by Thomas Laird
*
Spencer unzipped the body bag. This time we were at the City Morgue with Dr. Gray, the Medical Examiner.
“Middle Eastern persuasion, no?” Dr. Gray asked us.
“Yes. It appears likely,” Tommy told him.
“I don’t mean to make this racial, but it’s racial, isn’t it, Jimmy?”
“It looks like somebody crushed his skull…At least from a layman’s point of view.”
“Yes,” the doctor agreed. “Someone hit him with a blunt object, perhaps a pipe. That’s the way it’s done in the gangbanging world you hold the reins to, Lieutenant Parisi. Am I correct in assuming it was a blunt object, perhaps a lead pipe?”
“You’re the M.E. You tell me,” I smiled.
Gray smiled back at the both of us. He would do a thorough exam on this ten year old Arabic boy before it became final and part of his official report. But Gray knew what a lead pipe could do to a human skull, and we both took his word for it.
I have the office of being the one who tells the parents that their child has been killed. We approached the southwest side home of Barak Muhammad, the ten year old boy with the crushed skull. I rang the doorbell at the front of the three flat apartment building. No one answered. Tommy rang the other two bells, and finally someone buzzed us inside.
A black woman opened her apartment door on the first floor.
“Yes?”
“Police,” I told her. I showed her my ID.
“Yes?”
“Muhammad. They live on the top floor. Are they in?” I asked.
“Someone’s up there,” the thin, light brown, eighty-something woman replied.
I thanked her and we proceeded upstairs.
Before I could knock on the third floor door, we heard a warning.
“I have gun. I shoot you you sumabitch!”
“Police. Open up.”
The voice was female.
“Open up. Police.”
There was a pause. Then the door creaked open.
I showed her the badge. I knew there’d be no gun in her hand, but I had my .44 Bulldog palmed in my right hand just in case.
I put the piece back in my jacket pocket.
“Can we come in?”
*
The woman wept silently. It was the way Asian women registered grief while I was in Southeast Asia in Vietnam. Very rarely did the women there allow themselves to open up and grieve in a demonstrative way. Her name was Rikka Muhammad. Her husband had recently died of a heart attack in his early thirties. They had immigrated to Chicago just ten months ago. Once Fuad had died, it wasn’t long until Barak, the ten year old, had taken to the streets. It had only taken a few months until his death met him there, Rikka explained. She tried to keep the boy inside, but he was wild and unruly without his father. There was nothing she could do, and then the horrors of September had happened and Rikka and all Middle Easterners had become the enemy. They had left Saudi Arabia to escape the violence that pervaded their own homeland. Now they lived in fear for their lives—but now only Rikka survived.
She was small and pretty, I thought. She could marry again. She could have more children. But she was alone, a stranger in a very strange land. America had never been quite as strange as it had become the last few days in September.
We canvassed the neighborhood and got a few leads. The leads became solid and we located a few suspects. They were teenagers from the hood where Rikka and Barak lived. Two were black, one was Hispanic and one was a white kid. All were fifteen years old, and they hung together. We brought them in separately for interrogation.
“We found the pipe out back by the garbage, Dontrell,” Tommy told the black teenager. His mother was with him at the interview. “The pipe was smeared with blood. We’re going to find out that the blood belonged to Barak Muhammad, aren’t we, Dontrell.”
“You ain’t got shit.”
The mother slapped him. She was about to pop him again when I made her sit back down.
“You ain’t need to do none of that,” the kid told his mother.
“Why him?” I asked. “Why this little ten year old kid?”
“He a sand nigger, aww-ight?”
The mother slapped him again. She was lightning. I escorted her outside until the interview was over.
“You hit him because he was Arabic,” Tommy said.
“They hit us, we hit them back.”
“Barak Muhammad never hit anybody. He was ten years old,” I said to the black teenager.
“Ought to kill all those mothafuckkas. Blowin’ up our shit. Blowin’ up our shit right here in this city!”
The last time I saw hate in a youngster’s eyes the way I saw hate in Dontrell’s eyes was the way I saw loathing in the eyes of Vietnamese teenagers. That hatred was aimed at us, at twenty-year old GI’s in Vietnam in 1969. Now it was Dontrell’s turn to hate the Middle Easterners. They hit his turf, got too close to home, and patriotism he didn’t even know he had turned into something else.
We had the kid cold. I knew that that lead pipe would be all we’d need to nail Dontrell and his three bros. Fifteen year old murderers. They might not be tried as adults, and with the way public sentiment was running, I knew they’d be looked at by some as neighborhood heroes.
When we walked out of the interview room, the mother was too fast for us again. She popped Dontrell three times before Tommy could haul her off down the hall.
*
We investigated two other assaults, but the victims, both Middle Eastern, survived. They were living much the same way Barak Muhammad and his mother Rikka had been living. They had been hiding in their apartments until they ran out of food. When they emerged to buy supplies, a few gangs of ‘patriots’ had assaulted them. The two assaults were on females, both in their early twenties, this time. These ‘heroes’ had beaten up two very young women who had attempted to buy groceries for their infants they’d both left back at home. Neither young woman thought anyone would assault an innocent female trying to buy her baby formula and cereal, but apparently they had misread the local sentiment toward brown people from the place where Adam and Eve were created from a handful of Middle Eastern clay.
CHAPTER FOUR
Marty Van Dyke spent the better part of twenty-four hours in the foetal position on his living room floor after he’d identified Cathy at St. Mary’s with the two Homicides, Spencer and Parisi. Then the phone rang. Marty didn’t get up to answer it, but he listened to the message as it came in on his recorder. They wanted him to claim Cathy’s remains within forty-eight hours. They’d done the autopsy and all the examinations. It was a no-brainer. She’d been crushed in the avalanche of rubble and debris from the Anderson Building explosion of 9/12. The police were releasing her body to his care.
It was time to rise. He had a funeral to take care of, and he had no more time to lose going after the man or men who’d destroyed his wife and his life, and the lives of hundreds more. Marty couldn’t find room in his hardened heart for all the ‘collateral’ victims of the blast. There was only one tragedy that he could make room for. He knew he was selfish. He knew he was at the gates of obsession. No, he was already inside those gates, and that portal had been locked shut behind him. There was no turning back now. There was only the dread march ahead.
*
Her relatives came in from Indiana. There were her mother and two sisters, and all three were inconsolable. Marty made the attempt to express his grief, but it came out in hollow clichés. There was nothing you could say about this kind of a loss. The romance went that there was only one mate for a man and a woman in life, and some people were fortunate enough to wind up with that perfect other. Marty Van Dyke had been blessed for four years of life with Cathy Livingston. Now she was dead. Crushed in concrete. Her breath snuffed along with her life. She was the sweet safe spot in Marty Van Dyke’s life, and now there was no refuge. No place to turn to when you needed gentleness, when you needed comfort and peace. That romantic notion of the perfect other wa
s the only barrier from a world full of febrile, mad bombers, creatures whose world was truly hell. Instead of feeling remorse and grief, Marty Van Dyke felt the heat of anger rise to his temples as they lowered the casket into the earth at Lourdes Cemetery on the far southwest side. The minister pronounced the final words that Marty expected.
“Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes…”
Then Cathy disappeared from him forever, and his anger turned to rage.
There was talk of pairing Marty with another female journalist on the movie talk show, but Van Dyke turned them down. He went back to reviewing films on his own at the Herald. It was a way of paying the bills. And it was a way of having a significant amount of free hours to begin investigating his wife’s murder on his own. He relegated the mornings to screenings and the evenings to writing his reviews. The afternoons were free to pursue his real work.
*
Jack Donlan was the Special Agent in charge of the Chicago Office of the FBI. He was in charge, then, of the Anderson Building bombing. Marty Van Dyke still had connections around the city on the various newspapers and TV stations and those connections helped him find the man in charge. Finding Donlan was not the problem. Getting to see him was. It was like the joke in Catch-22 about a character named Major Major Major. You could only see Major Major Major when he wasn’t in his office. In other words, Donlan was constantly unavailable. But with the help of a few newspaper friends, Marty found him in the Computers Section of the FBI office in the Loop. Donlan really never was in his office. Not during the current investigation, at least.
“Agent Donlan?” Marty asked the man sitting in front of some state of the art cybernetics.
Donlan looked up. He was an athlete—or at least he had been at one time, Marty decided. He knew the man’s bio. He’d researched him thoroughly. Donlan had been an all-state fullback at Weber High School. He’d played briefly at the University of Notre Dame before a blown knee ended his football career. He’d gone on to become a lawyer from DePaul University in the city, and then he’d joined the Bureau to catch the bad guys. He’d had an illustrious career, nailing several Mafia members and an assortment of terrorists along the way.
“Who the hell are you?”
Donlan looked up with his iced gray eyes fixed with scorn on the redheaded reporter standing before him.
“I’m Marty Van Dyke.”
“The movie critic, right?”
“Yes. You know me?”
“I think you’re full of shit. Your wife was the brains in your outfit…I’m very sorry for your loss.”
The sarcasm never left Donlan’s face, however.
“What is it you want? And how the hell did you find me here?”
“I’m looking into the Anderson story.”
“You’re a movie critic, am I right?”
“I’m looking into it as a journalist.”
“I think you’re lying, Van Dyke. I think you’re on a fucking crusade. Excuse my crude language.”
“No crusade. I just want him.”
“Him who?”
“The guy who blew up my wife. The guy who stopped my fucking heart. You know what I mean, so don’t—“
“All right. Don’t get excited…I know you’ve lost…everything. I don’t really know what that feels like, so I won’t say I do. But I want this perpetrator or group of perpetrators as much as—“
“Was it Bin Laden?”
“There is no evidence it was he. Not at the present.”
“I didn’t ask about evidence, Agent Donlan. I was asking you what you thought.”
Jack Donlan stood. He was six feet three and about 245 pounds of solid Irishman. He had the cheeks and the cleft chin and the sandy brown hair. He could’ve been a member of that famine fleeing crew, all those years ago. He had the Gael look, that attitude of lifetime disappointment on his face.
“If I were to suppose, it would be off the record. And if you were ever to quote me off the record, you would become a persona non grata in my presence. Do you understand, sir?”
“You have my word. Off the record.”
“It’s that six foot six inch Arab bastard. It’s got his fingerprints all over it.”
“Why just this one building, the Anderson Building, then? Why not something far more high profile? The Sears Tower or…”
“You asked me my opinion. You have it. This conversation is over. Good day, sir, and again, I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Marty looked at Donlan and knew it was true. There’d be no further words. So he turned and walked out of the Computer Services.
*
He reviewed three movies on Thursday morning. One was a three star comedy. Marty didn’t laugh one time during the viewing of the farce, but he knew the film would be a hit and that it would appear odd that he hadn’t appreciated the good humor of the flick. He recognized the funny parts. He just couldn’t laugh at them.
The others were two and a half star action flicks that were both mindless and entertaining in a brainless way. They would also do well at the box office, he knew. He got the drafts edited and sent them to his Managing Editor. There was no following phone call from Aaron Mears, the Managing Editor, so he figured the three reviews had passed Aaron’s scrutiny.
Marty went to the internet and pulled up everything he could find on the Anderson Building explosion. He looked at the photos. He read about the comparison between this bombing and the job on the federal building in Oklahoma. The unnoticed barrel with the fertilizer was similar to the blast in Oklahoma because you didn’t need to be a demolitions expert to create a bomb like this one. All you needed was a computer, a little knowledge of basic chemistry, and maybe a background in the military. You didn’t need to be some genius like the Unibomber, some wild ex-academician who was into nuclear physics. You didn’t need to split the atom to make a boom the size of the Anderson Building. You might be affiliated with an American group of nuts. Survivalists. Sub groups comprised of sub species who were going to right the wrongs of this country or this world. Crazies, like the outlaws in Montana or Wyoming. Some kind of creature who took it upon himself to eradicate the excesses of an unbridled capitalism…
It didn’t have to be Bin Laden, Marty thought. There were enough knuckleheads within our borders to do something like this. Oklahoma was the proof of that theory. Maybe it was simply coincidence that the bomb had gone off in Chicago just one day after the cataclysm in New York. Maybe.
But Donlan seemed convinced of the popular wisdom. It was our swarthy skinned brethren in the Middle East. It had happened too close to the horror at the Tower to be coincidental. It had to be Bin Laden and his group called Al Qaida. This was part of the jihad, the holy war…And hadn’t the President of the United States talked about a new Crusade?
Marty checked out those historical crusades on the Net, too. After hours of reading he found that the Crusades were about Jerusalem, after all, not about religion. They might as well have called it ‘Manifest Destiny’, back then. It was about property. It was about real estate, like some savage land deal that went nightmarish, several times. Weren’t there seven or eight Crusades?
Vietnam had been an excuse to have an adventure in Southeast Asia, some scholars believed. We fought the communists in Vietnam simply to show them we would, some historians theorized.
It troubled him again why they’d chosen the Anderson Building. It wasn’t nearly the tallest or most prestigious edifice in the Loop. Not even close. In fact it was kind of a non descript, old fashioned brick building. No famous architect had designed it. No one ever chose it as an archetypal structure of downtown Chicago. It just didn’t fit the same profile as the World Trade Center. That building was state of the art, magnificent. The Anderson Building housed the Channel Two studios and a number of law offices, real estate offices and private suites.
It came clear to Marty Van Dyke on the third day after his wife’s funeral that Cathy hadn’t been killed by a force from outside the borders of the United States. Van Dyke kne
w in the center of his heart that the killer or killers came from right here, close to home.
*
Jack Donlan looked at the assembled agents in the room. This was the cream of the FBI. He had a crew of specialists from all over the country. These were the same kinds of specialists who were working the New York City case. These were A-team experts in everything, demolitions, counter-terrorism…You named it, they were sitting before him.
“We’re to presume that forces from the Middle East are responsible for the matter at hand,” Donlan told them. He looked at their faces and found only one agent who reflected doubt regarding the Bureau’s plan of attack.
“Your name is?” Donlan inquired of the younger agent. The kid looked like he was fresh out of the Academy. An athlete, like Jack. Muscular. Probably football. Jack guessed his background was legal, like his own history.
“Macmillan. John Macmillan. San Diego office, sir.”
“And that curious look on your face?”
“I wonder why we’re assuming anything, at this point , sir.”
“Because the wisdom of D.C. is the wisdom we all share.”
“Rather bureaucratic, sir. Forgive me.”
Donlan found himself smiling at Macmillan. He liked the kid. He liked his balls.
“Bureaucratic?” Jack smiled. “You think your wisdom is superior to our masters, then?”
“No sir. I just don’t see the point in assuming without evidence to back that wisdom up.”
“Well then…What is it you’d have us pursue?”
“The truth, sir. That’s all. Just the truth.”
The Homicide Detectives Parisi and Spencer also had their doubts regarding the selection of the Anderson Building as a target for nefarious agents of Al Qaida and its equally nefarious leader Osama Bin Laden. The building was too obscure compared to a number of other possible targets in Chicago’s Loop, and Lieutenant Jimmy Parisi brought it up with his partner, Detective Tommy Spencer, just before Parisi insisted that their Captain in Homicide allow them to pursue a rogue player in this northern Illinois scenario. The Captain respected Parisi’s opinion highly because of the Italian cop’s record. Spencer respected Parisi’s outlook equally, so they were allowed to get a crew together to investigate the possibility that this Saudi criminal might not have been the perpetrator that the media and the general population sought with blood lust currently. There had been numerous cases of assault upon people of Middle Eastern origin ever since the blast destroyed Chicago’s sense of safety from the terror beyond the Midwest. Public sentiment was heavily weighted toward Bin Laden and his demonic crew.
