The Fifth to Die

by J. D. Barker

  “Could you see yourself?”

  Kati thought about this for a second, then shook her head. The finger of her left hand was nearly able to slip out of the zip tie. “No, nothing like that. I think that only happens in the movies or on TV. But . . . I did feel free, though, free of my body, free of my body’s constraints.”

  Her finger nearly slipped the tie, then snapped back. If he heard the plastic against the frame of the chair, he didn’t acknowledge the sound. His finger tapped against the pill bottle.

  Win his trust, Kati told herself. Stay calm. If she remained calm, he would stay calm. Tell him what he wants to hear. Her mind drifted to the girl in the basement, the girl who was probably dying in the basement after swallowing glass rather than allowing this monster to hurt her. She’d rather die on her own terms than let this guy touch her. Kati admired her, but she had no desire to die. She would get out of here.

  Above the sink there was a window—dark outside, but she could make out the faint outline of the neighbor’s house, no more than ten feet away. A light glowed in one of the windows, and she thought she saw movement behind white curtains.

  Kati licked her lips. They were dry and chapped. “May I have some water?”

  The man stared at her, and at first she wasn’t sure he heard her. She was about to ask again when he stood and went to the sink, pulled a cloudy glass from the drying rack on the counter, and filled it with water from the tap. As he returned to the table, she could see particles floating in the water, remnants of whatever had been in the glass before, unwashed, filthy.

  The man in the black knit cap stood beside her and tipped the water glass against her lips. Kati drank. She drank and tried not to think about what she saw in the glass. Complacent, willing, unconcerned. These words floated through her mind, all the things she knew she needed to appear to be to survive. The water tasted sour. She smiled as he lifted the glass away. She would not show any discomfort.

  His hand trembled as he set the glass on the table and returned to his seat. She wasn’t sure if he trembled because of nerves or whatever was wrong with him, but she was certain it wasn’t out of fear or weakness. She wouldn’t make the mistake of believing that.

  “When you put me in that tank,” she went on, “I was blindfolded. I woke up in the dark, I didn’t know where I was. Then I was in the water, body-temperature water, then falling and silence, then . . .” Her voice trailed off; her eyes met his. “Then I was perfect, everything was perfect. No fear. No wants. No needs. Calm. Serene. Ideal.”

  The man studied her, his mouth open just enough to allow a trickle of spit down the left side. He made no move to wipe it away. The index finger on the hand that held the pill bottle twitched, tapping at the plastic. With his free hand, he rubbed his pointer finger and thumb together, making a small, circular pattern. “Why should I believe you?” he finally said.

  “I have no reason to lie.”

  “No?”

  “I was dead. The other girl told me I was dead. You brought me back, you saved me.”

  “Your heart stopped. You were dead for a little over three minutes. I brought you back. Maybe it wasn’t long enough. Maybe you didn’t see anything. You’re just telling me what you think I want to hear.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I think we need to do it again. Longer this time. Five minutes, maybe six. The brain dies after five—it should have been longer than five,” he told her. The twitching against the bottle intensified as he spoke, the words coming faster, urgent. “Less than five may not be enough.”

  Kati pulled at her bindings, tugged hard on her left. She couldn’t slip out, though. “Who is . . . Maybelle?”

  He drew in a deep breath and leaned back in his chair.

  “Maybelle Markel?” Kati said. “Yeah, Markel, that’s it.”

  “Where did you hear that name?”

  “It came to me when I was there, in that place. I . . . heard it. Like someone whispering to me or maybe shouting from a great distance, I’m not exactly sure. Who is she?”

  He took another pill. He fought with the bottle cap, got it open, and swallowed one dry.

  “You said you have a daughter. You said these are her clothes I’m wearing. Is that her name? Is your daughter’s name Maybelle Markel?”

  “I must have told you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  He looked puzzled as he shuffled through his memories trying to remember if he said her name, the pills lifting the haze from his eyes.

  Kati tugged her left hand again, hard this time, almost pulled free, but her hand snapped back. She might have cut herself on the zip tie this time. Not only did the base of her wrist hurt, but she felt warmth there, wetness. She wondered if the slickness of blood might help her slip free. “I think Maybelle wants you to know she’s okay. That she’s at peace.”

  “Is that what she said? What she told you?” There was an anxiousness to his voice that wasn’t there before. “Are you certain?” The lisp on certain.

  Kati nodded. “Yes, I think so.”

  His bloodshot eyes blinked, then locked on her, peering into her, through her. He stood up with such speed and force, the tabletop went with him, tilting up and to the side as the glass flew across the room and shattered. The corner of the table caught Kati in the rib cage like a battering ram, sending her chair tumbling back. The chair snagged for a second on the cabinets behind her before falling to the side, painfully pinning Kati’s arm against the floor, caught beneath her own weight.

  The word “Liar!” belted from him, a scream of anger and raw emotion.

  Kati screamed too. She screamed as she fell. But she was silent now, her eyes fixed on the place Wesley had fallen, only inches from her face. She felt his sticky blood in her hair, and she could see the small, lighter spot at the center of the bloody pool, the place where his head had rested on the floor.

  From the corner of her eye, barely visible now from such a harsh angle, she could also see the drawing she noticed when the man had brought her into the kitchen with Wesley. Attached to the refrigerator with a Domino’s Pizza magnet, a drawing of a house with a dog, a father, and a daughter standing in front of it, nothing more than stick figures, holding each other’s hands. The bottom right corner of the drawing was signed Maybelle Markel, in thick, blocky purple letters.

  Someone came into the room then. The front door opened and closed. Frantic footsteps down the hall. “What have you done?”

  “She lied. She didn’t see. None of them. Not one.”

  “Everyone will see soon enough.”

  86

  Poole

  Day 3 • 9:52 p.m.

  Special Agent Frank Poole, Detectives Clair Norton and Brian Nash of Chicago Metro, Sophie Rodriguez from Missing Children, and Edwin Klozowski from Information Technology sat at the conference table in the war room, all eyes on the six whiteboards at the front of the room.

  Behind them the coffeemaker beeped. Nobody got up.

  “This is overwhelming,” Klozowski finally said, the first to speak in nearly five minutes.

  It was overwhelming, Poole thought. Sixteen years with the Bureau, four with the Behavioral Science Unit out of Quantico before transferring to Chicago. He had never seen anything like this, not in an investigation, not in all the case histories he studied. There was no rhyme or reason to it, no real pattern. Serial killers always kept to a pattern, a signature. That pattern may evolve as the killer tuned his efforts, became more comfortable in his skin, but they were never random. There was always a pattern.

  Why couldn’t he see the pattern?

  “There’s too much noise,” Poole said quietly.

  Nash turned toward him, frowning. “What does that mean?”

  “We need to get rid of the noise.”

  Poole stood up and went to the front of the room, his eyes fixed on the boards.

  “I think we’ve lost him,” Klozowski said.

  Poole stood there for a moment, taking in the text, eve
ry word, every letter, every curved fumble of the dry-erase marker, he memorized it all. Then he turned the first board around backward, all those words lost to the back, replaced by a clean, white surface. He turned the next one and the one after that, until all six faced the wall and they all stared at nothing.

  Kloz snickered, leaned back in his chair. “Now I know we’ve lost him.”

  Poole walked around to the back of the boards and pulled all the photographs down, picked up a black marker from one of the trays, and returned to the front. “We’ve learned a lot over the past few days, too much. We need to filter out the noise and focus on what is really important, find the real evidence, piece it together as if it were fresh.”

  “Puzzle it out,” Kloz said.

  Nash and Clair both glared at him. He shrugged.

  Poole took the photograph of Anson Bishop and taped it to the top center of the board. He then sorted through the remaining photographs in his hand, placing the following beneath Bishop’s picture:

  Ella Reynolds

  Lili Davies

  Floyd Reynolds

  Randal Davies

  Libby McInley

  Larissa Biel

  Darlene Biel

  John Doe/Truck

  “These are the people directly impacted by this case,” Poole stated. “The victims or intended victims.”

  Clair asked, “Who does that leave?”

  Poole held up the remaining pictures in his hand. “Three of the spouses—Leeann Reynolds, Grace Davies, and Larry Biel, and the remaining children of the families.” He set the pictures on the conference table, facedown. “If we find a reason to connect these people to the case, other than relations, we’ll put them back on the board. Let’s focus on the others for now.”

  Nash drummed his fingers over the tabletop. “If this is all somehow Bishop, and he’s following the same MO as his past victims, that means the children were killed because of something their parents did. The kids aren’t the focus.”

  “But he also killed the parents this time,” Sophie interjected.

  “And look at how he killed the children,” Clair said. “Both girls drowned in salt water. This unknown boy frozen in the truck. They were all tortured.”

  “He didn’t remove the eyes, ear, or tongue on any of the children, which is a major departure,” Nash pointed out. “Completely different from what he did in the past.”

  “He did with Libby McInley,” Poole reminded them. “He killed her, just like he would have his past victims.”

  “Not exactly like his past victims,” Clair said. “Her toes and fingers were removed. He’s never done that before.”

  “More torture,” said Nash. “An escalation, maybe?”

  “A different kind of torture, different from everything else,” Poole said. He gathered the coffee cups from the table and went to the machine, began to fill them. “Fingers and toes are usually removed to get information. This is a major break from the norm for him. With all his other victims, he removed the eyes, ear, and tongue to send a message to whoever found the bodies, to taunt law enforcement, to sensationalize the murders. He went after the past victims because of information he already possessed, everything he learned from Talbot’s business activities. He didn’t need to learn anything from those victims. He had it all.”

  Poole returned to the table and passed out the coffee.

  Clair reached for her mug and took a sip. “So Libby McInley is different from all the rest—she knew something, something he needed, something he was willing to torture to learn.”

  Poole returned to the board at the front. “He was willing to torture Libby more than anyone else in order to get some information.”

  He removed the picture of Libby McInley from the center of the board and placed it at the top right. “Her murder is nothing like these others. Let’s separate her for now too.”

  “What do we know about Libby McInley? What makes her such a special target?” Nash asked.

  Poole rattled off the information from her file. “Charged in March 2007 and convicted in July 2007 of manslaughter for the vehicular death of one Franklin Kirby, sentenced to ten years, of which she served seven and a few months before being released on parole six weeks ago.”

  “What was the name of her victim?” Nash asked.

  “Franklin Kirby.” Poole took a step toward the conference table. “That name meant something to Porter too, but he didn’t expand on what he knew. Who is he?”

  “Holy hell, how did we miss that?” Kloz blurted out.

  Clair shook her head. “He’s in Bishop’s diary. Kirby worked for Talbot. He stole a lot of money from him and ultimately ran off with Bishop’s mother when Bishop was a kid. He also shot and killed Bishop’s father.”

  “The diary again.” Poole frowned. “I need to see that book.”

  “Let me try and get this straight,” Nash said, “because I have read the diary. Kirby kills Bishop’s father. Kirby runs off with Bishop’s mother. Libby McInley accidentally hits and kills Kirby with her car. Bishop kills Barbara McInley, Libby’s sister, in retaliation for her killing Kirby, then he ultimately kills Libby, even though the two of them are somehow working together? That doesn’t make any sense. Bishop would have been dancing in the street with Kirby dead.”

  Kloz cleared his throat. “What if Bishop didn’t kill Libby? Maybe somebody else did and just made it look like he killed her. That might explain why her fingers and toes were cut off. Somebody other than Bishop did it. Somebody after something.”

  “Who?”

  Shuffling in his chair, Klozowski went on. “What if Bishop didn’t kill Barbara McInley either?”

  Clair scratched at the back of her head. “We know he did.”

  “Do we?”

  Silence again.

  Kloz wrapped his hands around his mug. He looked down at the coffee swirling inside. “Every one of Bishop’s initial victims died because their families were involved in some type of criminal activity, every single one, except his fifth victim, Barbara McInley. Her death was attributed to her sister’s hit-and-run. An accident.” He turned to Nash. “Like you said, Bishop had no reason to kill her, not for killing Kirby, that’s for sure.”

  “Who, then?” Poole asked.

  Kloz answered quietly. “Bishop’s mother.”

  87

  Poole

  Day 3 • 9:55 p.m.

  “Bishop’s mother?” Poole frowned.

  Klozowski nodded. “She was romantically involved with Kirby. She’s never been caught. Who knows? Libby’s fingers and toes, that could have been revenge. Cut off an ear, take out the tongue and eyes, and drop them in little white boxes . . . it’s not hard to copy Bishop’s signature.”

  “The white boxes, were they the same kind Bishop used in the original killings?” Clair asked.

  Poole nodded. “Yeah, perfect match.”

  “If Bishop’s mother is running around out there, we don’t know her capabilities. Considering all the information her son put together, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch for her to match the box,” Nash said. “She had resources, all that money Carter’s husband stole from Talbot.”

  Poole paced between the boards and the table. “Back at Porter’s apartment, he pointed out McInley’s murder as different from the others. He said Bishop had seemed a little preoccupied with her, the fact that she was the only blonde of all the victims.”

  “I remember that,” Clair said. “Bishop stood there for a second, stared at the picture. Said it was an anomaly, his word.”

  Poole walked slowly back to the board and wrote Killed by Bishop’s Mother? next to Libby McInley’s photo, then he stepped behind the boards again before returning to the conference table with an old Polaroid and the lock of blond hair, both in evidence bags. He set them on the table.

  “What do these mean to all of you?”

  Clair picked up the Polaroid. “Where did you find this?” She showed it to Nash and Klozowski.

  “In
a drawer at Libby’s house, hidden under some clothes, along with the lock of hair.”

  Clair set the picture back down. “Bishop mentioned some photos in the diary. This could be one of them. If it is, one of these women is Bishop’s mother, and the other is their neighbor, Lisa Carter.”

  “We tried running facial recognition on both women, but we didn’t get anything. The age of the image and the angle of the shot don’t help. What about the hair? Was that mentioned in the diary too?”

  “No. Maybe it’s Libby’s?” Clair offered.

  “It’s not a match for Libby or Barbara.”

  “How about Kirby?” Kloz said. “He had long, blond hair.”

  Nash pulled the evidence bag closer. “Why would Libby have Kirby’s hair? Where would she get it?”

  Nobody had an answer to that.

  Poole went back to the board and added the information about the photo and hair. He scribbled the name KALYN SELKE too. “So all of you are aware, there’s this too—Bishop helped her get IDs under this name. They corresponded while she was in prison.”

  “Do you know how?” Clair asked.

  Poole shook his head. “I haven’t had a chance to get down to the prison yet. After talking to her parole officer, we did learn she was having trouble adjusting to being out. He thought she wanted to go back.”

  “Where was she? Stateville?”

  “Yeah. We also found a .45 at her house, which is a clear parole violation,” Poole told them. “She knew someone was after her. If what you’re telling me about Kirby and the mother is true, that makes sense. We just need to figure out why Bishop would protect her.”