J.D. Barker - The Fifth to Die - A gripping, page-turner of a crime thriller

Agent Diener snickered. “Who cares? He’s not Philip Marlowe. Gut instincts only sub for evidence in old black-and-white movies and pulp books.”

“Off how?” Poole repeated.

Porter ran his hand through his hair. “She’s the only blonde. Eight girls taken, and she’s the only blonde.”

“You’re kidding with this, right?” SAIC Hurless said.

Poole stepped closer. “He took the loved ones of the true criminals in his eyes. The McInleys only had blond children. He didn’t have a choice.”

Porter shrugged. “Maybe, but the crime doesn’t fit, either. Barbara McInley’s sister hit and killed a pedestrian. It was an accident. All the other crimes, everyone else he decided to punish, did something premeditated.”

Poole thought about this. “That’s still thin.”

“I never said I had something solid. Just a gut instinct, a hunch. Like your buddy said — just my very own Philip Marlowe moment, nothing more,” Porter told him. “If it played out, I would have told you.”

The tech returned holding the McInley file and handed it to SAIC Hurless. He waved it at Porter. “What did you find in here? Anything to back this up?”

“I didn’t get a chance to look,” Porter said. “It’s been a busy morning.”

SAIC Hurless stared at him for nearly a minute, neither man saying a word, then turned back to the two techs and the other federal agents. He waved his arm at the wall. “I want photos of all this, then bag and tag everything. Bring it all back. Turn over every inch of this place. You find anything at all having to do with this case, I want to know about it.”

He turned back to Porter and stood inches from his face. “I find you’re holding out, if this guy reached out to you and you’re holding back, if you know anything at all you’re not telling me, I will not hesitate to lock you up. I don’t give a shit what kind of seniority you may have or what your track record is, you’re nothing but a fucking thief to me, a thief and a hack interfering with a federal investigation. Now’s your chance to come clean, if there’s anything at all you haven’t told me; now or never. I hear about it in an hour, and you’re done. Do you understand me?”

“There’s nothing else.”

The man let out a breath.

Porter’s eyes stayed on him.

When SAIC Hurless finally turned away and crossed the room to root around in Porter’s closet, Porter found himself looking at the photo of Heather on his dresser, her bright, reassuring smile, and he had never felt so alone.

One hour and four file boxes later, they were finished.

Porter’s wall was once again bare, save for the tiny holes left by the tacks and the paint damaged by roughly removed tape. Agent Diener had the laptop under his arm and was slowly circling the room on the off chance something was missed. In the hallway Porter heard SAIC Hurless mumbling something to Dalton, but he couldn’t make out the words.

On his way out, Poole prepared to say something but then changed his mind. Porter watched him slip into the elevator, with the techs behind him, lugging the last of the boxes.

“Diener?” Hurless shouted out. “Let’s go.”

Agent Diener pushed past Porter and went to the elevator, trailing the scent of an aftershave forgotten since 1992.

The doors opened. Hurless said one last thing to Dalton and ducked inside, his eyes fixed on Porter as the doors creaked shut.

Dalton came back into the apartment with Nash behind him. “I really don’t know what the hell you were thinking, Sam. This is a clusterfuck.”

“It’s not like he was hiding evidence,” Nash pointed out.

Dalton went red. “You keep your mouth shut. I seriously doubt all this was going on under your nose and you didn’t know.”

Porter said, “He had no idea. This was all me.”

Dalton spun back to him. “Not only have you compromised the 4MK investigation, now you’re impacting our efforts to find this new psycho snatching girls. I can’t afford to take you offline right now.”

“Then don’t.”

“Hurless took it to his assistant director, and the AD called our chief. This is completely out of my hands.” The captain’s eyes fell to the floor. “I’m relieving you of duty, one week. You’ve got to get this shit out of your head. I find out you didn’t drop it, and this will play out much worse. They agreed not to charge you, but the suspension is nonnegotiable.”

“Captain, this is just a pissing contest. You can’t let politics dictate your actions. Catching this guy has to be our priority, nobody knows more —”

Dalton held out his hand. “Gun and badge.”

Porter knew better than to argue. He handed over his Glock and identification.

Dalton dropped both into his jacket pocket, turned, and left the apartment. He pressed the elevator call button.

“This new guy is nasty, Captain. He’s escalating fast,” Porter said.

Without turning, Dalton replied, “Nash and Clair will handle it.

I don’t want to hear anything from you for the next seven days. I do, and you’ll get another seven. Do we understand each other?”

Porter said nothing.

“Do we understand each other?” the captain repeated.

“Yes,” Porter said.

The elevator arrived and Dalton stepped inside, his hand holding the door open. “Nash, you’re with me.”

Nash looked to Porter but said nothing. Porter offered a slight nod.

Nash stepped inside the car. The doors closed, and Porter found himself standing in the middle of his apartment, his heart pounding in his chest, the silence screaming.

19

Lili

Day 2 • 11:36 a.m.

Lili huddled in the corner of her cage, the thick blanket wrapped around her. She had gotten dressed, but she couldn’t get warm. She couldn’t stop shivering, even when standing next to the heater vent. She couldn’t stop looking at the dark staircase in the corner of the basement or listening to the creak of old floorboards as the man moved around upstairs.

A spider crept across the chainlink a few inches from her foot, and she pulled away, pushing deeper into the corner.

With each footfall upstairs, a tiny bit of dust rained down from the rafters, a thin fog in the gloomy light. Lili tried to pretend this was snow and she was looking out a window. She tried to pretend she was safely back in her room at home, but the illusion broke whenever the man cried out.

He screamed, a lot.

His words were incoherent, a muffled blast of nonsense, and they were followed sometimes by crying, other times by a pain-filled wail. But they broke the relative silence of the home and lingered on the air, somehow living in those tiny bursts of dust drifting down.

Nothing preceded the cries.

Lili’s father once hit his index finger with a hammer while trying to help her build a birdhouse for school, and he let out a similar wail but it hadn’t lingered — like he caught himself about the scream, realized his daughter was watching, and bit his tongue. The scream came to an abrupt halt, dying somewhere in his throat as his face flushed with red.

The screams from the man upstairs did not drop off so suddenly. He would be silent for a really long time, no movement or noise at all. Then his voice would fill the house with the sharpness of a blade, then linger as they morphed into sobs.

Lili didn’t know what brought on his screams. She didn’t want to know. She preferred he keep whatever it was upstairs.

He had come down only once in the past hour. He emptied the bucket he had left for her waste, washing it in the utility tub before returning it to her cage. He then eyed the still-full glass of milk with the fly floating on top, picked it up, and carried it back up the stairs, all without uttering a word. He looked sickly pale, though. When Lili met his gaze, she couldn’t help but turn away, her eyes unwilling to look upon him — somehow, that had caused him to stay a little bit longer. If she wasn’t looking at him, he felt more comfortable looking at her, staring even. Who knew what thoughts ran through his head.