by Jean Heller
He shrugged. “They both are,” he said. “After the meeting with the mayor, I was pretty forceful in telling her to stay away from you, and stay away from the Ryan Woods investigation. I didn’t threaten to fire her. It never crossed my mind. Frankly, this department is horribly diminished by her loss. But when you’re a single mother with three boys, one in high school and two in college, and you depend on your job to support them, you probably hear nuance that isn’t there.”
“But you changed your mind, about helping me, I mean?”
“I found out she was copying material for you and confronted her about it,” he said. “She wouldn’t back down and made a most compelling case that we should be cooperating with you. She asked me how many more children would be kidnapped and abused or killed while the feds diddled with their perceived issues.” He nodded toward one wall of photos. “She tossed my own pictures in my face. I found I had no good argument against her. In the end, I actually gave her permission to give you the list of the worst foster operations in the city. I hope it helps.”
“It’s a long shot,” I said.
“Then let’s plan on meeting regularly,” Coughlin suggested. “You can brief me on what you’re learning, and I can give you material in our files that might help you.”
“You’ll be breaking a lot of rules,” I said. “Potentially bringing down a lot of grief on your head. There’s no way the feds won’t find out what you’re doing.”
His face morphed into a mask of anger and determination.
“Ask me if I care.”
The next morning was the first day of March, and the month was coming in like a lion. The high temperature wouldn’t quite reach thirty-two, the wind was whipping, and light snow was falling sideways.
I’d heard nothing from Carl Cribben, and with seventeen bodies in the medical examiner’s office I was getting very nervous about sitting on the story. It occurred to me enough time had passed that Tony Donato might have loosened up. If he knew that Aidan Coughlin was on board with me, it might sway him.
I didn’t want to call him. A phone call was too easy to ignore, a phone message even easier. It was time again for a personal visit and, if necessary, another stakeout in his parking lot until he showed up.
As fortune would have it, Tony’s black Tahoe was in its choice parking space when I arrived. I parked a couple of spots away and walked to the front door of his building just as he was walking out.
“You again,” he said with no pleasure at all. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the wind.
“Nice to see you too, Doctor.”
“Should I assume I know why you’re here?”
“I’m here to see you.”
“Should I assume I know what you want to see me about?”
“You should.”
“Then take a ride with me.”
I did. But only after Tony brought me a pair of rubber wading boots large enough to hold the contents of a small lake. In the car, he told me to pull them on over my snow boots. I figured we were headed for Ryan Woods.
“Are you speaking to me again?” I asked.
“Reluctantly,” he said.
“Okay. So speak.”
“When we get there.”
We drove in silence through block after block of car dealerships, gas stations, fast-food joints, and small, independent grocery and liquor stores, the kind that grow up in neighborhoods where the big-box chains don’t want to risk the shoplifting and robbery losses. The only sounds were the tires on asphalt, the whispers of slush, and the satellite radio station playing great pop hits from the seventies. It was my favorite music decade even though the seventies were over before I was born.
I was hit with a sudden memory. I was three or four years old, standing on my father’s shoes, him holding my hands, and my mother laughing as Dad and I danced around the living room to the tunes of Billy Joel, Elton John, Gladys Knight, The Doobie Brothers, Carly Simon, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye, Hall & Oates. I always asked Dad to play Withers’ “Lean on Me.” My father liked B.J. Thomas doing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” My mother urged us to do Leo Sayers’ “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing.” They were all good.
As if on cue, the next cut up was The Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady,” another of my long-ago favorites. Hearing it made me melancholy.
I came out of my reverie when Tony hung a left at Ninetieth Street and headed east back to Pleasant Avenue, an area I had last seen more than five weeks earlier. Crime scene tape still wound from tree to tree for three blocks and then at right angles into the woods for as far as I could see through the trees. It snapped in the wind like a pack of angry dogs. It had broken, or been broken, in several places and spliced back together. A lone police cruiser stood watch.
Tony acknowledged the two officers staying warm inside, then ducked under the yellow tape and held it up for me. We followed a trail for a while, then cut off into frozen mud. It had been trampled during warmer periods into thousands of footprints. When the temperature dropped, everything froze again, and the footprints were preserved in time. The sharp rises and deep ruts made walking uncomfortable and treacherous.
At least the trees cut some of the wind.
When we got to the site where Murphy found the femur, I actually gasped.
It appeared that more than half an acre had been dug up, and a backhoe was still at work scraping earth in a corner of the disturbed land.
I was speechless.
“You want to know how many, right?” Donato asked. He was standing slightly behind me, so I would have a full view of the scene.
I generated enough saliva to soothe my dry throat.
“I’ve been told seventeen.”
“Old information,” he said. “It’s eighteen and counting. I wanted you to get a sense of the scope of this thing before I started giving you the details.”
“Mind if I take some pictures?” I asked.
“No. Shoot away while I go talk to the backhoe operator and my staff over there. Looks like they might have found something new.”
I pulled out my iPhone and began shooting, even getting some images of Donato, members of his team, and the machinery operator. I took wide views of the entire area and close-ups of voids in the earth where whole skeletons had been raised from graves. I had reeled off a few dozen photos before Donato returned.
“Make it nineteen,” he said. “They found another full skeleton over there. It’s outside the boundary we laid out with the ground-penetrating radar, so we might have to expand the sweep.” He shook his head. “It’s a bone yard.”
“It is,” I said. “And Chicago is the hunting ground that feeds it.”
We wandered around for maybe twenty minutes. I confirmed descriptions for some of the photos I’d taken. Then we hiked back to the Tahoe and headed north back to the center city.
“Why have you decided to talk to me?” I asked.
“Aidan Coughlin called me yesterday and told me he was talking to you, and he told me why. He made sense. The feds won’t give me a good reason to be silent. When they raise the flag of national security, it sounds like typical Washington buzz to cover a myriad of things that might or might not be real.” He drove in silence for a minute then asked, “Do we know yet if the killing of the woman from DCFS is tied to this or just random?”
“I know what I think,” I said. “But I can’t prove it. Her name, by the way, is Winona Jackson. She’s not just ‘the woman from DCFS.’”
I hadn’t meant to jump on Donato so hard, but I was still pissed off about Winona’s murder. I was likely to stay pissed off for a long time.
The medical examiner didn’t seem offended because he began to spill all the details of the investigation to date.
Of the nineteen bodies and parts of bodies found buried in Ryan Woods, Donato said, DNA results had come back on seven. Four were black, three boys and a girl. Of the other three bodies, one girl was Caucasian, of Eastern European decent. The remaining two bodies were Me
diterranean, but that covered a lot of territory including Spain, France, Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, much of the Middle East, and North Africa. Oh, and Monaco.
“Monaco?” I said. “That’s nothing more than a city on the French coast.”
“But it’s the Mediterranean coast,” he said with a smile. “Just being thorough.”
Donato said they were still trying to interpret the rest of the DNA results. The children ranged in age from eight to twelve.
“That sure fits with the notion they were trafficking victims,” I said.
“It does,” Donato replied. “But don’t assume because some of the DNA came back as Eastern European and Mediterranean that the children were foreign nationals kidnapped to the United States. They could be the kids of immigrants.”
“Right. Is there any clue to how and when they died and who they were?”
“COD and TOD information is beginning to come in, but it’s spotty. Nothing conclusive yet on IDs.
When we got back to the ME’s office, there was a black Suburban parked illegally on Harrison Street with the engine running and two men inside, one black, one white.
I stopped and glared at them. I didn’t care if they saw me. I hoped they did.
“You seen that SUV around here before?” I asked Donato.
He glanced over.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “It’s the feds. They show up occasionally and demand to know what I’ve found out. Sometimes I tell them, and sometimes I tell them to go fuck themselves, depending on my mood and their attitude. The only certainty is that they almost always cop an attitude. I am now flipping them off.”
I whirled around to see that, but Donato’s hands were at his sides.
“I’m flipping them off mentally,” he said. “The beauty is, they can’t know and therefore can’t retaliate.”
I might have rolled my eyes a little.
I said, “They seem to follow me everywhere even though the places I’ve been haven’t produced anything worth asking about.”
“Jerks,” Donato said. “Come on in. Maybe there’s fresh coffee.”
When we were settled in his office with what passed for coffee, I told Donato about the men who’d assaulted me on my porch, issued a dire warning, then chloroformed me.
“One of the guys was NSA,” I said.
“You really think the feds would stoop to that?” he asked.
“I know it. The guy was at my house the next day. I only saw his shoe before he chloroformed me, but it had a deep gouge in the leather up by the toe. The fed standing at my front door the next morning was wearing the same shoe.”
“Jesus,” Donato said. “Some balls, huh?”
“I guess I don’t have a very good poker face,” I said, “because he realized I’d made him. Couple of days ago, I go up to Montrose Point to contemplate the lake, and he follows me. Comes up behind me and surprises me. Tells me the shoe’s been fixed, so I’d better keep my suspicions to myself because there’s no evidence to back up my accusation.”
“Did you turn him in?
“Not yet. But if he gets in my way again I might, just to piss him off.”
“Was it some guy named Cross?”
“Mason Cross, yes. Perfect name. He’s a bad-ass.”
“I’ve met him,” Donato said. “He’s good at scare tactics. You okay?”
“I am, but I’ve never been able to make that incident add up.”
“How do you mean?”
“Why would Cross do what he did to me and then butcher Winona Jackson? If he wanted to discourage us, why didn’t he kill me, too?”
Tony looked pensive. “I don’t think it was Cross. He would commit murder. Not of an American citizen on American soil. Would he try to scare you off? Absolutely, yes. But kill you? No. You have any alternate theories?”
“As I said in the car, I have a theory, but it’s only a theory. I agree with you. I don’t think the feds killed Winona. I think it was thugs from whatever country the feds have under the microscope. Either they were sending me a message, or she had access to information that could hurt them.”
“I wonder if she did.”
“If so, she never told me. At least I don’t think she told me.”
I was thinking of that last set of papers Winona left for me at Starbucks. They’d given me nothing so far, but maybe I’d missed something. I’d go through the list more carefully when I got home.
“The way they killed Mrs. Jackson might indicate the killers might be from the Middle East,” Tony suggested. “The place where cutting throats has risen to a grisly art form.”
“True,” I said, “unless they were from Monaco and wanted to make people think they were from the Middle East.”
“You’re joking.”
I smiled. “I am. Exaggeration for effect.”
“Point taken.”
“So what,” Tony asked, “do you plan to do with this information, such as it is?”
“I think it’s time to tell the people of Chicago what we know.”
“Leave me out of the story,” he said. “If you have to include a quote from me, here it is. ‘No comment.’”
26
When I walked into the office the next morning, Eric Ryland caught my eye from across the newsroom. He cocked his head toward his office, then turned and entered it. A summons, Ryland style.
I slipped out of my coat, picked up the green tea latte for fortification, and walked up the aisle wondering what sort of trouble I was in this time.
I was surprised to see the paper’s attorney, Jonathan Bruckner, sitting on one of the sofas in Eric’s office.
“Hey, Deuce,” he said. “How’re you doin’? You’re looking a lot better than you did the last time I saw you.” That was at my house when police questioned me after the assault.
“I’m doing fine, Jonathan, thanks. I always assume when you’re here I’m in some sort of hot water. How bad is it?”
Ryland spoke up.
“You’re not in trouble, Deuce,” he said, “but the paper might be. I’ll let Jonathan explain it to you.”
I turned back to Bruckner.
“I’m betting this involves Ryan Woods.”
He might have nodded, though the motion of his head was so slight I couldn’t be certain. He sat forward in his seat. Ryland walked over and closed his office door.
“Deuce,” Bruckner began, “I think you know that some years ago I was in the foreign service, that I served as the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s during Bill Clinton’s second term.”
“Great Britain,” I said. “Yes, I knew that. Impressive.”
“Yes, well, when you serve in such a capacity, you get to know your counterparts in other areas of the world. The rigors of the job are, on some occasions, akin to being on the beaches during the Normandy invasion. Some of your fellow travelers brush by you and never stick. A few become fast friends and remain so for the rest of your life. You stay in touch. See each other when you can. Call on one another if the need arises. And you trust them without question.”
He paused, and I took advantage to move the conversation ahead.
“And one of these life-long friends was in touch with you about Ryan Woods, I gather. He probably told you to pull me out of the game.”
Bruckner smiled. “In keeping with your metaphor, what he actually told me would equate to, ‘Escort her out of the ball park.’”
“What were his reasons?” I asked. “And please don’t tell me he waved the flag and invoked national security. That’s a Washington-driven cliché used to cover a multitude of sins, and I won’t accept it. If I’m going to be forced to back off, I want real reasons, full explanations, and details.”
“Since they’re matters of national security,” he said, “I can’t give them to you.”
I uncoiled all six feet of myself from the sofa and stood up.
I began to pace the office. When Bruckner and I made eye contact, he was forced to look up. I liked him, but I hoped hi
s neck ached.
“I already said I won’t accept that,” I told him. “I need a damned good reason to forget about the holes in the ground down there, dug to conceal the bodies of abused and molested children, some too young to walk to school alone. I need something to overshadow the nightmares I have about small bones, cracked skulls, and little blue backpacks rotting in the earth. I need to be convinced to ignore the fact that there are monsters roaming among us doing unspeakable things to babies who scream for their mothers and are strangled to shut them up. If you can’t provide that, Jonathan, if you can’t convince me that the threat to this country is so great we need to make human sacrifices of our children to save ourselves, then we’re wasting our time.”
I thought I might have slipped too far toward melodrama until I saw the lawyer’s eyes mist over. He tore his gaze from mine and let his head drop. I heard him say, “I can’t.”
I turned to leave.
“Deuce.” It was Ryland.
I stopped and turned, expecting to have my hide blistered.
He gave me a half smile, instead.
“We’ll talk later,” he said.
“Later” turned out to be a few seconds after Bruckner left. As I watched him walk away from Ryland’s office, I noticed that, while he was firmly and lawyerly erect, his eyes were downcast. He didn’t even glance toward my desk. I had definitely struck a nerve, but I didn’t know which one.
I watched him until he left the newsroom for the elevator lobby. When I looked back, Ryland was watching me from his office door. He smiled at me again, and again cocked his head in summons. Again, I obeyed. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Eric Ryland smile at me twice on the same day.
“Close the door and sit down,” he said when I got to his office. “Bring me up to date on what you know.”
I did, including everything I had learned from the medical examiner and from Aidan Coughlin, the DCFS administrator.
“That’s really grim,” Ryland said when I finished. “The big unknown, of course, is who is responsible. I don’t really want to take this public until we know more. But I also don’t want to get beat on the story. Nineteen dead children is pretty big news.”