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

said nothing. She wouldn’t say anything. To talk to him would give him power, and she wasn’t ready to do that. He didn’t deserve anything from her.

      The only light came from what was probably an open door at the top of the stairs. He stood perfectly still at the base.

      Lili’s eyes fought with the darkness, slowly adjusting.

      He remained out of focus though, a darker shadow among other shadows, an outline against the wall.

      “Turn around. Face the back wall, and don’t turn back again until I say it’s okay,” he instructed.

      Lili didn’t move, her posture firming.

      “Please turn around.” Softer, pleading.

      She gripped the quilt and pulled it tighter around her small frame.

      “Turn the fuck around!” he shouted, his voice booming through the basement, echoing off the walls.

      Lili gasped and took a step backward, nearly tripping.

      Then all went quiet again.

      “Please don’t make me shout. I prefer not to shout.”

      Lili felt her heart pounding in her chest, a heavy thump, thump, thump.

      She took a step back, then another, and another after that. When she reached the wall, the back of her cage, she willed her feet to turn around and faced the corner.

      Lili heard him as he walked closer, the living shadow. Something about his gait was off. Rather than steady steps, she heard one foot land, then the other slid for a second on the concrete floor before it too fell into place, repeating again with the next step. A shuffle or limp, a slight drag of the foot, she couldn’t be sure.

      Lili forced her eyes to close. She didn’t want to close them, but she did anyway. She forced her eyes to close so she could concentrate on the sounds, picture the sounds behind her.

      She heard the jingle of keys before the telltale click of a padlock — it sounded like the top lock — then the other a moment later. She heard him slip both locks from the gate, then lift the handle and open the door.

      Lili cringed in anticipation of what would come next.

      She expected his hand on her, a touch somewhere or a grab from behind. That touch never came. Instead, she heard him close the gate and replace the locks, both clicking securely back into place.

      His uneven shuffle away from her cage.

      “You can turn back around now.”

      Lili did as he asked.

      He returned to the stairs, lost to the dark again.

      A glass of milk sat on the floor just inside the cage, a thin bead of water dripping down the side.

      “It’s not drugged,” he said. “I need you awake.”

       8

       Porter

       Day 2 • 7:56 a.m.

      “I’ll see you in there. I need to hit the head,” Nash said as they stepped off the elevator at the basement level of Chicago Metro headquarters on Michigan Avenue. Nash took a right down the hallway and disappeared behind the bathroom door. Porter went left.

      After Bishop escaped, the feds had stepped in and taken over the 4MK manhunt. Porter had been on medical leave at that point, but from what Nash told him, they initially tried to take over the war room. Nash used his incredible charm, and threats of violence, on the interlopers and banished them to the room across the hall known primarily for the odd odor that permeated it, which seemed to come from the far left corner. Since that point, they coexisted with the civility of North and South Korea.

      The lights in the FBI room were off.

      Porter waited for the sound of Nash locking the restroom door, then tried the door to the feds’ room.

      Open.

      With a quick glance back down the hall, Porter slipped inside. He left the lights off.

      Six eyeballs.

      Seven victims. Eight, if he counted Emory.

      His subconscious was trying to tell him something.

      He crossed the room to the two whiteboards at the front and studied the victims’ photographs. The familiar faces looked back, their unknowing smiles captured forever in a moment of happiness. In those final moments on the eleventh floor of 314 West Belmont, Bishop pled his case, he laid his cards bare, so proud in the twisted logic of his plan. “These people deserved to be punished,” he told Porter. And it was true. Each of his victims did something horribly wrong, something worthy of punishment. But he didn’t go after them. Instead, he took their children. He made the children suffer in death so their parents would suffer forevermore in life. Each of these girls died not because of something she did but because of something a member of her family did. Each of these beautiful young faces snuffed out to pay for another’s crimes.

      Porter stepped closer to the first board and ran his fingers over the photo of Calli Tremell, Bishop’s first victim. Twenty years of age, taken March 15, 2009. Bishop’s first victim as 4MK — Klozowski was always quick to point this out. So thorough and sure in his methods, the pattern strongly suggested he’d killed before, developed a technique after honing a practice over years. He was too sophisticated to be a first-timer, and the thought of someone like him existing out there, taking lives, leading up to this . . . If this was his beginning as 4MK, Porter couldn’t imagine where he came from. The diary gave him some insight, but not enough, only a glimpse — a quick look through an open curtain before Bishop dropped the fabric back into place.

      Calli Tremell’s parents reported her missing that Tuesday. They received her ear in the mail on Thursday. Her eyes followed on Saturday, and her tongue arrived the next Tuesday. All were packaged in small white boxes tied with black strings, handwritten shipping labels, and zero prints. He never left prints.

      Three days after the last box arrived, a jogger found her body in Almond Park, propped up on a bench with a cardboard sign glued to her hands that read do no evil. Porter and his team had picked up on his MO by that point, and the sign confirmed their theory.

      Do no evil turned out to be the key to Bishop’s focus, something they realized with 4MK’s second victim, Elle Borton. She disappeared on April 2, 2010, more than a year after his first victim. Porter’s team caught the case from Missing Children when her parents reported receiving an ear in the mail. When her body was found a little over a week later, she held a tax return in her grandmother’s name covering tax year 2008. After some digging, they found out the grandmother had died in 2005. Matt Hosman in Financial Crimes discovered that Elle’s father filed tax returns on more than a dozen residents of the nursing home he managed, all deceased. Bishop killed Elle Borton, only twenty-three years old, because of crimes committed by her father.

      When 4MK’s motive became clear, they went back and looked at Calli Tremell’s family and discovered her mother had been laundering money from the bank where she worked, upward of three million dollars over the previous ten years.

      Porter stepped to his right and looked at the third photograph. Missy Lumax, June 24, 2011. Her father sold kiddie porn. Susan Devoro’s father swapped fake diamonds for real ones at his jewelry store. She was victim number four — May 3, 2012. Number five — Barbara McInley, seventeen years old. She disappeared on April 18, 2013. Her sister had hit and killed a pedestrian six years before, and Bishop killed Barbara as punishment. Allison Crammer’s brother ran a sweatshop full of illegals down in Florida. She was number six, disappearing on November 9, 2013, at only nineteen years of age. Jodi Blumington followed only a few months later. On May 13, 2014, she went missing at age twenty-two.