The Fifth to Die

by J. D. Barker

  “I’m glad I could be of service,” she said groggily. “Maybe pie.”

  “What?”

  “Pie might be better alone. More pie for me.”

  “I didn’t realize there was pie.”

  “Not on the plane, maybe after we land. There should always be pie.”

  “Sleep tight, Ms. Werner.”

  Somehow she did just that, falling asleep even before the cabin doors closed.

  The flight was only about two-thirds full. The seat beside him was empty.

  Sam waited until they were in the air, then turned on the small overhead light and opened the composition book to the first page, Bishop’s words melting away all else.

  93

  Diary

  “Are you comfortable, Anson?”

  He smiled at me, but it wasn’t a real smile. This was the kind of smile one wears at a dinner party or a fundraiser or an award banquet, the kind that disappears the moment the smilee disappears behind a closed door away from prying eyes. I have never been to a dinner party or a fundraiser or an award banquet, but I’ve read about them. Mother once brought home a People magazine, and the pages were filled with these smiles, polite but empty.

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So polite,” Dr. Oglesby said, glancing down at his notes. “You’ve been here a week, and I feel we barely know each other.”

  He wasn’t a very large man, maybe an inch or two taller than I. Although everyone called him “Dr.,” I had yet to see him wearing a white lab coat. Today he wore a gray and black argyle sweater and khaki pants. He was slightly overweight. The pudge around his belly bloomed out over the top of his pants as he crossed his legs. Not much. He probably exercised a few days each week, just a little bit—the weight wanted to come out, his body wanted to be fat, but he kept his potential for obesity in check. For now, anyway. I couldn’t help but wonder how he would look in another ten years. Would he change his mind about the lab coat? If I were a doctor, I would definitely wear a white lab coat.

  His office was a large box.

  The walls were painted an off-white and decorated with degrees and photographs of Dr. Oglesby fake-smiling beside other people fake-smiling. Unlike the other desks at Camden Treatment Center, his was made of wood, most likely something he brought in himself. Most here were made of the same gray metal.

  We sat in the chairs in front of the desk, facing each other. Apparently during one of the degree programs posted on the wall, the good doctor was told it was better to face one’s patient on equal ground, so rather than sit in the plush leather chair behind the desk, he came out here with the common folk.

  A large Oriental rug covered most of the tile floor, clearly a fake. I had never seen a real Oriental rug before, or a fake Oriental rug for that matter, but there was something about this one that screamed imitation. Maybe it was the mystery stain in the far corner, the one nearly hidden by a potted fern.

  “One week,” he muttered, tapping at the clipboard in his lap. “Were you taking any medications, Anson? Prior to your stay here? Anything at all?”

  He had asked me this question before, four times now. I gave him the same answer I did the other times.

  “No.”

  “Because you seem jittery, like someone going through the final stages of withdrawal. A few of the nurses have made note of this in your file. You’ve also been experiencing night sweats and tremors. These things are all signs of withdrawal.”

  I said nothing.

  “Was it chlorpromazine or maybe fluphenazine? Possibly haloperidol or loxapine?”

  I remained silent.

  “Haloperidol? You see, when I said that one, I noticed a slight tic beneath your left eye. That tells me you know that particular drug. What reason would a boy your age have for knowing a drug like that unless the medication was prescribed and you saw the name on the bottle every day?”

  My face flushed. I drew in a deep, even breath.

  “Haloperidol is not the type of medication you want to quit cold turkey. If a physician deems it appropriate to adjust or remove this medication from a patient’s treatment, that patient would be weaned off over a length of time. In some cases, another, less impactful medication might be added temporarily to a treatment regimen to lessen the more harmful effects of reduction.”

  Dr. Joseph Oglesby wore glasses. The lenses weren’t especially thick, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he actually needed them. He seemed like the kind of man who would wear glasses simply to bolster his role as a doctor, to help play the part. He wore his glasses on a silver chain around his neck and put them on and took them off with a regular frequency, punctuation at the end of a sentence rather than a visual aid. Wearing them around his neck on a chain reminded me of a librarian. He was no librarian, though. I could see the dust on the books lining his shelves from where I sat.

  “A sudden stoppage of haloperidol can lead to insomnia, restlessness, anxiety, agitation, depression, vertigo, seizures, even hallucinations. See how your foot is tapping on the floor? That fast patter? That is a definite indicator. Is there a reason you don’t want to take your medication, Anson? Is that why you’re lying to me?”

  I stopped my foot. I didn’t realize I had been tapping my foot.

  I would not tap my foot.

  The doctor raised the tip of his pen to his lip, his eyes on me, then wrote something down in the file. “Because it has been a week, you are through the worst. I see no reason to pick it back up at this point. Should you feel the need to take it, you’ll tell me? We can revisit the use of medication together?”

  I didn’t want to nod, but I did anyway.

  The smile again, thin, only at the edge of his lips.

  94

  Diary

  “Are you ready to talk about the fire, Anson?”

  He saw my leg tap before I was able to stop it. I placed a hand on my knee.

  “Do you know how many bodies were found inside the house?”

  I would not let my leg tap.

  “Three. I’ve been in close contact with the local authorities since the start of your visit with us, and they have yet to make a proper identification on even one of them. Because the bodies were burned so badly, they’re working with dental records. Without something to compare them to, they’re having a tough time. They’re waiting for one of two things to happen: either someone will be reported missing and a comparison of dental records will reveal a match, or you provide us with information that leads to identification. The authorities believe you know who those people are. They desperately want to speak to you about it, but since you’re a minor and currently under my care, they’re not permitted to do so. That could change, of course—all I have to do is sign a couple of forms and they’ll be able to sweep right in here and take you away to someplace where they’ll try and make you talk. I can’t imagine such a place would be pleasant, and I would absolutely hate to see something like that happen to a fine young man such as yourself, but I can only hold the wolves at bay for so long. Do you know what a district attorney is, Anson?”

  I knew what a district attorney was. They appeared fairly often in my comic books, but I would not tell him so. I had no intention of telling him anything.

  “Was one of the men your father, Anson?”

  My leg did not tap. His eyes were on me, a hawk on a mouse.

  “Of the three bodies found inside your house, all were male. According to the police, your father hasn’t reported to work since the fire. That leads them to believe he was killed in the fire. They’re concerned about your mother too. She seems to have disappeared as well. They’re quite concerned, actually. I think some of them may suspect she started the fire. The house was covered in an accelerant, most likely gasoline. From what I’ve been told, the place was saturated. Somebody had been thorough in their efforts. Did your parents get along? Did your mother have any reason to hurt your father? Was he hurting her? Did he beat her?”

  �
�Father would never lay a hand on Mother.”

  I didn’t want to talk. I knew I shouldn’t talk, but I would not allow someone to say something wicked of Father. Not this man, not anybody.

  “But your father was in the house when it happened, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. I was at the lake.”

  The doctor slipped his glasses on, pushing them up the bridge of his nose. “You told the firemen and later the policemen you had been fishing at the lake for hours and came home when you saw the smoke, yet you carried no tackle box or fishing pole and they found nothing at the lake to indicate you had either. They think you lied.”

  “I don’t lie.”

  “You lied to me about your medication. You lied about taking haloperidol, a very serious drug.”

  “That wasn’t a lie, that was a fib.”

  “What is the difference between a lie and a fib, Anson?”

  My leg tapped, but only once.

  “Do you know where your mother went, Anson? After she started the fire that killed your father?”

  Mother hadn’t killed Father, and Mother didn’t start the fire. I wanted to tell him that. I wanted to shout it out. I wanted to jump from this chair, take the pen from his hand, and embed it deep in his neck and watch the blood spurt out all over his argyle sweater and fake-smile pictures on the wall. I didn’t, though. I said nothing.

  “A mother’s instincts to protect her young are some of the fiercest known to man. Did your father hurt you? Did he touch you in a bad way? Is that why she wanted him dead?”

  “Father would never hurt me either.”

  “You were examined at the hospital prior to coming here, and they found no evidence of abuse, so I suppose that is true. Unfortunately, I don’t know how thorough they were in their examination. I have faith. My staff would have covered all bases, but you were taken to a county hospital and I can’t vouch for the skill and ability of the people working at a place like that. Some of those places can be downright barbaric, like stepping into a third-world tent city.”

  “I was skipping rocks.”

  “What?”

  “I never told the firemen or the police I was fishing. I was skipping rocks at the lake. I like to skip rocks.”

  “That is not what it says in the police report, Anson. Lying or fibbing are both bad, not things you want to do with me.”

  “The report is wrong.”

  He removed his glasses, and I watched them fall and dangle around his neck.

  The window in his office didn’t have bars on it. Rain began to fall.

  “Where did you go to school, Anson?”

  “Mother homeschooled me.”

  “Really? That is interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “Remember the tests we gave you on your second day? You scored extremely high on all of them.”

  “I enjoy tests. They’re fun.”

  “Your mother must be a very intelligent woman. What does she do for a living?”

  “I told you, she works in publishing.”

  He scribbled at his notes but did not glance down. “You did tell me that, but there is no record of her being employed, not recently, not at all. Your parents filed joint tax returns, and no employment has ever appeared for her. The IRS performed a detailed search at the request of the district attorney I mentioned earlier. That man is a bit of a bulldog, and he’s itching for the opportunity to talk to your mother.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Does it bother you that she left you? Those protective instincts I mentioned, I imagine it would be terribly difficult for a mother to abandon her only child and completely cut contact, just write him off as if he didn’t exist at all, throw him away like last night’s trash. I’m not sure what would drive a woman to do that. What did you do to make her hate you so?”

  This time when my leg began to tap, I did not stop it. Instead, I watched the rain outside.

  95

  Poole

  Day 4 • 4:38 a.m.

  Poole had touched down at Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport at a little past one in the morning. A black Subaru Forester with federal plates was waiting for him at the tarmac, driven by SAIC Robert Granger. The man’s eyes were red and heavy.

  He offered his hand and shouted over the engine noise winding down from the jet. “You must be Frank. Welcome to South Carolina.”

  Poole put him in his mid-fifties only because SAIC Hurless was fifty-four and he mentioned they knew each other from the academy. Granger looked far older than fifty-four. If Poole had met the man on the street, he would have easily tacked on ten years. Heavyset and bald, he wore thick glasses and a bushy goatee. Poole found this odd because the FBI dress code did not permit facial hair beyond a mustache. The rules in the South must be lax.

  Granger gestured toward the passenger door, and both men climbed in the car. They were moving away from the jet before Poole had his seat belt on. Granger waved at the security station before coasting through and heading for the highway. “So, 4MK, huh? Down here?”

  “We think he’s still in Chicago, but apparently this lake is connected to him somehow,” Poole told him.

  “It took some doing, but I finally got Sheriff Banister on the phone a little after midnight. That’s Sheriff Hana Banister. You’ll like her, she’s a bit of a firecracker. Been sheriff around Simpsonville for the better part of twenty years, keeps running unopposed, which is fine with the locals. Not many people out there, and they’re not too big on change. She said she’s got two experienced divers in town. I had three in Charlotte, so we rounded them all up and got them out to your lake straightaway. She’s familiar with the property, said it’s been deserted since a fire wiped out the main house. There’s a trailer out there the owners used to rent out. Teenagers use it nowadays for things teenagers do. From what she told me, not much to look at.”

  “Can the divers work in the dark?”

  Granger leaned up over the steering wheel and maneuvered around a slow-moving semi. “Didn’t seem to faze my guys at all. They jump at just about any chance to get in the water.”

  “How far is this place?”

  Granger glanced at the GPS on his phone. “We’re about thirty minutes out. Looks like this place is buried good and deep.”

  Two hours later Poole stood at the edge of the lake, watching the divers as Granger and Sheriff Banister (who was very much the firecracker) barked orders at their teams.

  A generator hummed in the distance, with snakes of cords running off in various directions. Large floodlights had been erected at the water’s edge, the bright beams illuminating the black pool.

  One of the divers broke the surface and raised her hand. “I’ve got another one! Twenty feet down, directly below me. I’ve got a cord on it, affixing a balloon now.” She pulled a small canister from her belt and flicked a switch. The canister popped and released a self-inflating bright orange balloon. She attached the cord she held in her other hand to the base and set it bobbing in the water.

  “Holy Christ, how many is that now?” Banister said from somewhere behind Poole.

  Poole glanced to his right, at the black body bags lining the shore. “Four. That makes four.”

  “Complete body or partial?” Granger shouted out to the diver.

  “Complete.” The diver replaced her regulator and disappeared back below the surface, the beam of her high-powered flashlight quickly fading away.

  They found small garbage bags containing remains as well, six of those so far. Only one had been opened, containing a human leg bone. Each of the others was carefully placed inside clear plastic bags while still below the surface, then brought up and stored in plastic bins in an effort to not contaminate the contents and preserve the findings. They would be opened at the medical examiner’s office at the federal building back in Charlotte. Sheriff Banister made no squabble about relinquishing jurisdiction to Poole and Granger. This was clearly beyond her department’s available resources.

/>   Poole pressed his hands together. This wasn’t Chicago cold by any means, but the air off the lake had a bite to it. Sheriff Banister stood behind him, the beam of her flashlight pointing down toward the base of one of the large trees. “Agent Poole? I think I’ve got your cat.”

  When you get to the lake, look for the cat.

  He walked over to her and followed the beam of her flashlight.

  A rusted metal lunchbox was buried at the base of a laurel tree. He’d walked the entire perimeter of the lake when he first got here, studying the ground for any sign of a cat. He expected to find whatever Porter was talking about near the shore, then the first body was found and he forgot all about the cat. This was about ten feet back, hidden in the trees.

  Poole bent down and brushed the dirt from the surface.

  Hello Kitty.

  “Cute.” He looked up at the sheriff. “Do you have any gloves?”

  “Yeah, here.” She pulled a pair of latex gloves from her jacket pocket and handed them down. Some of her graying blond hair fell loose from her ponytail. She pulled out the rubber band holding it all in place, twisted the hair together into one tight lock, then replaced the band. She did all this with one hand—the other, still holding the flashlight on the lunchbox, didn’t falter.

  Poole couldn’t help but wonder if she handled a gun with the same dexterity, if she ever had cause to use her weapon out here.

  “I’ve got one!” came another shout from the lake.

  Five now.

  Granger came over, the beam of his flashlight joining Banister’s. “That it? What you were trying to find?”

  Poole released the rusted metal latch on the front of the lunchbox and opened the lid. The diary stared back at him from inside. “I’ll need to see the property records, plat records, whatever you have for this place, the houses we passed on the way in too.”

  Banister leaned down, her breath white in the chilled air. “They’re stored down at town hall. I’ll make a call, wake some folks up.”