by Reid, Terri
The ride to Dubuque only took about twenty minutes from Galena. Once they were on the four-lane bridge over the Mississippi River, Mary had a clear view of the prosperous river town. A huge three-story steamboat was moored off the bank of the river in the distance. And like its predecessors that used to roam the great river a hundred years ago, it housed a casino. Another smaller steamboat was anchored farther west in a small inlet amidst a collection of red-bricked buildings and industrial docks waiting for the next barge to be unloaded and sent back on its way.
From the river, the city rose onto a bluff, and from her vantage point on the bridge, Mary could see the 190-foot tower of the Dubuque County Courthouse with its fourteen-foot-tall, bronzed Lady Justice at its pinnacle. The downtown, with its collection of historic and modern buildings, lay at its feet, and the grand, residential palaces of yesteryear dotted the hillside with their varied and unique architecture.
Once across the river, Bradley stayed on Highway 20 through the city until he reached its far western borders. He turned right on JFK Boulevard into an area that quickly changed from a collection of malls to one of residential neighborhoods. It took only ten minutes to reach the small, brick bungalow on Kimberly Avenue whose address matched their information. Bradley drove past the house and parked farther down the street.
“So, how do you want to handle this?” Mary asked.
“I think if we present it as an official investigation we’ll probably get more cooperation,” Bradley said. “So, how about if I take lead?”
“I agree,” she said. “I’ll introduce myself as an investigator working on the case.”
They left the car and walked up the street to the house. The backyard was visible from the front sidewalk, and Mary could see that it was littered with toys and playground equipment.
“They have children,” she said. “I wonder if they are younger or older than Liza.”
Soon after they knocked on the door, a pleasant looking woman answered the door. Her smile froze when she saw Bradley’s uniform.
“Mrs. Larson?” Bradley asked. “Mrs. Lorraine Larson?”
“Is everything okay?” she asked abruptly, her voice filled with fear.
“Yes, ma’am,” Bradley replied professionally, offering her his identification. “I’m Police Chief Bradley Alden from the Freeport Police Department. We are here about an investigation regarding a child who used to live in this household.”
Mary was surprised by Bradley’s cold demeanor, but she took his lead. “May we come in and ask you a few questions?” she asked.
The woman stepped back and opened her door wider. “Yes, of course,” she stammered.
“Is your husband home?” Bradley asked.
“Yes, he is,” she said. “Please have a seat. I’ll go get him.”
Bradley and Mary entered a small living room with worn but comfortable furniture. There was a white brick fireplace with a mantle in the middle of one wall. On the top of the mantle was a collection of family photos. Most of the photos featured a smiling set of twin boys with their parents, but one photo, obviously taken years ago, added a dainty little girl to the family. Bradley picked up the photo and showed it to Mary. “Was this Liza?” he asked.
Mary nodded. “She’s a little older now,” she said quietly, “but, yes, that’s her.”
His jaw tightened, and he put the photo back in place.
“They must still have feelings for her,” Mary suggested, “or they wouldn’t have a picture of her on their mantle.”
He shook his head. “We’ll see,” he said.
He turned sharply when he heard footsteps in the hall. Lorraine and her husband hurried into the room.
“This is my husband, Mark,” Lorraine said. “Mark, this is Chief Alden and…”
Mary stepped forward and offered her hand to Mark. “I’m Mary O’Reilly, a private investigator working on this case with Chief Alden.”
“Good to meet you,” Mark said cordially. “How can we help you?”
“Are your children home?” Bradley asked.
“Yes, they’re down in the playroom,” Lorraine replied.
Bradley nodded. “We won’t take too much of your time,” he said. “Is there a place where we can talk so your children will not overhear our conversation?”
Lorraine nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “Come into the dining room.”
Once seated around the table, Bradley pulled out the report he had received from the county. “We are looking into the whereabouts of Liza Parker,” he said. “We understand you adopted her in 2009.”
Lorraine reached over, took hold of her husband’s hand and took a deep breath. “We…we don’t have her anymore,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Bradley said. “You don’t have her anymore? But you did legally adopt her, didn’t you?”
Mark nodded. “Yes, of course we did,” he said. “But she’s not with us any longer.”
“Did she pass away when she was in your care?” he asked. “Because the county has no record of a death certificate.”
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Lorraine said. “I got sick. Cancer. Just after we adopted her. The doctor said that I needed to simplify my life, so we found another family who wanted to adopt Liza.”
“And what governmental or legal agencies did you work with in order to proceed with that adoption?” Bradley asked.
Mark cleared his throat. “Well, actually, we needed to move quicker than that, so we went with another avenue.”
“Another avenue?” Bradley asked, his voice clipped.
“Well, yes,” Lorraine said. “A friend told us about an adoption website where you could re-home an adopted child.”
“Re-home?” Bradley asked. “And exactly how do you do that?”
“You place an ad about your child on this forum, and families looking for children contact you,” Lorraine said. “Then you meet with them, and they sign a paper consenting to be her legal guardian.”
“And that’s all?” Bradley asked. “Did you do a background check on these people?”
“Of course,” Mark said. “We paid for a background check, and it came out just fine. We wouldn’t just give Liza away to anyone.”
“Do you still have a copy of that background check?” he asked.
Lorraine nodded. “Yes, I have it in my file cabinet,” she said. “We wanted to keep it so some time in the future we could possibly go and visit her again.”
“Could you please get that for me?” Bradley asked.
Lorraine stood and hurried out of the room.
“How is your wife doing now?” Mary asked.
Mark smiled. “Her cancer is in remission,” he said. “She’s been fine for about a year and a half now.”
“That’s wonderful,” Mary said. “So Liza was given up for adoption how many years ago?”
“About three years ago,” Mark said. “When we first learned about the cancer.”
“And your other children,” Bradley asked. “Your twin boys, what did you do with them?”
Surprised, Mark shook his head. “Well, we kept them, of course,” he said. “They are our children.”
“And Liza wasn’t your child?” Bradley asked.
“Well, yes,” Mark began. “But, you know, we had just adopted her. She wasn’t attached to us yet. We thought it was in her best interest…”
His voice trailed off when Lorraine came into the room.
“I made a copy of the papers,” she said eagerly. “You can keep this copy.”
Bradley reached over and took the papers from her, scanning them quickly. He looked up and met her eyes. “Thank you for your help,” he said, standing up and moving towards the door.
Mary quickly stood and followed him.
“Is Liza okay?” Lorraine asked, rushing after him to the door. “Is she missing?”
Bradley stopped, slowly turned around and faced the parents.
“Bradley,” Mary warned. “Don’t.”
“Liza is d
ead,” Bradley said, ignoring Mary’s request. “She was brutally murdered.”
Lorraine collapsed against her husband. “No,” she sobbed, her voice rising to a cry. “No, that can’t be true.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Bradley turned and opened the door, letting Mary outside before he followed her. He pulled the door closed behind him, muffling the sobs of despair.
“Bradley?” Mary asked, turning to him.
“Give me a minute, Mary,” he said. “Then we can talk.”
They walked down the street together in silence. Bradley opened the door for Mary, helped her in and then entered on the other side. Mary sat quietly, watching his internal struggle, and waited for him to begin the conversation. She’d seen this kind of reaction before when she was a cop in Chicago. Sometimes when a crime was so horrific or hit too close to home, an officer needed a few minutes to process it. They needed to get past the anger and the rage, to tamp down the frustration, and be able to professionally get their minds around the crime without letting emotion compromise their judgment. Mary had experienced the feeling more than once, especially in cases of child abuse. She needed to step back and remember that she wasn’t the judge and jury. She was an officer of the law, and she had to work within its guidelines.
They drove back down Highway 20, but just before the bridge, Bradley turned to the left and drove through the side streets to a small park on the bank of the Mississippi. He pulled into the parking lot, put the cruiser in park, and turned to Mary. “I need to tell you something before I answer your questions,” he said.
“Sure, whatever you need,” she said.
He turned and looked out the windshield watching the river flowing past them. “The reason I knew about re-homing wasn’t because of new laws against it,” he said, “although Wisconsin is working on laws to make it illegal. It was because of the increase of child trafficking on the Mississippi.”
“What?” Mary asked. “Child trafficking here in the Midwest?”
He nodded. “The Mississippi offers access to two different borders, a number of major highways and a number of large cities. Beyond that, there have been an increased number of websites that feature child pornography or live-streaming sexual child abuse throughout the Midwest.”
Bradley leaned forward, placing his head on the steering wheel for a moment, and then he turned back to her. “Mary, some of these kids who are being sold for sex are as young as three years old,” he said. “There is no limit to the sickness that is out in the world today. The streaming websites don’t only show child sexual abuse, but in many cases they also show the child being violently abused.”
He pounded his fist against the steering wheel. “And people pay money to watch it,” he said, his voice thick with anger. “There are sick people, really sick and unbalanced people out there, and these people, the Larsons, gave a little girl away like you would give a puppy away.”
“How bad is it?” Mary asked.
“It’s estimated that there are between 100,000 and 300,000 children in the United States at risk for commercial sexual exploitation and one million children exploited by the global commercial sex trade each year. The average age of these kids is twelve. Twelve years old, Mary. And Liza was only five.”
“Is that why you were so harsh with the Larsons?” she asked. “To be fair, we don’t know that’s what happened to Liza. She could have just been abused by someone. We can’t know she was trafficked.”
He sat back in the chair, closed his eyes and shook his head. “Your description of what happened to Liza reminded me of a victim’s report I read,” he confessed. “I made a couple of calls and discovered that another young girl was found floating in the Mississippi with marks similar to those on Liza. I also discovered that soon after her death, a porn video showing the young victim being abused was shown from an IP address coming from outside the United States.”
Mary felt sick to her stomach. “Was anyone arrested?” she asked. “Do they know who did it?”
He sat up and met her eyes. “The agency looking into this believes that it started as a streaming event,” he said.
“What? People watched it real time? They saw a little girl being abused, and they didn’t report it?”
“They not only didn’t report it, they paid to watch it,” he explained. “It was streamed live and recorded and then sold from an international distributor. Mary, people make a lot of money catering to the depraved people out there.”
“So, whoever we’re looking for,” she said, “whoever killed Liza, could potentially be running some kind of pornography operation?”
“Yes, and as the money increases, so does the danger,” he said pointedly.
She saw the look in his eyes, and she was having none of it. “Oh, no. Don’t tell me you want me to give up on this case,” she said.
He studied her for a moment and then shook his head. “No, I won’t do that,” he agreed. “But I want to work with you on this one. I want to be in on everything. Agreed?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, and then she placed her hands on her abdomen. “What kind of world are we bringing our baby into?” she asked quietly.
She felt his hand cover hers, felt the warmth and reassurance. “Hopefully a better one,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-five
“So how was your day?” Clarissa asked Mary as they set the table for dinner.
“It was very interesting,” Mary said, trying to inject some normalcy into an otherwise crazy day. “How was your day?”
“It was great,” Clarissa said. “Mrs. Brennan told us about Friday the 13th and how it can be lucky or unlucky.”
“Really?” Bradley asked from the kitchen where he browned hamburger in a cast iron pan. “I thought it could only be unlucky.”
Shaking her head, Clarissa placed a napkin next to a plate. “One thing you can do is wear red underpants,” she said with a giggle.
A knife slipped from Mary’s hand and dropped to the floor. “Red underpants?” Mary asked, bending over and picking it up. “Are you teasing me?”
“No, I promise,” she laughed. “Red underpants are good luck, so you should wear them on Friday the 13th.”
“I guess I’ll have to go out tomorrow and get us all red underpants,” Mary said, putting the knife in the sink and getting a fresh one from the drawer.
“Are there any other things we can do?” Bradley asked. “I’m not really a red underwear kind of guy.”
Clarissa thought for a moment. “Oh, yeah, you have to get out of bed on the right side of the bed,” she said.
“Which side is the right side?” Bradley asked.
“The side that’s not the left side,” Mary replied.
“Oh, that kind of right side,” Bradley said. “Well, that’s my side anyway. So I don’t know if it will be luckier.”
“Well, you’re not supposed to clean your house on Friday the 13th,” Clarissa added, “because holding a broom is bad luck and so is doing laundry.”
“We’re having the party here on Friday afternoon,” Mary said. “Do you think using a vacuum cleaner is okay?”
“I guess,” Clarissa said. “She didn’t say anything about that.”
“Well, we don’t believe in superstitions anyway,” Bradley said.
Reaching across the counter, Bradley’s sleeve caught on the salt shaker and it fell over, spilling salt on the table. He righted the shaker and automatically picked some of the spilled salt up and threw it over his left shoulder.
“Why did you do that?” Clarissa asked.
“What?” Bradley asked.
“Why did throw salt over your shoulder?”
Mary grinned at him. “Yes, Mr. We-Don’t-Believe-In-Superstitions-Anyway, why did you throw salt over your shoulder after you spilled it?”
Shrugging, Bradley sent an embarrassed smile to both of the ladies in his life. “Well, we don’t believe in all superstitions,” he amended.
Mary winked at Clarissa. “So,
what size would you like those red underpants to be in?” she called to Bradley.
“Funny, Mary, very funny,” he replied.
Clarissa climbed into her chair and Mary sat next to her. “Do you think it’s bad luck to have the baby’s party on Friday the 13th?” she asked.
Mary leaned over, hugged her and placed a kiss on her forehead. “No, I think by bringing everyone we love together to celebrate the new baby we will have greater power than bad luck, and we will turn Friday the 13th into a lucky day,” she said. “Besides, Rosie will be making the food for us, so how can it be unlucky?”
Nodding, Clarissa leaned towards Mary and lowered her voice. “Yeah, but Daddy will be grilling, and he burns stuff,” she said.
“I heard that,” Bradley called, walking over to the edge of the counter. “And I don’t always burn things. Sometimes I serve them raw.”
“And sometimes they’re burnt on the outside and raw on the inside,” Clarissa added.
“Well, that takes a pretty talented cook to do that,” Mary said, winking at her daughter. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Giggling, Clarissa nodded. “Yes, really talented,” she agreed. “Is that what Stanley means when he says it should be a crime what Daddy does to a steak?”
“Yes,” Mary replied quickly, grinning at Bradley. “That’s exactly what it means. The meat is so good, it’s a crime.”
“Stanley sure is funny,” Clarissa said.
“Yeah, he sure is,” Bradley muttered. “As funny as a broken bone.”
“Um, Bradley,” Mary said, trying not to laugh.
“Yes?” he asked.
“I think the hamburger is burning,” she said, biting back a smile.
Bradley turned to see smoke rising from the cast iron frying pan. He hurried over to the stove, picked up the pan and carried it to the sink. He turned on the cold water faucet, and they all heard a loud hiss as a puff of steam encased both Bradley and the sink.
A moment later, Bradley walked around the counter and sat at the table with them. Sighing, he pulled out his phone and turned to Mary and Clarissa. “So, do you want pizza or Chinese?” he asked.