The Hunting Ground (Deuce Mora Mystery Series Book 2)

by Jean Heller

  44

  Abdul Rahim Haroun al-Rashid was a mouthful. He was the sole owner of one of the most expensive homes in Chicago, a 15,000 square-foot, six-bedroom, eight-bath palace with a four-car garage, an elevator, an outdoor swimming pool, a hot tub and a spa, a greenhouse, terraces everywhere, a full basement, appointments befitting a prince, and drop-dead views of the lake and the downtown skyline.

  In photos, the house looked like a fortress. It had, in fact, originally been a brick warehouse when built in 1913. Nobody would mistake it for dusty commercial space any longer. The estimated market value of the house was in the $14 million neighborhood, a nice neighborhood, indeed. Even if I could have afforded the house, the property taxes of close to $70,000 a year were a deal breaker.

  Abdul Rahim Haroun al-Rashid had probably written a personal check for it.

  The other member of the delegation who owned Chicago property was Abdallah bin Kalil. His place was no palace. But as any realtor will tell you, it’s all about location, location, location. Bin Kalil’s property was nine blocks due north of Ryan Woods.

  It was described as a 50,000-square-foot industrial site on nearly four acres of land with two loading docks. It shouldered up to a cluster of railroad tracks, which appeared from a map to be a cluster of sidings. The building, described as a machine shop, was surrounded by other commercial and industrial buildings of the same nature. In short, a location totally deserted at night. There were no homes, no people nearby who might hear a child’s screams and cries for help.

  Just looking at Internet photos of the single-story warehouse with attached office area made my skin crawl. Not because it looked so ominous, but because it looked so frighteningly ordinary.

  I sat in the Recorder’s office suppressing urges to leave immediately to explore both properties. But the city was moving toward the evening rush, and I would be doomed to cool my heels in traffic. I could either go back to the office and wait for a couple of hours, by which time it would be mostly dark, or go home and hit the road first thing in the morning.

  On one hand, there would be fewer people around in the evening, especially at the industrial site, which would mean less chance of someone spotting and remembering my Explorer. On the other hand, if that building was the crime scene, there might be some very bad guys there prepping it for the owner’s visit the following week.

  I needed to hold off the reconnaissance mission for daylight.

  The next morning’s daylight was slow in coming.

  On Wednesday, April 23, the thick, gray cloud cover over the city refused to allow penetration by any but the most determined light. The rain came in torrents, whipped into frenzied sheets by gale-force winds of forty miles an hour.

  The storm system had spawned a series of tornadoes overnight that raked Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, southern Illinois, and Indiana, and now had moved into the Ohio Valley. Early reports said as many as twenty-two people were dead in five states, and damage was beyond anyone’s ability to calculate yet. The news videos were filled with the obligatory overturned tractor-trailers, smashed mobile homes, twisted broken trees, and once-peaceful creeks turned into raging rapids.

  In Chicago the rain was falling at the rate of half an inch an hour, prompting widespread flash flood warnings. The morning commute, light because it was Saturday, nonetheless turned highways into auto junkyards. Low ground had flooded overnight, and the affected areas were spreading. Sections of interstates were closed after they disappeared under water. Air traffic out of O’Hare and Midway had been put on indefinite ground holds, and flights scheduled to come in were ordered to stay on the ground at their points of origin. Several major fires raged despite the rain, most in old warehouses where there was plenty of fuel to feed them. I watched television images of the swirling winds over Lake Michigan churning up twelve-foot walls of water that slammed Lake Shore Drive, overwashing it and forcing police to close it in both directions. Two joggers who insisted on testing the weather were swept off the bike trail that runs beside Lake Shore Drive. Despite rescue efforts, both disappeared.

  I wasn’t going to be launching my real estate tour any time soon.

  I thought Mark might have been summoned to the fires, so I called to see if he wanted me to pick up Murphy. As it happened, he was sitting at home watching the same news reports I’d been watching.

  “Most of the time we don’t get called in until the fires are out,” he said. “And these have all the signs of being electrical in origin, sparked by flooding. So what are you doing with your day?”

  “Waiting it out,” I said. “The weather put my plans on hold.”

  “Why don’t we wait it out together?” he said.

  I smiled. “I’ll put on another pot of coffee.”

  When you live in a house that’s nearly ninety years old, a high wind finds its way in through openings you can’t even see with the naked eye. Although it was in the 50s outside, the damp and the chill made the inside feel like an old, dank cellar. So Mark put a fire in the fireplace, and our zoo immediately moved into every available square inch in front of it.

  I hadn’t seen Mark since I’d met with Charles at the juvenile justice building, so I brought him up to date on the brother’s disappearance and on the Saudi princes.

  “All I can think of is that Joey got snatched off a street somewhere and is being held for this plane load of perverts,” I said.

  “And that’s why you want to go scout out the house and the commercial space,” Mark said, “to see if there’s any sign of, well, anything suspicious.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I wanted to do it last night. But I’d bet this isn’t an operation that gears up once or twice a year when the owners and their friends feel the urge to get off on some child abuse in Chicago. I’m thinking there’s a steady, ongoing clientele. I didn’t want to run into any of them in the dark.”

  “Good reasoning,” Mark said.

  I plowed on. “This might even be a hub for a trafficking-to-order operation that smuggles children in and out of the country for clients who want something specific. If somebody in Croatia wants a blonde, blue-eyed, teenage California girl and is willing to pay shipping and handling, she will be on his doorstep in a couple of days. I’d be surprised if, somewhere on the dark side of the Internet, there weren’t apps for that.”

  I got up and started to pace. ”This is a year-round deal that someone manages for the Saudis, and those two properties are Operation Central.”

  “Why in hell would the Saudis want to get involved in something like that?”

  “It’s a very lucrative business,” I said, “and the Saudi royal family is especially fond of money. Winona gave me some material that put worldwide profits from trafficking at something like $32 billion dollars a year. Any single operation can net profits in the millions. The Middle East isn’t the only place that grows child abusers. The majority of countries in the world have problems with it. In 2010, the last year Winona had numbers for, there were 2,500 incidents of trafficking documented right here in the United States.”

  “Jesus,” Mark said. “All children?”

  “No, most were women. But kids were a significant percentage.”

  “So what would be your guess?” Mark asked. “The kids are held and abused in the house or the machine shop?”

  “I honestly don’t know. That’s why I want to scout both places.”

  “Well, you definitely shouldn’t go alone, and you shouldn’t go without some backup firepower,” Mark said. “I could go with you tonight. And you know what? When all this is over, you really need to buy yourself a gun and learn how to use it.”

  “You know how I feel about guns.”

  “All too well. A lot of people freak at the sight of a gun. But they don’t jump out of nightstand drawers and purses and shoot people on their own. Without a finger on the trigger, they’re just odd-looking paperweights. I think you’d change your mind once you got comfortable holding one and learning to fire it. Not with the intentio
n of killing anybody, but as some peace of mind that it’s in your bag if you ever need it.”

  I disagreed. “If it had been in my bag when those two grabbed me outside the front door, I wouldn’t have had time to go for it, and they might have found it and used it on me. How does that help me? I’m dead by my own weapon.”

  “I’m not saying that couldn’t happen. But . . .”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  “At least let me take you to a range and shoot a little.”

  “Mark, that’s enough. Don’t press your luck.”

  45

  The rain slacked off, but it didn’t stop until late in the afternoon. The street flooding could take hours to subside. I had my notes on my laptop, so I wrote my column from the little upstairs office next to my bedroom. Mark also had some reports to do and found the kitchen table, not too many steps from the beer supply, a perfect place to finish his work.

  Mark and I decided to scout the Arab-owned properties early in the evening.

  We took Mark’s SUV, since Murphy could ride in the back, and checked out the big house on the Near North Side first. There was no shortage of large homes on the Near North Side. Most were within walking distance of the toniest stores on Rush Street and some of the best restaurants in the city.

  It also wasn’t the sort of place where people sat on their stoops and chatted with friends, neighbors, and total strangers strolling down the street. Knocking on doors and asking about the people living across the street in the mansion behind the high brick wall would garner lots of blank looks and no information.

  So we did what all the best sleuths do. We parked the SUV, got Murphy out of the back, put him on a leash, and walked the street as if we actually belonged there. Murphy immediately got into the spirit, leaving a pile of remnant from his dinner on the grass beside a tree. Mark had a dispenser of plastic dog poo bags on the leash and collected Murphy’s sample. We passed several trash bins at corners on the block, but Mark didn’t toss it in any of them. I wasn’t sure why.

  The trees dripped on us and the wind still cut, but it wasn’t a bad evening. The trees in Washington Square Park across from our target mansion were in leaf, the grass was green, and it felt as if life at the top of the pyramid was good. Except for those walls. And that house. And the secrets I feared it held.

  We circled the block, looking for alleys we could use to get a perspective on the place. Was anyone inside? Could we hear anything? Were there any vehicles coming and going from the four-car garage with license plates we could trace?

  The answer in all three cases was, yes.

  We cut through one alley that ran east west beside the mansion. We found some garbage bins that had the house’s street number painted on the side. We dared look inside. None was more than half full, and everything was contained in dark green plastic bags of a size more in keeping with landscape cuttings than household trash. I thought I caught the aroma of fresh mown grass. There were no odors that might raise suspicion.

  Mark carried a classic Buck knife and used it to cut into every bag in every bin with the mansion’s address on it. Most were, in fact, filled with the waste from spring landscaping work. Two had kitchen and bath trash, food packaging, used tissues, and such. So there were people living in the house. But their garbage held nothing suspicious.

  To be thorough, Mark opened the bins on either side of the mansion’s access gate. He was beginning to search one when the gate opened, and a woman emerged holding a new bag of trash. She was surprised to see us. At least I think she was surprised. All I could see of her were her eyes. The rest was covered by a burqa.

  I smiled as cheerfully as I could.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you,” Mark said. “ We were looking for a place to throw this.” He held up the dog poo bag. “Is it okay to put it in here?”

  The woman glanced at Mark, and the bag, and the dog. Her look of surprise morphed into a look of terror. She threw her bag in one of the mansion bins and disappeared behind the gate without a word.

  “Should I take that for a yes?” Mark asked.

  “Why don’t you take it for permission to look at what she just tossed out?

  “Are we trespassing?”

  “No, alleys are city property. Trash on city property is public and fair game.”

  “Then why not?”

  He cut open the bag and found remnants of a dinner for several people: a container for two pounds of ground lamb, pieces of onion and garlic, partially eaten vegetables, and a cooked grain of some kind. Nothing of any interest whatsoever.

  He tossed the bag back into the bin and threw the dog poo bag in after it.

  “Well,” he said, “that was helpful.”

  “There has to be a staff that stays here,” I said. “You don’t let a 15,000-square-foot house sit idle until the owners decide to jet in for a week. Too many things can go wrong. That woman was probably live-in help.”

  “Was it me, or did she look terrified when she saw us?” Mark asked.

  “She did,” I said. “Maybe we startled her, or she was afraid of who we were.”

  “Well, let’s keep moving,” Mark said. “Lots of ground to cover tonight.”

  We had turned to leave the alley when a car pulled in.

  “Whoa,” Mark whispered. “That’s a Bentley.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s what I’d own if I lived here.”

  It was a convertible. The top was down despite the weather. I caught a glimpse of the driver as he passed under a street lamp in the alley. When he stopped and triggered a door to the mansion’s garage, I moved to get a look at the license plate. I wrote it down. It was a Wisconsin plate, but that wasn’t a huge matter. Milwaukee was less than a hundred miles due north of Chicago, probably a ninety-minute drive unless you were in a Bentley convertible, in which case you could make it in under an hour.

  “Did you get a good look at the guy?” Mark asked.

  “No, I was too busy taking down the license number. Did you see him?”

  “Not well enough to identify him in a lineup.”

  “Customer? Co-conspirator?”

  “No way to know until I run the plate and see who owns the ride,” Mark said. “Let’s go. We’ve got some South Side property to look at tonight.”

  46

  The area where the industrial building sat was as still as death, and no sooner had that thought settled on my brain than a shiver rattled my spine.

  Streetlights struggled to illuminate the roads chopped up by the alternating freezes and thaws of winter and the relentless chipping rains of spring. About a third of the streetlights were out, either victims of ancient wiring or of kids who used them for target practice with guns they shouldn’t have.

  I wasn’t sure if the place spooked me because of its ominous silence or because I dreaded what was going on there.

  Mark parked his truck under a working streetlight about half a block from the building. He reached across me, opened the glove box, and withdrew his holstered gun. I looked at him, but he wouldn’t meet my eye. He reached behind him to the back of the Land Rover’s center console and retrieved a flashlight he always kept on recharge there. Mark called it the Dominator. It was a few months before I discovered that was the name the manufacturer gave it.

  The Dominator was two-and-a-half pounds of pure ugly, a foot-long black monster with a bezel that could rip someone’s face off, and a variable-intensity light that topped out at 2,400 lumens. That was bright enough to cause temporary blindness in an adversary caught in the dark by the beam. In the strobe mode, it could trigger an epileptic event in someone whose brain was sensitive to such things. Mark had paid $1,400 for it out of his own pocket because he didn’t think his state-issued equipment was sufficiently powerful.

  When we got out of the Land Cruiser, Murphy whined, but Mark told him softly to stay and be quiet. He settled down on his fleece pad, moving his baleful gaze from one of us to the other and back as if looking for a second
opinion.

  Mark clipped his gun to his belt and carried the flashlight like a club. We walked toward the building down the center of the street. It felt as if we were the only ones left on the planet. If there were others around, we didn’t want to give them reason to shoot us for trespassing.

  We passed the front office, which squatted on the north side of the building. It was completely dark. Not even a night security light. When we came to the end of the street, we could only turn right, so the building was on our right and the railroad yard on our left. The building was L-shaped with the outdoor working area in the crook of the L, facing the rail yard. Mark turned his flashlight on full power toward the tracks. The wide beam could penetrate the darkness for six hundred or seven hundred feet. There was nothing to be seen but seven old rusting CSX freight haulers sitting like ghosts on a siding.

  He dimmed the flashlight to about half power and turned it on the back of the building. There were two loading docks, roll-up doors, high windows, and employee parking. There were no vehicles. It appeared the roll-up doors had been sealed shut, and there were heavy gates over both. Iron bars covered the windows, which looked to have been blacked out. Two walk-in doors were secured with iron bars padlocked across them.

  “Whoever owns this place doesn’t want company dropping in,” Mark said.

  “Or prisoners getting out,” I added almost in a whisper.

  We took a huge chance and walked onto the property to finish our tour around the building. The short south wall was solid cinder block with no doors or windows. Same for the long west wall.

  As we made the turn to walk along the west wall, I thought I heard something move in the brush behind us. So did Mark. We both spun around and Mark hit the bushes with his flashlight back on full power. At first we saw nothing. Then we heard the rustling again and saw the brush move.

  “Critter,” Mark said. “Let’s go.”