by Jean Heller
“What about the police?”
“I talked to Detective Onofrio. I’ve known her for years. And I trust her. I’ve explained your involvement. She agrees if and when we’re ready to go public with this case, she’ll tell her press guys to get in touch with you first.”
“If?”
He nodded. “It won’t be our decision to make. I’m sure of that.”
“If not your decision, whose?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Something’s going to leak, Tony. It’s a law of nature. The neighbors near the woods. Aren’t they curious?”
“They ask questions. They don’t get answers.”
“So one of them might turn to the media. Other media. Not me.”
“The other media know less than you.”
I asked, “Why is there so much secrecy about this?”
“I’m not sure, but there is.”
“On whose orders?”
“That I can’t say.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t. They were relayed to me by the mayor’s office, but they were issued from someone much higher on the food chain. I don’t know who.”
I wasn’t comfortable with any of it, the secrecy, the possibility of leaks to other reporters, the departures from normal policies and procedures. But Tony’s next words sealed the deal.
“The only way I can talk to you is with your promise of discretion,” he said. “Otherwise, you can take your coffee and go.”
I glanced at my cup. “Coffee? Is that what this is?”
“Deuce,” Tony said with impatience. I get that a lot.
“Okay,” I said. I saw no choice. “I promise. Now tell me what I got myself into.”
“The probable mass murder of children, at least five we know of—so far.”
7
I sat and stared at Donato for a few seconds, and he stared back at me. I was flat out lost for words. I was having trouble processing the fact that a simple walk in the woods on a sunny Saturday afternoon had unearthed something so grim.
“You okay?” Donato asked.
I managed to nod my head.
“What do you mean, ‘at least?’” I asked.
“Let’s go back in the lab, and I can show you.”
The ME sat me in front of a complex video setup. The only thing I understood about it was his finger on the “PLAY” button.
“You fully understand that I could lose my job for doing this?” he said.
“How many times do I have to promise not to write anything?” I asked. “If you really trust me, once should be enough. If once isn’t enough, then you should ask me to leave now before you do something you’ll regret.”
Donato pressed the key before he could think about it any more.
The computer began running video. He provided the narration. It became evident that I didn’t have the expertise to make sense of the images he was showing me. I knew they were collected during the sweeps by ground-penetrating radar. But where Donato saw bones, I saw slashes in the dirt. Where he saw fragments of fabric, I saw shadows.
Then the video paused, and I knew I was looking at the nearly complete skeleton of what had been a human being. Then another. And another.
“Where is this?” I asked.
“In the area where your dog found the femur,” he said. “We got suspicious because the understory has been disturbed over a wide area, and the regrowth isn’t uniform. Judging from that, the disturbances happened over several years. We won’t know how many years until we determine the times of death of the bodies.”
“You’ve found five skeletons like this?”
“Yeah. I said ‘at least’ five dead because we have five nearly complete skeletons. The bones you saw at the beginning of the video are scattered over half an acre. There’s no way to know now how many more bodies they come from.”
I tried to imagine the totality of it. Death’s half acre, filled with the murdered and discarded bodies of children. Hard to get my head around it.
I asked, “How could this have been going so long without anyone noticing?”
“The preserve is supposed to close at dark,” he said, “and there are no lights back in the trees. Someone dressed all in black couldn’t be seen.”
“But digging a grave creates noise.”
“So do wild animals rooting around. Unless you’re suspicious to begin with, you wouldn’t think twice about it.”
“So you’re going to dig up a chunk of the nature preserve?”
“It won’t be a wholesale excavation, no. We’re going to take this slow.” Donato shut down the video and sat on the stool beside mine. “We’re using some metal muscle to get through the frozen ground, but only where we have obvious skeletons or parts of skeletons. Once they’re recovered we’re going to try a new technique on what’s left.”
“New how?” I asked.
Tony’s eyes brightened. He was a natural teacher, and he had a new student.
“It’s something developed to find bodies where normal methods don’t work,” he said. “Bodies aren’t always left where they can be found easily. Radar can’t see through concrete, for example, and cadaver dogs can’t get a scent through concrete, either. Frozen ground has some of the same characteristics. When the water in the soil freezes, it expands and pretty effectively seals the ground. Radar can see what’s down there, but gases from decomp can’t work their way to the surface where dogs and sensors can detect them. With me so far?”
I nodded.
“So we drill small holes down to each target to let the gases escape. Then we insert thin tubes that so sniffers can confirm the find.”
“That’s what you’re doing now?”
“It’s going to start tomorrow, once we recover the last of the full skeletons.”
I thought about my next words. I didn’t want to offend the medical examiner, but the scientific method he would use to find the remains wasn’t really the point.
“Tony, what I want to know is who did this and why. How many dead kids are there? How did they die, why did they die, and who killed them?”
“Those are the primary questions for all of us, Deuce. Until we recover the remains, we can’t begin to investigate the who, or the how, or the why, or the when.”
“You’ve already had some body parts for a week.”
“We’re waiting for DNA results. When we get them, I’ll know more.”
“Any new estimate on how long that might be?”
“At least two more weeks.” He was interrupted by his lab door opening.
“Sorry to barge in,” said a young man in a lab coat. He glanced at me then back to Tony. Clearly he was trying to choose his words carefully.
“There’s a call for you on line two, Tony,” he said. “You probably should take it.” He stopped, then added, “In your office.”
Tony glanced at me then nodded to the lab tech. “Rob, would you take my guest to the lunch room for some coffee while I’m gone? And keep her company. I don’t want her to feel abandoned.”
Translation: I wasn’t to see, touch, or learn anything until Tony got back.
I was both irritated and intrigued. I wanted to object, but there seemed no future in it. So I followed Rob to the coffee. At least someone had made a fresh pot.
To my relief Tony found me five minutes later. I wasn’t sure how much longer Rob and I could have stared wordlessly at one another over a Formica tabletop.
Rob left and Tony took his chair.
“Deuce, you have to go,” he said. “Right now. Don’t call me or come back here until you hear from me.”
“Why?”
“I can’t discuss it.”
“When will you be able to call me?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“Tony, you’ve trusted me this far. Why stop now?”
“This isn’t my call. It came from somebody way above my pay grade.”
“I’ve been thrown out of better pl
aces,” I said.
Tony shook his head. He didn’t look happy.
“I’m sorry,” was all he said.
I knew Eric Ryland, my editor, wasn’t going to be happy with my pledge of silence. The more I thought about it the less happy I was. But it was too late.
“Well, that was a damned foolish thing to do,” Ryland said when I told him. “Now your hands are tied, and you’ve tied mine in the process. I can’t assign someone else to the story because briefing another reporter would break your word and reflect badly on the Journal’s credibility. Indiscretions have a way of becoming widespread knowledge.”
“He stipulated that what he told me was off-the-record, Eric. That means I can’t quote him or refer to him as a ‘source close to the investigation.’ But it doesn’t stop me from using what I know to go after the story some other way.”
I wanted to draw the conversation away from the blame game.
“What’s bothering me is the way the authorities are handling this,” I said.
“It certainly isn’t normal,” Ryland agreed.
“Usually the discovery of a body buried in the woods would warrant at least a press release from the police,” I said. “Now that they know there are at least five bodies, all children, somebody should be holding a major press conference with daily updates.”
“So why aren’t they?”
“I’ve been thinking about it since I left the ME’s office. Right now they don’t want the public to know anything. I can’t figure out why.”
“Maybe,” Eric said, “you should think harder.”
So I did.
I walked east to Michigan Avenue and rode a bus north to Randolph Street at the northwest corner of Millennium Park. I walked east on Randolph and into the new and remarkable Maggie Daley Park, a wonderland built with children in mind. It was the passion of the late wife of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, and it had been wildly popular with children and parents alike since opening day.
I took a bench in the cold winter sun and watched little kids, bundled up in bulky snowsuits, trying to get the hang of staying upright on the long, winding ice-skating ribbon. They seemed to range in age from three to six or seven, miniature Michelin figures on blades, running, stumbling, everything but skating, their laughter giddy with pure joy. But my mind kept morphing them into skeletons, buried in frozen ground, murdered for reasons I didn’t want to contemplate.
Why were city officials being so secretive about the bodies buried in the woods? To assume a massive conspiracy to protect someone was too Machiavellian to contemplate, but I contemplated it anyhow.
Maybe it was something as simple as wanting to have all the facts in place before talking about them. But that didn’t make practical sense other than to save the medical examiner and the chief of police the time and trouble of several press conferences a week.
Perhaps when DNA evidence came back, when approximate times and manner of death had been established, the entire matter would be presented in a package. Again, that was a significant departure from the norm.
At the very least, city officials should want to put parents on the alert so they could amp up the efforts to keep their children safe.
The sun was dipping behind me. As mothers and nannies collected their red-cheeked charges for the trips home, I got up and started walking. I don’t think I intended to walk a mile and a half back to the garage where I’d parked my Explorer, but I did. The cold air and rising wind off the lake cut through my clothes and chilled me to my core. I didn’t mind. The blades of icy air sliced away my dark thoughts and cleared my aching head.
In a twist on the words spoken by Marcellus to Horatio on the castle battlements in Hamlet, I muttered, “Something’s rotten in city of Chicago.”
I took it as my personal responsibility to find out what it was.
8
I had no place to go.
If I pursued the medical examiner, I would learn nothing new and risk destroying a relationship I needed. Donato had made it perfectly clear. Until further notice he had nothing to say to me.
Pete Rizzo, the spokesman for the Chicago police, still sang the same tune.
“Got no news on that, Deuce,” he told me several times. “We got nothin’ on the number of dead. Don’t know who they were, how they died, when they died, why they died, or who put ‘em inna ground. For all we know, Ryan Woods mighta been a burial site for the Illinois and Shawnee tribes that lived around here before Columbus was born.”
“Really?” I said with all the sarcasm I could muster. “You’re suggesting Native American kids wore blue jeans and carried backpacks to tribal dances?”
“Not really,” he conceded. “But I got nothin’ better for you.”
“It’d serve you right if I put that in a column,” I said, then continued before Rizzo could respond. “I don’t get it. Everybody’s treating the bones as if they’re a state secret. Those kids were born in this century. They had parents, brothers, and sisters. Families that deserve answers. And the police are doing nothing.”
“It’s not a priority,” he said. “There’s no evidence of criminal intent. Let it go.”
“The hell there’s no evidence of criminal intent. I saw a piece of skull that had been bashed in, Pete.”
“By what?” he asked. “Do you know? There’s all sorts of treacherous terrain in those woods, including a rocky ravine just north of where you found the bone. When I was in high school, my pals and I would go in there to drink beer and tell spooky stories in the dark. I saw several guys with loads on slip and fall into that ravine. One broke an arm. He could as easily have cracked his skull open. Until we have evidence of murder, which we don’t, there’s nothing for us to do or say.”
I almost asked if discarding the bodies of children in a public park didn’t at least constitute littering, but I figured that would simply annoy Rizzo and reduce the likelihood of future cooperation. Murdered children are not taken lightly. Yet these bodies didn’t seem to make any difference to anyone. I couldn’t accept that.
I wouldn’t accept that.
I got home to a pleasant surprise. Mark had returned.
He was sitting in his truck a few doors down from my house, and he had company. My new young friend, Charles, was sitting in the passenger seat. They seemed to be having an amiable discussion. As I passed them, Charles recognized my Explorer and pointed me out. Mark turned and grinned.
I spotted an open space in front of my house and grabbed it. I was so eager to talk to Mark that I slipped on a patch of unseen ice and fell into his arms. He had gotten out of the truck while I was doing a mediocre job of parallel parking.
“Hey, nice catch,” Charles said.
Mark helped me regain my footing and kissed me on the nose.
“It’s nice to see you’re still falling for me,” he said, “because I come back to find you’ve got a new boyfriend waiting for you on the front porch.”
“Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?” I asked.
“And miss catching my competition here? Do I look naïve?”
I pushed myself away in mock disgust.
“You two looked pretty friendly,” I said. “If no one has done formal introductions, Mark, this is Charles. Charles, this is Mark.”
“Your boyfriend,” the youngster said.
Busted.
“Well, uh, yes,” I said.
Mark scowled at me. “Charles informed me he thought I was your husband.”
I’m sure I looked uncomfortable, and I was just as sure Mark and Charles were enjoying watching me squirm.
“To be clear,” I said, “Charles and I have only met once before, and the exact nature of your relationship with me was left, well, somewhat ambiguous.”
“What’s ‘ambiguous’ mean?” Charles asked. “Like lyin’?”
I laughed. “Well, no, Charles. It’s more like being unclear.”
“Yeah, lyin’. That’s what I said. Well, it’s not unclear any more.” Having exhausted
his torment of me, the boy changed the subject. “Hey, Mark said if there was any more hot chocolate you’d make some for both of us.”
“He did, huh. Okay, I’ll teach you another word. ‘Presumptuous.’ Look it up.”
Nevertheless, the three of us wound up at the kitchen table talking about how Mark investigates suspicious fires. It was a subject of major interest to Charles, particularly when Mark talked about the science of an investigation. In addition to being sweet, the kid was smart and quick. We were still very early into this relationship, but it occurred to me while sitting around the kitchen table that we felt a lot like a family. I pushed the thought away.
While Mark was explaining to Charles in the simplest possible terms how an arson investigator can identify a fire’s point of origin, I took a few moments to appreciate the man whose bed I often shared.
Mark stood three inches over six feet, therefore three inches over me. He’d started his career as a firefighter, which required staying in top physical condition. I knew he had served in the military, but I didn’t know when or in what capacity. He’d kept his workout ethic when he moved to arson investigation. So he had broad shoulders, a muscular chest, and abs most often seen on the cover of romance novels. His lower body was similarly well developed, which I once proved to him by bouncing a quarter off his naked butt, much to my delight and his embarrassment.
Mark had all the right parts in all the right places and knew how to use them.
He had a strong, kind face with a straight nose, a dimple in his chin, and clear blue eyes. His sandy brown hair was cut in what I called a Euro mod grunge style, shaggy and probably longer than departmental regulations specified. It was a good look for him.
I cherished the whole package.
I found myself wondering what a child we produced might look like, combining my auburn hair and green eyes with Mark’s sandy hair and blue eyes.