by J. D. Barker
They crossed under the yellow crime scene tape and made their way toward the shore of the lagoon. Clair was standing next to one of the heaters, her cell phone pressed to her ear. When she saw them, she nodded toward the shoreline, covered the microphone, and said, “We think that’s Ella Reynolds,” before returning to her call.
Porter’s heart sank.
Ella Reynolds was a fifteen-year-old girl who had gone missing after school near Logan Square three weeks earlier. She was last seen getting off her bus about two blocks from her home. Her parents wasted no time reporting her missing, and the Amber Alerts were running within an hour of her disappearance. Little good they did. The police hadn’t received a single worthwhile tip.
Nash started toward the water’s edge, and Porter followed.
The lagoon was frozen.
Four 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, sir.”
“CSI Rolfes, can you explain what this means?”
She thought about it for 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. “Maybe it would help to move. Find a new place, start over.”
Porter 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.