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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.”

      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, СКАЧАТЬ