The Hunting Ground (Deuce Mora Mystery Series Book 2)

by Jean Heller

  When we walked back into the room of cages, I noticed something that had escaped my attention the first time. Against the wall to my left was a raised trough that reminded me of the way cowboys watered their horses in old western movies. There was an open twenty-five-pound bag of salt on the floor next to it.

  “What’s that?” I asked Colter.

  “Not sure,” he said. “When we came down I thought it might be a bathtub, but now I don’t think so. There are no faucets, unless they filled it from that hose.”

  I walked toward it, Klein right beside me.

  “It’s already full of water,” I said as I got close.

  Then I was standing over it, staring down at things both strange and familiar. They were segmented rods of varying thickness and color. I’d seen them before.

  The circle closed. I understood everything.

  “I know where the children are,” I said.

  65

  The next few hours were a frenzy of phone calls made, search warrants obtained, orders issued to police agencies and transportation agencies to be on the lookout for the individual I had identified as a probable suspect in the kidnapping and torture of children.

  Klein and I rode with Colter to the Thompson Center, the state office building in the Loop. On the way, Klein asked about the significance of the bamboo rods we’d found soaking in the mansion’s basement.

  “They’re used for caning people,” Colter said. “Rattan makes a better cane because it’s more resilient. Bamboo tends to splinter and draw blood. Keeping the rods soaked in salt water keeps splintering to a minimum.”

  “Damn,” Klein said, “talk about pouring salt in a wound.”

  When we got to the Thompson Center, we took an elevator to the offices of the Department of Children and Family Services. Colter flashed his badge, and without explanation to the stunned secretary, followed me back to Aidan Coughlin’s office. Coughlin wasn’t there, but his garden was going strong. When I pointed out his unusual Golden Square Stem bamboo, Colter examined it closely, ignoring Klein as he shot photographs. I took the time to reexamine the photos on the office walls. They had touched me deeply. Now their hypocrisy made me sick.

  Coughlin’s bewildered secretary followed us into the office. She professed not to know where her boss was. She hadn’t seen him, she said, since Monday.

  That bamboo in the office, identical to what I’d found in the basement of the Saudi mansion, plus my report that Coughlin had a much larger growth of the plants at his house, quickly got us a search warrant for the house in the Logan Square neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side.

  We arrived on the quiet street without lights or sirens. If Coughlin was at home, we didn’t want to alarm him into fleeing or worse, killing any children he was holding captive.

  Colter told Klein and me to stay in the car. Coughlin would recognize me, and that could prompt a dangerous reflexive action on his part. Two backup unmarked police units arrived and parked well away from the house. The armed officers inside walked casually up and down the street. A third unit parked on the block behind Coughlin’s house. Its two officers cut through back yards to their target.

  Colter was getting out of his vehicle when the radio erupted. Officers coming at Coughlin’s house from behind found him in his backyard garden, quite dead.

  Given the possibility that he’d been murdered by someone currently inside his house, the cops forced their way in. The main part of the home was empty. But in the basement they found cages identical to those at the mansion. Eight cages held one child each. Four cages held two. Sixteen kids in all. Twelve boys and four girls. Ages six to ten.

  All alive.

  Terrified, but alive.

  Harry asked to be able to photograph Aidan Coughlin’s body, but the police said no. No surprise there. Colter allowed me to look at the body, for identification purposes, even though I wasn’t a relative. There were no relatives around.

  Coughlin was lying on a teak chaise surrounded by thick stands of his precious bamboo, his large rock sounding garden, and a gentle wind chime. On a square teak table at his right hand we found a bottle of Stoli vodka, nearly empty, a heavy bar glass with some clear liquid at the bottom, and an empty pill bottle. The label said it had been filled with thirty pills, two-milligrams each. Xanax.

  There was no sign of violence on Coughlin’s body.

  There was no suicide note, either.

  “It almost has to be suicide,” Colter said. “Somehow the bastard found out the ring was about to go down, and he decided to take the easy way out. A bottle of vodka and an overdose of Xanax will do it.”

  “Do what?” I asked. “What’s the process?”

  “The medical examiner can tell you with more authority than I can,” Colter said. “Alcohol slows the heart. Xanax slows the heart. Two milligrams of Xanax is a heavy-duty dose. Take most of a bottle of them with most of a bottle of booze and your heart slows to a stop. Stopping your heart’ll kill you nearly every time.” He blew out a breath of relief. “Thank God he didn’t decide to take the kids with him.”

  I shuffled my feet. “I had something to do with this,” I said.

  Colter looked at me sharply. “With what?”

  “With how this went down. After Winona Jackson was killed, Coughlin told me he had approved of her helping me. He said he would take over that role. Any time I needed information on a murdered child who was identified, Coughlin passed me the kid’s DCFS file. In return, I kept him informed on what I was learning.”

  “So he knew we were going to take down the house?” Colter asked.

  I shook my head. “Not from me, no. The last time we spoke I told him about the house and the machine shop being part of the trafficking operation, but for some reason I decided not to tell him anything about the Saudis and your plans to take them down.”

  “Wow,” Colter said. “That decision probably saved the kids’ lives.”

  “You suppose he was the one who ordered Winona killed?”

  “We’ll probably never know for sure,” Colter said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if he wanted her out of the way so he would have an excuse to get close to you, and thereby close to the investigation.” He put a hand lightly on my shoulder. “It’s not your fault.”

  I sighed. “That doesn’t make me feel any better. Why would anybody do something like this? This man ostensibly devoted his life to the protection of children. How did he go from those inspiring photos on his office wall to . . . to this?” I waved my hand at the scene.

  “Can’t say for sure at this point,” Colter said. “Ask me again after the forensic CPAs finish taking apart his finances. These things are almost always for money.”

  “This isn’t fair,” I said.

  “What?” Colter asked.

  “He died too easy,” I said. “Sonofabitch deserved a long, hard, painful exit.”

  The children were released immediately from their cages, of course. Paramedics checked each one, started saline IVs, and prepared to transport them to area hospitals.

  Somehow word spread through the neighborhood, and people began showing up with stuffed animals for each child, donated no doubt by their own kids. As the parade of gurneys clacked their way down the sidewalk to waiting ambulances, several women standing nearby began sobbing and hugging one another. I hoped the kids could feel the love blossoming around the house where they had known only brutality.

  “Does Coughlin have a family?” Colter asked.

  “He told me he didn’t. He was married a long time ago, but his wife left him. I hope to God she got away before they had any children.”

  “Well, his personnel records at DCFS should fill in some blanks.”

  I faced Colter and held his eyes with mine.

  “Tell me this,” I said. “Is there anyone left alive who can be held accountable for all this death and abuse, for all those kids buried at Ryan Woods, for Joey Russell, for the children here, in this house?”

  Colter looked at his watch.
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  “As of two and a half hours ago, no. It’s over.”

  66

  I sat slumped in Eric Ryland’s office. We were discussing how to handle the breaking story both for the following day’s paper and immediately, for the Journal’s website. I was having a great deal of trouble focusing.

  There seemed to be no way to learn what had really happened at O’Hare early Wednesday morning, and even asking questions about it would likely land me in trouble. Jonathan Bruckner was present for the story discussions. I suggested he ask his network of past and present diplomatic officials what they knew about the airport shootings. He declined. He said to do so would be to violate the spirit of the agreement I signed.

  I took a bold step.

  “What if I resigned from the paper? I’m the only one here who signed the agreement. With me gone, the Journal would be free to report everything.”

  “Not really,” Ryland said, “though that’s a rather amazing offer. First, you and Mark are the only witnesses to whatever happened at O’Hare. Because of the agreements, neither of you is free to sit for an interview. I don’t know what you saw—or think you saw—but in the face of complete official denial, and lacking any credible evidence to the contrary, we’re nowhere and not likely to get anywhere.”

  “You know quite apart from any input from me,” I said, “that seven Saudi princes visited the White House then flew to Chicago for a vacation. Their plane landed at O’Hare early Wednesday morning. Then they simply disappeared. That’s at least a starting place for some sort of investigation.”

  “Already thought of that Deuce,” Ryland said. “There is no Saudi aircraft currently at O’Hare. There is no FAA record showing that the plane landed at O’Hare or departed. We can’t prove the Saudis ever reached Chicago.”

  I looked from Ryland to Bruckner and back in total amazement.

  “What about FAA enroute records between Washington and here?”

  “There are none. There is a record of the plane leaving Dulles International, but the flight plan took it east, out over the Atlantic, and there is no record that it ever made contact with international air traffic control. The story is it vanished over the ocean. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to an airliner. There will be a search, of course. But this plane will never be found.”

  “I can produce an air traffic supervisor at O’Hare who saw the plane land.”

  “Gina Brodsky?” Ryland said. “She says she was expecting the plane, but it never showed up. Furthermore, she says she hasn’t had any contact with you for a year or more.”

  “Wow,” I said. “They really covered all the bases, didn’t they?”

  “That’s the way they work,” Bruckner said.

  “And you can’t find any legal loophole we can squeeze through?”

  Bruckner shook his head.

  I felt as if I was having an out-of-body experience, flopping around on a tabletop like a goldfish that had jumped out of its bowl.

  It was hard to fathom the depth and breadth of this conspiracy.

  So the basic story I wrote was this:

  A ring had been trafficking in Chicago children, leaving at least twenty-six dead. Sixteen had been rescued from the Logan Square home that served as the center of the ring, which was run by the home’s owner, Aidan Coughlin. The rescued children were seriously traumatized and in need of short-term medical and long-term psychological care.

  Chicago police expressed confidence the ring did not extend beyond the Logan Square home, though the FBI was engaged in an investigation of Coughlin’s friends and associates to determine who else might have been involved and how far beyond Chicago the ring operated. An unidentified Wisconsin man had been questioned in connection with the ring but was not charged.

  The Wisconsin man, I later learned, confirmed that it was Coughlin who ordered the murder of Winona Jackson. As I had suspected, Coughlin wanted Jackson out of the way so he could become my source and exchange information with me. He was far more interested in what I could tell him than in what he could tell me.

  Lucy Sandoval, my research partner at the newspaper, helped me piece together what there was of Coughlin’s past. He was fourth generation American of Irish ancestors. He graduated from Chicago public schools and attended DePaul University where he received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in child psychology. He opened a private practice right out of college, specializing in treatment of abused children.

  At age thirty, he married Katherine Shea, but they divorced two years and four months later, and she died in Philadelphia in 2014 of cervical cancer. The couple had no children, and Coughlin never remarried.

  He eventually took a partner into his private practice and turned over management of the practice to the partner in 2003 when he was appointed to a post in DCFS. He rose quickly in the ranks, finally to head the Cook County division.

  And that was it. Clean and boring. No hint of the monster he had become. Lucy checked court records for bankruptcy filings or lawsuits by creditors and came up empty.

  Neighbors and friends had nothing bad to say about him because, they said, they hardly knew him. An older woman living across the street uttered the chillingly common assessment, “He was a very quiet man. Kept to himself mostly.”

  We ran a full page of photos of the dead children who had been identified and artists’ sketches of those who hadn’t, with thumbnail biographies. One of our City Hall reporters wrote a separate story on a full-blown rant by the mayor over the worldwide plague of trafficking of children and adults alike. The chief of police and the sheriff talked about efforts to curb trafficking in Chicago and Cook County. The medical examiner talked about the science of identifying the dead. And several of the dead children’s families spoke to Journal reporters about their heartbreak.

  The inevitable and welcome fundraising efforts blossomed on Facebook and other social media sites to collect money to defray the rescued children’s medical expenses and to help families of the dead get through a period of mourning without having to worry about showing up for work every day.

  The Army gave Sgt. Christian Carpenter, father of the dead boy whose leg Mark and I had found, an honorable discharge with a full pension to allow him to remain at home and attempt with his wife to piece together their lives. A local freight company immediately offered Carpenter a supervisory position and promised to hold it for him until he was comfortable leaving home to go to work.

  There were separate and unconnected stories for a few days about a Saudi Arabia jet with an unknown number of passengers and crew aboard disappearing over the Atlantic. The plane had been leased from the airline and was on a private flight when it went far off course and vanished from traffic control radar. There was information that the aircraft had been scheduled to take its passengers to Chicago, but the visitors apparently changed their minds. The United States expressed sympathy to the Saudis for their loss. And with that, the story vanished as completely as the plane.

  As for the commotion that morning in the mansion on the Near North Side, police and the FBI said it was a joint operation to snare a ring of drug traffickers who used the home as its headquarters and a shooting gallery for addict customers. The structure would be leveled two days later, and the city would decide what to do with the empty lot.

  The mansion was far enough from Coughlin’s Logan Square home to the north and the machine shop well to the south that reporters, including the Journal’s, never thought to ask if there was a connection.

  It was late afternoon when Dr. Vihaan Raji at Stroger Hospital returned one of the dozen phone message I’d left for him. At least his news was good. Joey Russell had been transferred to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, a little more than an hour due west of downtown Chicago. Joey would survive. And for the moment, it seemed, he would suffer no lasting physical effects of his mistreatment. Mental and emotional effects were something else entirely, but those already were being treated. The daily presence of his older brother a
t his bedside succeeded in keeping the child calm and receptive to the adults who came to help him.

  And no, I could not see either of them. The Faulkner School had laid down that ground rule for the older boy. And Joey’s doctors didn’t want him to see me. While I was the one who found him, his doctors feared that my appearance would refresh memories they were trying to help him get past.

  It was a little after ten o’clock when I finished up everything at the office and stood by while Jonathan Bruckner vetted all the stories. I laid my head on my desk and had to fight off sleep.

  I felt empty, wasted, blasted, and blanketed by an unbearable sadness.

  It was the sort of exhaustion that might put me to sleep at my desk but would keep me awake in my bed as memories of the last two days laced through my head.

  Inside my messenger bag my throw-away cell phone chirped that I had a new text message. I didn’t care. When it chirped a reminder, I groaned and pulled it out.

  The message was from Gina Brodsky, my friend the air traffic controller. There were two words: “I’m sorry.”

  67

  Ten days had passed, and I was only beginning to get a hold on reality again.

  Once the Journal had all the segments of the trafficking story each in its proper news cubby hole, Eric Ryland told me to take a week off—not vacation, but a paid leave to get my head screwed back on straight. More than anyone, he knew the toll it had taken on me to sign away a huge story, to help bury it where it would never be exhumed.

  Adding to the anxiety, neither of us knew what the story was. I had given him the two little digital voice recorders on which I had dictated a description of what Mark and I saw at O’Hare and conversations in which I had taken part later at the federal building. We listened to them together, then he went over to Jonathan Bruckner’s office and listened to them again with the paper’s attorney. Then the attorney locked the DVRs in his safe.