The Fifth to Die: A gripping, page-turner of a crime thriller

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.”

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.”

“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.

The woman sitting beside her rose as Porter entered the room. “Detective Porter? I’m Sophie Rodriguez from Missing Children. Thank you for coming. I know it’s late.”

Porter shook her hand and studied the room.

Most of these graystones had been built around the turn of the twentieth century. This particular one had been painstakingly restored with original trim and fixtures. The rugs looked authentic too but had to be knockoffs, careful reproductions of the originals. Antique furniture filled the space.

The man who had been speaking to Nash offered his hand. “I’m Dr. Randal Davies, and this is my wife, Grace. Thank you so much for coming out at this hour.”

The man gestured to a chair next to the couch.

Porter declined. “It’s been a rather long night. I think I’d better stand.”

“Coffee, then?”

“Please. Black is fine.”

Dr. Davies excused himself and disappeared down the hall.

Porter glanced at Rodriguez, who had returned to her seat on the couch.

“My office received a call from Mrs. Davies shortly after midnight, when her daughter didn’t come home,” Rodriguez said.

Mrs. Davies looked up, her eyes red and swollen. “Lili works downtown at an art gallery. On Thursdays she goes straight there after school and takes an Uber home when they close at eleven. She is always home by eleven thirty. If for some reason she’s running late, she texts me — she knows her father and I worry, so she always texts me. She is a responsible young lady, and this is her first job and she knows we worry . . .” She dabbed at her eyes with the tissue. “I hadn’t heard from her by eleven forty-five, so I called her, and it went straight to voice mail. Then I called the gallery and spoke to her supervisor, Ms. Edwins. She said Lili didn’t show up for her shift. She had tried to reach her several times and got the same thing: voice mail. No rings, just voice mail. I know that means her phone is off, which is very unlike her. She never turns her phone off. She knows I worry. I called her best friend, Gabby, then —”

“What is Gabby’s last name?” Porter asked.

“Deegan. Gabrielle Deegan. I gave her contact information to your partner.” When she said this, she glanced at Rodriguez. Porter didn’t correct her.

Mrs. Davies continued. “Gabby said she hadn’t seen her all day. She wasn’t at school, and she wasn’t replying to text messages. This isn’t like Lili, you understand. She’s a straight-A student. She hasn’t missed a day of school since the fourth grade, when she had chicken pox.” Mrs. Davies paused, studying Porter’s face. “You’re the detective who chased . . . oh God, do you think 4MK took our daughter? Is that why you’re here?” Her eyes went wide and flooded with tears.

“This isn’t 4MK,” Porter assured her, although he wasn’t certain of that himself. “At this point there is no reason to assume anyone has taken your daughter.”

“She wouldn’t disappear like this.”

Porter tried to change the subject. “Where does she go to school?”

“Wilcox Academy.”

Dr. Davies returned and handed Porter a steaming cup of coffee, then stood beside his wife on the couch. “I know what you’re thinking, and like we told your partners here, Lili doesn’t have a boyfriend. She wouldn’t skip school. She most definitely wouldn’t skip work — she loves that gallery. Something is wrong. The Find My iPhone feature is activated on her phone, but it’s not coming up on our account. I called Apple, and they said her phone is offline. Our daughter would not turn off her phone.”

Nash cleared his throat. “Mrs. Davies, can you tell Detective Porter what Lili was wearing today when she was last seen?”

Mrs. Davies nodded. “Her favorite coat, a red Perro parka, a white hat, matching gloves, and dark jeans. On cold days, Lili preferred to change into her uniform once she arrived on campus. She stopped in the kitchen and said goodbye to me before she left for school this morning. That’s her favorite coat. She bought it at Barneys with her first paycheck. She was so proud of that coat.”

Rodriguez pursed her lips.

Porter said nothing.

4

Porter

Day 2 • 3:02 a.m.

“How is that even possible?”

“We can show them a photo of the jacket to try and confirm,” Nash suggested.

Porter shook his head. “We can’t show them a picture of a dead girl.”

The three of them stood outside the Davieses’ graystone, their breath creating an icy fog between them.

“There is no way someone had time to kidnap Lili Davies, put her clothes on Ella Reynolds, and bury her under the ice at the park. There is no way. There just isn’t enough time.” Porter shuffled his feet. The temperature must be in single digits. “That means he would have been out at the lake during daylight hours, while it was open. Somebody would have seen him.”

Nash thought about this for a second. “In this weather, the park is nearly deserted. The only real risk would be when the unsub carried the body from his vehicle to the water. Unless someone got close, nothing else would really jump out as a red flag. He would just look like some guy out by the lagoon, maybe ice-fishing or something. If he set up with a fishing pole, I bet he could spend the day without anyone giving him a second glance.”

“Logistics aside,” Rodriguez said, “what’s the point?”

Porter and Nash exchanged a glance. They both knew serial killers rarely had a point, at least not one that made sense to anyone but them. And although they only had one victim, if she tied to this second missing girl, they might be looking at a serial.

“Do Ella Reynolds and Lili Davies know each other?” Porter asked Rodriguez.

Rodriguez shook her head. “Her parents only knew the name from television.”

“We should check with Lili’s friend Gabby,” Porter suggested. “What time did she leave for school?”

Rodriguez glanced at her notes. “Quarter after seven.”

Nash closed his eyes and crunched the numbers. “That only allows about twelve hours from the time Lili disappeared to the time Ella was found frozen in the lake.”

“Look at you doing math.” Porter said, and snickered.

“If this is one guy, he’s fast. Efficient,” Nash said.

Porter turned back to Rodriguez. “Sophie, right?”

She nodded.

“Go back in and search the girl’s room. Look for anything out of the ordinary. Get her computer — check her e-mails, saved documents. Look for a diary, photos . . . You find anything at all, you call me. Find out her route to school. Does she walk or get a ride? With friends or alone? Got it?”

Rodriguez chewed on her bottom lip. “What does this mean for Lili?”

Porter wasn’t ready to go there. He turned back to Nash. “Let’s go wake up Eisley.”

5

Porter

Day 2 • 4:18 a.m.

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office and morgue was off West Harrison in downtown Chicago. At this hour, Porter and Nash ran into little traffic, and they found the parking spaces out front to be relatively deserted. The guard at the front desk looked up at them with groggy eyes and nodded a hello. “Sign in, please.”