Voices In The Walls: A Psychological Thriller (Michael Gresham Series)

by John Ellsworth

  "No you're not," she says quietly. "I've got this."

  3

  Michael

  Two years earlier

  Jana Emerich told me what really happened at Menard Penitentiary. He told at the time I was defending him on his first murder case when he was still quite young.

  Evidently, Menard Penitentiary was the Wal-Mart of penal institutions. The Russians imported heroin. The Mexicans were the coke kings. The Aryans brought in hookers. The Crips provided protection. The Bloods offered murder for hire. And Randall Fox provided legal services to them all from his cell. Fox was a jailhouse lawyer—self-taught—but he had become enormously successful writing compelling post-trial motions backed by research that would have made any appellate lawyer jealous. He had written over 120 appeals that were now lodged in the Illinois Court of Appeals. He was golden because everyone wanted to be his friend.

  Then the Ding Wing unloaded Earvin Myers on him as payback for Fox's appellate successes. They meant to shut him down with a ding cut off from his meds.

  It worked.

  Myers talked day and night. Fox couldn't think, couldn't research or write. Everything ground to a halt. Fox's output dwindled to nothing in just a matter of days. Briefs went begging; motions for new trials were filed beyond deadline and refused by court clerks. There soon was talk among other prisoners of shanking Fox himself. The talk got back to him and Fox took action. A knife was acquired for two cartons of Marlboros. Its design was a long flat blade with a taped handle, a simple weapon fondly known around Menard as a shank. Randall Fox threaded it into the waistband of his prison dungarees. The monologue would be stopped. His prison law practice would continue and he would live another day.

  One night while Myers was asleep, Fox crept out of the bottom bunk and drew his shank. He poised the steel blade over Myers' groin.

  Then he separated the cellie from his nut sack.

  After the guards came running and Myers was rushed to the infirmary, Fox was again alone. This time in SHU for 180 days—solitary confinement. Then he was released back to his cell—without a cellie. He was free to work and soon his practice was again booming.

  New cases were filed on time. Appellate briefs were on time; motions for new trials were accepted by the court clerks—all was well with Randall Fox, LLC.

  But the prison struck back yet again. Enter yet another cellmate, name of Jana Emerich.

  Jana's father was a Catholic priest. He was also my priest and that's how I came to know Jana, when he was arrested for murder.

  Father Bjorn was never a positive influence in his son's life. The father was overflowing with shame at violating a laundry list of Vatican no-no's in the boy's conception. The son raged at his father's seemingly endless ability to ignore him. The priest abandoned the boy to the streets, where he grew up among gangs and drugs and kids who fed themselves by selling their teenage bodies. Jana recognized great potential in the teenage skin trade. But then there was a murder and Jana was indicted.

  After I had delivered a not-guilty verdict for him at his first murder trial, he paid me back by raping and impregnating my wife. We lost several friends because we kept Mikey, and some family members stopped speaking to us. They don’t know Mikey. Every day is another blessing with him tearing around the house in diapers and a smile. "Wheeee!" he cries dawn to dusk. "Wheeee!"

  Jana pled guilty to other murders. He had to: in the middle of raping my wife he admitted he had committed the murders. She testified against him and the grand jury indicted him. After entering his plea of guilty, he began serving two life sentences at Menard Correctional Center. He got an additional thirty years for the rape. His life as a free man was over. Or so we thought. But as lawyers we both knew that with the law nothing is ever really over. And Jana's case was no exception.

  His incarceration took a totally unexpected turn. It turned out the killer had a brain, clearly a gift from the priest and his doctorate in theology. Jana settled into prison life and earned his GED. Then he took college courses in psychology and psychopathology and deviant behavior and community mental health. He earned a college degree and wrote a thesis titled: The Good Seed: When Convicts Have Children. All of this was accomplished in twenty-two months. "Why not?" he said to his prison counselor. What better way to spend his time than to improve his mind?

  Which was when he encountered Randall Fox.

  With his history of violence behind bars, Fox had been single-celled after castrating Earvin Myers and confessing to his desire to cut someone again. Even so, after Jana was transferred to Menard in early 2014, several staffers at the maximum-security prison cleared him to share a cell with Fox.

  On April 27, 2013, Fox says he passed a note to a corrections officer threatening to castrate Jana if he wasn't moved out. He said he looked forward to performing the surgery. Jana repeatedly kicked and beat on the cell door, begging to be removed, according to Fox.

  By late morning, nothing. But then, according to the records, Fox knocked Jana to the floor with a single punch, grabbed a makeshift rope hidden under his mattress and began choking him. Jana lost consciousness. Fox went to work and separated Jana from his nut sack.

  Confronted by a Tribune reporter with the evidence of negligence, one top corrections official admitted that staffers erred by putting Jana Emerich in the same cell with Fox.

  "Emerich was like a mouse in a maze of lions," Fox, thirty-four, said in a chilling letter to the Tribune in August. "He should have never been in my cell to begin with. Emerich was given to me as a sacrifice to close me down."

  Taking a page from his Fox’s playbook, Jana Emerich filed suit in federal court. He alleged a long list of Civil Rights violations by prison officials. The federal judge wrote a terse one-sentence ruling that effectively put Emerich out on the streets again: "The prisoner shall remain free unless and until IDOC officials remedy the appalling circumstances surrounding this prisoner's incarceration." There was also a civil judgment for $500,000. Emerich had money and freedom. He rented a studio apartment in Chicago and began tutoring junior college kids.

  Jana worked the press like a pro. He was interviewed by a local TV news outlet as a prison success story, an inmate who had turned his life around and become a contributor to society. He was well-known in the junior college system and he was eventually offered courses to teach when the progressive institutions around Chicago decided he was rehabilitated and deserving of a second chance. The news team returned a year later and interviewed him again. The story continued. But this time with a twist. He blurted out to the interviewer that problems had arisen. "What problems?" the reporter asked. Jana replied that he had learned that his rape of my wife had resulted in the birth of his son.

  "That son belongs to me," Jana told the camera. "Every bit as much as he belongs to her. I want to see him, I want visitation, I want to play a part in his life. Maybe I even want custody."

  When the interview concluded, Danny and I stared at the screen too stunned to even speak.

  "Can he do that?" she finally asked.

  "I don't know," I told her. "I know very little about family law."

  So we visited Louis H. Rickover, Chicago's ranking family practice lawyer. It was said that Mr. Rickover could've had Joseph and Mary of Nazareth ruled unfit parents. He was that good.

  "Louis," I said two days after Jana’s TV interview, "Can Jana really get visitation rights?"

  Louis leaned away from the glass surface of his desk and placed his hands side by side.

  "Look," he said, raising one hand, "this is the law before January 1, 2014. Under that law, yes, he can ask for visitation. He can even ask for custody. That's your case." He raised the other hand. "Now for cases arising after January 1, 2014, he could not ask for visitation or custody. If there is clear and convincing evidence of sexual assaults, his rights are easily severed and he may have nothing to do with his offspring."

  "So he can come after Mikey?" Danny whispered. "Is that what I'm hearing?"

  The lawy
er shrugged. "His rights were never severed. He was never actually adopted by Michael. Have paternity tests been done?"

  "No," I said. "But I am definitely not the birth father."

  "How would you know that?"

  "We were having trouble conceiving," said Danny. "We had been to a fertility specialist. Because of Michael's age there was a motility problem with his sperm. They would have to spin down his sperm, catch the good ones, and plant them inside me with a syringe."

  The lawyer nodded. "We'll keep that confidential for now. Without paternity tests, who's to say you're not the birth father? We'll make the son of a bitch prove his paternity, at any rate."

  I added, "But I am definitely the father who has cared for Mikey. I have loved that boy like my own. I treasure him. He knows no other father except me. It has to stay that way. A murderer and rapist cannot ever be allowed into our son's life. We would murder Jana Emerich before we would allow that to happen."

  Rickover winced. "Please, not too loud. We don't do murder; we're lawyers and law-abiding citizens."

  "I was just making my point," I said when I saw the troubled look on his face.

  "We'll hope the police never call me to testify about what you just said."

  "What?" said Danny. "Isn't this confidential?"

  "As you know, there is the code of ethics for lawyers," the white-haired lawyer proclaimed. "Threats to commit a crime must be disclosed by the attorney who was present when the threats were made. I'm going to ignore what you said. However, please don't say that again, Michael. I play by the rules in my practice. All the rules."

  "I was only emphasizing—" I trailed off. Truth be told, I was damn serious when I said we would murder him before we'd allow him around Mikey. That was what I really meant. So would Danny. We stood together about that. She hated Jana even more than I did, if that was possible. Either one of us could have pulled the trigger on that monster.

  We paid for the lawyer's time and left his office. He agreed to take our case if Jana filed suit.

  Which Jana did, two weeks after we met with Mr. Rickover.

  The lawsuit filed was a suit to establish paternity of Michael Gresham, Junior—Mikey.

  The lawsuit was filed by the District Attorney of Cook County.

  Now he had the cops working for him and against us.

  4

  Michael

  Jana went back in front of the TV cameras. He had a new story for the people: Danny and I wanted him returned to prison. We were plotting against him to stop him from seeing his son. In front of the TV lens he implored the FBI to investigate new federal Civil Rights violations because we were trying to keep his son from him. He wanted federal kidnapping charges filed. He even challenged the Department of Justice to launch an investigation.

  Danny and I talked late into the night. Jana Emerich had become a master of manipulation. He was turning our community against us. And we were helpless to stop it. After all, we were lawyers. Nobody likes lawyers, least of all criminal lawyers like us.

  We started receiving phone calls. Friends and neighbors stopped us to ask if we had seen the TV news stories, which had now turned into a series on the hardships faced by a prisoner who was trying to see his son. Newspaper stories appeared, some of them wondering what influence Danny and I might have had in getting Emerich placed into the same cell as Fox. There was speculation we had managed this in order to see Emerich die in prison to keep him from his son. The Sun-Times ran a hit piece on us one Sunday, and the next day the FBI showed up at our office wanting to talk. We met with two special agents for one solid hour of back-and-forth having to do with our dealings with Jana Emerich. At the end, they indicated they believed us, but clearly we had been made into the bad guys through Jana's clever manipulation of the press. He was a wannabe psychologist, after all. Who better to fool the people?

  Much to our shock, and as a testament to Jana's acting abilities, he had built an audience that actually supported him. We received death threats from people who demanded we allow Jana to visit Mikey. He stepped it up, blaming his castration on Danny. She had set it all up, he claimed, as payback for an imaginary sexual assault. They had actually been lovers while he was living in our home, he claimed. I feared for Danny. I feared this animal—or his constituency—might come after her again.

  Cars were seen combing through our neighborhood at very slow speeds late at night. Our garbage bin was turned over and trash spread across our front lawn. Someone torched my boat, though the damage was slight, thanks to the security force at the Yacht Club.

  Then one night it happened. A shotgun blast ripped through our front window after we were all in bed. Danny and I flew out of bed and were running to the kids' rooms in seconds. They were found crying and shaking in their beds, but they were physically unharmed.

  The police arrived five minutes later. Photographs were taken, statements were given, questions were asked. But in the end the only thing that came of it was an inch-thick stack of police reports. Reports filed in triplicate, signed and stamped by the investigating officers. We were given a copy and it went straight into a drawer. After that, we were on our own. There was no police presence at night. The investigation stalled with no suspects to question and no license plates to track down. We had no doubt that the next time Emerich's supporters came there would be blood spilled. This was going to get worse before it got better. Much worse.

  By the new year we had all but retreated from the world. I still went downtown to work but Danny did not. My investigator, Marcel Rainford, spent his days looking after Danny and taking our eldest to school and fetching her in the afternoons when school let out. For my part, I came straight home after work without fail. I was armed when I left in the morning and armed when I arrived home at night. A new security system was installed and a fence erected. We learned to operate assault rifles. We were basically living in an armed camp.

  We might just as well have been in a war zone.

  And it was all because of our two-year-old—Mikey.

  At night when I put him to bed and helped him say his prayers, I would turn and take one last, long look before hitting the light switch. There he was, on his side, sucking his thumb, eyes closed and all movement paused for the first time that day.

  Many nights, with all the sounds one hears between two and five in the morning, I heard them whispering. It sounded like people out in our yard. People who had scaled the fence and were cutting the security system into Mikey's room. I imagined them passing him out through the window to his father, waiting out front in a car we'd never see again.

  Then I would rush down the hallway and check on my son again. Sure enough, thumb, eyes, sleeping soundly.

  Those were the nights I would turn and move slowly back to my bed. I would have to remind myself I was only saying goodnight to Mikey. Saying goodbye to Mikey—well, we would die before we would ever let that happen.

  Quite simply, we would die.

  5

  Danny

  Things settled down, and with time I let go of the stranglehold I had on our lives and started leaving the house again. Eventually I returned to our law office and our criminal law practice on LaSalle, downtown. We're officed in the Wiesell Building, an ancient edifice that soars upward all of thirty stories and that features rehabbed office space with interior walls of exposed brick and substantial wood beams overhead and exposed furnace and water pipes—not unlike your basic loft. The best part is our proximity to both federal and state courts. The one glitch is the state criminal court out on California Avenue, which requires driving, not walking. Our investigator, Marcel Rainford, doubles as our driver and he takes us there and drops us off and waits and brings us back, so we're not confronted with the horrendous parking snarl of the criminal courts.

  Many of the people who show up in our office are people who've had the world cave in on them and left them crazy as loons for it. Some of them have been through serial divorces; some watched a child die; some have surrendered their sanity a s
hot glass at a time or maybe a thousand lines of powder. But they all have this one character trait in common as they come through our oak door, and that is that the good times all lay behind them now while the road ahead looks like—well, not good.

  Which brings me to Gunnar Mendelssohn. He appeared when another shotgun blast again blew out our living room window. Just like that, our world was topsy-turvy again. The stress ran over me like a freight train. I came apart. That’s when Gunnar appeared.

  I met him at another lawyer's office when he introduced himself to me as one of the partners there. How it happened was, I was just coming out of the deposition room following a horribly stressful deposition, and I was heading toward the front desk where I would collect my coat and head out into another frigid Chicago day, and there was Gunnar.

  He was bent over, corralling papers. They had evidently slipped out of his file folder and spilled in the hallway. Being the kind of gal who makes time to stop and lend a hand, I dropped down and began collecting pages and handing them back to him. "Damn, damn, damn," he was whispering under his breath as I labored beside him. "Thanks so much for pitching in," he said to me, his butt all but rubbing up against my face as I worked from the south to the north and he worked from the north to the south. When the last paper was corralled we stood up and smiled at each other.

  He thrust out his hand.

  "Gunnar Mendelssohn. I'm a partner here."

  “Your voice is very familiar—have we met before?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I do think so. It will come to me. Anyway, I'm suing one of your clients for medical malpractice. I’m Danny Gresham.”

  "You're Michael Gresham's wife?"

  "I am. You could also say Michael Gresham is my husband."

  "I like you already."