The Empty Place at the Table

by Jode Jurgensen John Ellsworth

  But it had, and now I was dashing around the car with Javier in hot pursuit. I ran across the gravel up onto the stunted grass and sandy soil and kept going beyond the house. Down the hill I ran about two hundred yards. Then I was running on the beach, heading south of the house.

  My ears didn't lie to me: he was right on my tail, just about to grab me, where I zagged left. At that exact moment, he made a dive for me and narrowly missed. I jumped over him on the ground and headed back the way I had come. But then I slipped in the sand and went down. My hand went beneath the sand. I came up holding a sea shell. Or half of one. I almost dropped it and ran again except he was hovering over me and then falling onto me and pinning me down on my back. His hands encircled my throat, and the choking began like I had known all along it would. I had known he would eventually catch me and kill me.

  Wildly I struck out at his face. My right hand without guidance from me flew instinctively up and swiped at his face. But I was still holding the shell. When I swiped at him, the shell zipped across his throat. Suddenly his hands released their grip on me, and he reached both hands up to his throat and held them tightly.

  "Get help, please."

  "You were going to kill me," I said.

  It then looked like a red blooming flower an instant later as the blood came oozing over his hands and ran down his forearms. He moved his hand on his throat, attempting to staunch the flow.

  But it was no use. The blood was pumping out of the side of his neck, long spurting streams as his hands fell into his lap and he slumped sideways off of me. I edged out from under and saw that I was covered in his blood. I began running back the way I had come.

  The front door was still open. I dashed inside.

  "Susannah!" I cried.

  An older, tired-looking Mexican woman appeared out of a hallway. She was carrying a child about four years of age with very pale skin. The child turned in her arms and showed me her face.

  Lisa. Twelve years ago.

  There was no doubt whose toddler this was. The woman held her out to me and I took her in my arms. Her head lolled to the side without a qualm. She'd been held and passed around by many different people; she didn't at all complain about my taking her up.

  Just then, Susanna came out of the hallway.

  "The rest of them are Maria's kids. Half of those are Iggy's, and half are Javier's and another guy. Juanita takes great care of all of them just like they are her own. No problems, Melissa."

  I began backing toward the door, almost daring the woman to follow after me and try to stop me.

  But she had no intention of doing that. Instead, she held up a hand and motioned for me to pause. Instinctively I knew it was okay to do so. Then she came to my granddaughter, bent low, and kissed her on the forehead. "Vaya con Dios," she said, her face crestfallen. "I love this baby," she told me.

  "Thank you for caring for her," I said. Susannah passed by me and turned me to head for the car.

  Following Susannah, I was sure that at any instant Javier was going to come back to life and come running after me and kill us all.

  But he didn't.

  We stopped at the hotel again. I lurked in the arches in the shadows while Susannah bought a shirt that said Life's a Beach. Then I crept into the restroom and discarded the bloody shirt. I proceeded to wash away every last speck of Javier's blood, even wetting my hair and finger-combing it then drying what I could with paper towels. The shirt fit a little large, but hey, who was complaining?

  Susannah was still driving, and I had Elena on my knee. I was strapped in; she wasn't. So in San Ysidro, after an hour wait at the border crossing, I went into a Walmart and picked out an approved child's car seat. We strapped it in and headed for a McDonald's where we could get a kid's meal and two burgers with fries and three boxes of milk. We sat in the car and munched without talking.

  Then, out of nowhere, Elena poked a fat finger at the McDonald's and said, "Mickey D's!"

  Susannah burst out laughing.

  "She got that from Lisa. That's what Lisa calls McDonald's."

  "Then you are the right one, aren't you?" I said to my new granddaughter.

  She gave a little sideways smile and put her head back in her seat.

  "Mommy?" she said.

  "We're going to get Mommy in about one day."

  WE PULLED into my driveway in Glencoe late the next day. The baby was asleep, and I was driving. Susannah was in the passenger's seat, her bare feet on the dashboard. She was flipping through a magazine.

  When the garage door started rolling upward, here came Lisa through the door from the kitchen. She flew down the steps and threw open the back door.

  Mother and child, reunited.

  Grandmother, child, and grandchild...starting from scratch.

  I couldn't wait to get started.

  37

  It was a flophouse in Little Italy just west on Harrison. The front desk was one clerk inside a bullet-proof glass cage and four huge Philodendron plants sadly nodding in the intermittent airstream rushing in through the front doors. The floor was tiny white tiles, and the walls wore coat number 79 of interior paints.

  Ishmael Montague, wearing khakis pants and a golf shirt, sunglasses, and a baseball cap, came breezing through the front door and jogged for the single elevator car. He stood at the buttons, madly hammering the up arrow and anxiously shuffling his alligator-shod feet. Across his left arm was draped a nicely folded London Fog, in the folds of which was concealed a Glock 26 with the small clip for easy concealment.

  No one in the lobby paid him a bit of attention, though at one point the desk clerk, fed up with Montague's hammering of the up button, turned away from a registrant and shouted, "Hey!" toward the elevator. He didn't pay any more attention than that, however, and turned back to his newest guest. Montague saw that he had drawn attention to himself and recoiled. Attention was the last thing he wanted. Which was why he was casually dressed like so many other men in downtown Chicago on that warm spring day.

  Finally, he was aboard the elevator alone, the rickety machine bumping and clacking him aloft, as it were. He got off on four, dug in his pocket for the key--an actual, metal key, not an electronic one--and let himself into his room. Maps were strewn around, and there were a dozen or more telephoto shots of his prey pinned above the small desk. Montague dropped his pants, kicked off the alligators, shrugged out of his shirt, and trod barefoot and fully nude into the bathroom where he spun the hot and cold handles of the bathtub. Minutes later he was in the tub, holding a yellow street map above the steaming water. With his eyes, he traced the northbound and major southbound roads serving Glencoe down to Laura Studios on Lindsey Lane. This exercise only served to confirm that he had, indeed, memorized the roads and side roads where an ambush might be laid. But he wasn't entirely happy with another traffic stop and shootout. For one thing, she would be expecting something like that and would be accompanied by an armed guard or two. He didn't like even fights, and he especially refused fights where the odds were in the other guy's favor. So the traffic-follow-stop-shoot scheme was tossed aside.

  That left an attack on her home or an attack on her workplace. As he soaked in hot water, there was a third possibility that came to him, and it included all the stores and malls and restaurants and wherever else that she might on a whim pull into and visit. Nothing would suit him more than following her into a crowd, getting close and firing point blank into her head, then disappearing into the crowd and casually joining traffic and driving away before the police could even arrive. Those were the best hits of all. The only drawback: she almost certainly would have one or two bodyguards with her at those times. Usually, they worked in pairs, one leading her and one following her. The way to avoid them returning fire was to make sure it was a crowded place where the risk of shooting an innocent was higher than the reward of shooting him.

  His mind roamed back over his call from Ignacio Velasquez early that morning.

  "She killed Javier," were the first words
uttered when Montague accepted the call.

  "My woman did that?"

  "She did. Cut his throat. He bled out on the beach."

  Montague shut his eyes. Javier had sent him on this mission, and now, at least in Velasquez's eyes, he had failed. The prey had succeeded in killing one of their own and yet she was still above ground. That couldn't be allowed to continue.

  'I am very disappointed in you, Ishmael," said the detached voice from Mexico. "Your failure cost Javier his life. Who's to say what else she might do?"

  "She's just one woman."

  "One you evidently cannot make heel. She outsmarts you and makes you seem a fool from where I'm sitting. You must prove to me you are capable of finishing her before returning to Mexico. And before any further payment is made to you, Ishmael. We go way back, and I have faith in you, but I'm losing my trust. You have until Friday. After that, I'm sending someone for you."

  The line went dead.

  His mind was racing. It was Tuesday. That left three days to kill the woman, or he would be killed without further discussion himself. Then they would go to Argentina and kill his wife and his children. He had no doubts about any of that.

  He climbed up from the tub and began drying. He knew it would be the last time he bathed before arriving back in Buenos Aires. Last night would be the last night he would sleep in a bed until then. He would dress now and locate a safe vehicle, one without warrants or holds. Then he would go to Glencoe.

  38

  Kendra McMann was working as the head of Chicago PD's Organized Crime Division, which included gangs such as the Mexican cartels. She had seen enough kidnappings, and horrible murders by professional killers sent north from Mexico and Latin America that she had almost personally undertaken the fight against them.

  Because her name was associated with the Lisa Sellars kidnapping case, she received notice when the girl's father, Mark Sellars, was murdered and his ex-wife Melissa Sellars shot. That pushed a button inside of her, so she assigned the investigation of that homicide to herself as an organized crime incident.

  While Melissa was hospitalized, McMann was the first detective to visit her. She found the mother in a coma and decided to wait until she could talk. They had talked after that, but Melissa had been very little help in identifying just who had attacked them. Once she was shot through the chest, she had passed out. That shooting was the second shot fired that day by the attackers and thus she was, for all intents and purposes, a non-witness to her own shooting. She had no memory of faces, descriptions, or any other scrap of information that might help McMann and her detectives solve the case.

  But there was one common item which might be a connector between the kidnapping a dozen years earlier and the murder a dozen years later. That was the name of Ignacio Menendez. His name had originally been given to her by a dancer known back then as Nancy Callender, whose professional name was Hermione. She decided to track down Nancy and talk to her just for old time's sake. Actually, for more than that: McMann wanted to know whether Nancy had heard from Menendez again. Especially recently.

  McMann hit the computers and had a current address on Callender within minutes. She was married now and living in Niles, Illinois, where she was teaching high school history. Which gave McMann pause. From stripper to teacher? It was usually the other way around--teachers going into stripping to pay school loan obligations. But McMann, who had seen everything under the sun, thought no more about it.

  She drove to Niles on a Tuesday afternoon just as Ishmael Montague was drying off following his bath. At Niles High School she parked and went inside to the administration offices. She explained that she had an urgent need to talk with Nancy Callender, who still used her maiden name to teach. She was rewarded with a quick retrieval of the teacher from class and provided a private office in the administration annex.

  Nancy remembered the detective. She was very grateful to her but still knew the cop could still ruin her life if the detective decided to file charges against her for her part in the kidnapping. Instead of filing those charges on her back then, McMann had allowed her to work as a CI--confidential informant. Crime was rampant at the Kit-Kat Klub back then. When the two owners were finally indicted for tax crimes and interstate transportation of minors, Nancy's help in bringing those charges wasn't forgotten. McMann had cut her loose to go her own way free and clear.

  Callender arrived in the conference room with a bead of sweat on her upper lip. She was frightened beyond anything she'd felt in a dozen years. Here was that the same detective from back in those dark days now wanting to speak with her again.

  She entered the room and forced a crooked smile. Detective McMann stood up from the table and gave the teacher a firm handshake that said unmistakably who was in charge.

  "Nancy, I need your help again."

  "I haven't been involved in any--"

  "This is old stuff. You provided us with the name of Ignacio Menendez years ago. He had contacted you through a contact at the club, and you had staked out the home of Melissa and Lisa Sellars for him. We later searched your apartment and found no evidence that the kidnapped girl had ever been there, so I cut you a deal. You fulfilled that deal, and we all went on with life. Well, we've now heard from Menendez again. So I need to ask you another question. I am warning you that if you give me anything besides a true answer, you will go to prison. Understand?"

  "Yes."

  "Have you been contacted by Ignacio Menendez at any time during the past six months?"

  "Yes."

  "When was that?"

  "Noon, today."

  "How did he contact you?"

  "Somehow he got my phone number. I was in the lounge eating my lunch when he called. I went to the restroom to talk to him."

  "Tell me exactly what he said."

  "He ordered me to take my own car to Glencoe to an address he gave me. He ordered me to watch for Melissa Sellars. He gave me a number I was to call when I saw her leave the house with her daughter. I was told the daughter is sixteen now and blond. For some reason, he wanted to know when they were together."

  "Good. All right, here's what we're going to do."

  The talk continued for another half hour. When they were done, Nancy was relieved simply because none of it was about her. Sure, she said, she'd help the police. Absolutely she'd make the call when the police told her to make it. They left it at that.

  Then McMann went to talk to Melissa Sellars.

  Step two.

  39

  Montague was surprised at the youthfulness of the man who provided the C-4 explosive. He couldn't have been over eighteen, Montague figured. He wondered where Menendez had found the guy, but he knew better than to ask.

  Montague had called Menendez and updated him.

  "I need enough explosive to blow a door off its hinges."

  "What would that be for?" Ignacio Menendez asked.

  "The police are watching the woman's house. She has armed guards with her twenty-four-seven. She is never alone. But I think they're going to run a scheme on me."

  "How do you know that?"

  "They brought a van to the house and ran it right into the garage. I was unable to see what came out, but I'm guessing it was cops. I'm thinking a bait-and-switch."

  "They're going to fool you into attacking her car, but it will be loaded with cops?"

  "Sure. That's common enough."

  "You're probably right. So what will you do?"

  "I won't fall for it, that's what. Except they'll think I fell for it and that's when they'll let their guard down."

  "Do you need help for this?"

  "Yes, I need two reliable trigger men."

  "What's their risk?"

  "Very low. In fact, there should be zero risks for them if they do what I say."

  "Good. My wife's brother works out of Cicero. I'll send him."

  "That works for me. What's his name?"

  "Edwardo."

  The men ended the call after Montague was given directi
ons for obtaining the explosive. He followed the steps given to him, met the explosives purveyor at a local Burger King and made payment. The detonator and explosive were handed over in a plain paper bag. In exchange, Montague paid the man five thousand dollars, no questions asked.

  "Do you know how to fire this off?" the kid asked him in a whisper.

  "I do. Used it many times."

  "You can drop it, shoot it, light it on fire--none of that detonates it. You absolutely must use the detonator. It's in the bag."

  "How big a blast am I buying?"

  "Enough to knock a door off its hinges."

  "Excellent," said Montague. "That works."

  VISCOUNT HALEY WAS a tough street cop with sergeant stripes who supervised a West Chicago district, an area with the highest incidence of gang shootings in the city. McMann borrowed him for her team. Viscount was two weeks shy of retirement when he entered McMann's Director's Office Thursday morning.

  McMann told him to sit down. Two other uniforms were already with her.

  "All right," she told them, "this is the deal. We have a cartel chief in Tijuana who put a hit on a Glencoe resident. The underlying crime of kidnapping happened here in Chicago a dozen years ago, so we've retained jurisdiction. We are, of course, working the Glencoe portion with the GPD. Any questions so far?"

  There were no questions.

  "The hitman is probably of Mexican descent. We say that because this is a critical hit for the cartel and it cannot go wrong. So they've sent one of their own, a trusted, loyal gunman."

  "When is this all going down?"

  "We're arranging for it to happen Friday."

  "What do you mean, 'arranging'?"

  "Making that his best opportunity."

  "What are we expecting?" asked Viscount Haley.

  "They tried hitting our woman when she was stopped at an intersection. They did manage to kill her husband."

  "Heard about that," said Haley. The other two cops were nodding. They'd heard too.