Джей Баркер – The Fifth to Die: A gripping, page-turner of a crime thriller (страница 11)
Six eyeballs.
Seven dead girls.
Porter returned to the photo of Barbara McInley. Punished because her sister killed someone in a hit-and-run. McInley was the only girl to really hold Bishop’s interest during their briefing, the only one he had honed in on. Porter could still picture him, tapping on her photo, the wheels of his mind racing.
Porter glanced over at the door, listening for anyone in the hallway, but heard no one.
A table stood against the wall on his left, stacked high with file boxes — everything they’d collected on 4MK. The third box from the left had the word
These were his files. His team’s files. They did not belong to the FBI.
“Fuck it.”
Porter wrapped the file in his coat, then replaced the lid on the file box and crossed the room to the door. When he was certain the hallway was still deserted, he slipped out of the room and pulled the door quietly shut behind him.
He ducked into the war room at the end of the hall and flicked on the overhead fluorescents.
“I was beginning to think you took the morning off,” Special Agent Stewart Diener said. He was sitting at Nash’s desk, his feet up, poking away at the tiny screen of his phone.
Porter hoped an indoor breeze would catch the man’s delicate comb-over. No such luck.
Porter stared at Diener. “We caught a body and a second missing girl. I’ve been up all night. What do you want?”
“Yeah, great job keeping a lid on that.” Diener tossed a folded copy of the
Porter glanced down at the headline:
This was followed by a photo of Emory Connors walking on the sidewalk, head down. Both the story and photo were above the fold — main headline. Below the fold were two other shots — a telephoto lens capturing the scene at the Jackson Park Lagoon and another of the Davieses’ house.
Diener stood and walked around to the side of Porter’s desk, pointed at the paper. “They name both Ella Reynolds and Lili Davies in here.”
“How is that possible? We haven’t released anything. I just met with Lili Davies’s parents a few hours ago.”
Diener shrugged. “One of your crack team of investigators has loose lips.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Porter muttered, skimming the text.
The story mentioned the body found at Jackson Park Lagoon and speculated that she was most likely missing teen Ella Reynolds. The reporter also revealed that quick on the heels of this discovery, another girl vanished. Lili Davies was last seen leaving for school yesterday, but she never got to class. The remainder of the story detailed 4MK’s past victims and implied that Anson Bishop was forced to change his MO after his botched arrest.
“What’s that nut sack doing in here?” Nash said from the doorway.
Porter held up the paper. “Delivering the news.”
Nash walked over and dropped his coat onto the chair Diener had vacated. He brushed a piece of lint from the man’s shoulder. “Nice to see you exploring your career options. If you behave, maybe after school today we can go down to Walmart and pick you out a nice bike so you can expand your route.”
Porter dropped the paper onto Nash’s desk and pointed at the photos of the lagoon and the Davieses’ home. “This isn’t Bishop. It’s completely irresponsible for them to go out on a limb and say that it is. They’re just trying to sell more papers.”
Diener said, “How can you be so sure? Maybe Bishop decided to change things up, just like they say.”
“Serial killers don’t change their MO, you know that. Their signature is fixed.”
Diener shrugged. “Bishop is no ordinary serial killer. Each of his murders was part of an elaborate revenge plot. A plot he wrapped up when he killed Talbot. Maybe he planned to retire after that and quickly realized he still had a taste for young girls. When he couldn’t keep it under control, he grabbed Ella Reynolds. He finished up with her and snagged Lili Davies.” Diener started for the door. “You take a step back and look from a little distance, and it makes sense.”
Porter dropped his coat onto his desk, Barbara McInley’s file still wrapped inside. His heart pounding.
“That guy’s a tool,” Nash said.
“Heard that!” Diener shouted from the hallway. “If you’re wrong and they are 4MK’s vics, then you need to kick them over to us!”
“The other guy’s a little better,” Porter said. “His partner — Stool, Drool, Mule . . . ?”
“Poole. Frank Poole. Also a tool, the whole room full of ’em. Hey, see what I did there?” Nash reached for the door, ready to slam it, when Clair pushed past holding an iPad. Kloz was right behind her, with three white boxes perched precariously on top of his laptop. “Little help here,” he said.
Nash plucked the top box off and carried it back to his desk.
“Don’t go too far with those,” Kloz implored. “They need to last me for the week.”
“What is it?” Porter asked.
“Three dozen from that new place down the block, Peace, Love, and Little Donuts,” Clair told them. “The little bugger was going to hoard them back at his desk, until I explained the virtues of sharing with his coworkers.”
Kloz snickered. “You said if I didn’t bring them down here, you’d send a mass e-mail to the department telling everyone I had these in my desk. I couldn’t leave them upstairs undefended with all those vultures. They’d be gone in a minute. And there’s only eighteen — six in each box, not twelve.”
Nash opened the box he pilfered, and his eyes grew wide. “My baby Jesus, these are beautiful.”
Porter grabbed the second box from the pile and settled at his desk. Clair grabbed the third.
“Hey!” Kloz cried out. “Those are mine!”
“Why are they so small?” Porter asked, his mouth full of cream filling.
Clair plucked a donut from her box and held it up. It was covered in Oreo crumbles. “They’re
Kloz settled into his usual desk next to the conference table. He placed both palms on the metal top and took a long, soothing breath, his face turning red. “Okay, you can each have one, only one.”
“I may have eaten four,” Nash said, wiping the culinary evidence from his lips. His eyes fell on the decimated box before him. “And I’m keeping the rest.”
Ten minutes later all three boxes were empty with the exception of one strawberry-frosted donut. Porter felt the sugar kick in. He stood up, walked over to their single remaining whiteboard, and wrote ELLEN REYNOLDS at the top.
“It’s
Porter grunted, wiped away the first name with the back of his hand, replaced it with ELLA. “Okay, what do we know?”
Clair said, “Ella Reynolds was reported missing on January twenty-second and found yesterday, February twelfth. Her body was discovered frozen under the ice at Jackson Park Lagoon.”
“She wasn’t frozen,” Nash broke in. “Not entirely, anyway. That’s what Eisley said. But the lagoon was.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Clair said. “According to the park, the lagoon was completely frozen over by January 2, twenty days before she went missing. Also, I have something on video we’ll want to watch after we update the board.”
Porter nodded. “When found, she wasn’t wearing her own clothes but clothes believed to belong to our second missing girl, Lili Davies.” He wrote her name on the board, then went back to Ella’s column. “Ella was last seen getting off her bus about two blocks from her house in a black coat, near Logan Square, approximately fifteen miles from where she was found. I think we can safely say the unsub staged the scene at the lagoon to appear as if Ella’s body had been there for weeks, which would be impossible if her clothes turn out to be Lili’s.”
Nash got up from his desk and went to the conference table in front of the whiteboard, taking a seat. “What’s the point of that? He went through a lot of trouble to put Ella under the ice, but then he dresses her in Lili’s clothes, giving us a firm date on the timeline. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes sense to him,” Porter pointed out. “All of this does. Including this —”
Porter wrote DROWNED IN SALT WATER beneath Ella’s name.
“Are you serious?” Kloz said.
“Eisley said he found salt water in her lungs and stomach. He’s fairly certain cause of death was drowning,” Porter told him.
“Drowning,” Clair repeated. “In salt water.”
Nash added, “The nearest ocean is about seven hundred miles away.”
“We’ll need to check out local aquariums and aquarium supply houses,” Porter said. “I think we can rule out a trip to the coast. This timeline is too tight.”
Clair was shaking her head. “I haven’t slept enough to deal with this.”