild things. Last year he met up with a coyote down here. One throaty growl from the pup and the coyote amscrayed.”
I inhaled a deep breath of the cold air.
“Smell that?” I asked him.
“What?”
“Rotting leaves and wood smoke. The outdoors.”
“When I smell wood smoke,” he said, “it’s usually in combination with toxic fumes, noxious gases, and chemical discharges from burning buildings. Wood smoke lost its charm for me a long time ago.”
Mark was an arson investigator for the State of Illinois, a man I met the previous fall while working on a story for my newspaper, the Chicago Journal. What was supposed to be a feature turned into a horrific confluence of crimes spanning six decades. The reporting nearly got me fired. And killed. That I still had a job and my life was due in part to Mark.
“Don’t be a buzz kill,” I said, acting the gentle scold. “Think fireplaces and wood stoves and romantic camp fires.”
He was about to answer when he was stopped by the exuberance of a large red dog that hurtled from the woods, leaping as if his feathered coat could help him fly. Murphy, layered in mud and snow, skidded to a halt with what looked like a small tree branch balanced in his jaws. In the unlikely event that we hadn’t noticed him, he trotted closer. His tail wagged with excitement. His heated breath wreathed his big, square head. He set his treasure in front of us.
I stooped to pick it up and throw it for him so he could play fetch.
“Don’t touch it,” Mark said with an edge in his voice.
As I looked up to ask why, Murphy ducked his head and moved toward the object, probably to nose it closer so we’d get the idea he wanted to play.
“Murphy, no!” Mark commanded. “Leave it.”
The dog backed off, head cocked in befuddlement.
I stood and stared at Mark, who was transfixed. Now it was his turn to crouch for a closer look.
“He wants us to throw it,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s not a stick,” he said. “It’s a bone. And I’m pretty sure it’s human.”
2
It was a little before three o’clock, and the sun slid toward the southwest horizon as if it couldn’t wait to get to the other side of the world. The temperature skidded with it. Mark and I warmed ourselves in the back seat of a police car while two Chicago cops were out with Murphy trying to find where he discovered the bone. The search had consumed almost an hour with no luck.
Mark’s truck and the police unit were parked nose-to-nose along the edge of a beautiful short stretch of street aptly named South Pleasant Avenue. It divided the Dan Ryan Woods nature preserve from the homes of a neighborhood known as Beverly. It was an oasis of genteel living more in keeping with upscale suburbs than the rough-and-tumble personality generally ascribed to Chicago’s South Side. I could see that the chimneys of some of these homes were the sources of the wood smoke I’d smelled earlier.
The terrain around this area wasn’t typically Chicago either. Most of the city was pancake flat. Beverly sat atop the Blue Island Ridge, the southern boundary of a region where advancing Ice Age glaciers had scoured out the Lake Michigan basin. When a warming climate melted the glaciers, they left behind mountains of displaced earth and rock called moraines. The area where we sat in the police car rose about a hundred and thirty-five feet above my house down in the flatland.
This area was as close as Chicago got to a mountain-climbing experience.
Dr. Anthony Donato, the medical examiner, arrived and took possession of Murphy’s treasure. After a cursory look, he confirmed Mark’s conclusion.
“The bone is definitely human,” he said. “It’s a femur, a thigh bone. Biggest bone in the human body. This one, though, it’s small.”
“Small?” I asked. “Like a child?”
He nodded. “If we find more remains I could confirm race, gender, age, and approximate time of death. Detectives might be able to match the description with a missing child report. Depending on the ambient conditions where the bone was buried, there might be surviving DNA.”
“Lotta ifs,” Mark said.
“There always are in cases like this,” Donato replied.
I felt a twinge of gloom. After the past fall, I didn’t need more death in my life.
“You see a lot of cases like this?” I asked. “The bones of dead children?”
The ME sighed, and his shoulders sagged a little. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“You don’t even want to know,” he said.
Donato had tagged and bagged the bone and placed it in the back of his Chevy Tahoe by the time the cops emerged from the deep woods with a very tired, very dirty Irish setter. One of the men, a brawny sergeant named Cerruto, pulled a memory card from his point-and-shoot camera and dropped it into a small plastic envelope which he signed and sealed and handed to Donato.
“You found the site,” Donato said. It wasn’t a question. He sounded resigned, like a man facing a monumental task he dreaded.
“Yeah,” the cop said. “I took pitchas of a couple-a bones lyin’ out inna open. We found some other items that look like they could be bones but are still mostly buried. We didn’t wanna walk through the scene and screw up evidence, so we taped off the whole area. We’ll leave a unit here, make sure nobody messes wit anything. Not surprisin’, we saw lotsa signs of scavenger activity.”
“We’re supposed to get snow early tomorrow,” Donato said. “I’ll have to get techs out here tonight and find what we can while the ground’s still exposed.”
There was nothing more for the police to do at this point but make a report. They had my information and Mark’s if they needed to get back in touch. They even had Murphy’s name, breed, and age.
I had to smile when they asked questions about Murphy. It was an old cliché in the newspaper business, something my first editor always told green reporters before sending them out on their first assignments, “Don’t forget to get the name of the dog.” Most of the time there was no dog. The message meant to pay attention to the little details. They often moved a story from good to great.
Now that Murphy had quit chasing around, he’d gotten cold and tired. Mark toweled him off and put him in a large kennel filled with fleece blankets in the back of his Toyota Land Cruiser. He turned on the engine and the heat to help Murphy warm up while we finished with Donato.
“Can I watch the dig tonight?” I asked the medical examiner.
“No,” Donato said. “Can’t let you on the site. But if you call me at the office tomorrow, late morning, I might have something for you.”
We drove north on Western Avenue in the early darkness to my new home in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. While many people choose to live on the North Side in the more affluent neighborhoods of the city, the South Side in general and Pilsen in particular had more appeal for me. Pilsen is an ethnic cauldron, a mix of Mexicans, Italians, Asians, Greeks, Slavs, and Western Europeans. I don’t like living in places where everybody looks and sounds like me. I like to be challenged by cultures and beliefs and points of view that differ from mine. The opportunity to do that is one of the many items on the list of things that make Chicago a great city.
Finding the bones of a child buried in the woods isn’t on the list.
Until late fall of the previous year I had lived in a condominium on South Oakley Avenue. But I decided to move when a Chicago-style bungalow I really loved came on the market. It was around the corner from my condo, on West Twenty-Fifth Street between Oakley and Claremont. The price was right, and it had beautiful fenced side and back yards. The interior was newly remodeled, pretty much in the way I’d have done it. That I would buy it was a no-brainer.
The block was limited to resident parking by permit. Despite my new two-car garage, I usually parked on the curb. Half my garage space was filled with boxes and gardening tools and a lawnmower, so there wasn’t room for my old Explorer and Mark’s Land Cruiser. He didn’t h
ave a resident sticker, so he used the garage. When spring came, one of my first projects would be to clean a lot of stuff out of the garage so there would be room for both vehicles.
Mark pulled into the garage, and we walked across the yard to the back door where Murphy could enter through the mudroom. Whoever had built the place in the nineteen-thirties had the foresight to put a small bathroom next to the mudroom. It was the only one in the house that hadn’t been remodeled, and that was fine because Murphy was the only one who used it.
I left Mark to bathe and dry the dog while I took care of my cats Caesar and Cleo. I had adopted them as stray kittens so young it was impossible to know their genders. The vet thought they might be males, so they became Caesar and Claudius. When Claudius turned out to be a girl, I started calling her Cleo. I figured giving her a gender-appropriate name would be less traumatic for one of us.