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

He would kill to have her back.

Even if only for five minutes, to have her back, to hold her, to ask her what to do next.

“I love you, Button,” he said quietly.

With a deep sigh, Porter stood up, gathered his trash, and dumped everything into the overflowing can at the door. He stepped out into the icy day, welcoming the numb of it.

Then he wandered.

Twenty minutes later Porter found himself standing in the lobby of Flair Tower on West Erie, a small puddle forming at his feet. He hadn’t planned on coming here, and as he pushed through the doors he considered turning right back around, but instead he found himself standing still, his eyes looking out across the lobby but not really taking anything in, dazed.

“Detective?”

Porter hadn’t heard her walk up. He hadn’t expected her to walk up, a building this size, but there she was, standing in front of him.

“Hello, Emory.”

The last time he had seen her was at the hospital shortly after she was rescued from 4MK. Bishop had placed her at the bottom of an elevator shaft in that building on Belmont, used her as bait to lure Porter in. She had been malnourished, gaunt, her skin pale. Her right wrist had been badly damaged by the handcuffs he used to restrain her, and Bishop had removed Emory’s left ear, yet she still managed to smile that day. Her hair was longer now, her face fuller, color in her cheeks.

“Detective, are you okay?”

“I’m . . . I’m sorry. I’m not really sure why I’m here. I meant to come and see you, you know, after, but things have been so hectic, the time got away from me,” he said.

“Let’s sit.” She took his hand and led him to some couches placed in front of a fireplace in the corner of the lobby. A log crackled, wrapped in thick flames, the heat reaching out and lapping at the air.

Porter tugged off his gloves, his fingers nervously twitching together. “I probably shouldn’t be here.”

Emory smiled. “That’s silly — it’s good to see you. I meant to stop by the station a dozen times but couldn’t bring myself to go. Silly. I guess it’s hard to find the words after something like that. The whole thing feels like a bad nightmare that happened to someone else. Like a movie I watched a few months ago and left at the theater. I can’t talk to my friends, they don’t understand. Ms. Burrow, either. She tried to coax the story out of me a few times, but I couldn’t . . . it all made her very uncomfortable. She wanted me to talk for my own sake, not because she wanted the details, and I didn’t see the point in burdening her with those details. It was my nightmare. There’s no reason for her to suffer too, have those thoughts in her head.”

“Did you see a shrink?”

Emory laughed and shook her head. “They sure wanted to see me. I don’t know how many dozens of them reached out. I tried to talk to one, but I couldn’t stop thinking she planned to write a book about whatever I told her, and the idea of walking past a book at the store, knowing this ordeal was carved in stone for others to read, the idea of all that shut me right up. I couldn’t tell her anything.”

“I don’t think they’re allowed to do that. She would have lost her license.”

“I suppose.”

Emory’s hands rested in her lap. Porter could still see a faint scar on her right wrist, but for the most part, the surgeons had done a wonderful job repairing the damage. On her left wrist, a small figure-eight tattoo — Bishop gave her that too.

She raised her right wrist and pulled back the sleeve. “They did a good job, right?”

“If I didn’t know what happened, I’d never guess. It’s barely noticeable.”

“I’m going back in next May. The doctor says he can wipe it out completely, but we need to give it a chance to heal up first,” she told him, rotating the wrist. “I still don’t have full motion, but it seems like it’s coming back.”

Porter’s eyes inadvertently went to her left ear, hidden behind her long chestnut hair. He caught himself, almost looked away, then figured he wasn’t fooling anybody. “How’s the ear?”

A wide grin spread across her face. “Wanna see?”

Porter couldn’t help but smile back. He nodded. “Is it gross?”

“You tell me?” Emory pulled her hair back, revealing a perfectly natural-looking ear. “Pretty cool, huh?”

Porter leaned in closer. Aside from a small scar visible at the base where doctors had attached the extremity, he couldn’t tell it wasn’t her original ear. “That’s amazing.”

Emory rolled up the sleeve of her right arm and showed him a small scar below her elbow. “They grew it here, using cartilage from my ribs. It only took a few months. The surgery was about six weeks ago. The doctor said Bishop removed mine with near surgical precision, so they had no trouble attaching the new one. Usually when they do this, the ear is torn off in some kind of accident and they have to try and piece the mess back together again. I guess I got lucky.”

“I think you’re a very strong girl.”

“You wanna know the best part?”

“What’s that?”

She turned her head and showed him her other ear. “Notice something different between the two?”

It took Porter a minute, and then it came to him. “Your right ear is pierced and your left one isn’t?”

“Yep.” She beamed. “The left was , but not anymore. I think I’m gonna leave it that way.” She held up her left wrist, showed him the small infinity tattoo. “I’m on the fence about keeping this. I think a small reminder of what happened isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s good to remember the bad. It makes other things seem not so terrible.”

“You are one remarkable, inspiring girl.”

She let her hair fall back. “Why, thank you, Detective.”

The two went quiet for a minute, not an awkward silence, but something a little more comfortable. Porter found himself watching the flames as they wrapped around the logs in the fireplace, the wood slowly growing red and white. The crackle they produced was soothing, relaxing. This girl had lost her mother as a child, now her father, and yet she smiled. Porter wanted desperately to smile. He wanted to smile and mean it.

As if reading his mind, Emory leaned in closer. “He wasn’t much of a father to me. I barely knew him. If not for the money, the way my mom drafted her will, I’m not so sure he would have wanted me around at all.”

“He was your father. I’m sure he cared for you. He just had trouble showing it.”

“He was a horrible man,” she said quietly. “Not to me but to so many other people.”

Porter considered telling her something to the contrary, try to build him up, thought better of it. She was a big girl. She deserved the truth. “It’s important to remember he’s not you. He never was.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, and she fought them back. “That’s not what the press says. They say it’s worse now than ever. All his assets going to a kid, leaving nobody to run the business. Building inspectors shut down one of his skyscrapers last month, and the press blamed me. Nearly four thousand lost jobs.”

Porter knew the building. Talbot had used substandard concrete in the construction. When the shortcut was discovered, he’d tried to retrofit the building (and most likely pay off inspectors), but the project was shut down anyway. The building cost a little over $700 million dollars, and it was set for implosion. Better to end it now, Porter supposed, than let construction complete and the thing topple over down the road.“They’re trying to sell papers. How could that be your fault?”

“There’s a lot of fighting going on at Talbot Enterprises,” Emory explained. “Three of my father’s senior officers are contesting his will. They’re saying he drafted it under duress, that my mother forced him to leave everything to me. With all of them making grabs for the money, key decisions aren’t happening, and things are falling apart. I’m not old enough to assume control, so Patricia Talbot stepped in as interim CEO until somebody can take over full-time.” Emory let out a sigh. “She’s suing me directly. She claims my father didn’t have the right to leave all that he did to me, that everything rightfully belongs to her. Then there’s Carnegie . . .”