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

any at all. His eyebrows were thin, barely there. When she saw his eyes, she wished she had not. The way he peered at her, a deep gaze from behind cloudy gray. They were the eyes of an old man, lost behind cataracts and film. He didn’t look old, though, maybe thirty at the most. The eyes did not fit; they weren’t natural. The right eye seemed darker than the left, bloodshot. Lili wanted to look away but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. She wouldn’t show weakness.

      “I apologize for my appearance. I haven’t been well. Today is a good day, though. I promise you it’s not contagious. Please don’t be frightened,” he said, the lisp evident.

      Lili squeezed the chainlink, welcoming the pain it brought, the distraction. She set her jaw, firm and defiant.

      The man’s mouth hung open slightly. She heard a slight wheeze with each drawn breath. “I’m going to let you out, and you’re going to do as I say.” His eyes flicked to the object in his right hand, a stun gun. He said nothing of it. Lili knew they weren’t fatal. She wondered just how much they hurt. Would she be able to push past him and get up the stairs, even if he shocked her?

      With his left hand, he slipped a key into first the top padlock, then the bottom, sliding each from the door and hanging them on the chainlink. Then he lifted the latch and pulled open the door.

      Lili remained still, her fingers tightening on the back of her cage.

      “Please come out,” he said quietly. “I could shock you and take you out, but then we would have to wait or possibly start over. It’s best that you just do as I say.”

      His eyes bore into her, those cloudy eyes. There was a bandage on his right hand near the wrist, dirty, stained with dried blood.

      “Out now!” he screamed.

      Lili jumped and drew in a deep breath.

      “Why do you make me shout? Please don’t make me shout. I don’t want to be loud. I don’t want to be mean. Just come out so we can begin, please. The sooner we start, the sooner it will be over.”

      She didn’t want to, Lili knew she shouldn’t, but she forced herself to stand and walk toward the man, toward the door of the cage, her eyes looking over his shoulder at the stairs behind him, at the light pooling toward the top.

      “Others have tried to make the stairs, but nobody ever has. You can try if you like, but it will only lead to a shock and delays. We would have to start over, but we would start over. It’s best that you just do as I say,” he said again in the most reassuring of voices. She felt his hand on the small of her back through the quilt, guiding her, nudging her toward a large white freezer against the wall with the stairs.

      He lifted the lid.

      Lili expected a rush of icy-cold air — they had a similar freezer at her house. Instead, warm, humid air rose from inside. The freezer was filled with water. She took a step back, tried to push away from him, but the prongs of the stun gun against her back held her still.

      “The water is nice and warm. Go ahead and touch it.”

      Lili watched her hand reach for the water, operating with a mind all its own. She dipped her fingers into the water. It was warm, far warmer than the air.

      “You’ll want to take off your clothes. It’s better that way.”

      He said this so nonchalantly, casually, a conversation between two old friends.

      “I’m not —” The words slipped out before Lili realized she spoke. She capped them off and shook her head. Her hands gripped the quilt and pulled it tighter around her small frame. She wanted to step away from the water tank, but he was standing behind her. His warm breath drifted over her neck.

      His left hand fell onto her shoulder and tugged at the quilt.

      Lili screamed, the first real sound she’d made since waking here. She screamed as loudly as she could, the sound so powerful it felt like a knife grating at the inside of her throat. It echoed off the basement walls and cried back at her in a voice that wasn’t her own. This voice sounded like a terrified little girl, like someone who’d lost control, someone who’d given up, someone she didn’t want to know.

      The metal prongs of the stun gun bit into her neck, two cold metal teeth followed by a pain so intense, it sliced at every inch of her, a blade cutting from her toes to her fingertips. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and her legs gave out from under her. Lili’s scream died away in an instant as silence enveloped her.

      She awoke on the floor, lying atop the quilt. The man was tugging her panties down. He had removed all her other clothes. Lili tried to reach for the edge of the quilt to cover herself, but her arm wouldn’t work. She stared at her fingers, still twitching.

      “I didn’t want to shock you. I don’t want to hurt you. Please don’t make me hurt you again,” the man said. “You can have the clothes back when we’re done. It’s better this way, you’ll see.”

      Lili understood what would come next, and she tried to mentally prepare herself.

      The man wrapped one arm around her back and the other under her knees and lifted her from the ground. Although he appeared sick, he was surprisingly strong. He lifted her over the freezer filled with warm water and gently lowered her inside. Lili was five-two. Her toes brushed the far side as her legs drifted out, flattening. He held her up at the shoulders, keeping her face above the water.

      “Warm, isn’t it? Nice.”

      The warm water was oddly comforting; it felt like slipping beneath the surface of a pool, allowing the water to hold you as you drift along. Lili noticed the feeling returning to her fingers, her arms, the warmth massaging her limbs back to life.

      “Close your eyes, relax,” he said in a soothing tone, his lisp barely catching. Calm. “Take in a deep breath, a nice, long breath.”

      Lili did as he said, not because he told her to, but because she wanted to. She allowed her lips to part and pulled in the basement air, allowed it to fill her lungs, a breath like those she learned in yoga class, a cleansing breath, deep and full.

      “Now let it out slowly, feel the air leave your body,” he said in a whisper. “Feel every bit of it.”

      Lili released the —

      The man pushed at her shoulders and plunged her into the water with such force, her head banged on the bottom of the tank. Her legs kicked and her arms flailed. Her fingers caught at the top edge for one brief second before the smooth plastic slipped from her grasp.

      Lili could hold her breath for a long time, almost two minutes the last time someone timed her. But that only worked when she filled her lungs with fresh air first, when she was prepared. She hadn’t filled her lungs, she’d emptied them, just as the man asked, and when he pushed her beneath the surface she inhaled instead, her body’s attempt at grasping for air. Instead of air, she gulped down water and immediately coughed, expelling it even before her head hit the bottom, expelling the water only to inhale more. The water filled her throat, her lungs, resulting in a pain so severe, Lili thought she might implode. When she stopped kicking, when she stopped flailing, the pain went away, and for one brief second Lili thought she would be okay, she thought her body had somehow found a way to survive on water, and she went still. She saw the man looking down at her from above with those gray, bloodshot eyes, his mouth agape. He was distorted through the water, but she could see him. Then everything went black, and she saw nothing at all.

       12

       Clair

       Day 2 • 9:13 a.m.

      Clair and Sophie Rodriguez pulled up to Lili Davies’s house on South King Drive and parked Clair’s green Honda Civic behind two news vans. Both had their satellite antennae