by J. D. Barker
Where your ear used to be, dear.
“Please don’t. Please be quiet—”
Better that you accept it now. Accept it and move on.
Emory lowered her legs over the side of her makeshift bed. The wheels squeaked as the gurney rolled a few inches before scraping against a wall and stopped. When her feet touched the cold concrete, she almost pulled them back up. Not knowing what was beneath her creeped her out, but remaining still while waiting for her captor to return was not an option she was willing to consider. She had to find a way out.
Her eyes fought the darkness, trying to adjust and pull in the smallest bit of light, but there simply wasn’t enough. She raised her hand to her face, and it was barely visible unless she practically touched her nose.
Emory forced herself to stand, ignoring the dizziness swooning through her head and the pain at her ear. She took a deep breath and held the edge of the gurney for balance just below where her handcuffs were attached, standing still until the nausea left her.
It was so dark. Too dark.
What if you fall, dear? What if you try to walk, trip over something, and fall? Are you sure this is wise? Why don’t you sit back down and figure things out. How would that be?
Emory ignored the voice and tentatively reached out, her left hand stretching into the blackness, her fingers groping. When they found nothing, she took a step toward the top of the gurney, toward the wall it rested against. Right hand on the gurney, left hand reaching. One step, then another, then a—
Her fingers found the wall, and she nearly jumped back. The rough surface felt damp and grimy. Cautiously running her hand across the wall, she found a groove and traced the edge with the tip of her finger, following horizontally until she found another groove, this one vertical. The pattern repeated about a foot down. Rectangles.
Cinder blocks.
You know, where there’s one wall, there’s usually another. Sometimes there’s a door or a window or two. Perhaps a walk of the perimeter is in order? Figure out just what kind of mess you’ve gotten yourself into? You’re tied to that pesky gurney, though—not really fit for travel.
Emory tugged on the gurney until the frame moved, rolling an inch or so on squeaky wheels. She squeezed the rail. Just holding the metal frame, holding on to something, made her feel a little safer. It was silly, she knew that, but—
It’s a crutch. Isn’t that the word?
“Fuck you,” she muttered.
With her left hand on the wall and her right dragging the gurney, she inched along, her feet shuffling. She counted as she went, attempting to map out the space in her mind’s eye. She took twelve steps before finding the first corner. Emory estimated the first wall to be about ten feet long.
She continued along the second wall. More cinder block. She ran her fingers up and down the wall in search of a light switch, a door, anything, but she found none; only more block.
Emory stopped for a second, her head turning up. She couldn’t help but wonder—how high could this room be? Was there a ceiling?
Of course there’s a ceiling, dear. Serial killers are smart; you’re not the first girl to attend his rodeo. He’s taken how many girls? Five? Six? He’s probably got the routine down to a science at this point. I’m sure this room is sealed up tight. You should keep exploring, though. I like this. Much better than sitting around waiting for him to come back. That’s a fool’s game. This has purpose. This shows initiative.
She continued around the room. The gurney fought again as she turned the corner, and she pulled the frame toward her with an angry yank.
Hey. I just thought of something. What if he’s watching you? What if he’s got cameras?
“It’s too dark.”
Infrared cameras can see in the dark plain as day. He’s probably got his feet up on a desk somewhere, watching Emory TV, a big, fat grin on his face. Naked girl in box. Naked girl trying to get out of box. The last girl took thirty minutes to venture this far around the room. This one is on a tear—she got there in twenty. How exciting. How entertaining.
Emory stopped moving and stared into the blackness. “Are you there? Are you . . . watching me?”
Silence.
“Hello?”
Perhaps he’s shy?
“Shut up.”
I bet he’s got his pants around his ankles and his pecker out with a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. Emory TV After Dark is on, and the party is just getting started. This one’s a keeper. Did you see how high she jumped?
“Now I know you’re not my mother; she would never say that,” Emory said.
Well, I think he’s watching. Why else would he take your clothes? Men are perverts, dear. The whole lot of them. The earlier you realize that, the better.
Emory turned in a slow circle and peered into the darkness, her head tilted up. “There’s no camera in here. I’d see the little red light.”
Right. Because all cameras have little red lights. Flashing little red lights you can spot from a mile away. I know if I were a camera manufacturer, I’d never consider building one without the little red flashing light. I’m sure there’s an oversight committee that checks each of them to be sure—
“Will you shut the fuck up?” Emory shouted. Then her face flushed. She was fucking arguing with herself.
All I’m saying is not all cameras have little red lights, that’s all. No need to get huffy.
Emory let out a frustrated breath and reached back for the wall. In her mind’s eye, she pictured the room as a giant square. She had checked two walls without finding the door. That left two more.
She began to inch across the third wall with the gurney in tow, her fingers following the now familiar cinder block pattern, drawing a path through the thick dust. No door.
One wall left.
She pulled at the gurney, more angry now than scared, counting off the steps. When she reached twelve and her fingers found the corner, she stopped. Where was the door? Had she missed it? Four corners, four left turns. She knew she had traveled full circle. She had traveled full circle, right?
Was it possible the room didn’t have a door?
Well, that seems like a horrible design. Who builds a room without a door? I bet you skipped right past the opening.
“I didn’t miss it. There’s no door.”
Then how did you get in?
High above her, a click echoed over the walls. Music screeched down at her so loud, it felt as if someone had jammed knives into her ears. She slammed her hands against the sides of her head, and a lightning bolt of pain shot through her as her left hand impacted the tender flesh where her ear had been. The handcuff cut into her other wrist. She bent forward and cried out in pain. She couldn’t block out the music, though—a song she had heard before. Mick Jagger howling about the devil.
18
Porter
Day 1 • 11:30 a.m.
Although only two weeks had passed since the last time Porter stepped into room 1523, deep within the basement of Chicago Metro headquarters on Michigan Avenue, the space seemed dormant, lifeless.
Sleeping.
Waiting.
He flicked on the light switch and listened as the fluorescent bulbs hummed to life, sending a charge through the stale air. He walked over to his desk and shuffled through the various papers and files scattered across the surface. Everything was just as he had left it.
His wife watched him from a silver frame at the far right corner. He couldn’t help but smile at the sight of her.
Sitting on the edge of the desk, he pulled the phone over and punched in her cell number. Three rings, followed by her familiar voice mail message:
You’ve reached the phone of Heather Porter. Since this is voice mail, I most likely saw your name on caller ID and decided I most certainly did not wish to speak to you. If you’re willing to pay tribute in the form of chocolate cake or other assorted offerings of dietary delight, text me the details and I’ll reconsider your position in my social roster and possibly�
��
Porter disconnected and thumbed through a folder labeled Four Monkey Killer. Everything they had learned about him fit in this single folder, at least until today.
He had chased the Four Monkey Killer for half a decade. Seven dead girls.
Twenty-one boxes. You can’t forget about the boxes.
He’d never forget the boxes. They haunted him every time he closed his eyes.
The room wasn’t very large, thirty by twenty-five or so. Aside from Porter’s, there were five metal desks older than most of the Metro staff arranged haphazardly around the space. In the far corner stood an old wooden conference table Porter had found in a storage room down the hall. The surface was scratched and nicked; the dull maple finish was covered with tiny rings from the hundreds of glasses, mugs, and cans that had sat upon it over the years. There was a large brown stain on it that Nash swore resembled Jesus (Porter thought it only looked like coffee). They had given up trying to scrub the discoloration away a long time ago.
Behind the conference table stood three whiteboards. The first two held pictures of 4MK’s victims and the various crime scenes; the third was currently blank. The group tended to use the last one primarily for brainstorming sessions.
Nash walked in and handed him a cup of coffee. “Watson hit Starbucks. I told him to meet us down here after he checks in with the lieutenant upstairs. The others are on their way too. What’s going through that head of yours? I smell smoke.”
“Five years, Nash. I was beginning to think we’d never see an end to this.”
“There’s at least one more out there. We need to find her.”
Porter nodded. “Yeah, I know. And we will. We’ll bring her home.” He had said the same thing with Jodi Blumington just six months earlier, and they didn’t find her in time. He couldn’t face another family, not again, not ever.
“Well, there you are!” Clair Norton hollered from the doorway.
Porter and Nash turned from the whiteboards.
“This place has been like a morgue without you, Sammy. Give me some sugar!” She crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him. “If you need anything at all, you call me, okay? I want you to promise me,” she whispered at his ear. “I’m there for you, twenty-four/seven.”
Any attempt at affection made Porter nervous. He patted her on the back and drew away. He imagined he appeared as uncomfortable as a priest returning the hug of an altar boy with the eyes of the congregation upon him. “I appreciate that, Clair. Thanks for holding down the fort.”
Clair Norton had been on the force for nearly fifteen years. She became Chicago Metro’s youngest black female detective after only three years on patrol, when she helped break up one of the largest narcotics rings in the city’s history—every person involved was under eighteen. Twenty-four students in total, primarily from Cooley High, although the crimes spread across six high schools. They operated completely on school property, which made things difficult, and meant the young-looking Clair had to go undercover as a student.
The event had earned her the nickname Jump Street, after the old Fox TV show—nobody on the task force dared call her that to her face.
Clair shook her head. “Hell, you should be thanking me for babysitting your partner over there. He’s as dumb as a box of rocks. I bet if you locked him in a room, you’d come back an hour later to find him dead on the floor with his tongue stuck in an electrical outlet.”
“I’m standing right here,” Nash said. “I can hear you.”
“I know.” She turned and plucked the coffee from his hand. “Thank you, baby doll.”
Edwin Klozowski, “Kloz” to most, strolled in behind her, an overflowing briefcase in one hand and the remains of a Little Debbie chocolate cupcake in the other. “So, we’re finally getting the band back together? It’s about time. If I had to spend one more minute down in Central IT dissecting the hard drive of another porn lover gone rogue, I might have considered going back to video game design. How you doing, Sammy?” He reached out and smacked Porter’s shoulder.
“Hey, Kloz.”
“Good to see you back.” He dropped his briefcase on one of the empty desks and shoved the rest of the cupcake into his mouth.
Porter spied Watson standing at the door and motioned for him to come inside. “Kloz, Clair, this is Paul Watson. He’s on loan from CSI. He’s going to be helping us out. Has anyone seen Hosman?”
Clair nodded. “I talked to him about twenty minutes ago. He’s running Talbot’s finances but hasn’t come up with anything yet. Said he’ll get in touch with you as soon as he finds something.”
Porter nodded. “All right, let’s get started.”
They crossed the room and settled at the conference table. The Four Monkey Killer’s victims stared down at them from the whiteboards. “Nash, where’s that picture of Emory?”
Nash dug the photo out of his pocket and handed it to him. Porter taped it onto the board at the far right. “I’m going to run through this from the beginning. It’s old news for most of you, but Watson hasn’t heard it before and maybe we’ll pick something up from the refresher.” He pointed to the picture in the top left corner. “Calli Tremell. Twenty years old, taken March 15, 2009. This was his first victim—”
“That we know of,” Clair interjected.
“She’s the first victim in his pattern as 4MK, but the evidence suggests he’s sophisticated and had most likely killed before,” Klozowski said. “Nobody comes out of the box killing like him. They build up, developing methods and technique over time.”
Porter went on. “Her parents reported her missing that Tuesday, and they received her ear in the mail on Thursday. Her eyes followed on Saturday, and her tongue arrived on Tuesday. All were packaged in small white boxes tied with black strings, handwritten shipping labels, and zero prints. He’s always been careful.”
“Suggesting she wasn’t really his first,” Klozowski reiterated.
“Three days after the last box arrived, a jogger found her body in Almond Park. She had been propped up on a bench with a cardboard sign glued to her hands, which read DO NO EVIL. We had picked up on his MO when her eyes arrived, but that sign confirmed our theory.”
Watson raised his hand.
Nash rolled his eyes. “This isn’t third grade, Doc. Feel free to speak up.”
“Doc?” Klozowski repeated. “Oh, I get it.”
“Didn’t I read somewhere that was how he picked his victims? ‘Do no evil’?” Watson asked.
Porter nodded. “With his second victim, Elle Borton, we caught that. Initially we thought the victims themselves had done something 4MK deemed wrong, and that was why he went after them, but with Elle we learned his focus wasn’t on the victims at all but on their families. Elle Borton disappeared on April 2, 2010, nearly a year after his first victim. She was twenty-three. Her case was handed to us when her parents received her ear in the mail two days later. When her body was found a little over a week after that, she was holding a tax return in her grandmother’s name covering tax year 2008. We dug a little bit and discovered that she actually died in 2005. Her father had been filing false returns for the past three years. We brought Matt Hosman in from Financial Crimes at that point, and he discovered that the scam went much deeper. Elle’s father had filed returns on more than a dozen people, all deceased. They were residents of the nursing home he managed.”
“How could 4MK possibly know that?” Watson asked.
Porter shrugged. “Not sure. But the new evidence prompted us to go back and look at Calli Tremell’s family.”
“The first victim.”
“Turns out her mother was laundering money from the bank where she worked, upward of three million dollars over the previous ten years,” Porter said.
Watson frowned. “Again, how could 4MK know what she was doing? Maybe that’s the link. Figure out who has access to this information, and you find 4MK’s identity.”
Klozowski snorted. “Yeah, ’cause it’s that easy.” He stood up and
walked to the board. “Melissa Lumax, victim number three. Her father was selling kiddie porn. Susan Devoro’s father swapped fake diamonds for the real ones at his own jewelry store. Barbara McInley’s sister hit and killed a pedestrian six years before Barbara went missing. Nobody connected the sister to the crime until 4MK. Allison Crammer’s brother ran a sweatshop full of illegals down in Florida. Then there’s Jodi Blumington, his most recent victim—”
“Prior to Emory Connors,” Nash chimed in.
“Sorry, his most recent victim prior to Ms. Connors. Her father was importing coke for the Carlito Cartel.” He tapped each of the photos. “All of these girls are related to someone who did something bad, but there is no connection between them. The crimes are across the board, no common thread.”
“He’s like a vigilante,” Watson muttered.
“Yeah, with better intel than law enforcement. None of these crimes were on our radar; we found them while investigating the murders,” Porter told him. “Without 4MK, these people would still be on the streets.”
Watson stood and walked over to the board, his eyes narrowing as he reviewed the photographs one by one.
“What’s up, Doc?” Kloz said, before bursting into laughter.
Everyone stared at him.
Kloz frowned. “Oh, so it’s funny when Nash does it, but not the IT guy? I see how things work down here in the basement.”
Watson tapped the board. “He’s escalating. Look at the dates.”
“Escalated,” Nash said. “His killing days are behind him.”
“Right, escalated. About one per year until after his fifth victim, Barbara McInley, then about every six or seven months. There’s this too.” He pointed at the photo of Barbara McInley. “She’s the only blonde. All the others are brunettes. Is there any significance to that?”
Porter ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t think so. With these kills, he’s really punishing the families for their crimes. I don’t think it was ever about the victims for him.”