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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ