by Jean Heller
I asked Winona if she had any theories about what became of the children.
She spent the next half hour drawing the lurid possibilities. Approximately one of every six missing children winds up in the control of human traffickers. Nearly eighty percent of trafficking victims become prostitutes and sex slaves. Some victims are forced to become organ donors. Some of the luckier missing kids don’t become victims of trafficking. They live on the streets in neighborhoods where they aren’t known, panhandling and doing odd jobs to make money to buy clothes and food. Some live in homeless facilities posing as the children of homeless adults. Some live with older siblings or other relatives who don’t want to report their whereabouts to the abusive caretakers the children had fled. Some are taken in by gangs who care for them and raise them for a life of crime.
My mind flashed on Charles.
“These kids can go missing for years,” Winona said. “The cops arrested a gangbanger last week after the guy was involved in a shootout in the West Austin neighborhood. He’s twenty-nine. The last time he came to anyone’s attention was when his foster parents reported him missing in 1998.”
“Eighteen years ago?”
“Yeah. He never even rated a milk carton.”
I fingered a corner of the file and thought about what Winona had told me. It was so tragic and unsettling. But none of it added up to a cluster of five or more dead children buried in the same area of Ryan Woods. That had to be something else altogether. I gave voice to the thought.
Winona nodded. “Only way I see the Ryan Woods scenario working is if the children were held by one person or one organization in one specific place inside the city. Probably one person buried all the bodies. Whoever it was is familiar with the woods. It’s a place he’s comfortable working without being noticed, a place he can get to under cover of darkness.”
“This is unconscionable.”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “State passed what’s called the Safe Children Act in 2010. It’s supposed to help minors who’ve been forced into prostitution get out of the criminal justice system and into child welfare. But what that did, mostly, was stop minors from talking about their victimization ‘cause they don’t wanna go into foster care. So they go to jail, or they go back on the streets. Eventually they go right back into the life. I saw one estimate that sixty-eight percent of all the minors—that’s kids under eighteen—who wind up as sex-trafficking victims are runaways from foster homes and social service facilities.”
The numbers stunned me.
“Is anybody chasing the bangers and the pimps and the traffickers?”
“Lots of folks’re tryin’,” she said. “Private organizations and foundations. Chicago cops have a unit that does what it can. The sheriff put a priority on trafficking. The problem is Chicago’s too big, and it’s growin’. It’s a big convention and trade show city with two big international airports. Access and opportunity for perverts who like ‘em young.”
She pushed the rest of the files across the table toward me, combining them with the missing children list.
“Take these home. Read them. A lot of your answers are in there. You got more questions, you come back to me in a couple of days, and we’ll meet again. And, oh, while you’re readin’, be sure you have a bucket or a toilet nearby.”
Winona and I left the coffee shop separately. She went first. I waited ten minutes, thinking over what she had told me. Then I downed the rest of my tea, which had gone cold, and packed the stack of folders in my messenger bag.
There was a black Chevy Suburban with its engine running parked illegally in the loading zone in front of the door. Two men, one black, one white, sat in the front seat watching the world go by. Other than those details I barely noticed the SUV, and I had forgotten it by the time I pulled my Explorer away from the curb. It might have been better if I’d remembered it.
That way it would have registered in my brain that it followed me home.
11
Mark and Murphy were gone when I got back to my house. Mark left a note saying he’d be at his condo. He needed some alone time to finish his report on the Rockford fire.
We actually lived apart more than we lived together. Each of us harbored a hermit streak that required nurturing by separation. We cherished our solo time as much as we cherished our together time. It was an unusual arrangement, but it worked for us.
I laid the folders on my bed and stripped off my clothes in favor of a floor-length flannel nightshirt and fleece slippers. I fed the cats and thought about feeding myself. I wasn’t especially hungry, and Winona’s warning about the possible ill effects of reading her files made me think they’d be more safely absorbed on an empty stomach.
As it turned out, nothing in them made me physically sick, but the data was painful and shocking nonetheless. I knew trafficking was twenty-first century slavery. Vulnerable men, women, and children were snatched up for forced labor, forced sex of every variety, domestic servitude, gang crime, and who knew what else. But I had no clue to the magnitude of the problem worldwide. And I had no idea it was such a big deal in Chicago.
One report called Chicago a national hub for human trafficking behind New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.
In 2010 alone, there were more than 2,500 incidents of human trafficking documented in the United States.
I was happier when I didn’t know.
I suspected that widespread ignorance mirroring my own was part of the reason trafficking thrived. According to one account, human trafficking had grown into a $32 billion annual business worldwide, a figure so big I couldn’t make sense of it. The human tragedy behind those figures was sickening, even in the abstract. Most people wouldn’t want to hear about it. And until more people paid attention and started fighting back, the business would continue to grow.
Winona had given me a number of documents, each more cold and devoid of emotion than the last. What stuck with me were spare and painful snippets of fact:
In India, the cost to buy a buffalo was $350. The cost to buy a child was $45.
In New York, a single Mexican girl forced into sexual slavery could earn traffickers $100,000 a year, and the New York traffickers had dozens of girls flowing through a pipeline from one Mexican town alone.
In Los Angeles, annual profits from a single girl could run to $140,000. In Washington, D.C. an Asian brothel specializing in women trafficked into sexual slavery pulled in $1.2 million annually.
In Chicago and other places trafficked boys often weren’t recognized as victims because people separated genders into stereotypes; girls were victims and boys were predators. Moreover, forced sex among males was often considered normal activity in gay communities. And LGBT kids were more likely to be kicked out of their homes by intolerant parents, which put them at higher risk of being picked off by traffickers.
At the end of ninety minutes I had finished the files and was energized to tear the city apart to find out who was behind the deaths of the children whose bodies were buried without ceremony in Ryan Woods.
I had to remind myself there was no proof they were victims of sex trafficking. But my gut told me that’s where the evidence would lead. I was certain these children died of injuries from repeated abuse. While dead children provided no income stream, replacing them was easy. In any big city the supply of street kids was open-ended.
Since no one inside the investigation would talk to me, perhaps I could make some headway by figuring out where the children came from.
I needed to have a discussion about it with someone who knew life on the streets and within the foster care system. The trouble was I didn’t know how to reach Charles.
I would simply have to wait until he showed up on my doorstep again.
12
There was no sign of Charles for the next three days, so I focused on my columns. The increasingly weird presidential primary election campaign, and Chicago’s response to it, gave me plenty of fodder.
I also focused on refresh
ing my knowledge of Numbers, the spreadsheet program on my iPad Pro. I knew in hindsight a spreadsheet would have helped in keeping people, places, and facts in order during the complex Vinnie Colangelo investigation, but it never occurred to me back then to use it. This time it did.
The list of missing children Winona had given to me had the addresses where they lived when they went missing. I would put each child and each location into a spreadsheet on my tablet. When I finished, if I had any functioning brain cells left, I would sort the children by location and see if I could spot any patterns.
If I did all that work for nothing, I could always stab myself with my stylus.
I was making headway slowly. Addresses are a bitch to type in one after another. I’d been at it for three hours on a snowy Saturday morning when the front bell rang.
Through the etched glass I saw Charles standing there, stamping his feet on the welcome mat, his eyes darting around the street. He appeared to be ready to take off running in an instant. I hated that kids had to live with so much anxiety, fully expecting trouble at any moment. It was a crappy way to grow up.
I was glad to see Charles even beyond my need for his help. He had become a habit I enjoyed. While he didn’t come around every day, he almost never missed more than one day at a time. He had made it his personal mission to make a serious dent in the world’s supply of hot chocolate. This time, after three days, I had grown worried. It wasn’t like him to vanish for long periods.
I enjoyed our conversations about life, from how to rid the streets of drugs and violence to geography and history matters he was learning at school but couldn’t quite grasp. His world was fenced within several square miles of Chicago. Places like Mexico, the Middle East, China, and oceans far more vast than his city’s Great Lake stretched his concept of size and distance to the ripping point. I loved trying to explain places and events to him because he drank in the knowledge the way a thirsty man chugs water.
I once asked Charles about his favorite subject in school. It was reading.
“I like the way stories take me away,” he said. He didn’t want to elaborate, and I understood, so I didn’t press him. I asked him if he had ever tried writing his own stories. He smiled shyly and nodded.
“I’d love to read one sometime,” I said, “that is, if you want me to.”
He shrugged.
“When you’re ready,” I said.
I was still waiting.
It was with a sense of relief that I let him in, and I was cheered when he rewarded me with one of his neon smiles.
I wanted to hug him, but I resisted.
“So I suppose you stopped to see if there was any hot chocolate,” I said as he peeled off his parka and slipped out of his wet boots on the mat by the door, an exercise in good manners that would never occur to most kids.
“That would be great,” he said, “but I hadn’t seen you in a while, so I thought I’d say hello and play with Murphy if he’s here. I don’t just come for hot chocolate.”
“I’m sorry, Charles,” I said. “Murphy’s with his dad. They’re out running along Lake Michigan like two crazy people. Or one crazy person and one crazy dog. But I can make you some hot chocolate.”
He beamed and nodded.
We sat in the kitchen, as usual, and talked about school and the weather and anything else I could think of to put off questions about life in foster care. Charles saw right through me.
“You nervous about something?” he asked.
I sat and watched him for a moment, marveling at the instincts of this child.
“Actually, I am, yes,” I said. “I want to ask you some questions, Charles, and the conversation might not be fun.”
His brows furrowed in renewed anxiety. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No, not at all,” I said, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand. “I need some information and maybe your opinion about some things.”
He gave me a one-shoulder shrug.
“Something very bad is happening way down on the South Side,” I said.
“What else is new?”
“This isn’t the usual stuff,” I said. “I’m going to tell you some things I don’t want you to repeat to anybody. Can you promise to keep my secret?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. The police have found some human remains, bodies, buried in a park. They’re children. Nobody knows how they died or why they died or why somebody buried them in the woods. I’m trying to find out. And maybe you can help me.”
“You talkin’ about Ryan Woods?”
I must have looked stunned.
“Us kids have always known about it,” he said.
“How did you know?”
“Word on the street, yo. It gets around.”
“Why didn’t you say something to your foster parents, or your teachers?”
“Ain’t no bidness a mine,” he said. “Out there,” he jerked his head toward a window, “you don’t mess wit what’s none-a yo’ bidness.”
In that moment, everything about Charles had changed. He had gone from a gracious, well-spoken boy to a gangbanger wannabe. As much as I heard it in his speech, I saw it in his face and in his attitude. He’d squirmed around so he sat at an angle on his chair, his right arm thrown over the back, a position of insolence. The areas around his eyes and mouth hardened. His voice took on the defiance of a child who’d had to make his own way on the mean streets and learned to take the law of the streets seriously.
His new friendship with me would not overcome that. Not yet.
I had hoped for help from him. Now he wouldn’t give me a weather forecast.
“So whachoo want from me?” he asked.
“First of all, I’d like you to lose the attitude. I know you’re tough. You don’t need the banger talk to prove it.”
“It’s the way I talk. I only talk like a white boy ‘round you.”
For some reason, that angered me. It left me feeling I’d been conned by this kid. I took a deep breath to settle myself.
“Why can’t you be yourself around me?” I asked, hearing an edge in my voice.
I got another one-shoulder shrug but no answer.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re finally being honest with me. Why stop now?”
Silence. His eyes dropped to the table.
Impudence. Shame maybe.
I tried something else.
“Did you think I wouldn’t like you if you acted like a black street kid?” I said. “Did you think maybe I wouldn’t notice the color of your skin? It’s hard to hide.”
Now his eyes snapped up, and the chin jutted out.
“I ain’t ashamed,” he said. “Why should I give a fuck whachoo think?”
“You shouldn’t,” I said, and I thought I saw a brief look of surprise on his face.
I seized the moment.
“Look, Charles, I know you’re black because I have eyes. I know you’re a street kid because you told me you’re in foster care, and a lot of foster care kids tend to be street kids. And I still welcome you in my house. Doesn’t that tell you anything about me?”
“You ain’t scared of me, of this me?” he asked.
“No. Why should I be?”
“I know how to shoot a gun. I have a knife.”
“You ever shot anybody?”
“No, but I cut a guy once.”
“Did you kill him?”
“No, but I cudda if I’d wanted.”
“Why’d you cut him?”
“He was messin’ with my little brother.”
“So you were defending your brother? That’s a good thing.”
His eyes rose and met mine.
“Yeah, you think so?”
“Yeah, I think so. It would have been nice if you hadn’t had to resort to violence, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.”
“You ever cut anybody?” he asked.
I smiled. “Only myself, sometimes, when I’m chopping up stuff for dinner and the knife slips. Does that count?�
��
“No,” he said, and I thought I caught a hint of a smile.
I got up from the table.
“Tell you what, Charles,” I said. “I’m going to make you another cup of hot chocolate, and then we’re going to start all over again. Okay?”
He didn’t say no.
Forty-five minutes later we had an agreement. Charles would work on accepting my friendship for what it was. I was genuinely fond of him and enjoyed being around him. I would accept him for what he was, a very smart kid with some rough edges and con-artist instincts who promised not to try to play me. I told him he didn’t have to talk to me like a white boy, but he should understand that when he grew up and wanted to be a success in a world of any color, a key would be how he presented himself.
I used the tired old line on him, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.” Since he’d never heard it before, he took ownership of it.
“Maybe I already had that figured out the first time I talked to you,” he said.
“Maybe you did,” I agreed. “Or maybe you were trying to make a good first impression for the wrong reasons. Don’t con people. Let them get to know you for who you really are, and you might find they like you even more because they will be able to sense your sincerity. You have very good instincts, Charles. You just need to listen to them.”
He pushed his empty cocoa cup away. “So whaja want to ask me?”
I plunged in. I asked him if he knew which foster homes and social service agencies that kids most dreaded, the ones they considered most abusive. I asked if he knew the names of children who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, or if he might know the names of any of the dead children buried in the park.
If I expected a eureka moment, I could see in Charles’s face I that wasn’t going to get it.
He confirmed it.