by Jean Heller
After they had food and fresh water, I set out to find something for two humans to eat. We had talked about going out for dinner, but finding the remains of a dead child had put a damper on my mood. When we ate out in the ‘hood, it was almost always at Bacchanalia or Il Vicinato, first-class Italian restaurants always filled with a jovial bunch of our friends. But jovial wasn’t my thing at the moment.
So I poured Scotch into a tall glass, lots of ice and soda, and sat in front of the fireplace in the living room to wait for Mark.
He appeared forty-five minutes later with a clean, dry, warm Irish setter.
I smiled at them and said to Mark, “Did you close . . . ?”
“Yes,” he said, knowing what was coming. “I remembered.”
It was something of a joke. I had an aversion to leaving the door to that back bathroom open, perhaps because it wasn’t very attractive. It had taken me a couple of months to train Mark to close it.
“I’m going to feed the pup and let him go to bed,” Mark said. “He’s pooped.”
He did a double take toward my Scotch. “Where’s my drink?”
“I didn’t know what you wanted,” I said.
“Beer,” he said. “I guess I can struggle to the fridge and open one myself.”
In the end we ordered Chinese from a place on West Eighteenth Street that delivered. We sat on the floor at the coffee table facing the fire, our backs against the sofa, and used chopsticks, taking our time. We stared into the fire in silence for long stretches, each lost in uncomfortable thoughts.
The food aromas roused Murphy, and he came to check things out. One bite of chicken and he was done, too tired to eat any more. He jumped on the sofa where the cats were curled up and fell into a deep sleep replete with snoring.
“Is this going to be a column?” Mark asked.
“A snoring dog?”
“No. The child.”
“I’m not sure what I’d write. We don’t know the age, or the race, or the gender, or the manner of death. If Tony Donato can figure out any of that, then probably yes. I was wondering what to say, and I’m not coming up with anything.”
“Kind of ruined a perfectly pleasant afternoon,” Mark said.
I nodded. There was nothing more to add.
3
Mark’s cell phone started playing “Great Balls of Fire,” the 1957 Jerry Lee Lewis hit, a little after 5 a.m. I knew why Mark had created that ring tone. It’s called irony, and it was funny, but not before dawn on a Sunday morning. It meant trouble.
An overnight fire had gutted a row of warehouses in Rockford, a city of about 150,000 people ninety miles northwest of Chicago. Local fire officials suspected arson. Mark was next up on the rotation of inspectors dispatched to fires of suspicious origins.
Fire inspectors in Illinois work for the state. They generally work from their homes, and they could be sent anywhere on a case. Mark might be gone for a few hours or a few weeks. He joked that it kept our relationship from getting stale.
I promised to check on his condo, pick up his mail, and look after Murphy. I fixed him a Thermos of coffee and two scrambled egg-and-pepper sandwiches while he showered and shaved. I reminded him of the snow in the forecast. I told him to be careful and kissed him goodbye. The sky was still dark when he pulled away.
I was always melancholy when Mark left town. After the downer of the day before, his departure put me in a funk. So I did what I do when I’m feeling low. I went back to bed.
Murphy’s bladder woke him, and he in turn woke me a little after eight. I let him into the side yard to take care of urgent business. I would walk him later.
The sky was a slate gray overcast that predicted serious snow. It hadn’t started yet, and Mark should have arrived in Rockford by now. I hoped he hadn’t run into the storm along the way.
I also hoped the medical examiner and his forensics team had found evidence of value at Ryan Woods. I would do as Tony suggested and call him later in the morning. Something like the discovery of a child’s bones made his presence at the morgue a certainty, even on a Sunday.
After two cups of coffee I fixed a bowl of quinoa with a little butter, sliced almonds, tupelo honey, cinnamon, and a sliced banana. Then I read three newspapers including my own, the Chicago Journal, and felt better. None of them mentioned the bone discovery.
My column on the Metro section front was, I thought, a fairly insightful piece on the ongoing problems in the Chicago Public Schools, problems for which solutions had been elusive for as long as I could remember.
I stared for a moment at the photo of me next to the column and tried to recall when it had been taken. I could see that it was outdated because it showed me with shoulder-length hair. I preferred the longer auburn hair because it better showed off my green eyes. But I had cut the mop back more than a year earlier because it had taken to winding itself into a tangle of curls in Chicago’s summer humidity. Even though the short hair got curly too, I liked to think it more resembled a style now than a meteorological mugging.
In any event, the photo should be updated. Yet studying it made me smile. In typical Chicago idiom, people often said they recognized me from my “pitcha inna paypah.” Inevitably they added, “I din know youse is so tall.” And I always reminded them it was hard to tell my height from a photo of my face.
I guess I should take a moment to introduce myself. My name, as you might know, is Deuce Mora. I’m the lead columnist for the Chicago Journal, and I’m six feet tall, just to clear that up. Before you ask, Deuce is my real name. I am the second born of fraternal twins. My father started calling me Deuce in the delivery room, and it wound up on my birth certificate. You could look it up. I don’t object to the name, really. It helps people remember me. I used to wonder how my mother felt about it, but I couldn’t ask her because she died when I was seven.
The first-born twin was a boy. Dad named him Gary. Go figure. I call my brother, Uno. It seems only right.
By the time I finished the papers, fed Murphy, and took him for a long walk around the neighborhood, it was nearly eleven and time to call Tony Donato.
“I think we found everything there was to find near the surface,” he told me when he picked up the phone. “As soon as we can get the equipment in there we’ll run over the area with ground-penetrating radar and see what’s farther down.”
“It’s gotten pretty cold. Can you dig when the ground’s frozen?”
“Yes, but very carefully. Only the top two or three inches thawed during the warm spell. They’re refreezing now. By tomorrow the ice layer will extend down at least a foot. We’ll have to use heavy equipment to work through it, and that gets tricky when you’re also trying to preserve evidence under the frost.”
I asked him what he’d found overnight.
“Maybe you’d better come over so I can show you,” he said. “It’s not good.”
It didn’t take long to get there. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s office is on West Harrison in the Hospital District, two and a half miles north of my house.
Laid out on one of Tony’s stainless steel autopsy tables was an assortment of bones in the positions they would have occupied in a human body before the body decomposed. Set to one side were rags of what, at one time, had been clothing. A filthy, decaying swatch of blue denim, a rag of yellow cotton, a blue sock, two Nike sneakers. A child’s shoes. But what made by breath catch was the small blue backpack, wet, dirty, and rotting.
I turned back to the skeletal remains. Somehow they were easier to contemplate, perhaps because there weren’t enough bones yet to look like a person.
“Does any of this tell you anything?” I asked.
“Some,” Donato said. “We found this.”
From another table he picked up a convex bone plate. It was part of a skull.
A splintered indentation marred the smooth surface.
But Donato’s attention was elsewhere. Using his pen he pointed out a squiggly line that ran several inches through the section of skul
l plate.
“This is part of the sagittal suture,” he said. “It runs the length of the skull and fuses as we age. If it was completely fused, we’d be looking at someone at least thirty-five. But fusing here isn’t close to complete, meaning this skull came from a much younger person. How much younger, I don’t know yet, at least not for sure.”
“What about that?” I asked, pointing to the indentation.
“The way it’s caved in, I’d say it’s blunt force trauma,” Donato said. “Determining what caused the damage would be total guesswork at this point. It’s also a guess whether the damage was perimortem or postmortem.” That was morgue-speak for near the time of death or after death. If the damage happened while the child was alive, Donato added, he or she wouldn’t have lived long.
Acid began churning in my stomach.
Donato shrugged. “It could have happened in a fall. Or any type of accident. Though I have to concede the manner of burial suggests something sinister.”
He picked up the thighbone Murphy had discovered.
“This is a femur,” he said. “As I mentioned yesterday, it’s the largest bone in the body, and its length is generally about twenty-five percent of the body’s height. This one measures twelve inches, which means it belonged to someone about four feet tall. A child. If the child was average, he or she would have been seven to eight years old. But height is a big variable, depending on things like genetics, nutrition, gender, and so on.”
“You can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl?”
“The only certain way to know is through DNA. If I were to hazard a guess, blue jeans, blue socks, blue backpack all say ‘boy’ to me.”
He turned the skull plate over several times in his hand. “If we locate enough of the skull, we can build a computer likeness of what the child might have looked like. But we don’t have enough yet. The jaw, some teeth, eye sockets, nasal area, forehead—any more of the face would help.”
It was almost painful to be so analytical and unemotional around the remains of a murdered child. The ME was used to it. I wasn’t.
Donato must have seen my discomfort.
“There is good news,” he said. “There is viable marrow in the larger bones that will yield elements of a DNA profile. That’ll give us a lot more information.”
“When?” I asked.
“DNA results can take four to eight weeks, or longer,” he said. “Given the circumstances, I think we can get the process accelerated, but not dramatically.”
“On television they get results the same day.”
Donato grimaced. “Why does everybody feel compelled to tell me that? They artificially telescope the process for TV because who wants to watch an episode that runs for six weeks while the characters sit around and whittle duck decoys?”
“I know,” I said with a smile. “Just trying to lighten the mood. But I still don’t understand why it takes so long.”
“Case loads. Staff and equipment shortages. But more than that, DNA mapping isn’t one test. It’s a whole series of procedures. They have to be done meticulously and methodically, and sometimes they have to be redone if the results aren’t clean. There is a process coming that could get results in four hours, but it can’t be used on DNA samples that are tricky. And believe me, these are tricky.”
Donato was silent for a time. He was staring at a grouping of bones.
“There is one other thing, Deuce, and it’s ominous,” he said. He pointed to the skeleton’s left hand. “We don’t have the thumb yet, but there are five fingers.”
“Is the extra finger from the right hand?”
“That’s not the tell. This finger is longer by several centimeters than it should be to fit with the rest. Right hand, left hand, it doesn’t matter. The bones of this finger are the wrong size.”
I took a deep breath. “Say it out loud, Tony.”
“We have more than one body.”
I winced. “Isn’t a little early to come to that conclusion?”
“I’m not concluding anything,” Donato said. “Simply raising a possibility.”
“When will you know?”
“When we do the radar sweeps.”
“Can you tell when the child died, the first body, I mean?”
“I should have a rough idea after some tests. Calcium in the bones oxidizes over time. The degree of depletion will yield a general time of death. DNA will tell us the rest.”
“It won’t tell you who the child was.”
Donato shrugged. “It could. Depends on how thorough the authorities were when—and if—the child was reported missing. They should have asked the parents or guardian for the child’s toothbrush, hairbrush, unwashed clothing. All those could have carried DNA samples. They should have taken DNA samples from parents, siblings, and other close relatives who would have enough alleles in common with the child to make a match. But I’m not optimistic any of that was done.”
I stared at the femur and wondered about the child it belonged to.
I asked, “How can DNA survive so long if everything else is decomposing?”
“DNA can almost be forever depending on exposure to the elements. A few years back, archeologists found the bones of England’s King Richard the Third buried under a parking lot in Leicester. He was killed in battle in 1485. That’s, what, five hundred and thirty years ago, give or take? He was positively identified when surviving mitochondrial DNA was compared with a descendant of his sister.”
“Really? After more than five hundred years?” I did some quick math in my head. “That’s like fourteen generations.”
“Yep. Because the remains were buried in rock. The four factors that destroy DNA are heat, light, water, and oxygen. A body left above ground around most of Chicago, DNA wouldn’t survive more than a few weeks to a few months. Buried a few feet down, especially on high ground where water drains well, mitochondrial DNA could conceivably last a thousand years. Or more.”
“Other kids might be in danger,” I said. “This can’t wait a thousand years.”
“It won’t have to. Check with me in a week.”
“I can’t even wait a week, Tony. I have to write the story now. You know it’s a child, and there are indications there might be more than one body.”
“Can you at least leave out the last part, about the possibility of multiple bodies? You’re going to create a press stampede.”
“No, Tony, I can’t. Sorry.”
“When will the story run?”
“Tomorrow. It’ll be on the Web tonight. You won’t talk to anyone else?”
“I won’t talk to anybody before or after your story appears. I didn’t even want to talk to you at this point. But you have something of a vested interest here, so . . . ”
“Who’s in charge for the police?”
“Detective Emily Onofrio. But she won’t talk to you. She won’t talk to any reporters. Emily isn’t fond of the media. Better go through the department’s press office. You should also touch base with John Chiu, the state’s attorney.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and DCFS. The Department of Children and Family Services is going to be in the bull’s-eye in this mess.”
“Why do you say that?” Donato asked.
“Because,” I replied, “the safety of endangered children is their business. If you’re right, if you’ve already found evidence of two bodies, there probably will be more. It’s not going to end at two.”
“No,” he said. “Probably not.”
4
Chicago was tragically familiar with stories about children from euphemistically designated “underserved neighborhoods” getting shot in the crossfire of gang disputes. I shouldn’t have been surprised that my column the next morning didn’t stir much reaction. The lack of outrage bothered me, nonetheless.
The Sun-Times followed up with a three-paragraph brief saying a bone, believed to be human, had been found by hikers in Ryan Woods. It was much the same in the Tribune. Police said they were looking into it. And that
was it. WGN tried to put a TV crew on the site, but it was cordoned off and guarded. The best they could get was video of yellow crime scene tape and cops, bundled against the cold, milling around among the barren trees.
It occurred to me that the murder of at least one child and the manner in which the body was buried—discarded was a more apt description—were cruel distortions of the meaning of the words, “Suffer little children,” in the King James Version of the New Testament. The acts of murder were more an echo of a creepy pop song from 1984, “Suffer The Children,” by a group called The Smiths. I went so far as to search out an old video on You Tube of the group performing the song. I found the lyrics as unsettling that day as I had the first time I heard them when I was ten. I was camping in the woods with friends. We were telling stories designed to scare the bejeezus out of one another. One girl played the song on her small boom box and sent us all scurrying for our tents.
Even the chaperones.
Once I got to the office, two television stations and one radio station called me for interviews which I declined to do for the almost-true reason that I knew nothing more than I’d written in the paper.
I sought refuge from the phone in my supervisor’s office. Metro Editor Eric Ryland and I had a tortured relationship. I considered him a gigantic ego in a suit, and he considered me insubordinate. We were both right.
We had smoothed things out a little the previous fall at the conclusion of the epic Vinnie Colangelo story. It made national headlines and had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Not for me exactly, but for the Journal, which could use the recognition to help boost sales and advertising revenue. Both were much needed in an age when newspapers were losing advertisers, readers, and relevancy.
The Colangelo story was up for the daddy of all Pulitzers, the Public Service Award. That meant the paper’s name would be on the plaque if we won, not mine. That galled me a little since the story had been unearthed with my job and my life squarely on the line. But people seemed to remember that I broke the story, and I did get a raise out of it; so I was getting used to the idea that there would be no hardware for my wall. Woodward and Bernstein had suffered the same fate, after all, and they survived.