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

Clair bit at her lower lip. “The ME will have to get a positive ID.”

“Who found her?”

Clair pointed to a patrol car at the far perimeter. “A little boy and his father — the kid’s twelve.” She glanced at the notes on her phone. “Scott Watts. He came out here with his father to see if the lagoons had frozen over enough for some skating lessons. Father’s name is Brian. Said his son brushed away the snow and saw part of her arm. The father told his son to stand back and cleared away a little more on his own — enough to confirm it was a person — then he called 911. That was about an hour ago. The call came in at seven twenty-nine. I stowed them in a patrol car, in case you wanted to speak to them.”

Porter scraped at the ice with his pointer finger, then glanced along the shoreline. Two CSI officers stood off to their left, eyeing the three of them warily. “Which one of you cleared this?” he asked.

The younger of the two, a woman who looked to be about thirty, with short blond hair, glasses, and a thick pink coat, raised her hand. “I did, sir.”

Her partner shuffled his feet. He looked to be about five years her senior. “I supervised. Why?”

“Nash? Hand me that?” He pointed toward a brush with long, white bristles sitting on top of one of the CSI officers’ kits.

Porter motioned for the two officers to come over. “It’s okay, I don’t usually bite.”

Back in November, Porter returned early from a leave of absence forced on him when his wife was killed during the robbery of a local convenience store. He had wanted to keep working, mainly because the work distracted him, kept his mind off what happened.

The days following her death, when he locked himself in their apartment, those were by far the worst. Reminders were everywhere.

Her face watched him from pictures on nearly every shelf. Her scent was in the air — for the first week, he couldn’t sleep unless he spread some of her clothes on the bed. He sat in that apartment and thought of nothing but what he would do to the guy who killed her, thoughts he didn’t want in his head.

Ultimately, the Four Monkey Killer had gotten him out of that apartment.

It was also 4MK who exacted revenge on the man who killed Porter’s wife. 4MK was the reason people like these two CSI officers acted odd around him. Not exactly intimidation, more like awe.

He was the cop who had let 4MK into the investigation under the guise of CSI. He was the cop 4MK stabbed in his own home. He was the cop who caught the serial killer and let him go.

Four months later, and they all talked about it, just not to him.

The two officers walked over.

The woman crouched down beside him.

Porter used the brush to clear away the snow nearest the shoreline and along the outer edges they’d previously cleared. When he expanded the circle by another two feet, he set the brush down and ran his palm over the ice, starting at the center and slowly moving out toward the edge. He stopped about four inches from the snow. “There. Feel that.”

The younger investigator removed her glove and hesitantly followed his lead, her fingertips brushing the ice.

She stopped about an inch from his palm.

“Do you feel that?”

She nodded. “There’s a small dip. Not much, but it’s there.”

“Follow it around. Mark it with this.” He handed her a Sharpie.

A minute later she had drawn a neat square over the body, with two smaller squares approximately four inches wide jutting out on each side.

“Guess that answers that,” Porter said.

Nash frowned. “What are we looking at?”

Porter stood, helping the woman to her feet. “What’s your name?”

“CSI Lindsy Rolfes, sir.”

“CSI Rolfes, can you explain what this means?”

She thought about it for a second, her eyes darting from Porter to the ice, then back again. Then she understood. “The lagoon was frozen, and someone cut the ice, probably with a cordless chainsaw, then put her in the water. If she’d fallen in, there’d be a jagged break, not a square like this. But this doesn’t make sense . . .”

“What?”

She frowned, reached into her kit, took out a cordless drill, attached a one-inch bit, and made two holes, one outside her line, the other near the body. With a ruler, she then measured the depth of both from the top to the water. “I don’t get it — she’s beneath the freeze line.”

“I don’t follow,” Clair said.

“He replaced the water,” Porter said.

Rolfes nodded. “Yeah, but why? He could have cut a hole and pushed her body under the existing ice, then let the hole freeze up naturally. That would have been much faster and easier. She would have disappeared, maybe for good.”

Clair sighed. “Can you explain for those of us who didn’t take Ice-hole 101?”

Porter motioned for the ruler, and Rolfes handed it to him. “The ice here is at least four inches thick. You can see the water line here.” He pointed at the mark on the ruler. “If you cut out a square of this ice and removed it, there would be a four-inch ledge from the top of the ice to the water. Then let’s say you put the girl’s body in the hole, she sinks, and you want to make the hole disappear. There’s only one way to do that. You’d have to wait for the water to freeze around her, at least a thin layer, then fill the hole with more water to the top of the ice, level it off.”

“It would take at least two hours to freeze,” Rolfes said. “Maybe a little less, with the temperatures we’ve had lately.”

Porter was nodding. “He kept adding water until this fresh ice was at the same height as the surrounding ice. Our unsub is patient. This was very time consuming.” He turned to the CSI supervisor. “We’ll need this ice. Everything on top of her, and at least a few inches surrounding this square. There’s a good chance some trace got in with the water while it froze. Our unsub hovered here for a long time.”

The supervisor looked like he was about to argue, then nodded reluctantly. He knew Porter was right.

Porter’s gaze went back to the overgrown mess of trees across the water. “What I don’t understand is why whoever did this didn’t dump her over there. Dragging a body out here in the open, taking the time to cut the ice, fill it, wait for it to freeze . . . that’s a lot of risk. The unsub could have carried her across the bridge and left her anywhere over there, and she’d go undiscovered until spring when they started work. Instead, he spends hours to stage her in the water near a high-traffic area. Risks getting caught. Why? To create the illusion that she was here much longer than she really had been? He had to know we’d figure that out.”

“Dead bodies don’t float,” Nash pointed out. “At least, not for a few days. Look at her. She’s perfectly preserved. I’m still not sure why she’s floating.”

Porter ran his finger along the edge of the square, stopping at one of the two smaller squares on the side. He lowered his face to the ice, looking down at her from the side. “I’ll be damned.”

“What?” Rolfes leaned in.

Porter ran his hand over the ice, above the girl’s shoulders. When he found what he was looking for, he placed Rolfes’s hand over it. She looked at him, her eyes growing as her fingers dug slightly into the ice. She reached for the same spot on the other side. “He kept her from sinking by placing something over this hole, probably a length of two-by-four based on these marks, then ran a string or thin rope around her body at the shoulders, and secured it to the board while the replacement water froze. When he was done, he cut the string. You can still feel the nubs here in the ice. There’s enough left to keep her near the surface. You can see a thin rope if you look through the ice at the right angle.”