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

“He wanted her to be found?” Clair said.

“He wanted to make an impact if she was found,” Porter replied. “He went through a lot of trouble to stage this so it appeared like she froze beneath the lake’s surface months ago, even though she’s only been here for a few days at best, possibly less. We need to figure out why.”

“This guy is playing with us,” CSI Rolfes said. “Twisting the crime scene to fit some kind of narrative.”

Self-preservation and fear are two of the strongest instincts of the human condition. Porter wasn’t sure he wanted to meet the man who possessed neither. “Get her out of there,” he finally said.

2

Porter

Day 1 • 11:24 p.m.

“You want me to come up?”

They were parked in front of Porter’s building on Wabash. Nash tapped at the gas to keep Connie from stalling. The night had grown bitterly cold.

Porter shook his head. “Go home and get some rest. We’ll hit the ground running in the morning.”

Using chainsaws, CSI had cut the ice around the girl as one large square, then carefully broke the ice away in manageable pieces, which were loaded into buckets and transported back to the crime lab for analysis. The girl’s body went to the morgue for identification. Porter put a call in to Tom Eisley, and the man agreed to go in early and contact him as soon as they made a positive identification. Uniformed patrol officers were still searching the park when Porter and Nash left, but at that point they had not found anything. Clair agreed to stay and review footage taken by the lone security camera placed at the park’s entrance. She wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for, and Porter couldn’t give her any direction other than to watch for something unusual over the previous three weeks, particularly after hours. The park itself closed at dusk, and after that, aside from a few lights in the most common areas, the grounds were dark. There were no permanent lights at the lagoon. Anyone coming or going after dark would stand out.

“About earlier, on the way to the lagoon —” Porter began.

Nash cut him off. “You don’t have to explain. It’s okay.”

Porter waved a hand in the air. “I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep. Not since Heather died. Every time I step into our apartment, the place feels so empty. I expect her to come walking in from one of the other rooms or through the front door with an armload of groceries, and she never does. I don’t want to glance over and see her side of the bed empty. I don’t want to see her toothbrush in the bathroom, but I can’t bring myself to throw it out. Same with her clothes. About a week ago I nearly boxed everything up for Goodwill. I got the first blouse into a box but had to stop. Shuffling her clothes around had filled the air with her scent, and it was almost like she was back again, if only for a little while. I know I have to move forward, but I’m not sure I can. Not yet, anyway.”

Nash reached over and squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “You will. When the time is right, you will. Nobody is rushing you. You just need to know we’re all here for you. If you need anything at all.” Nash fumbled with the steering wheel, tugging at a flap in the faux leather. “Maybe it would help to move. Find a new place, start over.”

Porter shook his head. “I can’t do that. We found this place together. It’s home.”

“Maybe a vacation, then?” Nash suggested. “You’ve got plenty of time off saved up.”

“Maybe, yeah.” Porter stared up at the face of his building.

He wouldn’t move. Not anytime soon.

The door of the Chevy squeaked as Porter tugged the handle and stepped out. “Holy balls, it’s cold.”

“Time to break out the long johns and whiskey.”

Porter knocked on the roof of the car twice. “If you put some time into this thing, it could be one sweet ride.”

Nash offered a smile. “Meet in the war room at seven?”

“Yeah, seven’s good.”

Then he was gone.

Porter watched the car disappear down the road before making his way into the small foyer of his building, carefully avoiding the piles of frozen dog poop on the steps. He passed the mailboxes and took the stairs. He didn’t do elevators anymore, not if given a choice.

Stepping into his apartment, he was assaulted by the mixed odors of a dozen take-out meals. The worst of the perpetrators, a pile of pizza boxes on the kitchen table, filled the air with stale cheese and old pepperoni.

Porter hung his coat over the back of a chair and stepped into the bedroom, flipping on the light.

The bed had been pushed to the far corner of the room, along with the two nightstands.

Hundreds of pictures and notes, Post-its, and newspaper articles filled the wall where the bed used to be. Some were connected by string. When he ran out of string, he drew lines with a black marker.

This was everything he had on 4MK, or Anson Bishop, or Paul Watson — all of them one and the same. He had details on Bishop’s past crimes, but mostly he focused on just where Bishop might have gone after his escape.

In the corner of the room, a laptop sat on the floor, the screen glowing bright. Porter lifted it up and studied the display. He used Google alerts (surprisingly simple for someone lacking the most basic computer skills) to flag every mention, every story, every sighting of Bishop, Watson, or 4MK on the Internet and drop the results into his personal e-mail account. Sometimes it would take hours, but he would sort through each message and plot out the locations mentioned on the large world map tacked to the wall at the center of all his other data. Maps too. Dozens of detailed maps, all the major cities.

Four months of data.

Thumbtacks filled the maps — red represented a sighting, blue for the location of the reporter writing the story, and yellow for the home of anyone who had gone missing or had been murdered in a way similar to 4MK’s MO. The copycats were everywhere. While many of the thumbtacks centered on Chicago, they went as far as Brazil and Moscow.

Porter picked up a yellow thumbtack and located the lagoon at Jackson Park on the Chicago map. “Ella Reynolds, missing since January 22, 2015, possibly found February 12, 2015,” he mumbled to himself. He had no reason to believe 4MK was responsible, but that tack would stay there until he was sure he was not.

His eyes were heavy with lack of sleep.

He had a brutal headache.

He sat in the middle of the floor and began sifting through all the Google alerts for today, all 159 of them.

When his phone rang two hours later, he considered ignoring the call, then thought better of it. Nobody called at one thirty in the morning without reason.

“Porter,” he said.

Why did his voice always sound louder in the middle of the night?

At first there was silence. Then: “Detective? This is Sophie Rodriguez with Missing Children. I got your number from Clair Norton.”

“What can I do for you, Ms. Rodriguez?”

More silence. “We have another missing girl. You and your partner need to get down here.”

3

Porter

Day 2 • 2:21 a.m.

Here turned out to be a graystone in Bronzeville on King Drive.

Rodriguez didn’t provide any details when she called, only said this case tied to the body of the girl found in the park earlier, and he’d want to be there.

Porter parked his Charger on the street behind Nash’s Chevy and trudged through the snowbank at the side of the road and up into the home at the corner. There was no need to knock. A uniformed officer at the door recognized him and ushered him inside. He found Nash and a woman he didn’t recognize sitting in a parlor to the left of the entrance. A man in his late forties, salt-and-pepper hair, fit, wearing a tweed sport coat and jeans, stood beside Nash. Another woman, no doubt his wife, sat on the couch with a crushed tissue in her hand.