Ballistics showed the bullets to be forty-five caliber, my own bullet of choice. The naked man had managed one shot from a little .380, but it had missed.
I switched to the pictures of the other two dead men. Both had been armed, their guns lying not far from their bodies, but neither had been fired. Both had been killed up close and personal. Gunpowder stippled the face of the man shot under the nose as well as the clothing of the second man hit three times in the chest in a nice, tight grouping.
All participants in dying had long rap sheets, even the mother. She’d been busted multiple times, mostly drugs and prostitution, but she did a six month stint in juvi when she turned fifteen for her part in an armed robbery of a liquor store.
The two clothed men were members of The West Side Slick Bloods (WSSBs), one of the three nastiest gangs in Chicago, and had been involved in everything from robberies to rapes. They both had several felony warrants out for their arrests and had been in and out the revolving door of the badly broken justice system that rules the Chicago courts and penal system. The last guy, the naked man, had done time for carjacking and theft from motor vehicles. He had a few assault charges including one with a gun, but no convictions for any of those.
And then there was Jerome. I looked hard at the three different mug shots they had of him. The first showed a thirteen year old boy with several stitches over his right eye and badly swollen lips and nose. In the second, he was sixteen and way larger, with just a hint of a scar from the old stitches and no new wounds. The third showed an eighteen year old man, huge and street tough, but without the usual sneer you see in street tough thugs. In all the pictures there seemed something lacking. Something in the eyes. I looked hard and long, trying to figure it out, but couldn’t quite get it.
There wasn’t a lot about him in the reports. Just the three arrests, all for assaults and always against multiple participants. After the last one, he never got arrested again. He was a suspect in a lot of stuff, but nothing the cops could ever make stick. Whatever might be lacking in there, he’d still managed to learn how to play the system.
After that came a load of speculation, mostly from special gang tasks forces. Jerome was suspected of being one of the WSSBs up and coming hitters… AKA assassins. And that he may have taken out as many as seven rival gang members.
I looked back at his picture, still not able to see what I was seeing, but knowing it was there.
I went back to the crime scene reports.
According to the investigation’s write up and the CSI team that worked the case, they believed the three Bloods were doing a drug deal with the two naked people when something went wrong and Jerome killed them all and took the money and the drugs. Then he found the little girl and decided to take her for ransom.
That sounded pretty lame to me. It left open way too many questions. The first of which is why were three clothed guys doing a drug deal with a naked man and woman obviously already engaged in other activities?
And why would a gang banger hit man suddenly decide to kidnap a little girl for ransom? Way too big a burden, and who would he ransom her too? Not to mention the fact that there had never been a demand for money or any type of contact between him and anyone else as far as the authorities knew. Besides, if he already had the drugs and the money, he would know everyone, including the police and his own former gang buddies, would be after him for the betrayal and killing of his Blood brothers. No way he would slow himself down with a little girl. It made no sense and as Judge Judy always says, “If it doesn’t make sense it isn’t true.”
So what did happen? I tried to figure out scenarios where Jerome would take the girl. The only possible reasons I could think of were too horrible for me to want to contemplate. I decided I’d have to learn more about Jerome to have any chance of deciphering his possible motives. But going through the file, there was virtually nothing about him other than his police write up and mug shots.
I decided to switch gears and googled Senator Alvin Marsh.
Hmm. First elected to the United States Senate on November 4th, 1986. Served seven terms so far for, as he put it, the great State of Illinois. A Democrat, he worked with the Obama administration on a host of bills. He sits on several of the more important seats and has his hand in everything from healthcare to green energy to education. So far, at least, the current administration hadn’t tossed him off any of the seats, which meant he was either very powerful or knew how to get along with all the folks up on Capitol Hill. Married for thirty-three years to the same woman with nary a hint of impropriety and worked in local Chicago politics before his run for the senate in eighty-six. Digging a little deeper, I learned that he’d been an orphan who ran away from the state home when he turned fifteen. He joined a faction of the Bloods that had migrated from California to Chicago and were recruiting heavily in the area to increase their slender hold on the rapidly growing drug trade. Marsh had been arrested for assault against a rival gang member after his older brother, Patrick Marsh, was killed in a drive-by and he did a nine month stint in juvenile detention. While he was inside, he hooked up with a new program to set kids straight,
