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

Nash smirked. “The girl from your dream. You were moaning.”

Six eyeballs .

Porter, still disoriented, realized he was in the passenger seat of Nash’s Chevy, an old ’72 Nova he’d picked up two months back when his prized Ford Fiesta sputtered and died on the 290 at three in the morning, forcing him to call headquarters for a ride when he couldn’t reach Porter.

Porter looked out the window. It was coated in a thin film of road grime and ice. “Where are we?”

“We’re on Hayes, coming up on the park,” he replied, flipping on his blinker. “Maybe you should sit this one out.”

Porter shook his head. “I’m all right.”

Nash made the left into Jackson Park and followed the recently plowed access road, the red and blue flashing lights bouncing off the dark trees around them. “It’s been four months, Sam. If you’re still having trouble sleeping, you should talk to someone. Doesn’t have to be me or Clair, just . . . someone.”

“I’m all right,” Porter repeated.

They passed a baseball field on the right, forgotten for the winter, and continued deeper into the bare trees. Up ahead there were more lights — a half dozen cars, maybe more. Four uniform patrol vehicles, an ambulance, a fire department van. Large floodlights lined the edge of the lagoon, and propane heaters littered an area roped in by yellow crime scene tape.

Nash pulled to a stop behind the van, dropped the car into Park, and killed the engine. It sputtered twice and sounded like it was gearing up for a stellar backfire before finally going silent. Porter noted several officers staring in their direction as they climbed out of the car into the icy winter air.

“We could have driven my car,” Porter told Nash, his boots crunching in the newly fallen snow.

Porter owned a 2011 Dodge Charger.

Most of their coworkers referred to the vehicle as Porter’s “midlife crisis car”— it had replaced a Toyota Camry two years back on his fiftieth birthday. Porter’s late wife, Heather, bought the sports car for him as a surprise after their Toyota was vandalized and left for dead in one of the less “police-friendly” parts of town on the South Side. Porter was first to admit sitting behind the wheel shaved a few years off his subconscious age, but mostly the car just made him smile.

Heather had baked the key into his birthday cake, and he almost chipped a tooth when he found it.

She led him down the steps and out in front of their apartment blindfolded, then sang “Happy Birthday” to him in a voice that had little chance of getting her on American Idol .

Porter thought of her every time he climbed in, but it seemed fewer and fewer things reminded him of her these days, her face gradually becoming a little more fuzzy in his mind.

“Your car is part of the problem. We always drive your car, and Connie over there spends her days rotting in my driveway. If I drive her, I’m reminded of the fact that I want to restore her. If I’m reminded of the fact that I want to restore her, I might actually get out to the garage and work on it.”

“Connie?”

“Cars should have a name.”

“No, they shouldn’t. Cars shouldn’t have names, and you have no idea how to restore her . . . it . . . whatever. I think you got that beater home, and the first time you picked up a wrench you realized you wouldn’t be done in forty-three minutes like those guys on Overhaulin’ ,” Porter said.

“That show is bullshit. They should tell you how long it really takes.”

“Could be worse. At least you didn’t get hooked on HGTV and convince yourself you can flip a house in your spare time.”

“This is true. Although, they knock those out in twenty-two minutes for a much bigger return on investment,” Nash replied. “If I did a house or two, I could pay someone to restore the car. Hey, there’s Clair —”

They crossed under the yellow crime scene tape and made their way toward the shore of the lagoon. Clair was standing next to one of the heaters, her cell phone pressed to her ear. When she saw them, she nodded toward the shoreline, covered the microphone, and said, “We think that’s Ella Reynolds,” before returning to her call.

Porter’s heart sank.

Ella Reynolds was a fifteen-year-old girl who had gone missing after school near Logan Square three weeks earlier. She was last seen getting off her bus about two blocks from her home. Her parents wasted no time reporting her missing, and the Amber Alerts were running within an hour of her disappearance. Little good they did. The police hadn’t received a single worthwhile tip.

Nash started toward the water’s edge, and Porter followed.

The lagoon was frozen.

Four orange cones lined the ice offshore, yellow tape running between them, creating a rectangle. The snow had been swept away.

Porter tentatively stepped out onto the ice, listening for the telltale crackle beneath his feet. No matter how many boot tracks waffled the lagoon’s frozen surface, it always made him nervous when they were his boots.

As Porter edged closer, the girl came into view. The ice was clear as glass.

She stared up through it with blank eyes.

Her skin was horribly pale, with a blue tint except around those eyes. There, her skin was a dark purple. Her lips were parted as if she were about to say something, words that would never come.

Porter knelt to get a better look.

She wore a red coat, black jeans, a white knit cap with matching gloves, and what looked like pink tennis shoes. Her arms were loose at her sides, and her legs curved beneath her, disappearing into the dark water. Water normally bloated bodies, but at these temperatures the cold tended to preserve them. Porter preferred bloated. When they appeared less human, he found it easier to process what he was looking at — he was less emotional.

This girl looked like somebody’s baby, helpless and alone, sleeping under a blanket of glass.

Nash stood behind him, his eyes scanning the trees across the water. “They held the World’s Fair out here in 1893. There used to be a Japanese garden across the lagoon, that whole wooded area over there. My father used to bring me up here when I was a kid. He said it went to shit during World War II. I think I read somewhere they got the funding to restore it in the spring. See all the marked trees? They’re coming down.”

Porter followed his partner’s gaze. The lagoon split into two branches — east and west — enclosing a small island. Many of the trees on Wooded Island had pink ribbons tied around them. A couple of benches littered the opposite shore, covered in a thin layer of white. “When do you suppose this freezes?”

Nash thought about this for a second. “Maybe late December, early January. Why?”

“If this is Ella Reynolds, how’d she get under the ice? She disappeared three weeks ago. It would have been frozen solid at that point.”

Nash loaded a recent photo of Ella Reynolds on his phone and showed it to Porter.“Looks like her, but maybe it’s just a coincidence — some other girl who fell through back when it was still soft.”

“Looks just like her, though.”

Clair came up beside them. She blew into her hands and rubbed them together. “That was Sophie Rodriguez with Missing Children — I sent her a picture, and she swears this is Ella Reynolds, but the clothes aren’t a match. She says Ella was wearing a black coat when she disappeared. Three corroborating witnesses put her in a black coat on the bus, not red. She called the girl’s mother — she said her daughter doesn’t own a red coat, white hat, or white gloves.”

“So either this is an entirely different girl, or somebody changed her clothes,” Porter said. “We’re a good fifteen miles from where Ella disappeared.”