by Jean Heller
I called Phyllis Metzler, the juvenile court official, and asked her if I could meet with Charles again. She said if I had anything to tell him, I would have to do it through her.
I told her we had chased down several leads, and each one came up empty.
“It’s not good news that he’s still missing,” I said, “but it is good news that so far as we know now, he’s still alive. The search is continuing.”
“I’ll give him the message,” she said and hung up without saying goodbye.
51
I was dragging when I got home at sundown. It hadn’t been a long day, or particularly difficult, but I expended a lot of emotional energy over Charles and Joey, and I felt drained. I had fond thoughts about a glass of wine and my bed.
I drove up the alley behind my house and into the one garage space that wasn’t stuffed with lawn and garden equipment and boxes of books I’d yet to unpack. I wasn’t going to see Mark, so he wouldn’t need the parking. He’d been called out on a suspected arson case in Champaign, a hundred and thirty-five miles south of Chicago. The city is the home of the University of Illinois’ Champaign-Urbana campus. Somebody who didn’t like something had torched a sorority house. One young woman had died of asphyxiation, and an older woman had been badly burned. So much for the hallowed halls.
I was thinking how much I missed him as I walked from the garage across my back yard to the back door, the same door Charles had broken to rob my place.
Mark had replaced the windowed door with a solid one and installed a Medeco lock, which was virtually impossible to jimmy. I felt very safe that no one was inside as I pulled out my key.
My downfall was not paying sufficiently close attention to what was going on around me on the outside.
In an instant a powerful arm wrapped around my neck. When I opened my mouth to scream, it was quickly filled with a rag that tasted the way I thought motor oil might. Mark’s insistence that I buy a gun, learn to use it, and carry it with me flashed through my head. But once again the grip on me was so tight I couldn’t have reached it.
If this was Mason Cross again, I’d see him in jail. As the grip from behind adjusted and tightened, a second man appeared in front of me. By the dim light from an alley street lamp I could see clearly that it wasn’t Cross. I was nearly positive it was one of the two I’d seen at the machine shop near Ryan Woods, the one who shot out Mark’s tire.
The knife he was holding in front of my face nearly made my knees give way.
“You meddle too much,” he said with an accent that sounded Middle Eastern. “You will not meddle again. This knife is dull. It will separate your head from your body, but it will be slow and painful. Not like your friend downtown. I did her quick with a sharp knife because there were many people around. Here we are alone. I can take my time, and I will enjoy your suffering.”
If the goal was to have me die terrified, it was working well so far. I saw no way out of this. The rag stuffed deep in my mouth depressed my tongue and muffled my screams so they registered as little more than desperate grunts. Even if my neighbors had their windows open, they wouldn’t hear me.
I won’t say my life flashed before my eyes, but my mind filled with thoughts of Mark, and what might have been, and of my cats, waiting inside for their dinner. I hoped they would be okay until somebody found my body and found them crying for food. I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t ready. But it wasn’t my choice to make.
The two men began the process of changing places so the knife handler could stand behind me and begin to saw away. I fought to break free, but short of getting in a good, hard kick that missed the killer’s groin but caught his knee, the struggle got me nowhere. Nonetheless, I could see that I’d caused Knife Guy a lot of pain. He became enraged and let loose a heavy backhand blow that opened a cut on my cheekbone. It hurt like hell, but I knew things were about to get much worse. I had no options left.
Except one that wouldn’t have occurred to me in a hundred years.
A shadow appeared behind the Knife Guy. My terror was interfering with my senses, and the new element didn’t register for a moment. But his words were crystal clear.
“You have two choices,” the new arrival said. “Either put the knife on the ground, or I’ll put your brains there.”
That’s when I realized there was a gun against the killer’s head. My attacker appeared for a moment as if he was going to comply then changed his mind, apparently willing to martyr himself to kill me and rejoice in the afterlife. He lunged at me, the point of the dull knife aimed straight for my heart. I pushed myself into the body of the man behind me, still holding me tight. Those few extra inches might have saved me.
The dagger was a whisker from the front of my shirt when the gun went off with the whispering sound of a silencer. The killer groaned and fell to the ground, blood gushing from a hole in his shoulder where the bullet that hit him in the back made its exit through his upper chest.
I wondered briefly if the slug had then hit me. But I didn’t feel any pain.
Now the gun was pointed in my direction, likely at the man behind me.
The weapon seemed to be floating. Whoever held it was dressed all in black and was standing in full shadow. While I couldn’t see him, I knew his voice.
Then I heard it again, directed toward the remaining attacker.
“Let her go, or you’ll be down there bleeding with your pal,” he said.
The man’s hold on me remained strong, and I felt him reposition himself to use me as a shield.
“Don’t do that,” cautioned the man with the gun. “I have pals, too, and one of them is standing behind you. If you don’t let the woman go, he’ll kill you.”
As if to make the point, I heard someone rack the slide on a semi-automatic pistol behind me. The grip on me loosened.
I jerked an arm free, pulled the rag from my mouth, and stepped away from my captor, stumbling on knees that didn’t want to support me yet.
When I looked back, I saw the second good guy slam the second bad guy to the ground and jump on top of him with a knee to the spine. The bad guy whimpered in pain as his hands were pulled roughly behind his back and cuffed securely.
The wounded man had gone quiet. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. The man who shot him had turned him over and was in the process of cuffing his hands. He stopped long enough to look up at me with scorn. It was Mason Cross, the face that went with the voice I’d recognized.
“You still want to get your kicks playing spy games?” he asked me. “These guys weren’t trying to scare you. They had every intention of killing you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got that. I have to admit that right now my enthusiasm for spy games is slipping.” My voice sounded funny. The rag had soaked all the saliva from my mouth, and I was having trouble generating more.
I glanced at the man who had come with Cross to my rescue. He was Chicago Police Det. Ronald Colter.
“Do you know who these men are?” I asked.
“The one who was holding you is Abdallah bin Kalil, the piece of shit who owns the machine shop,” Cross said. “The one here sporting my bullet hole is Muhammad Shedid, Bin Kalil’s driver and all around strong-arm goon. He does the heavy lifting, including the actual kidnapping of the children around Chicago.”
“Bin Kalil?” I said. “He’s scheduled to arrive on the plane with the others.”
“He came early,” Colter said, “like an advance man on a presidential trip.”
I felt hope rising. “So the ring is broken now?”
A desperate groan came from Muhammad Shedid. “Call ambulance,” he pleaded. “I am hurt, bleeding much.”
Cross kicked him in the ribs, below the bullet’s entry wound. Shedid cried out.
“I’ll call you an ambulance when I’m damned good and ready,” Cross said. “Please try not to bleed out while you wait. I have some seriously inventive interrogation techniques I want to test on you.”
I heard more footsteps behind me a
nd whirled to see two men, one black and one white, striding toward us. The watchers from the black Suburban.
“You two take charge of these guys,” Cross told them, indicating the men on the ground. “When you get around to it, call a bus for the one I shot. Hold ‘em on indefinite detention, and don’t let anyone except vetted medics anywhere near ‘em.”
He turned to Colter. “After you’re done out here, come on inside. I’m sure Ms. Mora will be glad to talk to you again.”
I wondered if Colter was still investigating Winona Jackson’s murder. I wondered if he was really a police detective. Perhaps he was NSA, too.
I turned back to Cross. He seemed to be smiling, but it might have been gas.
“I think you’re having an epiphany,” he said. “If you will allow us to come in, perhaps we could discuss it.”
“I don’t recall that you bothered to ask permission the first time,” I said.
“No, but neither was it my intention to do you any permanent harm,” Cross said. “I was trying to warn you in my own, perhaps overly exuberant way, to back away from a situation that might end badly for you. And it almost did.”
I couldn’t be too hard on Cross. He had just saved my life if only to prove his overly exuberant point.
I said, “I guess if I had to choose between chloroform and a knife across my throat, I’d go with your exuberance every time. Thank you.”
We walked the center hallway to the living room with a brief stop in the kitchen for a glass of ice water for me. I needed to generate some moisture in my mouth and throat. I offered water to Cross, but he declined.
I sat down. Unlike our first meeting, he did the same.
I drank half the glass of water, hoping it would wash away the oily taste on my tongue. It didn’t.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “We have at least twenty-five dead children in Ryan Woods. Maybe another buried somewhere else. All the locals have been closed out. And they’ve been threatened if they interfere.”
“I don’t threaten,” Cross said. “I simply carry messages.”
“From whom?”
“That I can’t tell you.”
“Why don’t you use your powers and authority to put an end to this?”
“We are.”
“I don’t see that,” I said. “Every time I turn around the body count goes up.”
“You have to give us a little more time.”
I was about to respond when Colter entered the room. I reached over to the coffee table for his business card. It was still where he left it weeks earlier.
“Detective Ronald Colter,” I said. “Distant cousin to the great explorer. Right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Really? Detective or Agent? Which is it?”
“Depends on the moment.”
“You were the second guy in my house the night I got chloroformed, right?”
He looked noncommittal. “Let’s talk about tonight. Are you all right? Do you require medical attention?”
“For having the stuffing scared out of me?” I said. “No, though I’m not sure I’ll sleep well for a while.”
“I’m sure your doctor could prescribe something. I was talking about the cut.” He nodded toward my cheek.
I touched the spot where I’d been hit. It had already stopped bleeding.
“I’m fine,” I said, though I wasn’t sure that was true. “Gentlemen, I owe you both my life, for which I thank you. But I think you owe me some answers.”
“You already know more than we wanted to reveal,” Cross said. “There will be no more information for some time. You’ll have to accept that.”
“Can you at least tell me how you came to be so handily close to my back yard when I needed help?”
“Colter and I were following the two who attacked you,” he said. “The salt-and-pepper team was following you. When it was obvious that you and the two Saudis would converge on this house, we closed in and positioned ourselves to stop any attempt they might make to harm you.”
“You cut the timing a little close,” I said. “You shot that Shedid guy when the tip of his knife was an inch from my heart.”
“I was hoping they wanted only to frighten you,” he said. “We didn’t want to detain those two at this point. Having to do so has disrupted our planning.”
“I’m sorry for that.” If Cross heard sarcasm in my voice, I hoped he knew it was deliberate.
He scrubbed his face with his hands.
“Look, Ms. Mora,” he said, “we are working very hard on this problem. We are hoping for a conclusion soon. This cannot be speeded up. I wish it could, but it can’t. And we can’t tell you any more about it.”
On one level, I didn’t want to accept that. I was so desperate to find Joey Russell before harm could befall him that it overshadowed all other concerns, including national security. On another, deeper level, I understood that men like Cross and Colter had jobs to do, and doing them well meant keeping things from me. I had a sense of entitlement to which I wasn’t, well, entitled. And I had to get over it.
Knowing that and doing it were entirely different matters.
So I asked, “Do you know what’s going on in the machine shop? Do you know what happened to the child those two carried out on Sunday?”
“Yes on both counts.”
I stared at Cross for a full thirty seconds, trying to will him to talk.
“There’s nothing I can tell you,” he said.
“Have you been inside?” I persisted. “There could be kids dying in there.”
“We don’t believe there are,” he said. “Not at the moment, anyway.”
“What about the mansion on the North Side?”
“That I can’t tell you.”
I tried another tack.
“Do you know anything about the whereabouts of a six-year-old boy named Joey Russell? He’s been missing for more than three weeks.”
“We know you’ve been looking for him,” Colter said. “We have no idea where he is. If it’s any consolation, we’re trying to find him, too.”
“Please try very hard,” I pleaded.
“We will,” Colter said. “We know about your relationship with the older brother. And despite everything you regard about us as callous and cold, we don’t want the body count to go any higher either.”
Abruptly, they both stood and started toward my back door.
“Lock up after us,” Cross said. “The garbage in your back yard has friends.”
They left.
I locked and bolted the door.
I fed the cats.
Then I drank most of a bottle of pinot noir by myself.
I don’t remember anything after that.
52
I woke up in the morning drenched in sweat. I emerged slowly from an alcohol-induced nightmare in which I had been dreaming of a shining scimitar glinting as it descended out of the sun and bit into my neck with a hollow thud. I remembered nothing more of the lurid scene than the finale, repeating itself over and over like a recording on eternal replay.
When I tried to move, I felt my stomach lurch. I quickly figured how fast I could reach the bathroom if the need arose. Looking across the bed in that direction, I saw that I hadn’t even undressed before falling on top of my duvet and spending the night fully clothed under a busy ceiling fan.
As a result I was wet and cold and sick.
Perfect.
The sun was in full shine coming through my bedroom window. I had neither the strength nor desire to get up, undress, and reposition myself under the covers. So I rolled over gingerly to the place on the bed where the sun fell in a wide swath in the hope it would warm me up. The two cats, which had commandeered that spot before me, were not happy about being displaced.
“I paid for the bed,” I said to them as they jumped down to find rays elsewhere. “You only get to use it when I don’t need it.”
In minutes I had fallen asleep, or blacked out, again.
Wh
en I next opened my eyes, the sun had moved on, but I was warm enough because the room was warm.
My brain was pounding on the inside of my skull as if it was trying to get out and find a safer place to live.
I needed water.
I got up from the bed. It was a slow process out of necessity. In addition to the headache, half the muscles in my body hurt. My stomach still wanted to convulse. And, perhaps worst of all, I felt my desire to continue in the pursuit of the Ryan Woods story slipping away again, just as it had after Winona was murdered. Events of the night before had truly scared me half to death.
I emptied my bladder, which was screaming for relief. I couldn’t handle the thought of toothpaste in my mouth, so I brushed only with water, which was sufficient because I hadn’t eaten anything the night before.
Then I sipped a sixteen-ounce glass of water at room temperature. I remembered someone telling me that drinking cold water on an upset stomach would upset it more.
I stripped out of my clothes and climbed into a cool shower, washed my hair and the rest of me, and then collapsed on a towel on the closed lid of my toilet. I was exhausted and ready to go back to bed.
So I did.
I picked up my phone from the nightstand and called Eric Ryland. I got his secretary, Sally. Eric was in a meeting.
“You aren’t sounding very chipper this morning, Deuce,” Sally said.
I confirmed it. “I had a terrifying night, and when it was over I got into a battle with a bottle of wine, and the wine won. I might be in later, but right now I need sleep. Would you tell Eric my column is done, and I’ll file it from home this afternoon unless I die first.”
“Can he call you if he needs to?” she asked.
“If he wants to talk to a real human being, he should wait a few hours.”
“I’ll tell him.”
The next thing I knew it was nearly two in the afternoon, and the cats were licking my face. I guess they’d decided if I wasn’t going to get up and feed them they would use those little hooks on their tongues to scrape some flesh off my body. There was probably still enough alcohol in my blood stream to make them tipsy.