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

Porter stared up at the photos of 4MK’s victims.

Seven deaths, one girl freed.

Anson Bishop had managed to integrate himself into Porter’s task force when he posed as a CSI photographer back in November. During his first briefing with the team, they reviewed each of 4MK’s past victims, tried to bring him up to speed while searching for Emory. He listened to them with attentive ears, soaking in what they knew, pretending all this was new to him. Porter often looked back on that moment, searching for anything that should have given away his true identity, but there was none. Bishop no doubt stared up at this board with a feeling of great accomplishment while portraying just the right amount of horror on the outside, just the right amount of interest. He asked the right questions and refrained from embellishing on the information provided. Porter imagined this was extremely difficult for him. During that last confrontation at Belmont, Bishop bubbled over with the need to share what he knew, to explain himself. That urge must have been overwhelming as he stood looking at these boards, as he heard what they knew about each victim.

Bishop made several points, though, latched on to a few details.

Porter closed his eyes and thought back on that day, on his words.

He recalled Bishop pointing out information access — find out who had access to information on all these crimes, and work back from there. That had been a moot point, though, because ultimately they discovered that it was Talbot himself who knew of all these crimes, and Bishop had pilfered the information from him. He mentioned the dates, pointed out 4MK was escalating. This was true, but if a reason existed, they never determined what it was. They believed 4MK was dead at that point. Only finding Emory mattered.

Then there was the hair color.

Porter recalled how Bishop fixated on the photo of Barbara McInley, the only blonde. An anomaly, he called her. The only blonde among a group of attractive brunettes. He went on to ask if any of the girls had been sexually assaulted — they had not. He also asked if 4MK had any male victims. Specifically, he asked if any of the girls had brothers, then said something like, “If we assume half these families had at least one son and he grabbed their children at random, one or two male victims should have presented. That didn’t happen. There was a reason he took the daughters over the sons — we just don’t know it.” Porter believed 4MK took female victims simply because they were easier to control, less likely to fight back.

Six eyeballs.

Seven dead girls.

Porter returned to the photo of Barbara McInley. Punished because her sister killed someone in a hit-and-run. McInley was the only girl to really hold Bishop’s interest during their briefing, the only one he had honed in on. Porter could still picture him, tapping on her photo, the wheels of his mind racing.

Porter glanced over at the door, listening for anyone in the hallway, but heard no one.

A table stood against the wall on his left, stacked high with file boxes — everything they’d collected on 4MK. The third box from the left had the word Victims written on the front with red marker, Porter’s own handwriting. He crossed the room, removed the lid, and shuffled through the contents until he located Barbara McInley’s file, the name also written in his handwriting.

These were his files. His team’s files. They did not belong to the FBI.

“Fuck it.”

Porter wrapped the file in his coat, then replaced the lid on the file box and crossed the room to the door. When he was certain the hallway was still deserted, he slipped out of the room and pulled the door quietly shut behind him.

He ducked into the war room at the end of the hall and flicked on the overhead fluorescents.

“I was beginning to think you took the morning off,” Special Agent Stewart Diener said. He was sitting at Nash’s desk, his feet up, poking away at the tiny screen of his phone.

Porter hoped an indoor breeze would catch the man’s delicate comb-over. No such luck.

9

Porter

Day 2 • 7:59 a.m.

Porter stared at Diener. “We caught a body and a second missing girl. I’ve been up all night. What do you want?”

Has he been in here the entire time?

“Yeah, great job keeping a lid on that.” Diener tossed a folded copy of the Chicago Tribune over to Porter’s desk.

Porter glanced down at the headline:

4MK BACK AND TAKING OUR DAUGHTERS?

This was followed by a photo of Emory Connors walking on the sidewalk, head down. Both the story and photo were above the fold — main headline. Below the fold were two other shots — a telephoto lens capturing the scene at the Jackson Park Lagoon and another of the Davieses’ house.

Diener stood and walked around to the side of Porter’s desk, pointed at the paper. “They name both Ella Reynolds and Lili Davies in here.”

“How is that possible? We haven’t released anything. I just met with Lili Davies’s parents a few hours ago.”

Diener shrugged. “One of your crack team of investigators has loose lips.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Porter muttered, skimming the text.

The story mentioned the body found at Jackson Park Lagoon and speculated that she was most likely missing teen Ella Reynolds. The reporter also revealed that quick on the heels of this discovery, another girl vanished. Lili Davies was last seen leaving for school yesterday, but she never got to class. The remainder of the story detailed 4MK’s past victims and implied that Anson Bishop was forced to change his MO after his botched arrest.

“What’s that nut sack doing in here?” Nash said from the doorway.

Porter held up the paper. “Delivering the news.”

Nash walked over and dropped his coat onto the chair Diener had vacated. He brushed a piece of lint from the man’s shoulder. “Nice to see you exploring your career options. If you behave, maybe after school today we can go down to Walmart and pick you out a nice bike so you can expand your route.”

Porter dropped the paper onto Nash’s desk and pointed at the photos of the lagoon and the Davieses’ home. “This isn’t Bishop. It’s completely irresponsible for them to go out on a limb and say that it is. They’re just trying to sell more papers.”

Diener said, “How can you be so sure? Maybe Bishop decided to change things up, just like they say.”

“Serial killers don’t change their MO, you know that. Their signature is fixed.”

Diener shrugged. “Bishop is no ordinary serial killer. Each of his murders was part of an elaborate revenge plot. A plot he wrapped up when he killed Talbot. Maybe he planned to retire after that and quickly realized he still had a taste for young girls. When he couldn’t keep it under control, he grabbed Ella Reynolds. He finished up with her and snagged Lili Davies.” Diener started for the door. “You take a step back and look from a little distance, and it makes sense.”

Porter dropped his coat onto his desk, Barbara McInley’s file still wrapped inside. His heart pounding.

“That guy’s a tool,” Nash said.

“Heard that!” Diener shouted from the hallway. “If you’re wrong and they are 4MK’s vics, then you need to kick them over to us!”

“The other guy’s a little better,” Porter said. “His partner — Stool, Drool, Mule . . . ?”

“Poole. Frank Poole. Also a tool, the whole room full of ’em. Hey, see what I did there?” Nash reached for the door, ready to slam it, when Clair pushed past holding an iPad. Kloz was right behind her, with three white boxes perched precariously on top of his laptop. “Little help here,” he said.

Nash plucked the top box off and carried it back to his desk.

“Don’t go too far with those,” Kloz implored. “They need to last me for the week.”

“What is it?” Porter asked.

“Three dozen from that new place down the block, Peace, Love, and Little Donuts,” Clair told them. “The little bugger was going to hoard them back at his desk, until I explained the virtues of sharing with his coworkers.”

Kloz snickered. “You said if I didn’t bring them down here, you’d send a mass e-mail to the department telling everyone I had these in my desk. I couldn’t leave them upstairs undefended with all those vultures. They’d be gone in a minute. And there’s only eighteen — six in each box, not twelve.”

Nash opened the box he pilfered, and his eyes grew wide. “My baby Jesus, these are beautiful.”

Porter grabbed the second box from the pile and settled at his desk. Clair grabbed the third.

“Hey!” Kloz cried out. “Those are mine!”

“Why are they so small?” Porter asked, his mouth full of cream filling.

Clair plucked a donut from her box and held it up. It was covered in Oreo crumbles. “They’re gourmet. I’d do air quotes, but my fingers are busy. They make them small and sell them as artsy-fartsy fancy food for twice the price of regular donuts. If they didn’t taste so damn good, they’d never get away with it, but these little guys are heaven. I can feel my ass getting bigger with each bite, and I don’t care.”

Kloz settled into his usual desk next to the conference table. He placed both palms on the metal top and took a long, soothing breath, his face turning red. “Okay, you can each have one, only one.”

“I may have eaten four,” Nash said, wiping the culinary evidence from his lips. His eyes fell on the decimated box before him. “And I’m keeping the rest.”

Ten minutes later all three boxes were empty with the exception of one strawberry-frosted donut. Porter felt the sugar kick in. He stood up, walked over to their single remaining whiteboard, and wrote ELLEN REYNOLDS at the top.

“It’s Ella Reynolds,” Nash told him.

Porter grunted, wiped away the first name with the back of his hand, replaced it with ELLA. “Okay, what do we know?”

Clair said, “Ella Reynolds was reported missing on January twenty-second and found yesterday, February twelfth. Her body was discovered frozen under the ice at Jackson Park Lagoon.”

“She wasn’t frozen,” Nash broke in. “Not entirely, anyway. That’s what Eisley said. But the lagoon was.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Clair said. “According to the park, the lagoon was completely frozen over by January 2, twenty days before she went missing. Also, I have something on video we’ll want to watch after we update the board.”

Porter nodded. “When found, she wasn’t wearing her own clothes but clothes believed to belong to our second missing girl, Lili Davies.” He wrote her name on the board, then went back to Ella’s column. “Ella was last seen getting off her bus about two blocks from her house in a black coat, near Logan Square, approximately fifteen miles from where she was found. I think we can safely say the unsub staged the scene at the lagoon to appear as if Ella’s body had been there for weeks, which would be impossible if her clothes turn out to be Lili’s.”

Nash got up from his desk and went to the conference table in front of the whiteboard, taking a seat. “What’s the point of that? He went through a lot of trouble to put Ella under the ice, but then he dresses her in Lili’s clothes, giving us a firm date on the timeline. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes sense to him,” Porter pointed out. “All of this does. Including this —”

Porter wrote DROWNED IN SALT WATER beneath Ella’s name.

“Are you serious?” Kloz said.

“Eisley said he found salt water in her lungs and stomach. He’s fairly certain cause of death was drowning,” Porter told him.

“Drowning,” Clair repeated. “In salt water.”

Nash added, “The nearest ocean is about seven hundred miles away.”

“We’ll need to check out local aquariums and aquarium supply houses,” Porter said. “I think we can rule out a trip to the coast. This timeline is too tight.”

Clair was shaking her head. “I haven’t slept enough to deal with this.”

“I think we’re all running on fumes,” Porter agreed. “What do we know about the second girl, Lili Davies?”

Nash opened his small notebook. “Parents are Dr. Randal Davies and Grace Davies. Her best friend is Gabrielle Deegan. She goes to Wilcox Academy. She was last seen wearing a red coat, according to her mother — a Perro red nylon diamond-quilted hooded parka. She also had on a white hat, white gloves, dark jeans, and pink tennis shoes. She never made it to school yesterday, which means she was most likely taken on the morning of February twelfth. Her mother said she saw her leaving for school. That was about a quarter after seven in the morning. Classes start at ten to eight, and she’s walking distance to the school.”

“Does she walk with anyone to school?” Porter asked.

Nash shook his head. “Her mother said the school is only four blocks, so she goes alone.”

Kloz gave the donut boxes a sad glance, then went to the conference table. “Four blocks isn’t very far. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for someone to grab her.”

Clair took a seat next to Nash. “Assuming she went straight to school, which we can’t assume. She might’ve run into a friend on the way and gotten into their car. I know it’s only a few blocks, but I used to do that all the time when I walked to school. When you’re that close to campus, the drivers and walkers tend to converge in the parking lot, and many of the students hang out there waiting on that first bell.”

“May I come in?”

The three of them looked up. Sophie Rodriguez stood at the door. Porter noted she was wearing the same tan sweater she had on at the Davieses’ house. Most likely she hadn’t gone home yet, either. “Please,” he said. “Take a seat, we’re running through everything.”

“Uh, Sam?” Kloz said, his eyes giving her a once-over. “Remember what happened the last time you invited a stray into the clubhouse?”

Clair smacked his shoulder. “I’ve known Sophie for almost four years. She’s been vetted.” She motioned to the chair to her left.

Sophie set her bag down by the door, removed her coat, and took a seat studying the board. “I know you’re all working this from Homicide and Lili is just missing at this point, but we have an obvious connection. Probably best for us to work together, at least for now. Until we have a handle on what’s going on.”

“Welcome to the team, Sophie,” Porter said.

Nash gave him a weary look but said nothing.

Sophie studied the faces in the room. “Ella was one of my girls, too. You always hope for the best, but when they don’t turn up for more than forty-eight hours, it usually means they’re a runaway or something worse. Both of these girls have solid home lives, so I think my heart was telling me it was ‘something worse.’ When you told me about the clothes, I guess you confirmed it for me. I’m just hoping we find Lili in time.”

“Did you show the clothing photos to Lili’s parents?” Porter asked. He had e-mailed them to her from the morgue.

Sophie nodded. “Her mother confirmed they belonged to Lili. She said she wrote the initials in the hat herself.”

Porter wrote FOUND IN LILI DAVIES’S CLOTHES under ELLA REYNOLDS on the board. Then he turned back to her. “What else can you tell us about Ella?”

Sophie studied the board for a moment. “I walked the scene a few weeks back, right after she disappeared. The bus lets her off about two blocks from her house, near Logan Square, but her parents told me she would sometimes go to Starbucks on Kedzie to do her homework. I took both routes. It took me four minutes to walk from the bus stop to her house, seven minutes to walk from the bus stop to Starbucks, and nine minutes for me to walk the route from Starbucks to her house. The entire area is very public, people everywhere. I don’t see how someone could have grabbed her without being seen.”

Nash asked, “Did you talk to the manager at the Starbucks?”

Sophie nodded. “He recognized Ella from the photo I showed him, but he couldn’t tell me if she was in on that particular day. She typically pays with cash, so I couldn’t reference debit or credit card receipts.”

“Any security cameras?”

“There is one, but it recycles daily. They don’t store the footage. By the time we got there, it was gone.”

Kloz cleared his throat. “Maybe I should take a look? I’ve never known a security system that really erased the previous day’s footage. If the system is hard-drive-based, fragments may still exist, even if the manager thinks the footage is gone.”

Porter nodded and wrote STARBUCKS FOOTAGE (I DAY CYCLE?) — KLOZ on the board. “What else?”

“We searched her computer and e-mail but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary,” Sophie replied. “Her phone disappeared with her. It last connected to the tower near Logan Square and dropped off four minutes after the bus’s scheduled stop.”

“Kloz?”

Kloz was already nodding, making a note on his laptop. “I’ll take a look at that too.”

Porter turned back to Sophie. “Did you find anything in Lili’s room?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Lots of clothes strewn about. Nothing hidden in any of the drawers or under the mattress, the typical places. There was a photo taped to the mirror of her and another girl. Her mother said it was her friend Gabby. Her father said she had both a cell phone and a laptop, but neither were in her room. Her mom told me she would have taken them to school, said she was carrying her backpack when she left.” She paused for a second, reading a text message on her phone. “My office pinged her cell, but it was off. The results just came back. The last tower it hit was near her house. It went dark at twenty-three after seven. That’s only about eight minutes after she left home.”

“Kloz, see if you can pull anything from her social media accounts or e-mail,” Porter pointed out.

“On it,” Kloz replied.

Sophie pulled a folder from her bag and spread the contents on the table. She had pictures of both girls. “Ella and Lili have a similar look, which would suggest an attraction or sexual motive, but the ME said there was no sign of assault with Ella. I’m not willing to write that off as a coincidence just yet.”

“Good point. May I?” Porter said, pointing at the photos.

Sophie handed the pictures to him, and Porter taped them to the board. “How old is Lili?”

“Seventeen,” Sophie replied.

“Both have blond hair, roughly shoulder length. Ella had blue eyes, Lili has green. They’re two years apart. Where did Ella go to school?” Porter asked.

Sophie flipped through her notes. “Kelvyn Park High. She was a sophomore.”

“Any reason to believe they knew each other?”

“None that I’m aware of,” she replied. “Different schools, different social circles, two years apart. Neither drove.”

“What about the gallery?” Porter asked. “Could they have met there?”

“I haven’t been to the gallery yet. They don’t open until ten.”

Porter scratched at his cheek. “I’d rather you and Clair walk to school, then maybe interview her friend, Gabrielle Deegan. Nash tends to scare the children.”

Nash smiled. “I can’t help if I’m intimidating.”

Porter nodded at him. “You and I will check the gallery.”

“Love me some art.”

“I’ll text you the address,” Sophie said. “It’s on North Halsted.”

Porter glanced back at the board. “What else?”

The group fell silent.

“Should we watch the video?” Clair asked.

“Yeah, fire it up.”

Clair tapped at the screen of her iPad, then set it in the middle of the table. The image was frozen. A horrible angle on a narrow blacktop road. The time stamp indicated 8:47 a.m., February 12.

Clair pressed Play, and the time stamp moved forward in real time. Two cars rolled past — a yellow Toyota and a white Ford. When a gray pickup truck came into view, Clair hit Pause. “I’m going to advance slowly,” she said, and the image moved forward a few frames at a time.

When the back of the truck came into view, Porter understood. “Freeze there,” he said.

The pickup truck was towing a large water tank, the kind belonging to pool cleaners.

“There’s no pool in the park, and pool service during the dead of winter is not in high demand,” Clair said. “I think that’s how he got the water in.”

“Do you have any other angles?” Porter asked.

Clair shook her head. “That’s the only camera.”

Kloz leaned in. “Not much I can do with it. The image is clear, the angle just sucks.”

“Roll back a few frames?” Porter suggested.

Clair pressed Rewind. The image reversed one frame at a time with each touch.

“Stop,” Porter said. “What’s with that glare, and why such a horrible shot?”

The camera pointed at a severe angle, nearly straight down. Normally they either pointed up a road or down a road, the best possible angle to capture cars either approaching or leaving.

They froze the shot that captured the most of the truck’s windshield, but a bright white glare obscured their view inside.

Porter could make out the shape of the driver but nothing that would help them identify the person. “Kloz, do you think you can enlarge this and clean it up at all?”

Kloz chewed on the tip of his thumb. “Maybe — tough to say. I’ll give it a shot.”

“The park manager said they rarely review the footage. The camera is there as more of a deterrent than anything. At some point either it got loose and pointed down toward the ground, or someone loosened it and purposely pointed it that way. He had no idea when or how it happened,” Clair explained. “He said the camera used to point down the road to capture the cars and their drivers as they approached.”

Porter turned to Kloz, but Kloz waved him off before he could speak. “Yeah, I know. I’ll go back through old footage and see if I can determine when it happened, on the off chance we catch our unsub smiling at the camera holding a wrench.”

“Sometimes they slip up,” Porter pointed out.

“Yep.”

“This is good. At the very least we should get a make and model on the truck. If we cross-reference that against pool cleaning companies, we may get lucky.” Porter turned back to the board. “Anything else we can add?”

Again, the room went silent.

Porter capped the black marker and took a seat at the conference table. “I want to get a better handle on the abductions themselves. This unsub works fast and appears to have no trouble taking these girls from public places. That means he either blends in well or possibly gets to know them in advance so they don’t feel threatened by him. He couldn’t pull them kicking and screaming off the street into this pickup truck without being noticed, so somehow he convinces them to go willingly.”

“He may have access to other vehicles,” Nash suggested. “Public works or a utility company van. Something that disappears in the background.”

Kloz flipped his laptop around so the others could see. The screen had a detailed map of Chicago and the surrounding areas. There was a red dot near Logan Square, one at Jackson Park, and a third on King Drive in Bronzeville. “We’ve got a distance of about ten miles between the two abduction sites. In a city this big, that’s a sizable hunting ground. Jackson Park, where Ella was found, is actually closer to Lili’s house than Ella’s own.”

Porter studied the map for a moment. “So Lili was abducted close to where Ella was found. That may be important.”

“Ella drowned in salt water?” Sophie was frowning up at the board. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“What about a saltwater swimming pool?” Kloz suggested. “That would fit with the truck.”

“Is that a thing?” Nash frowned.

Kloz was nodding. “I’ve got an aunt in Florida who has one. She’s allergic to chlorine. They’re low maintenance too, no chemicals to measure out.”

“There can’t be many around Chicago. Think you can run a list?” Porter asked.

Kloz said, “Maybe I can put something together through building permits.”

Porter studied the faces around the table. With the exception of Sophie Rodriguez, he had known them all for years. He retrieved the newspaper from Nash’s desk and set it on the conference table. “Watch your backs for reporters. Somebody is snooping around a little too close to camp, and they’re not afraid to speculate.”