The Fifth to Die

by J. D. Barker

  “I didn’t expect this to be real.” He nodded at the diary, still on the front seat. “I didn’t expect that to be real. I . . . I can’t leave now. I need to look. I need to see what’s here. I’m afraid if I leave, this place won’t be here in the morning. I know that sounds silly, and probably is, but I need to stay. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I do. I don’t think I have a choice.”

  She reached up, put her hands on either side of his face.

  He was grateful for her touch. He needed her touch.

  “I’m not gonna leave you to stumble around alone in the dark. Whatever this is, we do it together, but I’m going to make one thing very clear. When we get back to civilization, you owe this lady one hell of a dinner.”

  “Deal.” A smile edged across Porter’s lips. “I think I saw some old Arby’s coupons on the backseat.”

  They stood there like that for almost ten minutes while Porter’s strength returned and his head cleared. At some point Sarah slipped her hand into his. He didn’t remember the moment it happened, and he wished he had. These were the moments worth remembering, not some of the other thoughts that rattled around in his head. He gave her hand a squeeze. “I think I’m okay now. I guess I just got a little overwhelmed.”

  Porter let go and reached inside the car for the bag from the convenience store. He placed it on the roof, removed the flashlights from their packaging, and loaded batteries in each, handing one to Sarah. He put the diary in his pocket.

  Sarah flicked on her light and ran the beam up and down the deserted road while Porter read the instructions on the digital camera.

  “There’s a gravel driveway here, or maybe it’s an old road. I can’t tell, the weeds took it back.” She stood about five feet away from him, near the mailbox. “There’s something else too. Looks like there used to be another mailbox next to this one that says Bishop. I found a post, but it’s busted off about two feet out of the ground.”

  “It would have said Carter. They lived next door to the Carters.”

  “Oh yeah, from the diary.”

  Satisfied he had the camera under control, Porter loaded the gloves, Ziploc bags, and camera back into the bag, closed the car door, and went over to her. Her beam was still on the remains of the post. When she saw him beside her, she ran the light up and down the gravel she found. “This is what I was talking about. I don’t think anybody has been down there in years.”

  Porter followed the beam of light, watched it bounce over the rough gravel strewn with weeds and dirt. Watched it dance over the trees, waving silently in the moonlight. He watched the darkness engulf the light at the edge of the flashlight’s reach. Then he took Sarah’s free hand and started toward that darkness, not another word between them.

  78

  Clair

  Day 3 • 8:15 p.m.

  Clair spotted the flashing red and blue lights as they came down Ashland Avenue. She pointed out the windshield. “Over there.”

  “I see it,” Nash replied, turning into the Walmart parking lot.

  They followed the signs around the side of the long building to the loading docks at the back. As they rounded the corner, they came upon two patrol cars with a barricade set between them blocking the road. The officer on the left picked up the side of the barricade and ushered them through, replacing it behind them. Nash pulled up between one of the CSI vans and an ambulance. Both paramedics were standing at the back of the vehicle smoking cigarettes, little for them to do here but wait.

  “Do you smell gas?” Clair asked.

  “That’s just Connie,” Nash explained. “When she’s in Park, the smell comes up from somewhere underneath. I need to get her checked out.”

  “This car is a death trap, you know that, right?”

  “Don’t knock my baby while she’s down. She’ll fix up nice. Isn’t that right, Connie girl?” He reached up and ran his hand over the dashboard, then blew a kiss in that direction.

  “Bishop’s got nothing on you. You’re one crazy fuck.” Clair climbed out of the car into the cold air and slammed the door behind her, her hands deep in her pockets. Nash followed, nearly slipping on a patch of ice.

  A gray Toyota Tundra pickup truck with a water tank hitched to the back was parked on the ramp leading up to the loading dock. CSI surrounded the truck with large halogen floodlights. The perimeter was roped off with bright yellow tape. At least half a dozen uniformed patrol officers stood around the site, keeping the growing crowd at bay. They were mostly Walmart employees—the store was open twenty-four hours. They must have called in friends, though, because a few of the onlookers weren’t in uniform, and a car approached from the opposite side of the parking lot, heading directly toward the lights and crowd. Clair knew, once word got out, it wouldn’t take long for this crowd to double or triple in size. It would be even worse once the press arrived.

  Clair counted three CSI investigators. All stood inside the parameter awaiting orders.

  Lieutenant Belkin saw them and approached from the crowd, shuffling over. He wore a puffy navy coat with his badge affixed to the outer lapel and CHICAGO METRO stamped across the back in large white block letters. “We sealed off the scene as soon as we got here.” He pointed at a semi idling about fifty feet away. “That truck arrived a few minutes before eight and called inside—the pickup was already on the ramp, blocking his path. The warehouse supervisor came out, saw someone inside the truck, went to tell them to move, then backed off and called 911 when he realized . . . well, you’ll see. He touched the door frame. We took his prints for eliminations, also took a cast of his shoe to rule out his prints around the vehicle. There’s a second set in the snow, but they’re pretty muddled from this weather. CSI got casts of those. Probably your unsub. They circle the vehicle a few times. Might get something. The supervisor’s name is Willis Cortese, and we’re holding him inside the building. You can talk to him, but I don’t think he’s got much else to offer.”

  Nash pointed at the security camera above the loading dock. “Any footage?”

  Belkin shook his head. “There are three cameras back here. Someone knocked them out last Tuesday. Maintenance hasn’t had a chance to replace them yet.”

  “Knocked them out how? They’re mounted pretty high up.”

  “Cut the video line and bashed the cameras with something good and heavy. They don’t know exactly, but the cameras are a mangled mess. Whoever did it had a good handle on the cameras’ capabilities. They came in out of the viewing angle. According to Security, the feed is live, then goes black, no shot of the person or persons who did it. I’ve got one of my guys looking over the hardware and footage in case they missed something.”

  Nash gave Clair a quick glance. They were both thinking the same thing—Bishop.

  Belkin pointed a thumb back at the truck. “That’s a fucking mess. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Show us,” Clair said.

  Belkin nodded and turned back toward the truck. He ducked under the yellow tape and held it up for Clair and Nash. He approached the driver’s side door. The window was open. “Best we can tell, your unsub took the hose from the water tank and emptied the contents into the cab, close to five hundred gallons. It would have taken some time. Twenty, thirty minutes, maybe longer. When I got here, the temperature was seven degrees, with a wind-chill of negative two. The CSI folks are still trying to figure it out, but they said whoever did it would have had to spray for a few minutes, then pause for five to ten, then spray again. They said this was done in layers. Even at temps this cold, to do something like this, they had to build it. If they emptied the tank in one shot, it wouldn’t look like this. This took patience and one large set of brass balls, particularly out in the open like this.”

  Clair tried really hard to listen to Lieutenant Belkin as he explained what they were looking at. He went on with additional details about the thickness of the ice, the consistency. She heard Nash ask if it was salt water. She heard Belkin explain that it was not. Sal
t water wouldn’t freeze at this temperature. She heard all this while her brain tried to wrap around what she was looking at.

  Inside the cab of the truck was a person. That person was wearing a seat belt and had both hands on the steering wheel. Gaze fixed forward, locked on some nonexistent object off in the distance.

  The body was encased in rough ice, thick and crusted all around—thin around the face and head, thick at the seat and floor.

  The face stared ahead in a frozen dead gaze.

  It was a boy. A teenage boy.

  79

  Porter

  Day 3 • 9:10 p.m.

  It was the house they saw first.

  What was left of the house.

  Porter and Sarah stopped in the driveway, the beams of their flashlights playing over the vine- and weed-covered boards.

  There had been a fire, no mistaking that. The roof was gone, and what remained of the walls was charred and black. Most of the structure had collapsed, either with the fire or sometime later.

  Porter took out the camera and handed it to Sarah. “You’re in charge of pictures.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “That thing stores a thousand shots, so don’t hold back. I want to capture everything. We don’t know what might be important.”

  Sarah held up the camera, looking through the viewfinder at the structure.

  The house had been small.

  Porter could tell that much from the footprint. Maybe eight or nine hundred square feet, at the most. As in the diary, there was a porch but not what Porter expected. When he read the book, his mind’s eye drew a large wrap-around porch surrounding a fairly large home. This place was neither of those things. The porch was only about six feet wide and four feet deep, balanced precariously on old cinder blocks. There were two wooden steps, but he didn’t trust either under his weight. Rot had taken them long ago.

  “I thought the house would be bigger,” Sarah said beside him. “The way the diary described the place.”

  The camera made a tiny click whenever Sarah snapped a picture. Funny how people hold on to the past, Porter thought. There was no need for a digital camera to make any noise, yet someone took the time to build in the sound.

  “The eyes of a child, I suppose. Everything looks a little larger through a kid’s eyes.”

  “I guess.”

  Porter put a tentative foot on the porch, stepping over the damaged boards. The beam of his flashlight found the place where the front door had once stood, now just a gaping hole.

  “You’re not going in there?” Sarah said.

  “I need to see the basement.”

  Sarah’s flashlight bounced off the two remaining outer walls and the open space where the roof should have been, finally landing on what was left of the floor. “That can’t possibly be safe to walk on.”

  Porter took another step forward. The boards protested beneath him, groaning and aching.

  “If you fall through, you could get seriously hurt. We’re in the middle of nowhere out here.”

  Porter’s flashlight landed on what was left of an old refrigerator and stove about twelve feet deep into the mess. A rusty padlock dangled from the refrigerator door.

  Promptly at nine, she would latch the refrigerator closed and fasten the door tight with a shiny new Stanley padlock. It would remain locked until lunchtime, and the process would repeat again for supper. While I was perfectly capable of fasting until the noon hour, something told me a little sustenance in my belly would help with the lingering effects of the previous night’s bender and possibly set me right for the remainder of the day.

  Partial two-by-four walls stuck up in random places like large, blackened toothpicks growing from the floor. An old bathtub was buried under rubble toward the back.

  Porter took another careful step and kneeled down at a large hole in the floor where the living room had probably been. The flashlight picked across debris that had fallen through to the lower level long ago, impossible to make much of anything out. For a second he thought he’d found the metal stack pipe the Carters had been handcuffed to but realized it was a tree that had somehow taken root in the cracked concrete floor and grown almost tall enough to reach outside for light.

  “Do you see anything?” Sarah asked.

  “We’ll have to excavate the entire site. This place has been falling apart for years.”

  “No bodies, though, right?”

  “They would have been hauled out of here a long time ago.” Porter told himself that was true, yet his mind had no trouble seeing them, dozens of dead bodies wrapped in the tattered remains of this house, flesh burned and black. The place reeked of death.

  “Hey, can you toss me the camera? Don’t get too close—I don’t want you walking out here.”

  Sarah hesitated, took a practice swing, and lobbed the camera to him underhanded.

  Porter caught it with the tips of his fingers. “Thanks.”

  Careful not to drop the camera, he lowered it down into the hole, his finger on the shutter button. He snapped about a dozen shots, sweeping back and forth, the bright flash illuminating every corner.

  “Hey, I found a car!” Sarah called out from somewhere behind him.

  Porter took one last look at what remained of the basement and retraced his steps until he was back on solid ground. Sarah stood about twenty feet from the house, her flashlight pointing into a tangled mess of weeds.

  He didn’t see the car at first, not until he was almost standing on top of it. Sarah was busy stomping down the tall grass. “I think it’s a Volkswagen. Hard to tell.”

  “A Volkswagen? That doesn’t make sense.” Porter saw the rusted pile of metal then, the cracked windows. The interior had become the home of some woodland creature, the seats covered in matted grass. He walked around the car, carefully inspecting the frame. When the beam of his flashlight landed on the rear bumper, he paused, leaned in closer. “I’ll be damned.”

  “What?”

  When Sarah knelt down beside him, he pointed at the bumper sticker, faded, barely legible. She read aloud, “POOR MAN’S PORSCHE.”

  Father drove a 1969 Porsche. It was a marvelous machine. A work of art with a throaty growl that rumbled forth with the turn of the key and grew louder still as it eased out onto the road and lapped up the pavement with hungry delight.

  Oh, how Father loved that car.

  “It’s a Volkswagen Bug. I think this was Bishop’s father’s car.” Porter stood up and ran the beam of his flashlight over the visible parts of the vehicle. “See how the hood and trunk are both open? The smashed windows and lights? All the damage is consistent with the diary, it’s just not a Porsche.”

  “A poor man’s Porsche.”

  “Yeah.”

  Porter rounded the back and took a picture of the dirty license plate: expired in October of 1995.

  Sarah stood up and pointed off to the right. “There’s another house.”

  Porter followed her gaze, then took a few steps forward. “That’s not a house, it’s a trailer.”

  He handed the camera back to her.

  “I believe the politically correct term is ‘mobile home,’ ” Sarah said.

  He pushed his way through the tall weeds, crossing what was once the Bishop front yard, and Sarah followed. When he reached the trailer, he turned in a slow circle, his flashlight illuminating the surroundings. When he was once again facing the small structure, he stood still, his mind racing. “This must be where the Carters lived. There’s nothing else out here.”

  The screen door at the back of the Carters’ house had been left open. The wind owned it now, banging it against the white-paint-flaked frame. I reached for the handle and held it still for Mrs. Carter. She walked past me into the dark kitchen. She hadn’t said a word the entire walk back, Neither of us had. If it hadn’t been for the sound of her sniffling, I wouldn’t have known she was behind me.

  Sarah climbed the concrete steps and tried the door, one hinge cracked and
separated from the metal frame. “It’s open.”

  The windows, at least the two facing the front, were gone. Frail curtains swayed in the wind, fluttering against the dark interior.

  “Let me go first,” Porter told her, stepping past. “Stay close.”

  He moved through the doorway into a small kitchen—a tiny Formica table and bench built into the wall on one side and rusted appliances on the other. The floor was covered in mud, the elements having taken their toll. The refrigerator door was open, shelves bare. Most of the cabinet doors were missing. All the windows in the room were either busted out or standing open, air whistling in. Immediately following the kitchen was a tiny living space with a couch, the material so faded and eaten by rot there was no way to determine what it once looked like. Graffiti covered every flat surface, brightly colored images and shapes interspersed with blocks of text, random names, and various tags.

  “Can you get pictures of all this? We’ll review them later.”

  “Must be some kind of hangout for the local kids,” Sarah said, raising the camera. “Every teenager needs a respectable place to put away their alcohol and get laid in peace.”

  Porter moved past the small living space and kitchen, past a tiny bathroom with a dry, stained toilet and a shower curtain balled up in the corner of the bathtub. As his flashlight traveled over the cracked mirror, Porter saw his own face staring back at him. His mind returned to the diary, to a little boy taking this same walk down the narrow hallway.

  I began down the hall, with my knife hand pressed against my chest, the blade facing forward. Father taught me this particular grip. If necessary, I would launch the knife forward with the full strength of my arm muscles and the accuracy of a loaded gun. Unlike an overhand thrust, a jab would be difficult to block. This hold also allowed me to go directly for the heart or the stomach, with either an upward or downward motion, respectively. With an upper-hand grip, coming from above, you could only strike down—such an attack was more likely to glance off your victim than penetrate deeply.