The Fifth to Die: A gripping, page-turner of a crime thriller. J.D. Barker

asked, “What about cause of death? I don’t really see anything on the body. No wounds, no strangulation marks.”

      At this, Eisley lit up.“Ah, yes. And you’re going to find this strange.”

      “How did she die?”

      “She drowned.”

      Nash frowned. “That doesn’t sound so strange. We found her under the ice in a lake.”

      Porter raised a hand. “You said the mark on her back was post mortem. Are you saying she was alive when he put her in the water?”

      “Oh no, she was dead at that point. I’m saying she drowned, and then he put her in the lake.” He went over to a microscope on a raised table to his left. “Take a look at this,” he said, pointing at the device.

      Porter walked over and looked down into the eyepiece. “What am I looking at?”

      “When they first brought her in, I was able to snake a tube down into her lungs, and I extracted water, that water.”

      Porter frowned. “What are these specks floating in it?”

      The edge of Eisley’s mouth curled up. “That, my friend, is salt.”

      “She drowned in salt water?”

      “Precisely.”

      Nash’s face went from lost to confused, then back again. “We’re in Chicago . . . the nearest ocean is what, a thousand miles from here?”

      “The Atlantic would be the closest,” Eisley told him. “Baltimore, Maryland. About seven hundred miles.”

      Porter’s cell phone rang. He glanced at the display, then answered. “Hey, Clair.”

      “Back from vacation? I called you about a dozen times.”

      “You called me three times.”

      “So your phone is working,” she replied. “You should never ignore a woman, Sam. It won’t end well.”

      Porter rolled his eyes and walked slowly across the room. “We’re at the morgue with Eisley. He confirmed the girl in the lake is Ella Reynolds. It also looks like she was wearing Lili Davies’s clothes.”

      “Who’s Lili Davies?”

      He thought he’d told her about the second missing girl, then realized he never had. They hadn’t talked since the park. He needed sleep; his head was a foggy mess. “Can you meet Nash and me in the war room in thirty minutes? We all need to get up to speed.”

      “Sure thing,” she said. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’ve been calling you?”

      Porter closed his eyes and ran his hand through his hair. “Why have you been calling me, Clair?”

      “I found something on the park video.”

      “Thirty minutes in the war room. We’ll talk then. Grab Kloz.”

       7

       Lili

       Day 2 • 7:26 a.m.

      “Would you like a glass of milk?”

      Lili Davies heard his voice before she saw him, truly saw him.

      He spoke slowly, softly, only a breath, each word enunciated with the utmost care as if he put great thought into what he wanted to say before releasing the words. He spoke with a slight lisp, the s in glass troubling him.

      He’d come down the stairs nearly five minutes earlier, the boards creaking under his weight. But when he reached the bottom, when he stood at the foot of the steps, he remained still. Shadows engulfed him, and Lili could make nothing out but the outline of a man.

      And this was a man, not a boy.

      Something about the way he stood, his broad shoulders, the deepness of his breaths, these things told her he was a man, not one of the boys from school. Not someone she knew playing some kind of sick joke, but a man, a man who had taken her.

      Lili did want milk.

      Her throat was as dry as sand.

      She was hungry too.

      Her stomach kept making little gurgling noises to remind her of just how hungry.

      She said nothing, though; she didn’t utter a sound. Instead, she huddled deeper into the corner, her back pressing into the damp wall. She pulled the smelly green quilt tighter around her body. Something about the material made her feel safe, like being wrapped in her mother’s arms.

      He’d been gone for at least an hour, maybe more. Lili used that time to try to figure out where she was. She hadn’t allowed herself to be afraid, she wouldn’t allow herself to be afraid. This was a problem, and she was good at solving problems.

      She was in the basement of an older home.

      She knew this because her house was older, and she remembered what the basement looked like before her parents brought in the contractors and construction crews to renovate it. The ceilings were low and the floor was uneven. Everything smelled like mildew, and spiders thrived. Every corner and cranny had either an old web or a new web, and the spiders crawled everywhere. When her parents brought in the contractors at her home, they gutted the basement, leveled the floor, sealed the walls, and coated everything in fresh drywall and paint. That drove the spiders out, at least for a little while.

      Her friend Gabby lived in a brand-new house, built only two years ago, and her basement was completely different. High ceilings and level floors, bright and airy. They carpeted, brought in furniture, and turned the space into a fun family room. Basements in old homes could never be fun family rooms, no matter how much work was done. You could cover up the moisture, even level the floors, drywall, and paint, but the spiders always came back. The spiders wouldn’t give up their space.

      This basement had spiders.

      Although she couldn’t see them from where she sat, she knew they were right above her, creeping in and out of the exposed floor joists. They watched her with a thousand eyes as they spun their webs.

      He gave her clothes, but they were not her clothes.

      When she woke on the floor, wrapped in the green quilt, she quickly realized she had been stripped nude and left here, in this cage, a stranger’s clothes folded neatly and left near her head. They didn’t fit. They were at least a few sizes too big, but she put them on because she had nothing else, because they were better than the green quilt. Then she wrapped herself in the green quilt anyway.

      She was in a dimly lit, damp basement. More precisely, she was in a chainlink enclosure set up in a dimly lit, damp basement.

      The enclosure went from floor to ceiling, and the pieces were welded together. It was meant to be a dog kennel. She knew this because Gabby’s family owned a dog, a husky named Dakota, and they had a very similar, if not the same, kennel in their backyard. They bought it at Home Depot, and she and Gabby had watched her father put it together over the summer. It didn’t take him long, maybe an hour, but he hadn’t welded it.

      When Lili stood up, wrapped in her green quilt, and ran her fingers over the various pipes and thick metal wire that made up her cage, she sought out joints, remembering how Gabby’s father assembled his, then her heart sank as she found the bumpy welds. The gate at the front was locked tight with not one padlock but two — one near the top and the other near the bottom. She rattled the gate, but it barely moved. The entire structure had been bolted down into the concrete floor. It was secure, and she was trapped inside.

      “You should drink something, you need to be strong for what is to come,” the man said,