The Fifth to Die

by J. D. Barker

  “Well, I’d remember a car.”

  “He could have parked on the street. There are cars up and down this road.”

  Poole said nothing.

  “Tell me again.”

  “There isn’t much to tell. We traced the fake identification to a mailing address—the abandoned house across the street. We cleared the house. I drew the short straw, and Diener opted to photograph the interior, particularly the walls with the graffiti, while I talked to the neighbors. The woman across the street said the man living here collected the mail, so I came here next. I didn’t expect Bishop to open the door. He took me by surprise. We struggled. He bested me when he got ahold of the table leg. When I woke, I cleared this house, then went back across the street and found Special Agent Diener.”

  “So you knew someone used the house across the street as a mail drop, you knew that someone came from here, and you still came over without backup?”

  Poole felt his face flush. “I had no reason to believe there was any danger. I most definitely didn’t expect Bishop.”

  “And he was expecting Sam Porter? The Metro detective?”

  “His exact words were, ‘You’re not Sam Porter.’ I’m not sure what that means.”

  “It means he wouldn’t have been surprised to find Porter on his doorstep.”

  Poole shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking, but Porter is a good cop. He made some mistakes, but he’s not mixed up in this, not like that. He wants this guy found, that’s all.”

  Hurless touched his chin. “Maybe, maybe not. I just learned there was a diary on the body they found a few months back, the bus victim they thought was 4MK. Apparently it was Bishop’s diary. Porter never checked it into evidence. It’s mentioned in the report, but Metro doesn’t have possession, never did.”

  “Why would he withhold evidence?” Poole asked.

  “Why would Bishop expect him on his doorstep?”

  Poole grimaced, pressing the ice pack harder against his neck. “Why mention the diary in a report if he planned to withhold?”

  “The diary is in Detective Nash’s report, not Porter’s. Porter doesn’t mention it once in forty-three pages of typed text.”

  A crime scene tech approached and stood silently beside SAIC Hurless, waiting for a break in the conversation. They looked at her and she raised her voice. “Sir. We’ve completed our preliminary of this residence. There are no prints. We found traces of latex residue on many of the surfaces, so he most likely wore gloves while here. Other surfaces have been wiped clean.”

  “What about the table leg he hit me with?”

  “Wiped,” she said.

  Poole nodded toward the bathroom, regretting the motion the moment he did it. “What about the bathtub or shower. Maybe he bathed here?”

  “The bathtub was dry and covered with bleach stains. We think he cleaned it after each use—same with the sinks in both the bathroom and the kitchen. He removed the traps on the plumbing as well. We’re taking all the remaining pipes with us in case something got caught up inside. We’re also vacuuming all surfaces. We’ll find something,” she assured them. “Nobody can hide completely.”

  “Any way to tell how long he was here?” Poole asked.

  She shook her head. “He was ready to bug out on a moment’s notice. Probably got out in less than ten minutes. He could have been here for days or months.”

  “The woman across the street said she remembers seeing him as far back as six months ago,” Hurless said.

  “So Bishop put this together as a safe house before he was outed as 4MK.”

  “Looks that way. According to property records, the house is owned by a subsidiary of Talbot Enterprises. They’ve been buying up houses in this area for about two years and turning them out as rentals. They keep the utilities on to prevent the pipes from freezing while they’re vacant. The whole neighborhood is a hotspot for the homeless and squatters. Once he jimmied the lock, he’d be able to come and go as he pleased. It’s not tough to run a disguise in weather like this. Everyone’s got multiple layers on. He wouldn’t stand out.”

  “If he set up this safe house in advance, most likely he has others.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  Poole turned back to the tech. “What about the cell phones? Bishop took mine and Agent Diener’s.”

  “Both went dark at twenty-four minutes past two this afternoon,” she replied.

  Poole lowered the ice pack and turned back to SAIC Hurless. “Can we go back across the street? I want to get a better look at that wall.”

  Diener’s body was gone, but the dark red stain remained. Poole could still hear the man’s gruff voice, the shuffle of his gait. He half expected him to come walking out from a back room followed by one of the remaining crime scene investigators.

  SAIC Hurless motioned toward the graffiti wall. “What can you tell me about these cutouts?”

  Diener’s eye still sat precariously on the edge of the dusty drywall, a tag with the number 37 placed beside it.

  Poole traced the opening with the tip of his finger. “There was a poem here—Dickinson. Written with a black marker or a Sharpie. It said:

  Because I could not stop for Death,

  He kindly stopped for me;

  The carriage held but just ourselves

  And Immortality.”

  He crossed over to the second hole, where Diener’s ear now lay, tagged number 38. “This one was Hanshan.” He recalled the poem verbatim:

  “A telling analogy for life and death:

  Compare the two of them to water and ice.

  Water draws together to become ice,

  And ice disperses again to become water.

  Whatever has died is sure to be born again;

  Whatever is born comes around again to dying.

  As ice and water do one another no harm,

  So life and death, the two of them, are fine.”

  At the third hole, Diener’s tongue now lay in silent reflection of the words that had been here earlier, the number 39 beside it:

  “Let us return Home, let us go back,

  Useless is this reckoning of seeking and getting,

  Delight permeates all of today.

  From the blue ocean of death

  Life is flowing like nectar.

  In life there is death; in death there is life.

  So where is fear, where is fear?

  The birds in the sky are singing ‘No death, no death!’

  Day and night the tide of Immortality

  Is descending here on earth.”

  He motioned toward the opening, toward invisible words. “Home, fear, death, were all underlined. The poem is Tibetan, old.”

  It was the fourth hole that intrigued him most, higher on the graffiti wall and off to the right. Nothing sat within it, only an empty space in the drywall, but clearly cut away by Bishop with the same careful technique he used on the other spaces—nearly a perfect square missing.

  Poole had not studied whatever was here as he did the others. With those, he read the words, took in the measured handwriting. He could see each letter with perfect clarity in his mind’s eye. This hole was different. At best, he had glanced at this portion of the wall.

  “What about this one?” Hurless said. “What was written here?”

  Poole raised a hand, silenced him, then closed his eyes, concentrated, focused on what he saw when he first walked the abandoned house. He had seen this wall, but he hadn’t seen the wall. He hadn’t made a conscious effort to memorize it, to take it in. The haphazard artwork and words were nothing more than a smear in his memory, a Pollock painting slightly out of focus.

  Are you trying tell me something, Bishop, or are you hiding something? Poole thought.

  He pictured the wall, every inch of the wall. He visualized himself walking past, his eyes taking in every speck of color, his eyes glancing over this very spot, this missing spot. The same black handwriting, the blocky letters. He could see them, but they wer
e out of focus, like the background of a photo with a subject front and center and all else blurred. He concentrated on those black words, on the blur, not so much the meaning of the words but the image of them. He concentrated until they came into focus, one letter at a time, and only then did he read, speaking them aloud: “You can’t play God without being acquainted with the devil.”

  70

  Kati

  Day 3 • 5:20 p.m.

  Kati Quigley woke with a start. It had begun slowly, her ascent from sleep, but that last moment when her consciousness climbed out of the well and burst through the opening at the top came fast, and it caused her to jump.

  Her hands were tied behind her back. Her feet were bound too. Her eyes covered, some kind of blindfold. The ground felt damp beneath her. The air smelled of waste—feces and urine and something else.

  “Hello?”

  The sound of her own voice seemed thin, a stranger’s voice. A pain throbbed against her temple, and for a moment she couldn’t remember why. Then the memories of what happened came flooding back, a horrid onslaught of images ending with the man with the disgusting wound on his head chasing her down the hallway, bashing her into the door.

  Oh God.

  “Wesley?”

  A shuffle beside her, only a few feet away.

  A thin light crept through the cloth over her eyes but not enough for her to really see—only vague shapes and shadows, strange monsters dancing in the distance.

  “Wesley? Is that you? Are you okay?”

  She remembered the ugly man diving across the table and slamming his cocoa mug into Wesley’s head, the terrible cracking sound it made followed by Wesley falling to the floor. She ran then. She should have tried to help him, but instead she ran, thinking of nothing but herself as the ugly man came after her.

  “I’m sorry, Wesley,” she said quietly, sobs threatening to choke her words.

  A groan then, again, only a few feet away—not Wesley. This was a girl’s voice. Even though it was muffled and faint, she could tell.

  “Who’s there? Who are you?” Kati pulled her knees to her face, tried to slide the blindfold from her eyes with her knee. It didn’t work, though. The cloth was secure, too tight.

  She forced her body to shuffle toward the voice, like an inchworm, using her legs to push the rest of her. The pain on the side of her head cried out with each movement, rushing over her with waves of nausea. She didn’t stop, though. She forced herself toward the voice until her arm brushed against something soft, something warm.

  The other girl jerked as their skin came in contact, and then she pulled some sort of blanket or quilt up between them.

  “Who are you?” Kati said again, feeling the squirm beside her.

  “She wasn’t pure, she will never see. Instead, she has cast herself into the fiery lake to drown in her own blood.”

  Kati jumped at the voice, a shiver rushing over her body like fingers across a coffin lid.

  A man’s voice, the man with the wound. He had trouble with the letter s. He said the words at just above a whisper from only a few feet away, from the direction she had just moved.

  Kati shuffled closer to the warm body next to her. She felt the body twitch beneath the blanket. “Where are we? Where’s Wesley?”

  The man coughed, his breath catching, sounding wet. “Your friend Wesley is there with you. He is not doing well.”

  Kati thought of the smells—feces, urine, and something else. She didn’t want to think about that something else. “The people at the Kingdom Hall, they know where we are. They know we were on this street, what houses we planned to visit. If you let me go, I’ll tell them it was an accident. I’ll tell them Wesley fell and you tried to help him.”

  “I don’t care if they come for you. I don’t care if they come for me. We’ll be done by then.”

  His voice drew closer now. Kati could hear him crossing the floor, the slight drag of one of his feet. She could hear it, something wrong with the way he walked.

  A rattling noise, metal on metal. A door opening.

  “Will you see for me?”

  Beside her now. She could feel his hot breath on her neck.

  “Will you tell me what you see?”

  Kati screamed, and the moment the sound left her lips, he shoved something into her mouth, a rag or cloth. It tasted like dirt and something sour. Then his arms were around her—he lifted her off the ground and carried her. A hand came out from the blanket beside her and wrapped around her arm for a brief second before falling away.

  “You are a believer, a follower. You will see.”

  Dropping then.

  The man let her go, or lowered her, she couldn’t be sure. She felt the water first, then his arms were gone, and she sank deeper into it, whatever it was. She sank until almost completely submerged, all but her face, her blindfolded face reaching for air from the highest point. Her hands and feet touched bottom, and if she tilted her head, she could keep it above the water line.

  The water was warm, nearly hot.

  Had Kati been able to see, she would have watched the man in the black knit cap as he pulled the tarp from the stack of car batteries wired in a series next to the freezer converted into a water tank. She would have seen him pick up both ends of the jumper cables attached to the last battery in the series. She would have seen him drop both ends down into the water.

  Kati didn’t see any of those things.

  Kati saw nothing at all as the electricity caused her body to spasm with such strength, she broke the zip ties at her hands and feet.

  She saw nothing but the brightest of white lights.

  71

  Clair

  Day 3 • 5:43 p.m.

  “I’m not going to sit in here, locked up like a common criminal, while some maniac has our daughter,” Larry Biel spouted. He continued to pace the small hotel room—they had been there for nearly two hours, and he had yet to stop moving.

  “Larry, this isn’t helping. Please come here and sit next to me,” Darlene Biel said from the bed.

  Clair watched them both from the small table just inside the door.

  Uniformed officers had arrived at the Biel household within four minutes of Clair’s call. Both were found safely inside their narrow three-story home on West Superior Street. Darlene Biel was on the phone cycling through her daughter’s friends for the fifth time, while her husband, Larry, sat at Larissa’s computer, digging through the data. He knew his way around a computer and had installed a parental monitoring program called KidBSafe on her PC two years earlier. He reluctantly handed the laptop off to Clair, who in turn had it rushed to Klozowski’s team back at Metro.

  Clair then explained that while they had no reason to believe their current unsub had their daughter, particularly since it had only been half a day since she was last seen, she would like to place them both in protective custody anyway while they ruled it out. It took twenty more minutes for her to convince them to leave their home. Darlene moved fast. She was in pharmaceutical sales, spent a lot of time on the road, and kept a travel bag packed and ready. In less than five minutes she was at the front door. Larry was not so fast. He lingered in each room as if expecting his daughter to appear from some shadowed corner, an extended game of hide-and-seek, until finally Darlene packed a bag for him and helped get him into a waiting cruiser.

  Although Chicago Metro owned three safe houses, Clair opted to take them to a hotel downtown, one she picked at random and paid for with cash. If Bishop was somehow involved, she had no intention of leaving a paper trail. Only Nash knew her location. He and Sophie Rodriguez remained at the Biel house to supervise the search. Undercover cars were parked a few houses down on both ends of the block, ready if the unsub made an appearance.

  “Larry, you’re making me nervous, please sit down,” Darlene said again.

  Larry Biel crossed the room one more time, then dropped onto the bed beside his wife, his red face turned to Clair. “How many girls did you say this guy has
grabbed?”

  “At least two others that we are aware of. But let me stress, we have no reason to believe this person has your daughter. You said yourself she could be with one of her friends. We’re just taking every precaution.”

  “She’s not with any of her friends,” Darlene Biel said. “She planned to go to Carrie Ann’s house to get ready for the dance, and Carrie Ann hasn’t heard from her all day. None of her other friends have heard from her today either. She doesn’t disappear like this, never. She always tells me where she’s going. We don’t keep secrets from each other.”

  “And this guy killed the girls’ parents too?” Larry Biel said, ignoring his wife. “The man they found in his backyard packed in snow, is that what happened to him? Is that who you’re talking about?”

  “I can’t comment on an open investigation.”

  “The reporter said his throat was cut so bad, his head almost came off.”

  “You’re safe here. We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”

  Larry ran his fingers over the pressboard nightstand, tapping them nervously. Clair was beginning to think the man was better off pacing.

  There was a knock at the door, and Larry jumped up.

  Clair held up a hand. “I got it, please stay there.”

  With a hand on her gun, she looked through the small peephole, relaxed, and opened the door. She had ordered a patrol officer to pick up pizza.

  He handed both boxes to her and held his hand out, hoping for a tip.

  Clair closed the door on him, secured the deadbolt and the inner latch, then placed both boxes on the table. “We’ve got plain cheese and pepperoni.”

  “I can’t eat anything,” Larry said.

  “Hopefully this will be over quickly, but it’s always best to keep your strength up,” Clair told him.

  Darlene pulled a slice of plain cheese and sat on the corner of the bed. Although she appeared calm, her hand was shaking. A clump of cheese slipped off the side of the slice and splatted on the carpet. “I’m so sorry, I’m a bit of mess right now.”