Wednesday’s Child: McGee's Case of Orphanage Girls Taken by Traffickers

By Carl Douglass

Wednesday's Child is the third novella of Carl Douglass's McGee series. It is a tale of “Wednesday's child is full of woe.” Brigid O'Hanlon--age thirteen--is one of the “Wednesday's Children”--a foundling left on the doorstep of St. Anne's Orphanage in Red Hook, New York. One of the few days she and her girl-friends can count is the grand and city-wide heralded celebration of their thirteenth birthday. Harm befalls them, and McGee and Associates are called to help save them on a pro bono basis. The search transcends city, then country boundaries, and then on the high seas. The Human Trafficking division of the NYPD is called into the search after bodies are found in the pestilent Gowanus Canal near a semi-trailer containing the bodies of victims of a human trafficking network run by the Snakeheads. The hunt for the girls and for the clever and heartless monsters who killed their vulnerable captives descends into an underworld of CIs, Mafiosos, crooked Teamsters, and child molesters, presided over by the ephemeral devil, Sister Chi. The combined resources of McGee, the NYPD task force, the New Jersey State Police, the FBI, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, the CIA, and the Catholics of NYC, and The MSS and the PSB of the Peoples Republic of China join in an around-the-world and around-the-clock manhunt for the rust bucket ship, the Golden Traveler, and the kidnappers. It promises to be very close and dangerous thing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publication Consultants
• Release date: Jul 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781594335853

Carl Douglass

Author Carl Douglass desires to live to the century mark and to be still writing; his wife not so much. No matter whose desire wins out, they plan an entire life together and not go quietly into the night. Other than writing, their careers are in the past. Their lives focus on their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Book preview

Sixteen

Chapter One

May 4, 2020

There are words that are never uttered in Saint Anne’s Mother of Mary Orphanage in the area of Brooklyn known as Red Hook—originally the Dutch " Roode Hoek. One of those words is unadoptable. Even the more genteel phrase, Wednesday’s Child, is spoken only among the staff out of earshot of the children. In the early days of the orphanage—then known as The Famine Church Children’s Home"—the entrance lobby carried a large framed inscription intended to show the home’s caring for children:

Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go,

Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child works hard for a living,

Wednesday’s Child

But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day

Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.

Several decades later, during a renovation, the sign was changed to reflect the sincere desire to promote the adoption of unadoptables, then euphemistically called Wednesday’s Children. For a time, the visitor was greeted with the inscription:

Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe, But Very

Soon Her Joy Will Grow.

In the 1960s, the orphanage—responding to political correctness, which eschewed the negative connotation that Wednesday’s Child suggested—did away with any designation for special children between the ages of six and sixteen whose lifelong dream of being part of a loving family in a stable home seemed never to be fulfilled. During that time, the orphanage and its patron parish, changed its name to Saint Anne’s—knowing that no one could find fault with the blessed name of the mother of Saint Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

Brigid O’Hanlon—age thirteen—is one of the Wednesday’s Children. She is a foundling left on the doorstep of the yellow brick Catholic church dedicated to Saint Anne. Many babies began their lives in the boat-shaped church built by the area’s dockworkers, and then the orphanage during the time of the Great Irish Famine when hordes of impoverished Irish immigrants flooded the poor neighborhoods of New York from 1850 onwards. Her exact birthday is unknown, but the nuns reckoned it to be very close to June 3, 2007, when she was found. She had no known name; so, the warm-hearted sisters named her after the favorite Irish saint, Saint Brigid, and the parish priest at the time, Father O’Hanlon, who dedicated his life and ministry to caring for the poor and unwanted children.

Sister Ophelia, abbess of Saint Anne’s nunnery and senior sister of the orphanage, decides to begin a small publicity blitz to bring the older children in the orphanage to the attention of the good citizens of New York in hopes of stimulating interest in adoption. She decides to focus first on the lovely, attractive, and obedient girls, and selects Brigid O’Hanlon as the first girl to be presented to the public in a series of birthday announcements. The announcements are set to come out on the first Wednesday in June 2020—coincidence intended—and her smiling image is posted in churches, on two billboards, and in a special interest section donated by the New York Times.

Brigid O’Hanlon’s angelic face becomes the poster image for teenagers needing to be adopted, and for a short time, hers is the most well-known face in the city. Capitalizing on Brigid’s popularity, Sister Ophelia announces a birthday celebration to be held at the orphanage on that Wednesday. The public is invited; the girls are decked out in brand new modest dresses; and the orphanage undergoes a spring cleaning like never before.

Chapter Two

May 11, 2020, midevening

Detective Sergeant Mary Margaret MacLeese and Detective First Grade Martin Redworth are promoted to their present ranks after their stellar work in the Decklin Marcus murder case, which brought down a Cosa Nostra/al-Qaeda/Russian Mafia/US banking criminal conspiracy that saved hundreds of lives, trillions of dollars, and proved that Decklin’s socialite mother was part of the murder conspiracy. Their reward—besides the rank promotion—is to be given a plum assignment to the new NYPD elite Organized Crime Human Trafficking Unit. To celebrate their assignments, McGee & Associates Investigations hosts a black-tie dinner and fund-raiser in their honor. McGee and his partners earned enough money in their most recent major success—The Only True Church of Christ Crime Syndicate Murder Case—to become financially independent and to enjoy the luxury of pursuing only cases they feel personally passionate about. The organized crime networks of human trafficking have become that passion, and they are more than happy to work with the NYPD to halt the heinous industry—especially where it involves children.

McGee’s full name is Joseph Patrick Aloysius Michael John McGee—unique as that would seem to twenty-first-century Americans. That moniker was a gift from his religiously and Irishly eccentric mother who was more Irish than the Fenians and more Catholic than the pope. She was very young when McGee was born, and could not make up her mind what to call her firstborn, so she used all the names from some Irish ditty. Mostly in his youth, while she was still living, Athracht Baga Gaudentia Tóibín McGee—whose Christian names were all those of early Irish Catholic saints—called him Joseph Patrick. Having the highly unusual identity as the boy with five first names, McGee learned to fight in the first grade and earned a crooked nose and the right to be known only as McGee to everyone but his mother thereafter.

McGee is a private investigator who came by his profession in an unlikely way. Most PIs are former cops who either became unfit for further NYPD service or retired with a nice letter, a nice plaque, and a meager pension, and chose being a PI over being a security guard. McGee, on the other hand, knew what he wanted to be from his mid-teens on. He got a degree in criminology at CUNY—graduating with honors after three years—and a law degree from Columbia. His first job was as a CSI for NYPD. That lasted three years, and he quit because the pay was too low and the promotions too slow. He then worked as a criminalist for the FBI specializing in ballistics and then banking fraud for a total of five years. He quit the FBI on reasonably good terms and maintained firm friendships with agent friends despite no longer being able to stomach the bureaucracy. PI work is not all that lucrative for most people, probably because they are just not suited for high-end work. McGee’s firm—McGee & Associates Investigations—does its share of nasty divorce dirt digging and embezzlement work, but their real money comes from surveillance in corporate espionage cases, forensic accountancy, and in-depth investigations for the defense in highprofile criminal cases—usually murders. Since the Only True Church of Christ fraud, embezzlement, and murder case, the firm has been able to pick and choose from hundreds of cases to pursue only those of real interest and importance.

The office of McGee & Associates Investigations in midtown Manhattan is clean and presentable with chrome and glass fixtures and no hand-painted signs by the proprietor—another set of differences between McGee’s and the lower class of PIs whom the real cops refer to as bottom feeders. Especially since the huge True Church case, McGee & Associates do not advertise on TV or on billboards. Their clients are largely rich—but sometimes just compelling—have serious issues with opponents, and often have important secrets to keep. The firm’s policy has always been to provide the truth. The clients who pay the bills are informed up front that McGee’s will not lie for them in or out of court, and the firm will give them all of what they discover and let them be the judge of how to use the information. They have never taken bribes; anyone who does such a thing will be kicking rocks down the road half a minute after McGee learns that he or she does. Sometimes the clients balk at such pristine morality, but it has paid off over the two decades the eminent firm has been in business.

McGee has two partners. Caitlin O’Brian has been with him for nearly two years. Her former occupation was as one of New York’s finest—a homicide detective in the Central Investigation and Resource Division, Homicide Analysis Unit—who ran afoul of her precinct captain. It seems that there was a disagreement about who had the right to do what with which and to whom, and