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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ