J.D. Barker - The Fourth Monkey - A twisted thriller you won’t be able to put down

The room wasn’t very large, thirty by twenty-five or so. Aside from Porter’s, there were five metal desks older than most of the Metro staff arranged haphazardly around the space. In the far corner stood an old wooden conference table Porter had found in a storage room down the hall. The surface was scratched and nicked; the dull maple finish was covered with tiny rings from the hundreds of glasses, mugs, and cans that had sat upon it over the years. There was a large brown stain on it that Nash swore resembled Jesus (Porter thought it only looked like coffee). They had given up trying to scrub the discoloration away a long time ago.

Behind the conference table stood three whiteboards. The first two held pictures of 4MK’s victims and the various crime scenes; the third was currently blank. The group tended to use the last one primarily for brainstorming sessions.

Nash walked in and handed him a cup of coffee. “Watson hit Starbucks. I told him to meet us down here after he checks in with the lieutenant upstairs. The others are on their way too. What’s going through that head of yours? I smell smoke.”

“Five years, Nash. I was beginning to think we’d never see an end to this.”

“There’s at least one more out there. We need to find her.”

Porter nodded. “Yeah, I know. And we will. We’ll bring her home.” He had said the same thing with Jodi Blumington just six months earlier, and they didn’t find her in time. He couldn’t face another family, not again, not ever.

“Well, there you are!” Clair Norton hollered from the doorway.

Porter and Nash turned from the whiteboards.

“This place has been like a morgue without you, Sammy. Give me some sugar!” She crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him. “If you need anything at all, you call me, okay? I want you to promise me,” she whispered at his ear. “I’m there for you, twenty-four/seven.”

Any attempt at affection made Porter nervous. He patted her on the back and drew away. He imagined he appeared as uncomfortable as a priest returning the hug of an altar boy with the eyes of the congregation upon him. “I appreciate that, Clair. Thanks for holding down the fort.”

Clair Norton had been on the force for nearly fifteen years. She became Chicago Metro’s youngest black female detective after only three years on patrol, when she helped break up one of the largest narcotics rings in the city’s history — every person involved was under eighteen. Twenty-four students in total, primarily from Cooley High, although the crimes spread across six high schools. They operated completely on school property, which made things difficult, and meant the young-looking Clair had to go undercover as a student.

The event had earned her the nickname Jump Street, after the old Fox TV show — nobody on the task force dared call her that to her face.

Clair shook her head. “Hell, you should be thanking me for babysitting your partner over there. He’s as dumb as a box of rocks. I bet if you locked him in a room, you’d come back an hour later to find him dead on the floor with his tongue stuck in an electrical outlet.”

“I’m standing right here,” Nash said. “I can hear you.”

“I know.” She turned and plucked the coffee from his hand. “Thank you, baby doll.”

Edwin Klozowski, “Kloz” to most, strolled in behind her, an overflowing briefcase in one hand and the remains of a Little Debbie chocolate cupcake in the other. “So, we’re finally getting the band back together? It’s about time. If I had to spend one more minute down in Central IT dissecting the hard drive of another porn lover gone rogue, I might have considered going back to video game design. How you doing, Sammy?” He reached out and smacked Porter’s shoulder.

“Hey, Kloz.”

“Good to see you back.” He dropped his briefcase on one of the empty desks and shoved the rest of the cupcake into his mouth.

Porter spied Watson standing at the door and motioned for him to come inside. “Kloz, Clair, this is Paul Watson. He’s on loan from CSI. He’s going to be helping us out. Has anyone seen Hosman?”

Clair nodded. “I talked to him about twenty minutes ago. He’s running Talbot’s finances but hasn’t come up with anything yet. Said he’ll get in touch with you as soon as he finds something.”

Porter nodded. “All right, let’s get started.”

They crossed the room and settled at the conference table. The Four Monkey Killer’s victims stared down at them from the whiteboards. “Nash, where’s that picture of Emory?”

Nash dug the photo out of his pocket and handed it to him. Porter taped it onto the board at the far right. “I’m going to run through this from the beginning. It’s old news for most of you, but Watson hasn’t heard it before and maybe we’ll pick something up from the refresher.” He pointed to the picture in the top left corner. “Calli Tremell. Twenty years old, taken March 15, 2009. This was his first victim —”

“That we know of,” Clair interjected.

“She’s the first victim in his pattern as 4MK, but the evidence suggests he’s sophisticated and had most likely killed before,” Klozowski said. “Nobody comes out of the box killing like him. They build up, developing methods and technique over time.”

Porter went on. “Her parents reported her missing that Tuesday, and they received her ear in the mail on Thursday. Her eyes followed on Saturday, and her tongue arrived on Tuesday. All were packaged in small white boxes tied with black strings, handwritten shipping labels, and zero prints. He’s always been careful.”

“Suggesting she wasn’t really his first,” Klozowski reiterated.

“Three days after the last box arrived, a jogger found her body in Almond Park. She had been propped up on a bench with a cardboard sign glued to her hands, which read DO NO EVIL. We had picked up on his MO when her eyes arrived, but that sign confirmed our theory.”

Watson raised his hand.

Nash rolled his eyes. “This isn’t third grade, Doc. Feel free to speak up.”

“Doc?” Klozowski repeated. “Oh, I get it.”

“Didn’t I read somewhere that was how he picked his victims? ‘Do no evil’?” Watson asked.

Porter nodded. “With his second victim, Elle Borton, we caught that. Initially we thought the victims themselves had done something 4MK deemed wrong, and that was why he went after them, but with Elle we learned his focus wasn’t on the victims at all but on their families. Elle Borton disappeared on April 2, 2010, nearly a year after his first victim. She was twenty-three. Her case was handed to us when her parents received her ear in the mail two days later. When her body was found a little over a week after that, she was holding a tax return in her grandmother’s name covering tax year 2008. We dug a little bit and discovered that she actually died in 2005. Her father had been filing false returns for the past three years. We brought Matt Hosman in from Financial Crimes at that point, and he discovered that the scam went much deeper. Elle’s father had filed returns on more than a dozen people, all deceased. They were residents of the nursing home he managed.”

“How could 4MK possibly know that?” Watson asked.

Porter shrugged. “Not sure. But the new evidence prompted us to go back and look at Calli Tremell’s family.”

“The first victim.”

“Turns out her mother was laundering money from the bank where she worked, upward of three million dollars over the previous ten years,” Porter said.

Watson frowned. “Again, how could 4MK know what she was doing? Maybe that’s the link. Figure out who has access to this information, and you find 4MK’s identity.”

Klozowski snorted. “Yeah, ’cause it’s that easy.” He stood up and walked to the board. “Melissa Lumax, victim number three. Her father was selling kiddie porn. Susan Devoro’s father swapped fake diamonds for the real ones at his own jewelry store. Barbara McInley’s sister hit and killed a pedestrian six years before Barbara went missing. Nobody connected the sister to the crime until 4MK. Allison Crammer’s brother ran a sweatshop full of illegals down in Florida. Then there’s Jodi Blumington, his most recent victim —”