The Caller

by Chris Carter

  Slowly the room stopped spinning, but the noise didn’t go away.

  Tanya looked left then right, but with the curtains shut, the low light, and the stupor of sleep, she could make sense of very little.

  The noise came at her again, but not nearly as loud as moments ago. It had somehow lost its strength as it moved from dream into reality.

  Then a memory came to her and it petrified her soul.

  ‘Oh, my God.’ Tanya cupped her mouth with her hands as she twisted her neck around to look behind her. Her front door was unlocked. The security chain undone. She had forgotten to lock it after she came back from the grocery store.

  Her body stiffened with fear.

  ‘Someone is in here. Someone is in my apartment.’

  Tanya’s breathing went from resting to ‘marathon finishing line’ in a fraction of a second. The lethargy of sleep was now completely gone, but then, just like that, so was the noise.

  ‘What the hell. Am I going crazy?’

  She focused on listening and waited.

  Nothing.

  She concentrated harder and waited some more.

  Still nothing.

  ‘Damn! I probably am going crazy,’ she whispered, laughing at herself before finally getting to her feet and walking over to her front door to lock it. Just to be certain, she stood there for a moment, ears pricked like an animal’s.

  Silence.

  Tanya coughed to clear her throat and that made her realize how thirsty she was. She walked over to the fridge and poured herself a large glass of cold water, but as she brought the glass to her lips, the noise echoed throughout her living room one more time, sending fear cascading down her spine and the glass plummeting from her hand. As it smashed against the kitchen floor, Tanya heard it again – muffled, subdued, but very real – and it had come from somewhere to her right. Immediately her body swung in that direction. This time it took her eyes less than two seconds to finally zoom in on the source of the noise.

  Her cellphone.

  It was vibrating on top of a paperback book on her dining table.

  Tanya let out an almost hysterical laugh.

  ‘You silly bitch,’ she said to herself, stepping over the broken glass and snatching the phone from the table. She was about to answer the call when it finally dawned on her.

  A phone call.

  Her throat constricted as if she was being choked by strong fingers.

  The phone vibrated in her hand.

  Tanya checked the display screen – unknown number.

  ‘Oh my God! It’s him again. It’s that fucking psycho.’ Once again her eyes were flooded by tears of desperation. ‘No. I’m not answering this. I’m not.’

  The phone finally stopped ringing.

  Tanya looked back at its display screen with a terrified look on her face – four missed calls.

  ‘Why? Why is this happening again?’

  Buzz, buzz.

  The phone vibrated twice in quick short bursts. Not a call, but a text message. The message preview appeared on her screen.

  Tanya, this is Detective Robert Hunter of the LAPD. If you’re screening your calls, please pick it up. If not . . .

  The fog of confusion thickened inside her head.

  Tanya was about to unlock the phone and read the rest of the message when it began vibrating again – incoming call. She hesitated for a couple of rings while the gears inside her brain slowly got back to normal speed. As they finally did, she brought the phone to her ear.

  ‘Hello?’ Her voice wavered.

  ‘Tanya, this is Detective Robert Hunter. We spoke earlier this morning?’

  Tanya immediately recognized Hunter’s voice. There was something about the way he spoke, a certain confidence in his tone of voice that somehow calmed her.

  ‘Oh! Hello, Detective.’ She felt her drumming heart begin to slow down.

  ‘I’m very sorry if I’ve woken you.’ Hunter sounded sincere.

  ‘No, not at all. I still can’t fall sleep, even though I’ve been trying.’ Tanya turned to look at the clock on her wall and her eyes widened in total surprise. She truly believed that she’d been lying on her sofa for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, when in reality it’d been nearly three hours since her head had touched those cushions. ‘Oh God!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘No. No. I just . . . lost track of time. Didn’t notice it go by so fast.’

  ‘Given the circumstances, Tanya,’ Hunter said, ‘that’s not actually a bad thing.’

  ‘No,’ Tanya admitted. ‘You’re right. I guess it isn’t.’ She laughed again. Not hysterically, but still hard enough for Hunter to pick up on it.

  ‘Are you sure everything is OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m positive.’ She looked back at the broken glass and the spilled water on her kitchen floor.

  Hunter gave her a few more seconds before he spoke. ‘I’m truly sorry for bothering you again so soon, Tanya, but I just thought of something I need to ask you.’

  Tanya took a deep breath. She didn’t want to think about what had happened anymore, but she knew she had no choice.

  ‘OK. Sure.’ He voice was back to being timid.

  ‘What I’m going to ask you to do is to think back, but unfortunately, I can’t tell you how far back. It could be a few days, a few weeks, a few months, or even longer.’

  ‘OK,’ she replied, with no conviction at all.

  ‘I need you to try to remember if anyone has ever asked you the same question you were asked yesterday, or something very similar. And by anyone I really mean “anyone”, Tanya – friends, acquaintances, strangers, beauty clients, whoever.’

  Tanya sat back down on her sofa. ‘I’m not sure I understand, Detective.’

  Hunter had a feeling he had worded it too much.

  ‘OK.’ He tried to make it simpler this time. ‘I guess that since the advent of the smartphone, we have all become a little . . . lazy when it comes to memorizing phone numbers. Go back ten, fifteen years maybe, and most of us knew at least five numbers by heart.’

  Tanya was still young, but she knew Hunter was right. When she was only ten years old, she did have quite a few numbers memorized – her home number, at least two or three of her school friends, her father’s work number and so on.

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ she agreed.

  ‘Great. So my question is – have you ever found yourself caught in a similar conversation with anyone, talking about how we used to memorize several phone numbers before, but now we don’t anymore?’

  Tanya squinted her eyes at nothing while she thought about it for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she replied at last. ‘Actually, Cynthia and I were talking about how we used to know so many numbers by heart only last week.’

  ‘OK, who’s Cynthia?’

  ‘Oh, she’s another cosmetologist at DuBunne, the spa I work at.’

  Hunter jotted down the name on a piece of paper. ‘Was anyone else taking part in that conversation?’

  A couple more thoughtful seconds.

  ‘No. Not really. It was only Cynthia and I.’

  ‘Anyone standing close enough to be able to eavesdrop on the two of you? Can you remember?’

  Tanya began chewing on her bottom lip. ‘No. I remember it well, we were at the back, sorting out the supplies room.’

  ‘OK,’ Hunter acknowledged. ‘Can you remember having a similar conversation with anyone else? Maybe a client, or on a night out with a date . . . anyone, really. Maybe a conversation where someone dropped a more specific question?’

  ‘Like if I could remember my best friend’s cellphone number?’ Tanya’s voice lowered, sadness punctuating every word.

  ‘Yes. But it might’ve not been so direct.’

  Tanya took her time. Her left hand moved to her mouth and she began pinching her lips with her thumb and index finger.

  Hunter waited patiently.

  ‘I . . . I can’t be sure right now, Detective. My mind is still a bit o
f a mess.’

  ‘That’s not a problem, Tanya. Thank you for trying. Could you do me a favor and think about it for a while. It might suddenly just come back to you.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. Of course I can.’

  ‘If you remember anything, anything at all, however small it might seem to you, please give me a call. No matter what time, OK?’

  ‘Yes, of course. If I remember anything I will.’

  Tanya disconnected and reached for the card Hunter had left by the ashtray on her coffee table. She studied it for a long moment before paranoia began whispering in her ear. Right then she decided that she would not put that card down until she had memorized both numbers on it.

  Twenty-Three

  It took another whole day for Karen Ward’s autopsy results to finally come through on Saturday morning. The details of the brutality with which she was murdered were just as shocking on paper as they were visually.

  In total, there were twenty-nine severe lacerations to her face. Three of those had breached through to the inside of her mouth. In consequence, her tongue had been almost completely severed. Her killer had used so much force in the head-slammings that chunks of glass had embedded themselves into six out of Karen’s fourteen facial bones, including her nose, cheeks, forehead and chin. The force of the impacts also caused both of her cheekbones to fracture, together with her nose and jaw. Death had indeed come as the result of extensive brain trauma, where the hypothalamus and the optic tract were ruptured by a five-inch long shard of mirrored glass that had been introduced via the victim’s left ocular globe cavity.

  Toxicology came back negative on all counts. The killer had not sedated Karen, not even as he subdued her prior to her murder, which meant that Karen Ward was one hundred percent lucid throughout her entire ordeal.

  CSI had also come back with several test results. Only one set of fingerprints had been found inside the victim’s apartment, and they belonged to the victim herself. The prints that were found on the outside of Karen Ward’s front door also gave them very little to go on. One of the sets belonged to Karen herself, the other three got no matches against AFIT – Advanced Fingerprint Identification Technology – which meant that whoever they belonged to had no previous records, but the result that had really surprised everybody had been the fingerprint test that the CSI fingerprint expert had run against the fire escape door by Karen Ward’s apartment. He hadn’t found a single print, as if the door had been completely wiped clean that same night.

  Forensics was still analyzing fibers, hairs and specks of dust that had been collected at the crime scene. So far, nothing had flagged up as unusual. The container the killer had used to hold the glass pieces he had obtained from the bathroom mirror was never found, nor were the remaining shards of glass. The speculation was that maybe the killer had kept them as trophies.

  IT Forensics had also managed to breach the password security on the laptop found in Karen Ward’s living room. Hunter and Garcia’s team were already searching through text files, images, email messages, and everything else they could find, but just like Hunter had expected, they still hadn’t come across anything they thought could be of any interest to the investigation.

  ‘Any luck?’ Garcia asked as Hunter finally got back to the office. He had spent the entire morning in Santa Monica, where he had visited Burke Williams, the beauty spa Karen Ward was working at when she started receiving the notes Tanya Kaitlin had told them about.

  ‘Not sure yet,’ Hunter replied, taking off his jacket and placing it on the back of his chair.

  Garcia made a face at Hunter while waiting for his partner to clarify.

  ‘I managed to get a list of all the clients who were attended to by Karen Ward during her short time at Burke Williams.’

  ‘All right. How many?’

  ‘Sixty-two names.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds,’ Hunter explained. ‘From his body frame, Tanya Kaitlin was very sure that the killer was male, remember?’

  ‘OK,’ Garcia conceded. ‘So how many out of the sixty-two are male?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘That’s a pretty good reduction.’

  ‘Operations is already working on their profiles,’ Hunter said. ‘So let’s wait and see what they can come up with and we’ll take it from there.’

  ‘How about the stalker notes Karen received? Did you ask the people at the spa about them?’

  ‘I did, and no one had a clue what I was talking about.’

  ‘What?’ Garcia found that positively odd. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It seems like Karen didn’t tell anyone at Burke Williams about the notes she was getting or about being stalked,’ Hunter clarified. ‘I spoke not only with the spa manager, but with everyone else who worked there, including the receptionist. They all echoed Tanya’s words – Karen was a great cosmetologist and the sweetest person you could ever meet, but none of them knew anything about any notes. She never told a soul.’

  ‘So what reason did she give them for leaving?’ Garcia leaned forward, placing both elbows on his desktop. ‘She must’ve told them something.’

  ‘She did. She told them that she was going back to Campbell due to family problems. That was all.’ Hunter had a seat behind his desk. ‘She’d been there for less than four months, so no one felt that they were close enough to her to ask for any more details.’

  ‘Well,’ Garcia said. ‘LA is such a mega-metropolis that moving neighborhoods could be just like moving cities. People could easily get away with a white lie like that.’

  ‘After Burke Williams,’ Hunter continued. ‘I took a drive down to Long Beach to talk to the people at True Beauty.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Garcia said. ‘Exactly the same thing. Karen never told anyone about the notes she was receiving or about being stalked.’

  Hunter nodded as he woke up his computer. ‘Lastly, I dropped by DuBunne spa in South Torrance.’

  ‘DuBunne? Isn’t that where Tanya Kaitlin works?’

  ‘That’s right. I wanted to have a quick chat with that Cynthia woman Tanya mentioned.’

  ‘The one who she had the conversation about remembering phone numbers with?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s a nineteen-year-old girl,’ Hunter explained. ‘Fresh out of beauty school. She’s doing her apprenticeship at DuBunne. Still lives with her parents in Gardena.’ He shook his head. ‘Whatever conversation she had with Tanya about not remembering phone numbers by heart anymore was inoffensive. I did ask her if she remembered having that conversation with anyone else. She didn’t. I don’t think this killer acquired that information through her.’

  ‘Talking about Tanya,’ Garcia said. ‘Any word from her? Has she recalled any other conversations about not remembering phone numbers and all?’

  ‘No, nothing. My hope was that she would’ve remembered something when I asked her the question for the first time yesterday. That would’ve caught her brain by surprise. Now that she’s had time to think about it, she probably won’t.’

  ‘OK, I don’t follow,’ Garcia said. ‘Surely the more you think about something, the more you search your memory, the more chances you have of your brain remembering something, no?’

  ‘In most cases, yes.’

  ‘But not in hers? Why?’

  ‘Because the guilt that she has placed on herself would’ve triggered a toxic defense mechanism response that would’ve pushed her brain into selective post-traumatic amnesia.’

  Garcia kept his eyes on Hunter for a couple of silent seconds. ‘OK,’ he finally said. ‘So just for a moment, let’s pretend that I don’t have a Ph.D. in psychology like you do, Robert, and tell me all that again.’

  Hunter smiled before clarifying. ‘Tanya feels guilty for Karen’s death because she believes that she should’ve known her number. She thinks it’s her fault her best friend is dead. Because of that, as a defense mechanism to lessen her pain, there’s a chance
that her brain will choose to let go of any memory that it somehow associates with that guilt. The more she thinks about it, the more her brain will push the memories away because remembering will make her feel even more guilty.’

  ‘OK, now I get it and that’s not good.’

  ‘I’m still keeping my fingers crossed, though,’ Hunter added. ‘Everyone reacts differently to traumas, so you never know. I’ll give her another call later tonight.’

  Garcia reached for his notepad. ‘By the way, I got off the phone with forensics just minutes before you got here.’

  ‘Anything new?’

  ‘They just finished analyzing the collage note we found inside Karen’s bedroom,’ Garcia said, sitting back on his chair. ‘As we were expecting, they drew a blank. It’s completely clear from fingerprints or DNA.’ He looked up from his notes. ‘Who goes through the trouble of cutting out letter by letter from a magazine to hide his handwriting, only to forget to wear gloves while piecing the note together, right?’

  Hunter said nothing because, as crazy as it might sound, he’d seen it happen before. Most killers out there had a below-average IQ and were categorized as ‘disorganized murderers’. Movies and books sometimes portrayed some of them as cunning masterminds, but in reality, most of them would struggle with a fourth-grade math exam. They were labeled ‘disorganized’ because they didn’t really set out to kill their victims. They usually did it out of an uncontrollable violent impulse, which could have been initially triggered by a number of factors – shame, insecurity, anger, jealousy, low self-esteem, under the influence of mind-altering substances – the list was long and very personal. The problem was, the reverse of the coin, the killers who were categorized as ‘organized murderers’, tended to be highly intelligent, organized, and very, very disciplined.

  ‘The piece of paper used as a backdrop for the note,’ Garcia continued, ‘came out of a common white-paper pad, nothing special about it either. Easily found in any supermarket or stationery store.’

  ‘How about the shoes?’ Hunter asked.

  Garcia shook his head. ‘They’ve been cleaned . . . bleached, actually. Forensics found absolutely nothing inside them. No skin cells whatsoever. Not even from Karen herself.’