The Fifth to Die

by J. D. Barker

  Larry stood up and resumed pacing. On his third pass, he took a slice of pepperoni. “We should be hanging posters, we should be talking to the media. I can get a bunch of guys from the construction site to help comb the neighborhood. I can’t sit here like this. I can’t do nothing while some psycho has my baby girl. This guy’s not gonna hurt me. I’ll tear him apart if he tries to hurt me. I’ll kill him if he touches my baby.”

  Larry was a big guy. His job kept him in shape. But Randal Davies had been more than six feet tall and exercised regularly. Floyd Reynolds too. Both were dead now.

  Clair’s phone rang.

  “Hey, Kloz, did you find something?”

  Darlene stood up from the bed, looking at her hands. Both were covered in pizza sauce. “I’m gonna clean up.”

  Clair nodded at her and watched her disappear into the bathroom. Larry continued his pacing.

  “I found the obituary. It ran two days ago in the Sun Herald,” Kloz said from the other end of the line.

  “So not the Chicago Examiner?”

  “Either our guy is branching out, or he’s been placing ads in multiple papers and the Examiner was just a lucky break.”

  “What does it say?”

  “I texted it to you. Did you get it?”

  Clair’s phone dinged. “Yeah, hold on.” She glanced down at the display:

  DEALER OF DOPE

  MOTHER AND WIFE

  DARLENE BIEL FINALLY FOUND PEACE

  AT THE BUSINESS END OF DEATH’S KNIFE.

  A crash came from the bathroom, the sound of a body hitting the floor.

  72

  Clair

  Day 3 • 6:04 p.m.

  Larry was the first to the bathroom door. He jiggled the handle—locked. “Darlene?”

  “Get back!” Clair shouted, her foot missing him by less than an inch as she kicked the door just below the lock. The frame protested but didn’t give.

  Larry plowed into the door, shoulder first, hitting hard, and Clair heard the splinter of wood as the frame cracked.

  Darlene was on the bathroom floor, her body spasming, a white foam dripping from her mouth down her cheeks and chin. Her eyes were open wide, all white, rolled back into her head.

  Larry dropped down beside her, cradling her head against the tile floor. His hand was covered in blood, as was the tile beneath her head.

  Darlene’s body shook. Her toothbrush snapped with a loud crack between her convulsing fingers.

  “Turn her on her side! Make sure her tongue is clear, don’t let her choke!” Clair shouted out, scanning the room.

  Toothbrush in two pieces.

  Toothpaste tube open on the counter.

  Mouthwash.

  The white foam at Darlene’s mouth pooled on the floor as Larry turned her on her side.

  Clair grabbed the liquid soap dispenser from the wall and tore it loose from the plastic mount, then dropped down beside Darlene. “She needs to drink this!”

  Larry’s eyes went wide, and he pushed her away. “Hell no—that will kill her!”

  Clair fought him, turning Darlene’s head. “She’s been poisoned, something fast-acting, like cyanide. Most poisons are acidic. Soap is a base. It will neutralize the poison, cause her to throw up.”

  Before Larry could object, Clair had twisted the cap off the soap and poured the thick, pink liquid into Darlene’s open mouth. Then she held the woman’s mouth closed and pinched her nose, forcing her to swallow.

  Darlene’s body jerked with a terrible force, and Clair lost her grip. The woman’s head twisted and her arms flailed out. She kicked at the air.

  “You’re making her worse!” Larry shouted.

  Clair forced more soap down her throat, forced her to swallow. It came back up a moment later with a gurgling cough, spewing over the wall and tile. Clair made her drink more. She threw up a second time, then a third. Her body finally stilled, and Clair checked her pulse.

  Beside her, Larry’s face was white and long. “You killed her! Oh my God, you killed her!”

  Clair tried to draw in a breath, but every muscle in her body fought her. “Go call 911.”

  73

  Porter

  Day 3 • 8:06 p.m.

  Porter and Sarah Werner had landed in Greenville, South Carolina, at 7:25. The sun had vanished over the horizon about midway through the flight. At that point Sarah closed the plastic blind. Porter wasn’t aware that she’d been looking out the window at all. Her eyes seemed transfixed on Bishop’s diary in her hands. He had watched her finger slide down each page as she read, taking in every word.

  At the airport, she had paid for the tickets. At that point she understood Porter was trying to fly below the radar, and the fewer hits on his credit card, the better. He offered her cash, which she refused, citing this trip as a business expense, and she had no problem covering the cost from Uncle Sam’s usual cut of her earnings.

  She had finished the diary shortly before the flight landed.

  In Greenville the rental car, a well-equipped red Hyundai Sonata, had gone under her name as well.

  Sarah plugged the address from Bishop’s diary into the GPS app on her phone and drove off in relative silence with Porter in the passenger seat.

  Once they left the airport property and eased onto the highway, Sarah was the first to speak. “Maybe we should get a hotel and go in the morning, when it’s light out. We’ll have a hard time seeing anything in the dark.”

  It was dark.

  In the city, light found its way into every corner. Streetlights, traffic lights, offices, businesses, there was always light. Out here there was nothing. The sky was pitch black, dotted with distant stars. Along the edge of the highway, Porter could see maybe thirty feet before the darkness blotted out their headlights. Within minutes of their leaving the airport, civilization seemed to drop away, replaced by sprawling fields and nothingness.

  Porter glanced over at the GPS. “According to your thingamagizmo, we’re only thirteen minutes away. I’d rather scope it out, see what we can see tonight, and maybe go back in the morning.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “I slept during police school.”

  “I find that hard to believe. Where else would you learn a fancy term like thingamagizmo?”

  Heather.

  He had learned it from Heather. One of her favorite non-words.

  His thumb drifted to his wedding band.

  Sarah caught him looking at it. “Tell me about her?”

  Porter felt his face flush. “You don’t want to hear about my wife.”

  “I do,” she said. “I’d really like to.”

  He hadn’t really talked about her much since her death. He had tried with both Nash and Clair, the two of them loading him up with alcohol not long after Emory was found and he returned to duty. Although they were his friends, he was technically their superior, and he’d always had a problem showing emotion. There had been plenty of private moments after Heather’s death. He still found himself talking to her a couple times a day. Every day as he got dressed, he lingered a bit too long at the closet, his fingers brushing her clothes. Her death left a void in him, a big empty space. He missed her dearly, every second of every day.

  “Her name was Heather. She was killed in a botched convenience store robbery a few blocks from our apartment about six months ago. They caught the guy, just a kid really. Harnell Campbell.” Porter went quiet for a second, his gaze drifting to the window. “Somehow, he escaped. He should have stayed in jail, because Anson Bishop tracked him down. Killed him, we think. His body never turned up. Bishop left the kid’s ear sitting on my bed like some kind of gift. I guess in a way it was. I sure as hell wanted to kill him. The idea of him spending a few years in prison and getting his freedom back while my Heather was lost ate at me. I came home, and there it was: her killer’s ear in a neat little white box with a note.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “It said—

  Sam,


  A little something from me to you . . .

  I’m sorry you didn’t get to hear him scream.

  How about a return on the favor?

  A little tit for tat between friends.

  Help me find my mother.

  I think it’s time she and I talked.

  B.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So that’s why you’re here? That’s why you came to New Orleans? To help him find his mother?”

  Porter shook his head. “I’m here to catch him, period. She’s a lead, nothing more. Him killing Campbell, that was a one-sided deal. I don’t owe him anything other than a comfortable cell.”

  “But he could be in New Orleans too. He might have been watching the entire time,” Sarah pointed out. “He can’t enter the prison without risk of getting caught, but he probably followed your every move.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So he could be here, following us.”

  Porter hadn’t thought about that. He assumed Bishop kept tabs on him in New Orleans, but here? “I don’t know about that. He couldn’t have known what was said between us and his mother. Nobody has seen what she wrote in the diary but us, the address.”

  “There are cameras in the interview room. It’s possible one of them caught a good angle. Somebody on the inside slipped you that cell phone and the knife. He could have followed us to the airport. Hell, he could have been on our plane. Somebody high profile like him, to be able to hide as long as he has, he’s got to be good at disguises, blending in. I think I’ve seen his face on the news every day since you ID’ed him. To not get caught, with all that heat . . .” She let the words trail off, reached up and brushed an errant hair from her eyes, then glanced up at the rearview mirror. “He’s not out here, though. I haven’t seen another car in a while. Of course, he could be driving with the headlights off. That’s what I’d do.”

  “I don’t think he’d follow us. I think you’re right, he’s good at hiding. I also think he’s smart enough to stay hidden. If I had to bet, he’s hunkered down somewhere, waiting for things to cool off a little bit. People have short attention spans. I’m surprised the press has stayed on it this long. As soon as some other big story hits, he’ll get put on the back burner. If he plans to make a move, he’ll do it then.”

  “I see what you’re doing,” Sarah said.

  “What?”

  “You completely changed the subject. I asked you about your wife, and somehow you managed to turn the conversation to Bishop. I’m not having that. I need answers. I’m a sucker for a good love story. Tell me how you and Heather met. And if you try to weasel out of it and go on about Bishop again, I’m gonna pull over and beat you with the tire iron. I see plenty of places to hide a body out here.”

  “You are one scary girl.”

  “Woman. Scary woman and proud of it. Now, tell me about Heather.”

  Porter sighed. “We met at the hospital, of all places.”

  “The hospital? What happened?”

  “I was a rookie cop, not far from here actually, near Charleston. I took a bullet to the back of the head. She was one of the trauma nurses lucky enough to be working the ER when they brought me in.”

  Sarah’s eyes went wide. “You got shot in the head?”

  Porter reached to the back of his head and found the scar, a small bump to the left of center. “It was a peashooter, a .22. My partner and I were trying to take down a petty dealer, mostly dirty heroin and some crack. On the street, they called him Weasel. We cornered him in an alley. I came up from behind him, and my partner circled around the block so he could come in from the other side. He saw my partner first, spun around, and panicked when he saw me standing behind him. He was wired on something, real jumpy. He had the gun in his hand and pulled the trigger by accident. He didn’t mean to shoot me, the gun wasn’t even pointing at me, it was more of a reflex than anything else. The bullet hit a dumpster behind me and ricocheted, and I caught it in the back of the skull.”

  “Holy hell. How are you still alive?”

  Porter shrugged. “My thick head, I guess. The bullet lodged in place, got caught in the bone. It didn’t make it into my brain but got real close.”

  “Well, that was lucky.”

  “Yeah, I guess. They think the ricochet is what saved me. A direct hit, and I would have been done. There was still damage, though. Pressure started to build up almost immediately.” He paused for a second, recalling. “It’s funny, I actually remember the hit. It was like a hard slap to the back of the head. It didn’t knock me off my feet like it does in the movies. I stood there like an idiot. Thought I could get back to the car and drive myself to the hospital. I touched it, saw the blood on my fingers, and took about two steps before I passed out. I didn’t wake up again for nearly a week.”

  Sarah slowed as a small animal scurried across the road and disappeared in the bushes at the side. “Were they able to remove the bullet, or is it still in there?”

  “No, they got it out. Then they put me in a coma until the pressure finally reduced.” His finger found the small scar again. “The bullet went in from a weird angle, came in low on the left. Most of the pressure was centered above the hippocampus region.”

  Sarah held up a hand. “Wait, I know this. That’s the portion responsible for emotions and memory.”

  “Give that girl a gold star.” Porter grinned. “It also runs our autonomic nervous system and handles spatial recognition. They knew my nervous system was intact even while I was in a coma, but until I woke, they weren’t able to tell if anything else had been impacted. When I opened my eyes, Heather was standing over me, this beautiful smile on her lips, and I knew I was in love.”

  74

  Clair

  Day 3 • 8:07 p.m.

  Clair stood in the hallway outside room 316 at the Piedmont Hotel, her hands balled up in fists and her stomach in knots. CSI had arrived ten minutes earlier and sealed off the room.

  “Clair-bear?”

  She turned to find Nash stepping off the elevator, unfastening his thick coat. “What the hell happened?”

  Clair shook her head. She was still trying to piece everything together. “He poisoned her. At least, I think he poisoned her. I forced her to throw up. She was stable when the paramedics took her away. Still unconscious, though.”

  “But alive?”

  “Yeah. Still alive.” She took a couple of steps, her back to him. “How is this happening? How is this bastard able to stay ahead of us like this?”

  “We’ll get him.”

  When she turned back around, there were tears in her eyes. “I was supposed to protect her, and he got right past me. Tried to take her out right under my nose.”

  Nash wrapped his arms around her, gave her a hearty squeeze. “This is not your fault, Clair-bear. There is absolutely nothing you could have done differently.”

  “I should have seen this coming. With Randal Davies, the unsub got into their house and poisoned his coffee with lisinopril. The unsub knew only Randal Davies drank it, and he targeted him. Somehow he got poison into something belonging to Darlene Biel, either her mouthwash or toothpaste . . . she traveled regularly for work. He got into her travel bag and set his poison. After Randal Davies, I should have seen that coming, I should have . . .” Her voice trailed off. She pressed her face into his shoulder.

  “Detectives?”

  Clair pulled away from Nash, wiped at her eyes, embarrassed. “Yes?”

  CSI Lindsy Rolfes stood at the hotel room doorway. She averted her eyes as Nash released Clair from the hug. “You were right. The field test came back positive for cyanide.”

  “Toothpaste or mouthwash?” Clair asked.

  “Toothpaste. We found a small puncture hole in the tube. It looks like the unsub injected it into the toothpaste tube with a hypodermic needle about an inch down from the top. Because of the toothpaste consistency, she may have used it for days without encountering the poison. Honestly, toothpaste makes an exc
ellent delivery method—the paste acted as a primitive timer. If the unsub would have placed the poison lower in the tube, he could have bought weeks rather than days before she encountered it. I’d keep that in mind—most likely he wanted it to hit around this time.”

  Clair drew in a deep breath and let the air back out before speaking again. She wasn’t going to let this guy get the better of her, no way. “Anything else?”

  Rolfes pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose with a gloved hand. “That’s all so far. We’re still testing her personal items. I’ll finish up at the lab.”

  “So nothing in the husband’s belongings?” Nash asked.

  “Nothing that we’ve found. I’ll call you if we turn up something else.” She turned and disappeared back into the hotel room.

  Clair massaged her chin, walking in slow circles around the hallway. “The obituary was Darlene Biel. She was the target. That means this guy isn’t going after only the fathers, he’s going after a parent. There’s a thread connecting them—connecting the girls and connecting the parents. We just need to find it.”

  “You need some rest,” Nash told her. “You’ve been running on empty for two solid days. You can’t think straight like this. Neither can I, for that matter.” He lowered his voice. “When I got here, I tried to climb out of my car and forgot to take off my seat belt. I actually sat there for a second or two, trying to figure out why I couldn’t get up. My brain is toast. We all need to get some rest and regroup.”

  Clair was shaking her head. “I’m going back to Metro. I need to work the boards, see all the data. There’s something there, I know it. Their daughter is still out there, and she may still be alive. She’s only been missing a day.”

  “We have half the force out looking for her.”