The Fifth to Die

by J. D. Barker

  Father was very skilled.

  He could see Bishop behind him, feel his eyes on the back of his neck. When was the last time he was here? When he was a boy? All those years ago? Or had he returned? Had he returned and walked this same hall again?

  “Two doors at the back. Must be the bedrooms,” Sarah said from behind him.

  Both doors were closed.

  Father once told me if you sneak up on someone, you have a second or more to attack before they are able to react. The human brain processes this activity slowly; your victim freezes for a moment as they try to comprehend the fact that you’re standing there, particularly in a room where they believe they are alone. He said some victims will continue to freeze, just watching you as if they were watching a television program. They stand there, waiting to see what happens next. Sometimes, not knowing what comes next is better.

  Porter wished he had his gun. Why didn’t he buy a shotgun locally? No waiting period on those.

  His hand went to his pocket, wrapped around the hilt of Bishop’s knife.

  He reached for the doorknob on the left.

  Behind him, Sarah screamed.

  80

  Kati

  Day 3 • 9:11 p.m.

  “Wake up!

  “Wake up!

  “Wake up!”

  Muffled.

  Words spoken through a wet towel.

  A girl’s voice.

  “Please, wake up . . .”

  The words right in her ear. Warm breath. A heavy whisper.

  When Kati’s eyes opened, they felt so heavy with the effort, they almost slammed shut again. Consciousness returned. With it came pain, washing over her like a hot liquid from inside, burning at her muscles and bones.

  The blindfold was gone.

  Her hands and feet were no longer bound.

  A girl of about her age bent over her, faces nearly touching. Kati’s head in her lap.

  When Kati’s eyes focused on this other girl, the girl pressed a finger to her lips. “He can’t hear us,” she breathed. “We can’t let him hear us. I don’t want him to come down here.”

  Something was wrong with her voice. She sounded like someone getting over a bad cold. It pained her to speak. Kati could see it in her eyes. Dried blood crusted her lips.

  Kati tried to sit up, couldn’t, fell back into the girl’s lap.

  The other girl brushed at her hair. “I changed your clothes. It was me, not him. He left clothes for you. Your clothes were all wet. You’ll catch cold down here, so I couldn’t leave you like that. You don’t want to get sick. You need your strength. We need to get out of here. Can’t do it alone. Need to work together.”

  The girl spoke in ragged breaths, each word a struggle.

  Kati vaguely remembered the water tank, falling into it.

  Then nothing.

  “He tried to electrocute you. He did electrocute you, I saw him do it. He put you in that big water tank over there and dropped jumper cables down into the water. There was this loud bang, then I smelled . . . I smelled . . . something burning. I think it might have been your hair. I can’t tell. Your hair is still wet. He took you out of the tank and gave you CPR. He gave you CPR for a long time, then you coughed, but you didn’t wake up. He watched you for a while, then he put you in here. He put you in here with me and went upstairs. He hasn’t been back down. Not yet. We need to be quiet so he doesn’t come back down. If he realizes you’re awake, he’ll come back down, I know he will.”

  The girl coughed.

  She grimaced in pain.

  When she took her hand away from her mouth, red spittle covered her palm. “I . . . I swallowed glass, to keep him away from me. It worked, he didn’t touch me.” A weak smile. “Guess I showed him, huh?” She wiped her hand on the green quilt wrapped around her body. “I’m Larissa.”

  “I’m Kati,” she managed, her own throat dry, needing water. “Where . . . where is Wesley?”

  “Who?”

  “I . . . I came here with Wesley Hartzler. He was with me.”

  “I haven’t seen anyone else, only you. He only brought you down here.”

  “I came here with him,” Kati repeated.

  At this, Larissa’s eyes lit up. “Could he have gotten away? Maybe he went for help?”

  Kati saw the strange man leap across the table, saw him smash his cocoa mug into the side of Wesley’s head. Wesley falling to the floor. “I don’t know, I think he hurt him. I think he hurt him really bad.”

  “Maybe he didn’t hurt him so bad. Maybe he got away. Otherwise, I think he’d be down here with us. He would have locked him in here.”

  Kati looked up at the girl holding her, watched her eyes dart desperately around the room before they fixed on the ceiling. “How long have you been down here?”

  The girl’s gaze turned back to her, a quick, animal-like movement. “I . . . I’m not sure. A day, maybe? I passed out after I swallowed the glass. It’s been hard to keep track of time. What day is it?”

  “Saturday,” Kati said, forcing herself to sit up. Her head was spinning. She touched her left temple and winced.

  Larissa’s face fell. “He took me this morning. It hasn’t even been a day. God, it feels like I’ve been here a week.” She coughed again, more blood.

  Kati tried to stand, fell back over. Larissa helped to steady her. “Be careful, I’m sure you’re still weak.”

  Kati nodded, drew in a deep breath, tried to stand again, this time pulling herself up with the chainlink. Once on her feet, she started to circle the cage, checking every seam, every little opening.

  “I’ve been over it a dozen times. He welded all the seams and bolted the frame down into the concrete. There’s no room to get out at the top, and he’s got two padlocks on the gate. There’s no way out of here.”

  Kati rounded the corner and came to the door. She studied both locks. “Where does he keep the key?”

  “On a chain around his neck. Do you know where we are? Where the house is, I mean?”

  “You don’t know where we are?”

  Larissa shook her head and told her how he had abducted her.

  “This house is on Lowell. There are neighbors all around. Wesley and I came here recruiting for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

  “Does anyone know where you are?”

  Kati frowned, dropping the lock. It clattered against the metal frame. “No. There was a large crowd of us at the start, roughly two dozen, but we all left the hall early this morning and split up to cover the most ground. We were gone hours before we got to this house. I lost sight of the others. We go in small groups to stay safe. I stuck with Wesley because he said he knew the neighborhood, he knew this street.”

  Kati crouched back beside Larissa. “You said he didn’t touch you or me. Is that why he took us? Did he take us for sex?”

  A tear formed at Larissa’s eye, and she wiped it away with a dirty hand. “At first, I thought so, but with you . . . he asked if you would see for him, if you would tell him what you saw, before he put you in the water, before he electrocuted you. When he was trying to revive you, he kept telling you to come back from the light, come back to him. He was frantic. He didn’t want you to die, but he tried to kill you. I don’t—”

  A door opened at the top of the stairs.

  Heavy footsteps.

  Larissa lay back down, covered herself with the quilt. “Pretend to be sleeping still. He’ll leave you alone,” she whispered, closing her eyes.

  Kati didn’t, though. She stood there, she stood there at the door as the man with the black knit cap came down the remainder of the steps to the basement, his right foot dragging slightly behind him.

  “You’re awake.” He approached the cage. “My daughter’s clothes fit you well, that’s good. I wouldn’t want you to catch cold. I should have removed your clothing before I put you in the tank. It’s better that way, but I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  He wrapped his fingers through the chainlink, gripping the metal. �
��You must tell me, what did you see?”

  Kati looked at his hands. His fingernails were dirty, his skin covered in small colored lines, smudges from markers or pens. On the side of his head, his large incision was partially visible at the edge of the cap. The wound was red and inflamed against his pale skin, flaked with dried blood, scratched raw.

  “What did you see?” he said again. The s drawn out, a lisp. He watched her anxiously with unblinking eyes.

  Kati reached up, brushed her finger over his, then clasped at his filthy hand through the chainlink, holding him within her grasp. She leaned close, her face inches from his. “I saw something amazing,” she told him. “I saw the face of God.”

  81

  Porter

  Day 3 • 9:13 p.m.

  The raccoon scrambled out of the bathroom, down the hall, and disappeared out the front door, which still hung open at the front of the mobile home.

  Sarah jumped back, an embarrassed look on her face. “Come on, that didn’t scare you? Not even a little?”

  “I’m trembling on the inside,” Porter told her, trying to suppress a smile.

  He reached back for the doorknob, twisted, and opened the door on the left side of the narrow hallway.

  A small bedroom.

  Empty, but for some broken beer bottles piled up in the corner. The window was boarded over, busted out like the others at the front of the house.

  Porter turned to the door on the right. “If there’s another raccoon, I’ll protect you.”

  “My hero.”

  He opened the door.

  Another bedroom, this one furnished.

  A full-size bed flanked by two nightstands occupied the left wall. On the opposite wall was a closet with what were once mirrored doors. Both had been smashed long ago, the pressboard beneath covered in graffiti. The drawers from the nightstand had been removed. Two were missing. The other two were in the closet, stacked in the corner. The mattress on the bed was stained an assortment of colors, none of which Porter could identify. The room smelled of mold and mildew, stale air.

  “Nobody has been in here for a long time,” Sarah said. “That mattress might even be too gross for kids.”

  “Never underestimate the power of a teenage boy’s hormones. This is like a penthouse when you’re sixteen.”

  “I can’t imagine someone actually living here. This was someone’s home at one point.”

  Porter went to the drawers in the closet, lifted the one on top—both empty. The dresser on the wall beside the door had been ransacked too. Three of the drawers were missing. His mind drifted back to the diary, to Bishop’s mother pulling out these same drawers in search of something.

  He said, “Look to the place where the monsters hide, Detective. That’s where you’ll find answers.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what she told me, back at the prison.”

  “Monsters hide under the bed,” Sarah said.

  Porter lifted the mattress, forcing it up and leaning it against the wall with a grunt. The cloth of the box spring beneath had either rotted or been carted away by something for nesting. There was little left but ragged edges along the wood frame. “When I was a kid, I used to hide all the good stuff under my mattress, monsters or not.”

  Sarah ran the beam of her flashlight over the box spring. “By good stuff, if you mean dust bunnies and more beer bottles, you’ve struck gold. What exactly are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure,” Porter admitted. “In the diary there was a large beige metal box under here.”

  “Well, it’s gone now.”

  Porter lifted the box spring and leaned it up against the mattress on the wall, then knelt. He ran his fingers over the floorboards, under the beam of his light. “The floorboards are uneven.”

  “This whole place is uneven.”

  “They’ve been pulled up, then put back.”

  Sarah crouched down next to him. “I think the bad guys in the diary would have checked that, don’t you?”

  “Maybe it was done later. I need a screwdriver.”

  “If you think I packed a screwdriver before heading out on this little outing, you clearly don’t know me. I’m thrilled when I remember my iPhone charger—something I just realized I left on my desk.”

  Porter pried at the boards with his fingers but couldn’t get a good grip. “What about the car keys?”

  “Those I do have.” Sarah pulled the keys from her pocket and handed them to him.

  He set his flashlight down on the floor, and Sarah pointed her beam at the boards as he worked the key into the small space between two of them. At first there was no give, then they both heard a pop as the first of three boards separated from the floor. He pulled it out and set it aside, then tugged at the next board. This one came out easily, as did the next. He removed five in all, creating an opening about two feet square.

  Porter took his flashlight and shined the beam down into the hole.

  “What do you see?”

  He reached inside, pulled out a sleeping bag, and handed it to Sarah. “Looks like camping gear. There’s another sleeping bag and a backpack.”

  He reached back in and retrieved the other two items, then searched the space again to be sure he didn’t miss anything. “That’s it.”

  Sarah tugged at the backpack zipper.

  “Hold on a second,” Porter said. He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and handed them to her. “Put those on first.”

  She frowned. “Do you honestly think this is evidence? It’s probably just kids again. One of the smarter ones hid his own bed so he wouldn’t have to make his prom princess lie down on that filthy mattress.”

  “Best to be safe until we know for sure.” Porter put on a pair of his own.

  Sarah slipped on the gloves and went back to work on the zipper. “It’s rusty, doesn’t want to move.” She grimaced and it finally gave, opening with a metallic rip.

  Stale, musty air came out of the bag. The scent of something worse came up from the bottom.

  “You better let me do that,” Porter told her, reaching for the backpack.

  Porter shined his light down inside while trying to breathe through his mouth. Then he began removing items from the center pocket of the bag, placing them in a row on the floor. When the bag was empty, he leaned back, studying the items under the light.

  “Why does it smell so bad?”

  “Water got in at some point, recently I’d guess. Everything’s rotted, stagnant. It’s been down there a long time,” Porter replied.

  He counted six shirts, four pairs of jeans, socks, and undergarments, both men’s and women’s. The clothes were damp, the material crumbling under his touch. One of the socks was balled up, the end folded in on itself. Doing his best not to damage the material, Porter pulled it open and smoothed it out, revealing a bulge, something inside the sock.

  He exchanged a look with Sarah, reached in, grasped the contents, and set it on the floor.

  Porter’s heart thudded in his chest. “Get a picture.”

  Sarah nodded and raised the camera.

  A locket, small, gold-plated, on a chain along with a rusty key. After Sarah got a picture, Porter pried the locket open. Although it contained a photograph, the image was faded and lost. On the inside were the initials L.M.

  Sarah photographed that too.

  82

  Clair

  Day 3 • 9:14 p.m.

  They should have gone back to Metro, tried to get some rest in the war room on that ancient couch that probably began life in Chicago law enforcement back when Al Capone and Diamond Joe Esposito were still shoplifting candy behind their mothers’ backs. That couch with its faded brown leather, cracked and creased, and padding that had gone as hard as the floor.

  Clair needed that couch.

  Clair needed to sleep.

  “I know I still have one,” Nash grumbled beside her, flipping through the keys on his ring. “It’s one of these.”

  H
e selected a gold one and slipped it into Porter’s apartment door. The key didn’t turn.

  Wrong key.

  Nash pulled it back out, metal grinding on metal.

  “Why do you have so many?”

  The big man shrugged. “I move, the old key stays, new key gets added. You do this enough and you end up with a lot of them.”

  “Most people toss the old ones or turn them back in when they move. You’re not supposed to keep them.”

  “Are you moonlighting for the key police now? How the hell do you find time for that?”

  Nash tried another, silver this time, with an octagonal head. It didn’t work either.

  “All I’m saying is you should have around three tops. The one for your car, your apartment, and the war room back at HQ, that’s it. No reason for more.”

  Another gold key, round head. This one slipped in smoothly. This key turned the deadbolt.

  Nash pushed open the door. “If I didn’t keep my old keys, I wouldn’t be able to do things like this.”

  “Sam? Are you home?” Clair wasn’t sure why she called out, but she did. They had knocked three times, and nobody answered.

  The apartment was dark.

  Nash reached inside and turned on the living room light.

  They both saw the toppled chair.

  “Holy hell,” Nash said.

  Clair drew her gun and began checking each room, turning on lights as she went.

  Nash remained in the living room. He walked slowly around the room, toward the chair. “Clair, he’s not here. This isn’t a break-in.”

  Clair returned from the bedroom, the bathroom light blazing behind her. She shouldered her weapon. Her eyes landed on the cell phone on the coffee table. She reached down and picked up the iPhone. Her thumb pressed the home button. Nothing happened. “Sam’s phone, it’s turned off.”

  Nash wasn’t listening to her, though. He was leaning down beside the La-Z-Boy chair, his fingers running over the loose material at the bottom, the Velcro fasteners.