The Hunting Ground (Deuce Mora Mystery Series Book 2)

by Jean Heller

  “Coughlin won’t talk to anyone else. He told me so before I could even ask. Tony won’t either. At least he says he won’t.”

  “So you think we’re safe holding off?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” I said. “A lot of people live around Ryan Woods. They have to know something big is going on. They must be seeing tiny body bags coming out of the woods every day or so. And since they’re not seeing stories about it in the papers or on television, their natural inclination might be to call a reporter somewhere and suggest something is really wrong. At that point . . .” I held out my hands and shrugged. “I don’t think we should take the risk. I already told Tony Donato I was going to write what I knew.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He would have preferred hearing he’d won the Powerball jackpot, but he understands we can’t sit on this. We just can’t use his name.”

  “Okay, then,” Ryland said. “Let’s publish. No speculation at this point about who might be responsible for the deaths. And I think we’ll leave NSA out of it for the time being. Their involvement raises more questions than we can answer. Call Donato and Coughlin and warn them the story is coming. You might let your FBI friend in Washington know, too. Try to get comment from the police and the mayor’s office. Then write the hell out of it.”

  I got up to leave. Ryland stopped me.

  “You think we’re safe holding back the international aspects for now?”

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” I said. “All we have is speculation. Nobody has any more than that.”

  I wished I were as certain as I sounded.

  27

  My story and photos the next morning blew a hole through Chicago’s heart.

  The police chief held a press conference to say there had been a task force working round-the-clock for more than a month in pursuit of the person or persons responsible for Ryan Woods. He said he “suspected” the children were the victims of traffickers. Several reporters asked why the gruesome discovery hadn’t been made public by the police, and much earlier so that parents across the city would take steps to protect their kids. Each time the question came up, he talked all around it. Either the fourth or fifth time someone asked, he ended the press conference.

  The mayor held a press conference promising swift justice for child traffickers and the elimination of all human traffickers in his city. He did so with tears in his eyes. Someone asked me if I thought they were genuine. I didn’t know. I hoped so.

  All over the city, people demanded to know who was responsible for the murders. No one speculated. Nobody mentioned the possibility of foreign involvement. Had I been one of the traffickers, I might have felt secure in the belief that no one suspected.

  Eric Ryland ordered me to hand off part the story to the Journal’s police and City Hall reporters. They would follow the body count, the political fallout, the unanswered question about why the city had kept the grisly discovery from the public. I had columns to write, Eric argued, and he wanted me pursuing the international angle, which he referred to as “the sexier part of the story.” I put up a pretty good fight against handing off any part of the story, arguing that I didn’t have the time to bring other reporters up to speed. But it was a fight I knew I would lose.

  One of my colleagues told me at least thirteen different citizen organizations had called press conferences to announce they would work in impoverished and dangerous areas of the city to raise public awareness of trafficking. They would patrol the streets with armed citizen soldiers in the fight to save children. That probably meant the body count would rise. Everyone would be eyeing one another with more suspicion than usual.

  Two of these citizen press conferences were held almost simultaneously outside City Hall. When the angry speeches ended, the two groups merged into one large demonstration by parents and friends of missing children who feared their little ones had wound up unmourned and unrecognized in the cold, wet earth of Ryan Woods. There was so much going on in so many places that Eric pressed me into service to help cover the demonstration and write a column about it.

  A number of the participants recognized me, of course. Both men and women grabbed me and hugged me and begged me to find out if their missing children were among those lying in morgue drawers waiting to be identified and taken home.

  To say it was heartbreaking was to understate the impact by a factor of a ten. I promised all who asked that I would do what I could. To that end, I broke away from the crowd, leaving the despondent to grieve with others they hadn’t known two hours earlier. They were crying so hard they had to gasp for air even as they grasped at hope for closure.

  God, I hate that word. Closure. What is it, anyway? A chance to put an end to tragedy and get on with life? That’s impossible. The tragedy never ends. It hits you with wave after wave of raw emotion all day, and then it invades your dreams and slaps you awake at night. As time passes, and the amount of time is one of those variables no one can predict, the waves roll in less and less frequently until there comes a time when you think it might be over. Just when you stop paying attention, a wave blindsides you, generated by nothing you can define and coming from nowhere you can predict. That the waves come less often in no way diminishes their crippling power. Each time they knock you to your emotional knees.

  Yes, the grieving do eventually get on with their lives with different degrees of success. But their lives are emptier, sadder, and less fulfilling. It’s worse for those who don’t know what happened to their children. Those who find their young ones know with cruel finality how their stories ended. Those who don’t must live with crippling uncertainty. Are their children still suffering? Do they cry out for parents who can’t hear them? That last question is a killer, beyond unbearable.

  So it was that a Latino man, probably in his forties but appearing much older, came and stood in front of me and told me in broken English that he had been looking for his missing son for six years. Six years not knowing if he was dead or alive, suffering or beyond misery. The only way he would know, the man said, was to try to join his son and remain by his side forever. I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  He looked at me for a few seconds, then took three steps backward. The hand he pulled out of his coat pocket held a gun. He put it to his temple and pulled the trigger. The crack of the pistol reverberated off the buildings. A chunk of the man’s skull flew some ten feet, followed by a mist of red blood and globs of gray fat that had been his brain.

  The body, dead in a millisecond, crumbled to the pavement like a balloon figure with a pin stuck in it. There was nothing to be done for him. I hoped he would get his wish and be reunited with his son somewhere, someday.

  The police were all over me in a cocaine heartbeat. I identified myself. I told them the man had recognized me. I repeated the man’s story. The outcome was there for them to see with their own eyes and their own hearts. They took my contact information.

  I turned and walked away. The police didn’t need any more from me. There were at least a dozen witnesses to what happened. And I had somewhere important to go, a place where I could start getting some answers.

  28

  I found Tony Donato in the middle of several autopsies, none related to Ryan Woods. He told me I could come in and talk to him while he worked, but I chose to wait until he finished. Autopsies were not my idea of a spectator sport.

  A wave of cold air preceded him out of his operating theater. It carried the powdery odor of bone dust, the metallic smell of blood, and the sour stink of death. I experienced a reflexive gasp, which drew the cold stench of decay into my mouth where it coated my tongue and throat and tried to gag me. Tony offered me a mint, which did little good.

  “I should carry a jar of Vick’s when I’m coming here,” I said.

  “You mean to put under your nose to block the smell?” he asked. “Don’t bother. It doesn’t really help.”

  “What do you use?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “You get used to it.” H
e turned toward his office. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got an update for you.”

  Donato unlocked one of his desk drawers and pulled out a slender file. He put it on his desk and clasped his hands on top of it as if to protect it.

  “I’m going to tell you some things you cannot write today. I need your word on it,” he said. “I realize that when I told you not to write anything at all until I gave you the green light, I was acting under the belief that the NSA’s warnings about a threat to national security were reasonable. When Aidan Coughlin and I talked it through after Winona’s murder, we realized we couldn’t sit on this, and the NSA be damned. Aidan already had an appointment with you, and he said he would take the leash off. You wrote your story, and the world hasn’t ended. So I think we made a defensible call.”

  “Is either of you in trouble with the mayor?”

  Donato laughed, the laugh of a man who didn’t find anything funny.

  “The mayor’s got his own problems,” he said. “He doesn’t have time to worry about us. It was bad enough when the whole city blamed him for the misdeeds of his police. Now he’s got the whole city on his back because he didn’t disclose the Ryan Woods situation when it first surfaced. If the public knew Aidan and I helped you bring the story to light, we could be elected to any city jobs we wanted.”

  “Aidan doesn’t want to be involved publicly,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” Donato replied. “I told you that already. But eventually I’ll have to be because I’m the man with the remains and the scalpel and the microscope.”

  “Then I guess you’ll be the next mayor.”

  “There’s only one reason I can think of to want that,” Donato said. “Excellent seats at Blackhawks games. And even that’s not enough to assume all the grief.”

  “So where is this leading? What’s in the folder?”

  “We’ve positively identified four of the bodies and the approximate times of death,” he said. “I can’t give them to you yet, but I’m telling you so you can get ready. Until the next of kin are notified, we can’t release them.”

  My heart rate jumped a notch.

  “How close are you?” I asked.

  “Just started looking. One of the children was an eight-year-old black boy, the one you and your dog found. The mother identified his backpack, though she said she bought it at Target, so there are probably thousands like it. We checked her DNA against his and got a positive match. She’s devastated, as you can imagine, and her family has gathered around to protect her. They don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “But if they’ve been notified, you’ve fulfilled your responsibility, and you can release his name, right?”

  “It’s not that cut-and-dried. She asked us not to make her son’s name public until she can notify her husband—the boy’s father. He’s in the Army, stationed in Afghanistan. He’s been gone for most of five years. She needs to get him back here. She doesn’t think she can face the public alone. Giving her that much privacy is the least we can do.”

  I understood that. It also made leaks to other news organizations more likely.

  “How long will that take, getting him back here?” I hated sounding so callous.

  “The military grants immediate leave in situations like this,” Donato said. “Maybe a few days until he’s home. I’m staying in touch.”

  “Can you at least tell me who he was?”

  “No, not yet.” I must have looked pained because Donato added quickly, “Deuce, I gave the mother my word.”

  “What about the mayor and the police? Did they give their word, too?”

  “I don’t know for certain,” he said. “I can’t speak for them. The mother made her request to all city officials, and so far as I can tell, all city officials are on board. They don’t need any more grief with devastated families.”

  I shook my head. Donato’s assurance didn’t assuage me.

  “What about the IDs on the other three?”

  “Notifications are still in process.”

  The two of us sat and stared into space for a few moments.

  “I don’t know how you do this job, Tony,” I said. “It would kill me.”

  “There are times I think it will kill me,” he said. “This would be one of those.”

  29

  By the time I got home I was feeling pretty low. The little boy Murphy had unearthed was about to become the most tragically famous little boy in Chicago, and I would have a name and a face to put with a muddy thigh bone.

  I wondered if the fact that the boy had disappeared and died while the father was off fighting a war in Asia would create more tension than the marriage could survive. Were there other kids in the family? What would the impact be on them? I wanted to stop thinking about all this, but I couldn’t shove it out of my head.

  I had hoped the appearance of my story all over the front page of the Journal would prompt Mark to call. He didn’t. I’d spent half the day wondering about Charles, where he was, and how he was. I didn’t hear anything about him, either.

  I poured myself a glass of wine and sat down to think about dinner when the phone rang. Caller ID told me it was my brother, Gary, who lived Denver. I smiled.

  “Hey, Uno, how ya dooin?” I always answered the phone in typical Chicago jargon because Gary missed the city where we grew up.

  He was laughing.

  “Thanks for a sound of home,” he said. “I see you’re causing all sorts of trouble again. Did you ever think about becoming a grocery clerk at Jewell?”

  “No. Maybe a cowboy in Wyoming. Spend my time with flatulent cows.”

  Gary was a prosecutor with the Denver District Attorney’s office. And he was good. He’d been offered a couple of partnerships with criminal law firms in Denver and elsewhere, but he turned them all down. Maybe someday, he said. For now, he was very happy putting crooks away. He specialized in white-collar criminals, particularly those engaged in computer schemes. He called them, “predators,” and he was right.

  “Your story was all over the news out here,” he said. “It scared Laurie half to death. She’s monitoring the kids to make sure they don’t hear any of it.”

  Gary and Laurie had two boys, four and six. They were adorable, smart kids, and had they been mine, I would have moved heaven and earth to protect them. My brother and his wife were doing that already.

  “So tell me something,” Gary said. “After I heard the news, I went to your paper online and read the whole story. I got the feeling there were things going on between the lines that you weren’t writing about. True?”

  “I can’t really talk about it, Gary, especially not on the phone,” I said. “But if it’s any help, I have no indication that the Denver area is involved.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “So how’s by you? We’ve only talked a couple of times since you and Mark were out here for Thanksgiving.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m not sure Mark’s in the picture any more,” I said. My voice got snagged and trembled when I mentioned Mark’s name. Giving voice to my fears deepened my feelings of loss. But this was my twin brother on the phone. Though only fourteen minutes older than me, he was the man who, in the absence of my father, had been my sounding board for years. So the story flooded out, starting with Charles and running through Mark’s reaction to my idea of adoption.

  “Aw, shit, I’m so sorry, Deuce. There must be a way to salvage this, especially the relationship with Mark. He’s a good guy.”

  “I keep hoping he’ll call, but so far he hasn’t.”

  “Well,” Gary said, “speaking as a man, if I were in a fairly new relationship with a woman who suddenly announced she was thinking of adopting a black street kid with criminal tendencies, it would rock my world pretty hard.”

  “You’re not a racist. What does his being black have to do with it?”

  “It’s not the color of his skin, Deuce. It’s his environment and his experience. He didn’t grow to nine or ten years old in the same world yo
u and Mark would provide for a child of your own. I have no doubt you, of all people, could help Charles adjust to his new, post-adoption world. But it would take a long time and a lot of effort and patience. You and Mark have the love to give and the patience to work with the boy. But neither of you has that kind of time. You both have jobs that eat up huge numbers of hours, and a lot of Mark’s hours are out of the city. The hours you have together you need for yourselves. Am I making any sense?”

  I wanted to say no, but Gary’s conclusions weren’t different from my own.

  “So how would this hypothetical woman go about salvaging her relationship with you? Would it even be possible?”

  “Yep,” he said. “When two people really love each other, these things are always salvageable. Laurie and I have been through this a couple of times. Not the same problem as yours, but bumps of equal magnitude. Go see Mark. Talk it out. Remember, making up is half the fun. In fact, I think we conceived Sean the night we salvaged something or other.”

  Sean was their older boy.

  “TMI, Uno,” I said.

  “Okay, babe. Let me know how it goes. I’m always available for marriage counseling for my little sister.”

  I hung up and grabbed my coat before I could think too much about it.

  I parked in a loading zone across the street from Mark’s front door. He lived in the West Loop, on North Carpenter Street between Washington and Randolph, opposite Harpo Studios where Oprah had held forth for so many years. The site would be razed soon for a new MacDonald’s headquarters.

  Mark’s building was an old warehouse, artfully converted into condos. There were hundreds of warehouse conversions in the city, a much better idea than tearing down the old red brick structures for new construction. The warehouses had been built to last, and finding a good use for them helped Chicago keep its personality from bending before a landscape of unyielding glass and metal.