The Hunting Ground (Deuce Mora Mystery Series Book 2)

by Jean Heller

  As I debated what to say if Mark answered his door, I saw him emerge from La Sardine, a very good French restaurant in the building to the south of his. He had a very beautiful woman on his arm who looked vaguely familiar, a strawberry blonde, slim, and nearly as tall as me. At least he hadn’t given up on tall women.

  They put their arms around one another and walked to Randolph, where they turned east and disappeared.

  After dinner drinks at The Girl and the Goat, maybe. Or Nia.

  My stomach hollowed out. Any illusion I had of patching things up with Mark evaporated. He had certainly rebounded quickly. He hadn’t even tried for reconciliation. Right on to the next woman. I wanted to cry and scream at the same time, but I didn’t have the strength to do either.

  I slumped in my seat and felt lost.

  I sat in my car like that for nearly an hour, wondering if Mark had tossed out the stuff of mine that I left at his place, a metaphor for our trashed relationship. Or maybe he boxed up everything and threw it in his storage locker. One thing was certain. He hadn’t left my belongings in his condo for a new girlfriend to find.

  I was about to try to gather enough strength to drive home, when the light entering my car from a nearby streetlamp went out, blocked by a large person who had come to my car door. I scrambled to reach the ignition when I heard my name.

  “Deuce. Hey, Deuce.” It was Mark.

  I inhaled deeply and willed my heart to stop beating me up from the inside.

  “Hey, Deuce, open the window.”

  I thumbed it down. Mark crossed his arms over the door and peered in.

  “What are you doing sitting out here?” he asked.

  “I just got here,” I said. “Thought we could talk if you were home.”

  “You didn’t just get here,” he said. “I saw your car, and you, when Katie and I came out of the restaurant. And now you’re still here.”

  “Where’s Katie?”

  “With her husband last I saw her,” he said, and I saw realization in his smile. “Her husband, by the way, is my brother from Indianapolis. Howard. You met them at Christmas. I’m sure you remember.” His tone said he wasn’t sure at all.

  Oh Lord, yes, I did remember. No wonder she looked familiar.

  Mark continued. “Howard had a business dinner tonight at Nia, so I offered to take Katie out to keep her company. Then I walked her over to hook up with her the man she married.”

  His smile was now a shit-eating grin.

  “Still want to talk?” he asked. He turned and pointed to an empty section of curb in front of his building. “Park over there, and I’ll get the placard from Lazlo.”

  The empty section of curb was another loading zone. Lazlo, the building doorman, had a “Handicapped” placard he loaned out for a fee to favored unit owners with friends who needed a parking spot for a while. A car with a placard could park illegally almost anywhere without being ticketed. A car with a placard could park in a metered spot without paying and wouldn’t be ticketed. In Chicago, disability has its rewards.

  I hung a U-turn and took the spot. Mark handed the placard to me. I closed the window and hung the card from the rear view mirror. Mark opened my door.

  “Come on up,” he said.

  I got a bigger reception from Murphy, the big, red dog, than Mark did. I got down on my knees and gave him a good scratching behind his ears. I had missed him, too.

  Once we were settled in Mark’s living room, I thought about where to start. Murphy curled up on the sofa beside me and settled his head in my lap. I occupied my hands by petting him, mostly to hide the trembling. I toyed with the notion of simply blurting out, “I’m sorry.” But what if he didn’t care? What if Mark had decided a relationship with me was more trouble than I was worth?

  He remained quiet for a few minutes, too, and then he tried to rescue me.

  “I see from the paper you’ve been pretty busy,” he said. “Look what Murphy started, huh? Wonder Dog.”

  I quickly broad-brushed the situation in Ryan Woods without going into the international aspects of the case. Until I found out if we had a future, I wasn’t willing to risk telling Mark things I wouldn’t want relayed to others.

  “So what have you been up to?” I said, figuring it was his turn to talk a while.

  “Called out on the grain elevator explosion in East St. Louis,” he said. “I hate grain elevators. All that highly flammable dust is an invitation to disaster. We have eleven dead. Maybe more. Plus a few the hospitals might not be able to save.”

  “I hadn’t heard that arson was suspected,” I said.

  “It wasn’t. But there was such widespread damage it became an all-hands-on-deck thing. Every available fire investigator in the state converged on it. We were all pretty sure we knew why the elevator exploded, but we had to find the evidence. I was down there for nearly a month. I got back early this afternoon.”

  I let myself feel hope that being busy out of town is what kept Mark from calling me.

  “What did you do with Murphy?”

  “I took him along,” Mark said with a smile. “What do you think I did with him before I met you?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It never occurred to me.”

  It was time to change the subject and address the elephant in the room.

  “Look, Mark, I’m sorry I blindsided you about Charles,” I said. “And so you know, adoption isn’t going to happen. I dropped the charges to a misdemeanor so he could get into a special school that’s supposed to help him. I hope it does. But he’s out of my life. I miss him. But the point is, I didn’t think things through. Adoption was a bad idea. Even if it had been workable, I had no right to assume you would welcome the added responsibility.”

  Mark nodded and repositioned himself in his chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “And I should have been willing to talk it through with you. Looking back on it, I think I said no almost as soon as the conversation started. That wasn’t fair. The subject was too important to brush off.”

  “Any chance we can go back to where we were before that night?”

  “No,” he said, and my heart sank. Then he explained. “I think we both learned an important lesson, and we shouldn’t forget it. What we can do is pick up now, as though I just got home from a long business trip, which I did, during which I missed you a great deal, which I also did. We’ll see how it goes. I don’t have that poor pizza any more, but I can offer you a glass of wine. What do you say?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Yes to all of it.”

  We walked together into the kitchen. Mark slid a bottle out of his wine rack and set about opening it. I got two glasses. While he was focused on the cork, I put my arms around his waist from the back and pressed myself into him. He wiggled his ass against me, and I suddenly wasn’t thinking about wine anymore.

  He turned around, grabbed my ass with both hands and pressed us together. I detected that he wasn’t thinking about wine anymore, either.

  Brother Gary was right. Makeup sex is awesome.

  30

  As much as we both wanted it, I couldn’t spend the night with Mark. For one thing, Lazlo would want his placard back. For another, I needed to get an early start trying to pry the names of the Ryan Woods victims out of those who knew.

  I got home a little before 2 a.m. and managed four hours’ sleep before my alarm shattered a very sweet dream that evaporated, as dreams do, almost as soon as I opened my eyes. But it left a pleasant afterglow.

  I had slipped my feet into a pair of slippers when the phone rang.

  It was 6:02 a.m. Not a good sign.

  I picked up my cell phone. Caller ID said it was Eric Ryland.

  When your workday normally begins around 10 a.m., but your editor is calling you four hours early, there’s either a disaster somewhere that prompts a big response. Or the callee, me, is hip deep in big-dog doodoo. I was willing to bet a week’s salary on the doodoo.

  “Good morning,” I said as well as I could with mo
rning frogs in my throat.

  “Have you seen the Trib?” Ryland said without prelude.

  “No,” I said, wondering if my Chicago Tribune had even been delivered yet. “My alarm went off two minutes before you called.”

  “They have the names of two of the children found at Ryan Woods.”

  “Crap,” I said. “Who’s the source?”

  “Unnamed.”

  “I thought you said the police reporters would be all over that angle.”

  I didn’t like deflecting Eric’s anger toward my colleagues, but he had taken that thread of the story away from me. On the other hand, I had been in the medical examiner’s office the day before and hadn’t gotten squat out of him.

  “You’ve still got the best sources,” Eric snapped, “Have you talked to them?”

  “Yes. I spent time with Tony Donato yesterday. He wouldn’t give up anything. He told me four bodies had been identified, but no information would be made public until family notifications were made.”

  “And you didn’t think that was news?”

  “Not really,” I said. “It didn’t advance the story.”

  “Not your decision, Deuce. When are you going to get it through your head that you’re not the metro editor of this newspaper?”

  I didn’t want to have this conversation, so I tried to refocus it.

  “He told me the ID on one boy, the one whose bone Mark and I found, would be released as soon as the father could ship back from Afghanistan. The mother’s a wreck. She needs her husband’s support. So she asked to have her son’s ID withheld for a few days, and city officials agreed. It wouldn’t have been right to publish that. Someone would have been able to identify her. It would made an already terrible situation even worse.”

  “You led with your heart, and it cost us the lead on the story. Get in here.”

  While I was in the shower, I indulged my guilt over the Trib’s scoop. I honestly didn’t know what I could have done to prevent it, but I was dismayed anyway. Maybe by the time I got to the office Ryland would have calmed down, or at least directed his anger elsewhere. Even if that were the case, I’d still be behind the eight ball.

  When I got to the newsroom, Ryland already had two police reporters and one of our courts reporters in his office. I couldn’t figure out why the courts reporter was involved, but there was a lot about Eric Ryland’s thinking that eluded me. I joined them.

  “You’ve seen the Trib?” Ryland asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “The names of the two boys didn’t ring any bells, but there’s no reason they should. I couldn’t tell, judging by the ‘no comments’ from the mothers, whether either boy is the one we discovered.”

  I filled in everyone on my conversation the previous day with Tony Donato.

  “I’ll give him a call this morning and see if the Trib story changes his mind about disclosing the names.”

  “I wasn’t the source.”

  Donato didn’t even say “hello” when he picked up the phone. He went immediately into defensive mode.

  He added, “I wouldn’t have done that to you.”

  I believed him.

  “Was the information accurate?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “For my information, was either of the two the body our dog found?”

  “No.”

  “Can you say anything more today than you did yesterday?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Right now, I don’t think so,” he said. “But I’ll see what I can do. If I can say any more later, you will be the only one who hears it from me.”

  I turned back to the Trib and read the story again. It was thin. Other than the names of two boys and the dates they disappeared there was no information on how they died, when they died, or what their short lives had been like.

  I knew the two reporters whose bylines were on the story. Both covered City Hall, which made me think the leak was from the mayor’s office.

  I pulled out Winona Jackson’s list of missing children and both names were there. Notes beside the names provided a little information the Trib didn’t have, but not a lot. Winona had told me if we matched any names, she would give me data from the children’s DCFS files. I had no idea whether Aidan Coughlin follow through.

  I printed out the new information, such as it was, and carried it to Ryland.

  “I confirmed the Trib’s story is accurate,” I told him. “Tony Donato wasn’t the source. I think the leak came from the mayor’s office. Tony is going to see if he can break loose anything more.” I handed him my printout. “This is what I have right now on the two boys. Maybe it will help some.”

  Ryland took the paper from me, scanned it and said, “Yeah, but not much. Stay on the story this time.”

  A little after 9 a.m. I called Aidan Coughlin at DCFS. He was at his desk.

  The speed with which he took my call made me think he’d been waiting for it.

  “Mornin’, Deuce,” he said, “though I suspect there’s nothing good about it so far today.”

  “Not much so far,” I said. “I’m hoping for some improvement.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Winona gave me a list of all the children gone missing in Cook County in the last ten years,” I said. “At least the ones DCFS knew about. She said some are never reported, which is unfathomable to me. She said . . .”

  “ . . . that she’d give you the files on any kids who were identified, assuming we have files on them.” Coughlin finished the sentence for me.

  “Winona told you that?”

  “She told me everything,” he said. “After I found out she was sharing information with you, and after I assured her I wasn’t going to fire her, we made a mutual pact with the devil. We decided until the feds straightened out their priorities, we would, to any reasonable degree, ignore several major laws and the consequences of breaking them.”

  I said, “Wow.”

  “Whether I carry through on that depends on you. Whether I keep my job and stay out of jail is contingent on you never telling anyone where you got your information. I agreed to this for the greater good, not to become a martyr.”

  When I reached Coughlin’s office, I found him waiting on the sidewalk outside the upside-down ice cream cone that was the state office building.

  “I told my secretary I was going for coffee,” he said, “and as long as I’m out here, I might as well do that. Care to join me?”

  I accepted.

  We walked to a Dunkin’ Donuts on North LaSalle and sat at a table in a back corner. A large, sealed manila envelope with no writing on it lay on the table between us. Coughlin hadn’t offered it to me, and I didn’t feel free to touch it.

  He asked me about the investigation, and I told him what I knew. I suspected he was already up to speed with most of it.

  “Any new thoughts on who might be behind it?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to deal in speculation, so I said, “No, not really. It’s frustrating.”

  When we finished, Coughlin pushed the envelope toward me, an invitation to take it. As I reached for it, he put his hand on it to stop me for a moment.

  “Remember,” he said, “no martyrs.”

  I was stunned when I got back to my desk and opened the envelope. There were four files, each stapled separately. The top two were for DeShawyn Simpson and Montell Washington Jr., the two boys whose names were disclosed in the Tribune that morning.

  There were two more. The names were Jennifer “Jenny” Gentile and Malachai Carpenter, the two children not yet publicly identified. My eyes lingered on the name Malachai Carpenter. If neither of the first two boys was the one Mark and I discovered, as Tony Donato told me, it must have been Malachai. I read his file first.

  He had been born on August 21, 2007. He would have been nine years old had he lived to this summer. He disappeared, as nearly as anyone could tell, after getting off his school bus in the Irving Park neighborhood. His friends and the bus driver remembered him get
ting on and getting off. But he never made it home. He simply evaporated.

  That was Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2014. Malachai had just turned seven.

  His mother, Theresa Carpenter, reported him missing that evening. She had called his friends, all the relatives she had in the Chicago area, neighbors, everyone she could think of. Nobody had seen him after he got off the big yellow bus. She walked the path he took from the bus stop home. Then she walked every other path imaginable. She searched people’s yards, garbage cans, alleys. Nothing.

  The police had taken her report reluctantly because the boy hadn’t been gone twenty-four hours. But given his age and the fact that he had no history of running away, they took note. They had no more luck finding him than Theresa had.

  It appeared from the file that the hunt for the boy was pursued diligently, even to questioning most of the children at his school, the principal, and all the teachers. No one was able to generate a single lead.

  The father, Christian H. Carpenter was a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps. He had returned from Qatar to be with his wife and help with the investigation. One DCFS caseworker noted that being a part of the search seemed to be Sgt. Carpenter’s means of channeling his anger and fear. Understandably. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like for the parents. Malachai was their only child.

  I thought for a minute about what I was going to say to Tony Donato. I owed him a courtesy call to tell him I now had the names of all four children and planned to use them along with other information I had obtained. I didn’t want to call him this early in the day, however, because I didn’t want to risk that he would then release all the names to other media in Chicago in spite of his promise not to.

  Even though Donato wasn’t responsible for the Tribune scoop this morning, my motto was, “Once screwed, twice paranoid.”