The Fifth to Die

by J. D. Barker

  The faculty at Wilcox Academy had organized a candlelight vigil for tonight. Gabby wasn’t sure she would go. What was the point? A bunch of people standing around holding candles wasn’t going to bring her back, and they all knew she was Lili’s best friend. Everyone would be staring at her.

  She closed Instagram and opened iMessage. She scrolled through all the car pictures they had shared over the past few months. Lili would never own a car, she would never drive, she would never be married, she would never have babies, she would never . . .

  The tears came again, and Gabby tried to fight them back. She hadn’t washed off all her makeup before bed, and she could only imagine what her eyeliner looked like.

  “You okay in there, baby?” her mom said from the other side of the door.

  “Yeah.”

  The handle jiggled. “Why is this locked?”

  Gabby didn’t reply. She wiped at her eyes.

  “Maybe you should eat breakfast. You’ll feel better if you eat something.”

  Right. Cap’n Crunch fixes everything.

  “Maybe later, Mom.”

  Gabby rolled over, the sheets tangling around her legs. She opened the photo app on her phone and scrolled through Lili’s album, hundreds of images, pictures of them at the park, downtown, at school. She saved some of their Snapchats here too. They liked to use Snapchat for their private conversations because messages disappeared the instant they were viewed by all recipients. They were free to say whatever they wanted away from the prying eyes of parents who read everything. They were careful to use iMessage too, for the things they wanted their parents to see, but the real conversations took place on Snapchat. If Lili said something she wanted to keep, like her comment about Philip Krendal’s butt-crack in science class, Gabby took a screenshot before the message disappeared from Snapchat and saved it in Lili’s photo album—password protected and hidden, parent-proof, as it should be. Unlike the Instagram memorial, these pictures made Gabby smile. Lili was the queen of the one-line tag. She liked to send pictures of her Lhasa apso, Scrappy, with little snippets of dialogue. Grumpy Cat had nothing on her. There were pictures of cars too, not the ones she found online but the ones she found at local dealers that she really liked. The next time her dad brought up buying a car, she planned to show him one she wanted locally, a specific car, see if she could talk him into going down to the dealer and making an offer, call his bluff. Her favorite was a 2010 Camaro she’d found downtown, cherry red with black upholstery. If she rolled into the school lot driving that, she would have turned all the boys’ heads—the girls’ too.

  Gabby paused at another picture. In this one Lili was holding up her iPad to her camera screen next to her smiling face. The caption read: “#WinnerWinnerChickenDinner.” Gabby had completely forgotten about it. Lili had won some kind of contest online for a local driving school. Gabby told her it was probably a scam. She figured they used the contest to draw kids down there, then try to upsell them into a pricey package. Half the driving schools in Chicago did it, ever since the state made thirty hours of lessons mandatory before you could obtain your license. Lili said she was going to check it out anyway, but if she did, she never had the chance to tell Gabby what happened. She’d have gone with her.

  Gabby sat up in bed.

  She remembered what the police asked her. Would Lili get into the car with a stranger? Her answer had been no, but . . .

  She pinched the image and zoomed in until she could read the name of the driving school: Designated Driver. It took her all of ten seconds to find their address.

  Twenty minutes later she was dressed and out the door. Her mom didn’t even hear her leave.

  100

  Porter

  Day 4 • 8:24 a.m.

  “Pull off there, to the side, Sarah. May I call you Sarah?”

  Porter knew they shouldn’t be following this woman’s instructions blindly. He understood this was the wrong thing to do, yet that was exactly what they were doing.

  They left the prison with her in the backseat, watching them, watching the outside world as it rushed past.

  Sarah did as she was told, pulling the BMW not into one of the parking spaces at the front of the building but into the alley running along the side.

  “Put the car in park and beep your horn twice.”

  The horn echoed off the buildings on either side, a residual slap.

  “You look a bit peaked, Detective. You should try breathing every few minutes. It does wonders for the circulatory system.”

  Porter ignored her.

  Someone had come out of the alley across the street. Porter recognized him, the same homeless man he had watched urinate on the sidewalk.

  Was that really only twenty-four hours ago?

  “May I have the key, Detective?”

  Porter nearly asked her what key, then remembered the business card. He dug it out of his pocket and passed the card to her.

  “I’d like to do something about these handcuffs and leg restraints as well.”

  “They stay on.”

  “We have a long ride ahead of us.”

  “Life can be very cruel sometimes,” Porter muttered.

  She smiled again, a slight curl at the base of her lip. “Yes, I suppose it can.”

  He didn’t like that smile.

  He didn’t like it one bit.

  The homeless man knocked at the window, then turned, watching across the street.

  Porter watched as she pulled the key from the back of the business card, bent down, and released the ankle monitor. The small box began beeping immediately.

  “Won’t they know?” Sarah asked, watching in the rearview mirror.

  Jane Doe rolled down the window and handed the monitor to the waiting man. He affixed it to his own ankle.

  The beeping stopped.

  The homeless man gave the roof of the car another tap and returned to the alley across the street, not a word between them.

  Porter said, “Those ankle monitors aren’t as reliable as the general public might like to believe. They store data when they can’t reach a cell tower and upload the data as a batch when they make contact. The older ones, the ones in circulation for a while, regularly report false removal data. Too much jiggling over time of parts not meant to be jiggled. The monitoring center usually programs in a window—if the device reports a problem lasting longer than a minute, an alert goes off, less than a minute, and it’s ignored. They would have programmed a geo-fence before they released her. As long as she doesn’t leave the geo-fence, nobody will be the wiser. I saw that guy yesterday, and even my cab driver said he didn’t belong. I’m guessing he’s been waiting for us.”

  Sarah took this all in, her eyes glancing nervously at the rearview mirror, then back to Sam.

  Without turning in his seat: “Where exactly are we going?”

  “Didn’t my boy tell you? Chicago, of course. I’ll give you the exact address when we’re closer to the city.”

  That smile again.

  That wicked little grin.

  “I’d like to read Anson’s letter now. May I have it, please?”

  Porter wanted to say no.

  He wanted to tell her to fuck off, sit back, and shut up, but he didn’t. Instead he reached into the glove box, retrieved the crinkled yellow pages, and tossed them into the backseat.

  He heard her scrambling to retrieve them but did not look.

  He would not look.

  “Wasn’t there a diary too? I do so miss his words.”

  Porter closed the glove box on the knife and locket before she could glimpse them, then opened the black and white composition book where he had left off. “You can have it when I’m done.”

  Jane looked to Sarah, their eyes meeting in the rearview mirror. “I believe Anson gave you until eight o’clock tonight. I suggest we get going. Wouldn’t want to keep him waiting. He has a temper, that one. I understand he has playthings. Chop, chop.”

  Porter said, “Not another word out
of you unless you’re spoken to. Do we understand each other?”

  Jane raised her cuffed hand to her lips and turned an invisible key before returning to her letter.

  Sarah took one last nervous look in the mirror at the woman behind her, backed out onto the road, and put the BMW in drive, speeding forward. “Chicago it is,” she said. “Nothing like a good road trip.”

  101

  Diary

  Doctor Oglesby wore a green argyle sweater today, again with khaki pants. I could only imagine argyle growing wild in his closet, slowly taking over the solids and plaids with their evasive patterns. Could you spray for argyle? Maybe there was a way to hold it at bay. Did wearing argyle on the regular cause one to morph into a doctor of the mind? If he wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops every day rather than the sweaters, would he be a different man because of his choices? Would the clothing cause his personality to shift? Can the clothes change the man? Or does it work the other way around? A change in personality first, which then leads to a desire to wear more casual clothing. I wasn’t—

  “Anson? Where are you right now?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize, it’s fine. I’m just curious where your mind takes you when leave the room like that.”

  “I was right here. I didn’t go anywhere.”

  “You were physically right here, but your mind was in a distant place. What were you thinking about?”

  The glasses were off again, dangling around his neck.

  “Who is the girl down the hall from me?”

  “What girl?”

  “Two doors down.”

  The doctor frowned at this. “Have you met?”

  On went the glasses, a scribble in his notepad.

  I shook my head. “I’ve heard her crying. She seems very sad.”

  “Does that make you feel sad?”

  “Should it?”

  “Do you ever cry, Anson?”

  I had to think about this, maybe the first compelling thing the doctor asked of me since I got here. I couldn’t remember the last time I had cried. Father taught me to cry, I could cry at will, I could summon tears with the snap of my fingers, but I didn’t remember ever needing to do so, even when—no, not then. I wouldn’t think about that. The last time I think I cried was after Ridley’s puppies. I didn’t want to talk about the puppies either, not now, not ever. Father once told me although I knew how to cry, real men do not. Real men never cry. Dirty Harry would be far less threatening if he broke down into tears while waving his gun at the bad guys, or worse—when they pointed their guns at him.

  “When you learned you were alone, when you first realized both your parents were gone and you were all alone, did you cry then?”

  “Yes.”

  I said this only because I knew it was what he wanted to hear, the correct answer. I had not shed a tear—there was no point. Crying would not have helped or changed anything. Crying would have been a waste of time. I did not waste time. I did not let emotion control me.

  “Yet, you haven’t cried at all since arriving here.”

  Glasses off again.

  “There is no shame in crying, Anson. Emotional reactions to situations and our environment aid our body in coping with the current predicament. Bottling up emotion, holding such things inside, that can be dangerous. Have you ever taken a can of soda and shaken it up real good, then popped the top?”

  “I don’t drink soda.”

  “Shaking the can causes the gases inside to become agitated. Opening the can allows that agitation to be released. If you don’t open the can, all that energy remains inside and it can be damaging, all those molecules running into each other, getting angrier and angrier as they realize they’re trapped with no place to go. Shake a can and leave it to fester long enough, and the soda will taste bad when you eventually do open it.”

  “Soda is bad for you.”

  “The girl down the hall from you, she cries because something horrible has happened to her. I can’t share the details of another patient, but the things that have happened to her were unimaginable, something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, not even someone who lies or fibs to me. She cries because crying makes her feel better. She cries because crying helps her heal. Crying is a normal reaction, it is the right reaction. I worry far more about someone who doesn’t cry than I do about a girl like her. I don’t want to worry about you, Anson, but I do.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yes, well—” Dr. Oglesby stood and went around to the other side of his desk. He pulled open the top left drawer and took out a plastic ziplock bag. There was writing on the outside, but I couldn’t make out what it said. Inside the bag was my Ranger Buck knife.

  He set the bag down on the desk between us, then came back around to his chair. With his pen, he poked at the bag, turning it slightly. “That’s a nice knife, Anson. Did your father give you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I bet you’d like to have it back.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if I were to keep it? Or maybe throw it away? I suppose I could even give it to someone on the staff. Seems silly to let such a nice knife go to waste.”

  “It doesn’t belong to you.”

  “No? I think it does. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Have you ever heard that expression? The police gave the knife to me for safekeeping. A knife is a weapon. I’m not so sure a boy like you should possess a weapon.”

  My eyes fixed on him.

  I wanted to look at the knife, but that was also what he wanted me to do. I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do, no sir.

  He gave the bag another poke and eased back into his chair. “If I were to return the knife to you, what do you suppose you’d do with it? Would I be in danger? Would my staff have reason for concern? What does a boy who doesn’t cry do with a knife like that?”

  Something was absent from that plastic bag, something I desperately wanted to ask him about but knew I couldn’t. The picture of Mother and Mrs. Carter had been in my pocket too. Where was the picture?

  I imagined Dr. Oglesby holding the picture in the dark, studying it, filthy thoughts running through his little head. Filthy thoughts he’d no doubt wipe away with a discarded argyle sweater.

  That would not do.

  That would not do at all.

  I looked at the knife. “It makes a good screwdriver, and I’ve used it to open boxes. Sometimes I cut the bark off old trees, or pick rocks out from the tires of Father or Mother’s cars. A pocketknife is a useful tool to have on you, but if you prefer to hold on to my knife for now, if that makes you feel more comfortable, that’s fine.”

  Dr. Oglesby smiled. “I’m glad you approve, Anson. And you are one hundred percent correct. I had a Swiss Army knife when I was a boy your age. I carried that knife with me everywhere I went.”

  Father once told me Swiss Army knives were a joke, bulky and unnecessarily bogged down with useless clutter. A real man could get by with nothing but a knife. Any man who felt the need to carry a corkscrew, scissors, and metal toothpick in his pocket was not resourceful. That was the kind of man who cried. Dirty Harry would never carry a Swiss Army knife. I did not mention this, though, because the doctor seemed pleased with my last response.

  The doctor scratched the side of his nose, studied his finger, then nodded back at the desk. “You know, Anson, before the police gave that to me, they ran the blade through a series of tests. I’m not sure exactly what they were looking for, but something compelled them to study your knife very carefully.”

  I thought about Mr. Carter then, his final visit to the lake. Father had cut him up into tiny pieces neatly wrapped in plastic and tasked me with sending those pieces to the bottom of the lake. I punctured each plastic bag with my knife before chucking them into the water, weighed down with rocks. Best to give the fish a taste, Father once told me.

  “You know what they found, Anson?” He reached for his glasses, thought better of it, and lea
ned forward instead. “Your knife had been scrubbed and soaked in bleach, every nook and cranny. Might as well have been brand new. Considering you only used it for things like opening boxes, picking at rocks and bark, and the occasional screwdriver, it seems odd to me that you would use bleach on it. I imagine the police were curious about this too.”

  “I like to keep a clean blade.”

  He said nothing then, he said nothing for a long time, then: “Yes, I suppose you would.”

  Ten minutes later he led me from his office back down the hall to my own room.

  Nurse Gilman always smiled up at me when the doctor led me past the nurses’ station. Today I smiled back, then bent to adjust my slipper—it was large, and my foot sometimes slipped out.

  102

  Clair

  Day 4 • 8:28 a.m.

  Kloz had been right, the little shit knocker.

  So far, he’d tied eight more obituaries belonging to employees at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital, employees who were very much alive.

  Once he matched the employee names, Clair worked with the hospital’s HR department to reach out to each one and communicate what was happening, dispatching cars to fetch them.

  She spent most of the night gathering them all here, at the hospital. Each person had been told to not to bring anything at all—no food, no toiletries, no books, no cell phones, not one single personal possession other than the clothing on their backs. All would be provided once they arrived. Those with families were told to bring their families. Nobody was permitted to make a phone call, not before leaving or after arriving.

  She gathered them here, in the hospital’s cafeteria.

  They were pissed.

  Stir-craziness set in quickly, and most staffers were just longing for their shift to start so they could leave the room. It was worse for the children and spouses, but this made the most sense. The cafeteria was at the center of the hospital, easily guarded. They had plenty of food and shelter. She couldn’t accommodate this many people at a safe house, not even in multiple safe houses. The department didn’t have the resources.