The Caller

by Chris Carter

  The house’s backyard was nothing more than a rectangular patch of green grass – no swimming pool, no garden, no flowers, no shed, nothing. Mr. J quietly stepped on to the back porch, avoided the squared window that looked into the kitchen, and flattened his back against the wall to the left of the back door. No lights were on inside or outside, which placed the entire porch in a dark shadow. On the floor, by the two short steps that led down from the porch, an ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts and joint tips. Mr. J was about to try the handle on the door, when the lights in the kitchen came on. His back returned to the wall and he waited.

  He heard the fridge door open and close.

  He heard a screw top twist.

  Then the back door was pulled open.

  Mr. J waited.

  The porch lights didn’t come on.

  The man who stepped outside wasn’t Cory Russo, but he was tall and carried enough gym muscle mass to look like he would put up a good fight, but Mr. J had no intentions of getting into one. Still cloaked by dark shadows, he pulled his silenced weapon out of his right pocket.

  The man walked over to where the ashtray was and sat down at the edge of the porch. He reeked of marijuana. His arms were the hairiest Mr. J had ever seen. From his shirt pocket, the man took out an already rolled-up joint that was as thick as his index finger. He lit it up and sucked in a drag that seemed interminable. When the man began exhaling, Mr. J made his move.

  The man never saw him coming.

  He never heard a thing.

  As he was about to take a sip of his beer, Mr. J placed the barrel of his gun against the man’s nape.

  ‘I’m going to ask you a few questions,’ he whispered by the man’s left ear, his voice calm as a priest’s, but firm as a drill sergeant’s. ‘You either nod or shake your head. You make any other movement other than that and you won’t have a head to shake or nod with anymore, is that clear?’

  With the huge joint still held between his thumb and index finger, the man nodded once.

  ‘Is Russo in the house?’ Mr. J asked.

  The man hesitated.

  Mr. J cocked his gun. ‘Is Russo in the house?’

  The man nodded once.

  ‘Is he alone?’

  The man nodded once.

  ‘Is he awake?’

  The man nodded once.

  ‘Is he in the living room?’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘Is he in the bedroom?’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘Is he in the bathroom?’

  The man nodded once.

  Mr. J smiled. There was nothing easier than sneaking up on someone when they were in the bathroom.

  ‘Thank you, and good night,’ Mr. J said.

  Before the man was even able to frown, Mr. J hit him across the back of the head with the butt of his gun. He had done that so many times before, he knew exactly where to hit and how much strength to put into it.

  With a painful ‘urghh’, the man slumped forward – unconscious.

  Mr. J put out the man’s joint, cracked his knuckles and, like a silent rat, entered the house.

  Eighty-Four

  Hunter squinted at the image on his computer screen before blinking once, twice, three times.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ He sounded confused within himself, but he wasn’t imagining it. There was something there. Something in the killer’s eyes that sent goose bumps up and down his spine.

  Many people believed that a person’s eyes were ‘the windows to their soul’. Hunter wasn’t sure if he believed that or not. He wasn’t sure if this killer even had a soul. What he believed – what he knew – was that a person’s eyes could reveal a lot about that person’s personality. It could reveal their identity.

  Hunter leaned forward on his desk and brought his face to just a couple of inches from his screen.

  ‘Is that a smudge?’ The loud question was thrown at an empty office.

  Whatever it was, it was still too small for him to be able to tell.

  Like a rocket, Hunter’s hand shot to the computer’s mouse. With two clicks he enlarged the image to ten times its original size, until all he had on his screen were the killer’s eyes. He blinked one more time, feeling something flip inside his stomach.

  What he was looking at wasn’t a smudge.

  ‘I’ll be damned!’

  The picture had pixelated, which was expected after enlarging it tenfold, but he didn’t even need to alter the color saturation on the image. He didn’t need to call Dennis Baxter at cybercrime, or hurry the picture to IT forensics, because there it was, on the inside corner of the killer’s left eye, sitting halfway between the tear duct and the iris – a small, but very distinctive, blood clot, shaped almost perfectly like an upside-down heart.

  Still, just to be sure he wasn’t seeing things, Hunter called up the filtering palette on the image application he was using. He was no expert, but he knew enough to be able to smooth out a pixelated image. It took him less than a minute to get it to the point of no doubt.

  Hunter sat staring at his computer monitor, completely transfixed by a small blood splatter that in real life wouldn’t be any larger than three millimeters, if that.

  But what knotted his throat, what made Hunter’s heart thump erratically against the inside of him, was the fact that that wasn’t the first time his eyes had rested on that upside-down, heart-shaped blood clot.

  Hunter had seen it before.

  Eighty-Five

  The odds of two people having identically shaped blood clots at the exact same spot on the sclera of their eyes were one in sixty million. Hunter had to look that up.

  He pushed his chair away from his desk, stood up, took a couple of steps back and stared at his screen again.

  He could feel his legs shivering under him.

  ‘Where? Where have I seen it before? Where?’ He urged his brain to remember, but that was something that Hunter had never been able to control. He had always been highly perceptive, even as a kid. His eyes would notice the smallest of details on people, objects, locations, images, whatever, but his brain, fearing an overload, would automatically push what it considered to be ‘excess information’ into his subconscious mind. Once there, retrieving it wasn’t a fun game. That aside, Hunter also faced a second challenge – the number of faces he had seen in the past few days, even in the past few hours, had been overwhelming.

  Once Dennis Baxter sent him the two bogus social-media identities he’d requested earlier, Hunter had spent the rest of the day browsing through social media sites. He had started with the victims’ pages. He looked through all their photos, and scanned through all their posts going back two years. That done, he moved on to the people who the killer had called and did the same. More photos. More posts. After that he began cross-referencing the victims’ friends.

  Hunter wasn’t really sure what he was looking for, but he was certain that the killer had been using social media sites to acquire information on his victims, so maybe, if he was lucky, something would catch his eye. The result had been an image overload but, in one of them, he had seen that same upside-down, heart-shaped blood clot. In one of them, he had seen the killer. He was sure of it.

  Hunter knew that there was no easy way of doing this. He would have to start browsing through everything again. He took a deep breath, stretched his six-foot frame to try to get rid of the muscle stiffness, and got back to his computer.

  As he dumped himself on to his chair and began typing, his right elbow brushed against some files that were at the edge of his desk, sending everything to the floor. Pages and photographs scattered by his feet in all directions. Hunter reached for them, but as he picked up an old report, the entire room span around him.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ he whispered almost catatonically, because that was when he realized that he had been wrong. He had been very wrong.

  Hunter hadn’t seen that upside-down, heart-shaped blood clot on a photograph over the Internet. />
  He had seen it face to face.

  Eighty-Six

  With his silenced Sig Sauer in hand, Mr. J crossed the empty kitchen and paused by the door that led into the living room. No lights were on. He listened for an instant, but the only sound polluting the air around him was the incessant low humming of the old refrigerator pushed up against one of the corners in the kitchen. He peeked around the door, studying his next move.

  The living room was small and uncluttered, which made things easier, because he needed to get to the short corridor on the other side of it. Five quick and silent steps got him there. Still no signs of Cory Russo.

  Mr. J regarded the hallway before him. It offered four doors – two on the right, one on the left, and one at the far end of it. The one at the far end was wide open, with the lights switched off, as was the first door on the right. The other two were shut, but a sliver of bright light escaped from under the door on the left.

  Mr. J stepped into the hallway and flattened his back against the left wall, before sidestepping four paces until he reached the door. He held his breath, placed his ear against it and listened carefully. Someone was definitely in there.

  Mr. J stepped forward, away from the wall, and positioned himself directly in front of the door. Out of habit, he looked left, then right, before taking a deep breath and holding it in his lungs for a couple of seconds. With his left leg firmly grounded, he sent a kick to the door’s handle so powerful, the entire frame cracked.

  Cory Russo, who was sitting on the toilet, flipping through a porn magazine, jumped back from the fright so hard, he smashed his head against the wall behind him, almost knocking himself out. The magazine fell to the floor. Russo came crashing back down against the toilet seat with a horrified look on his face.

  ‘Hey, big guy,’ Mr. J said, his gun pointed directly at Russo’s forehead. ‘So what do you say, want to try that kick to my chest again?’

  Mr. J was wearing the exact same disguise he’d worn earlier when he’d knocked at Russo’s door.

  Russo looked back at Mr. J, still a little groggy from the head slam. ‘Fuck, man.’ His eyes moved down to his bare legs for a quick second. ‘This is undignifying.’

  ‘You think?’ Only then did Mr. J catch a whiff of the smell in the room. His face screwed up. ‘Goddamn, man, did you just crap a rotten animal carcass?’

  ‘What?’ Russo couldn’t see the moment as a time for jokes.

  ‘I told you I would find you, didn’t I?’ Mr. J said.

  Russo frowned at him.

  ‘Not that tough without that fucking mask, are you?’

  The look inside Russo’s eyes hardened. He still hadn’t recognized him over his disguise, but he finally knew what Mr. J was talking about.

  Eighty-Seven

  A subconscious memory could be triggered back into the conscious mind by just about anything – an image, a sound, a smell, a place, a name . . . there really was no telling, and that was what had happened inside Hunter’s head. As he bent down and reached for the scattered files on the floor, his eyes settled on a lab report sheet, and something that was right at the top of the page opened a direct pathway to the memory he was searching for. It had indeed been a detail his eyes had noticed, but his brain had discarded as unessential, sending it straight into his subconscious, but he now knew that he hadn’t noticed that detail on a photograph.

  The memory Hunter was searching for didn’t trickle back into his mind like he’d hoped it would. It smashed against it like an ugly train wreck. One second he had nothing, the next . . . there it was, the eyes, the blood clot, the face.

  ‘No way,’ Hunter whispered, fighting the memory inside his head, because what it was telling him was that he had been that close to the killer, that he had looked into his eyes, that they had shared the same breathing space.

  Hunter disregarded the files and photographs on the floor and reached for a blue folder that was sitting to the left of his computer screen. It didn’t take him long to find what he was after.

  He looked back at the enlarged image on his monitor and studied the killer’s eyes again. Inside his head, the memory began colliding with reason, but if there was one thing that Hunter knew well, it was that reason and violent murder rarely crossed paths. Still, a memory wasn’t enough. He needed more information, and he needed more information now.

  Hunter minimized the image-viewing program and called up a different application. As it loaded up, he typed in the name he got from the blue folder and hit ‘enter’. A few seconds later, he had that person’s basic personal file on his screen, including a portrait photograph.

  The first thing Hunter did was enlarge the photo and look into that person’s eyes.

  No blood clot.

  He enlarged the picture further.

  It wasn’t there, but Hunter knew that a blood clot could appear in someone’s eye at any time and for a number of reasons. All that was needed was for that person to suffer any sort of trauma that would cause the delicate blood vessels beneath the tissue covering the white of the eye to break.

  The picture Hunter was looking at had been taken seven years ago. The blood clot could have appeared in his eye any time after that.

  Despite knowing all that, doubts had started coming at Hunter from all angles. Was he really that desperate for a lead that his brain had given him a fantasy dressed up as a memory?

  It was very possible, he knew that much, but why that person? And why did the memory feel so vivid in his mind?

  Hunter minimized the portrait photo, went back to the person’s personal file and began scanning through the information on the pages – name, address, place of birth, marital status and so on, but it wasn’t until he got to the third page that something made him pause. Something about an accident.

  ‘Wait a second . . . What?’

  He went back to the top of the page and read it again, slower this time. The information was flimsy at best, but it did provide him with a couple of important details he could use to run a more refined search. Intrigued, Hunter did exactly that.

  The file the search returned wasn’t very long, but the information and the photographs it contained shocked Hunter for two reasons. One: The devastating sadness of it all was life-changing. Two: If Hunter was right about the killer, this had to have been the trigger.

  Suddenly, as he read the file for the second time, Hunter remembered a couple of photographs he’d seen while browsing through one of the social media sites that afternoon.

  A lump lodged itself in his throat.

  ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he whispered, already doubting the crazy theory that had just begun taking shape inside his head.

  He quickly reloaded his browser and logged back into that same social media website. This time, he knew exactly whose pages to look for. There was no blind searching.

  It took him about five minutes to find the first photo, and as he did, he felt as if his office walls had begun closing in on him.

  ‘This can’t be it.’

  Stunned, Hunter moved on to somebody else’s profile page and their ‘photos’ tab. He scrolled through the images until he found the one he was looking for.

  ‘Oh, my God!’

  Both pictures, despite coming from two different pages and belonging to two different people who didn’t know each other, shared the same theme.

  ‘This is nuts.’

  His heart began sounding like a kick drum, but he wasn’t done yet. They now had three victims. Three different people. Three different social media pages to check.

  ‘Be wrong, Robert,’ he said to himself, as he typed the third and last name into the search box. ‘Be wrong.’

  The page loaded and Hunter moved straight on to the ‘photos’ tab. His eyes began scanning the thumbnails like a lion searching for prey – forty, sixty, one hundred pictures – nothing. It wasn’t there. One hundred and ten, one hundred and twenty – no. His crazy theory was just that, a crazy theo—

  ‘No way.’ The wal
ls closed in further. His finger moved off the scrolling ball on his mouse as his eyes locked on to a specific thumbnail.

  ‘No, no, no.’

  He maximized it.

  There it was, a photograph with the exact same theme of the two previous ones he’d just seen.

  Hunter stepped away from his computer and started pacing the room. He could feel his muscles tensing up on him. He could feel a headache starting to grab the base of his skull.

  The clock on the wall read 01:54 a.m.

  His mind felt tired. Exhausted, actually. There was nothing that Hunter wanted more right then than to go home and be able to fall asleep, but the key words were ‘be able to’.

  He paused before the picture board and stared at all the photos for a long while. The victims, the video-call witnesses, the savagery of the crime-scene shots. There were pieces missing everywhere and he knew he wouldn’t find them by pacing the length of his office, or sitting behind his desk.

  He considered what to do next.

  Improvise, Robert, a voice said from deep inside his head. Improvise.

  Eighty-Eight

  Hunter had no problem finding the house, a brick-fronted, two-story, family home with a well-cared-for front lawn and perfectly shaped hedges. The house was in total darkness, with the exception of a dim light that bathed the porch in a weak yellow glow.

  A note by the doorbell read ‘not working’. Hunter gave the door three firm knocks and waited. No reply. He tried again, the knocks a little firmer this time. Still no reply. He stepped back from the porch and looked up at the house. No lights. No movement. No sound.

  What are you doing here, Robert? You should go home. The ‘sensible’ half of his brain decided to engage in conversation. He paid it very little attention and skipped over the hedge fence that surrounded the front garden before trying the window on the left – locked, and the closed curtains kept him from seeing inside. He had no better luck with the window on the right.

  It’s a sign, Robert. Go home. Sensible half was back.