The Fifth to Die

by J. D. Barker

  Lili Davies—Found posed inside stockroom of Leigh Gallery—drowned, salt water

  Darlene Biel—Pharmaceutical sales rep—poisoned with cyanide

  Larissa Biel—Missing from corner of West Chicago Avenue and North Damen as of 2/14 morning

  Unknown Boy

  Libby MCInley

  Killed by Bishop’s mother?

  Has photo of Bishop’s mother and neighbor/Carter

  Lock of blond hair—possibly Kirby? How would she get it?

  IDs in the name of Kalyn Selke/obtained with Bishop’s help

  Corresponded with Bishop while in prison/means unknown

  .45 in possession

  Felt safe in prison, not on outside

  poems

  Because I could not stop for Death,

  He kindly stopped for me;

  The carriage held but just ourselves

  And Immortality.

  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.

  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.

  You can’t play God without being acquainted with the devil.

  underlined words

  ice

  water

  life

  death

  Home

  fear

  death

  * * *

  89

  Porter

  Day 3 • 10:16 p.m.

  Sam removed the battery from the phone and threw both pieces out into the center of the lake. The water swallowed them whole, harsh ripples rolling out from the center until they faded away to nothing, another secret beneath the blanket of black.

  “Why toss the phone? You told him where we are,” Sarah said beside him.

  Porter knelt back down a few feet from the water’s edge, his fingers covered in dirt. He had been digging.

  The path had led them about a quarter mile into the woods and ended at a small clearing just as the diary described. A small clearing, looking out over the lake.

  Bishop said the water froze during the winter.

  That had been a lie.

  While temperatures in South Carolina could fall below freezing, the winters were much milder than farther north, nothing like those in Chicago. Even if they dropped below freezing, they never seemed to hold there long enough for the ground to freeze, most definitely not a large body of water like a lake. This was by no means a big lake, but it was big enough to escape the worst of the cold, of that he was certain. Bishop had probably only written that to help conceal the location. Porter could think of no other reason. Misdirection.

  He knelt in the dirt. Sarah held both flashlights. The beams were focused on the base of the large oak tree looming over the clearing, a laurel oak. At the base of the tree was a small hole. Porter didn’t have to dig very deep at all. Part of it had been sticking out of the ground. It caught Sarah’s eye right away.

  A white metal lunchbox, covered in rust.

  Porter didn’t expect to find the skeleton of a dead cat.

  He didn’t expect to find this either.

  The lunchbox was open now. Inside was an envelope, the paper yellowed with age, bound to a composition book with black string. The envelope addressed simply—

  Mother

  “Sam, why’d you toss the phone?” Sarah asked again.

  Porter took the bound package from the box and handed it to her. “I’m not worried about Poole knowing where we’ve been, I’m more concerned about him learning where we’re going,” he told her.

  “What about Bishop? He gave you that phone for a reason.”

  “We need to shake him up, disrupt him. We’re not his puppets. If he can’t reach us with that phone, he’ll need to find some other way. Maybe this will flush him out,” Porter said.

  He took Bishop’s diary from his pocket and put it in the lunchbox before closing the lid and tossing a little dirt on top, nearly covering the Hello Kitty image stamped into the rusty metal.

  Bishop’s cat.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  90

  Poole

  Day 3 • 10:23 p.m.

  “Sir, I need to see this through,” Poole said, tugging the steering wheel of his Jeep Cherokee hard left. He skirted four cars at a standstill in the right lane.

  Why is there traffic? It’s damn near eleven o’clock at night.

  A 727 buzzed over him, the belly exposed as it approached O’Hare Airport.

  “You should be on administrative leave. You lost your partner today. The last place you need to be is in the field,” SAIC Hurless said through the Jeep’s speakerphone.

  “Clear the jet, sir. I’m nearly to the airport.”

  “You need to turn around, come back to the field office, and brief me so we can get someone else on this,” Hurless said.

  Poole took a deep breath, tried to calm himself. He jerked the wheel and barely missed a brown Mitsubishi Outlander trying to make a left turn. The driver hit his horn and held it down.

  “According to Tech, he called you from a burner phone, and the nearest cell tower matches the location data he gave you, so he was standing somewhere close to that lake he mentioned. I pulled up satellite photos, but there’s not much to see. The tree cover is so heavy, you can’t make out what’s happening on the ground. This is odd . . .”

  “What?”

  “The phone was a burner purchased and activated in New Or­leans,” Hurless said, his voice flat, sounded like he was reading.

  “New Orleans? Could that be a mistake?”

  Bishop was in Chicago as of a few hours ago. Porter was outside of Greenville, South Carolina, middle of nowhere.

  “The signal died right after he hung up with you. Probably pulled the battery to avoid a trace. Run through it again. What did Porter tell you?”

  Poole recounted the conversation again, word for word.

  “I don’t like this. Porter is too much of a wild card,” Hurless said when he finished. “If he’s working with Bishop, this may be a smokescreen.”

  “I think Libby McInley is somehow the key to everything, the key to catching Bishop. Porter knows more than he’s telling us, but he hasn’t steered us wrong. If he says we need to sweep a lake in South Carolina, I think we’ve got to believe him. The team is still processing the two houses from earlier, so we’ve got nothing else to go on right now. I need to do this. Please clear that jet.”

  Poole took the airport exit from Kennedy and followed the signs toward Fixed-Base Operator hangars, where they housed the charters and private flights. “Bishop somehow communicated with Libby McInley when she was in Stateville Correctional. We need to know how he was able to talk to her and help her obtain the fake identification. We figure that out, we’re one step closer. I follow Porter’s bread crumbs and we take another step. Hold on a second, sir—”

  Poole pulled up to the security gate and passed his identification to the guard. Something clicked when he saw the man in uniform. “I’d check the security guards at the prison, sir, all the correctional officers. That’s got to be it. Mail, phones, and electronics are all under constant surveillance. That only leaves the human element.”

  The
security guard handed him a clipboard, pointed to a line, and Poole signed. The man then pointed to a lot on the right, mouthing the words, “Anywhere over there.”

  Poole nodded and pulled the Jeep into a space next to the small federal building shared by Homeland, FBI, and ATF.

  He shifted into Park.

  “I’m here, sir. What do you want to do?”

  SAIC Hurless sighed. “I ordered them to fuel the plane ten minutes ago. You should be wheels up in twenty. I’ll reach out to the local field office while you’re in the air. That’s Bob Granger in Charlotte. We go way back. I know him from the academy. He can scramble the local sheriff’s office and find Porter’s lake. Put a team in the water. Touch base with me when you’re back on the ground.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You better be right on this.”

  91

  Porter

  Day 3 • 10:26 p.m.

  Porter and Sarah had made their way back to the rental car in relative silence. Porter drove, and Sarah was on the phone booking flight reservations.

  She cupped her hand over the microphone. “The next flight doesn’t leave until four in the morning. That gives us a little over five hours. Should I book it?”

  “What?”

  She repeated the question.

  “Yeah, sorry. My mind is racing right now.”

  He stared out the windshield at the road, at the white stripes flying past and disappearing behind them. There were very few cars out at this time of the night. For this he was grateful. It felt like he and Sarah had the road to themselves, the lights of Greenville approaching in the distance. “Maybe we should find a hotel room near the airport, someplace we can get cleaned up and change.”

  Sarah finalized the reservation and disconnected the call. “May I remind you, you still haven’t bought me dinner? As first dates go, this one has been unique, I’ll give you that, but I’m not sure I’m ready to rush into a one-hour stop-and-bop motel with you, Mr. Porter.”

  The bound package they’d found in the lunchbox at the lake sat in the center console, the word Mother barely visible in the dim light of the envelope, Bishop’s voice, his words, shouting out from the composition book.

  Dinner.

  They hadn’t eaten since New Orleans.

  His stomach gurgled.

  Thirty minutes later Porter sat on one of the double beds inside a small room at the Greenville Airport Motel 8. Taco Bell wrappers littered the table near the door. Sarah was in the shower.

  The package felt heavy, heavier than it probably should, not necessarily with the weight of paper but with something else. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Someone’s life trapped inside.

  Or the rantings of a madman.

  He felt that way about the diary when he first read it, but two hours ago he had been standing in the very place where the events inside it had played out.

  The Carters.

  His mother.

  His father.

  The two men Porter later learned were Kirby and Briggs.

  All of them.

  All of it, true.

  The envelope and composition book were bound together with a piece of black string. He couldn’t help but wonder if it came from the same roll he’d used when he tied all those boxes.

  Porter removed the string, opened the envelope addressed to Mother, and unfolded the pages. The paper crinkled under his touch.

  How long had they been there?

  How long had this letter waited for a mother who never appeared?

  Porter recognized the handwriting immediately, a younger version of the writing in the diary.

  Momma. I know you have always wanted me to call you Mother, but I really just want to call you Momma. Is that so wrong?

  Momma

  Momma

  Momma

  Momma.

  Sorry, Mother.

  I am so sorry. I am sorry for whatever I did that would make you want to leave me behind. I am so sorry for all that I did that would make you want to run away without me.

  Did you leave because you didn’t have a choice?

  Did you leave because those men came to the house and you had to get away?

  That’s it, isn’t it?

  You wouldn’t leave me otherwise. Not like this.

  I was too slow getting back from the lake. If I had gotten back faster, you would have told me to hop in the car with a skippity jump, loaded up my bags, and all of us would have gotten away together. We would have started a new life together and left this one in the rearview mirror, blurred by the dust behind that green Plymouth.

  I didn’t want to write this letter, but the doctor told me I had to. He also told me he wouldn’t read it, but I know that he will. Father taught me to recognize a lie, and Dr. Joseph Oglesby is not a very good liar. He thinks he is, but he is not, no ma’am, not in the slightest. His dead little eyes shrink whenever he tells a fib, thirty-two of them in our last session alone.

  Hello, Dr.

  You should cut your hair. The comb-over is not fooling anyone. You look silly.

  I’m sorry.

  I shouldn’t say such things.

  Father taught me better than that.

  He once told me it is better to shower someone with compliments, let them swim in them until they’re drowning. They’ll reach for you and hold on tight, your friend forever.

  Not Mother, though, not my mother, not you. If you realized I was giving away too many compliments, you’d probably tell me to take them back.

  The two of you are different.

  Were different.

  Father.

  Oh, my father.

  I can’t write about that now. I know Dr. Oglesby wants me to but I can’t, it hurts too much. It hurts almost as much as when I dug up the spot at the lake under my cat, when I found my knife.

  I knew what that knife meant.

  You left me, Mother.

  As much as I’d like to believe you didn’t leave me intentionally, as much as I’d like to believe you had no choice but to run off without me, I know that is not true.

  I knew the moment I saw that knife.

  Why do you hate me, Mother?

  Why do did you hate Father so?

  After the house, after the fire—Do you know about the fire?—After the fire I was brought to the Camden Treatment Center just outside of Charleston.

  The people here are very nice, even Dr. Oglesby with all his lies. They gave me my own room. There is a window, but it doesn’t open. No summer breezes for me, only the steady hum of the air conditioner.

  Dr. Oglesby asked me to keep a diary.

  He gave me a black and white composition book and told me it would make the perfect diary.

  I told him only girls wrote in diaries, and he told me a journal then, I should keep a journal, that’s what boys do.

  I told him I would think about it.

  I’m a smart boy. I know he only wants me to write things down so he can read them, so he can better understand me.

  Would that be so wrong?

  To be understood?

  Don’t worry, Mother. I won’t tell him your secrets.

  Your secrets are safe with me.

  Most of them.

  Your loving son,

  AB

  P.S. Tell Mrs. Carter I said hello, the man with the long blond hair too. I’m sure one day I will see all of you again. I’ll keep my knife close until that day, I’ll keep it sharp. Thank you for returning it to me.

  “Anything good?”

  Porter looked up.

  Sarah stood at the bathroom door wearing a white towel, another wrapped around her long hair in that way only women seemed to know how to do, steam escaping from behind her.

  Porter caught himself staring at her tanned legs and forced himself to find her face.

  “Maybe I should get dressed.”

  “No. Yes. I mean, go ahead. I’m going to get in the shower.” Porter swallowed, his face burned.

  This is
n’t high school. Pull it together.

  Looking away, Porter dropped the letter on top of the composition book and crossed the room, entered the bathroom, and closed the door at his back.

  She smelled like lilacs.

  92

  Porter

  Day 4 • 3:42 a.m.

  Sarah took the window seat.

  She looked exhausted.

  Porter fell into the seat beside her, realized he was sitting on the seat belt, then stood back up long enough to find both ends. He sat down again, buckled the belt, and pulled the excess so it was snug.

  Sarah was watching him with a grin. “Do you honestly think that flimsy little belt is going to do a lick of good if this plane decides to take a header into solid ground somewhere over Alabama?”

  “I don’t want the attendant to yell at me. Sometimes, if you’re nice to them and follow all the rules, they’ll give you the full can of soda instead of just a cup.”

  She opened her mouth, about to say something, then changed her mind and leaned back in her seat, closing her eyes. “Wake me when we get there, Detective Sam Porter.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For coming with me. I thought I wanted to do this alone, but it’s better with you here,” he told her.

  “Very few things are better in life when you’re alone.”

  “I’m beginning to realize that.”