The Mind Hunter

by Mir Quadri

  “What?” asked Evelyn in shock as she realized that Will, as she had hoped, liked her too. Her pupils dissolved and she could barely control the smile from coming on her face.

  “That’s not the point. The point is I did speak to you and you were there in my Hunting Session.”

  “Will, I’m flattered with your analogy. But what you’re saying did not happen. I couldn’t have called you. I don’t remember calling and saying those words to you, ever. And how do you know that heart-rate didn’t go up after you saw yourself when that guy told you that he knew you were there.”

  “I don’t know. I know that I remember hearing your voice on the phone. And I have some circumstantial evidence to prove that now.”

  “I don’t know what else to tell you Will other than the fact that I wasn’t the one who called you.”

  Will paused for a minute and moved closer to Evelyn. He put his left hand on her shoulders and asked “Evelyn, do you believe me when I say that I did not kill Mr Zhu.”

  “Frankly, I don’t know what to believe anymore, Will” she said.

  “But you have to believe me. I did not kill him. I don’t even know him.”

  “Will, while investigating this case, I came across some pictures of Mr Zhu’s brother. He has been reported missing for sometime now. His name is Evan Zhu. Does that name ring a bell?”

  “No. But why?”

  “I saw his picture on your wall, in that dark room, the day I came down to pick you up for the interview. He was your prime suspect in your family’s killing.”

  Will, totally confused at the moment, just brushed his hair with his fingers as Evelyn continued “now, I know how badly you want to find the killers of your family. And honestly, the way you have been lately, I can see the frustration boiling under you. Now, it could happen that you found out about Mr Zhu’s relationship to his brother and went to the house and killed him, thinking that he was Evan Zhu. It could happen.”

  “No” cried Will.

  “I want to trust you, Will. But the evidence against you is overwhelming.”

  “What evidence?”

  “Something happened, Will. Before the Hunting Session with Ms White, she had particularly requested me to get you on the case. She told me that she had some information about your family’s murders and was willing to give that to me in exchange of me putting you on this case.”

  “Really? Why did you not tell me about this before?”

  “I didn’t even know she was telling the truth. I wanted to make sure that you stayed focused on the job at hand, which was to find Mr Zhu’s killer. I was eventually going to tell you” said Evelyn.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “That’s not all of it, Will. There’s some more evidence suggesting that …” said Evelyn and paused.

  “What? Suggesting what Evelyn?” asked Will.

  “Suggesting that you may somehow be responsible in killing your family!”

  “Yes, I am responsible. I should have protected them.”

  “Not like that, Will. There’s some evidence that you might have killed them too.”

  “What? Are you insane?” retorted Will.

  “Harry’s team picked up some camera footage from a Store which showed you getting into the house around the time of the murder.”

  “This is ridiculous. I loved my family. Why would I kill them” he screamed in anger.

  “Listen, Will. I don’t believe any of this. But you have to come in. Surrender yourself. You can’t keep running like this. Come in and we will figure this out.”

  “No” said Will with tears in his eyes.

  “What are you going to do? Where are you going to run?”

  “You got to do what you got to do…”

  “What does that mean”

  “You got to do what you got to do…” said Will, again.

  “Will. Listen to me. Just come with me and surrender yourself. I know you trust me. I will make this right. You can’t run. You are stuck here. Surrender yourself before they arrest you”

  Will took his phone out and dialed a number.

  “Thank you for calling PG&E department. How can I help you?” answered the lady on the phone.

  “Hi, is this customer service?” asked Will.

  “Yes, sir. How can I help you?”

  “Well, I am calling from the Miami PD and we have a scheduled fire evacuation drill. For some reason, I was not able to turn the alarm on. This drill is important for people to know what to do if there was a real fire, ever. So I was hoping if you could turn on the fire alarm remotely, we can have our staff perform the drill. I would appreciate that?”

  “Sure, do you have the pin number for this request?”

  “Sure” said Will and looked up his phone for the picture he had taken in the restroom earlier that had that pin number listed for emergencies.

  “Oh yeah, it’s 9784673” he read from the picture on his phone.

  “Alright, I just sent the signal. The alarm should be on, any moment now.”

  “Thanks” said Will and hung up.

  “Will, what are you doing?” asked Evelyn as the fire alarm started buzzing in the building loudly as people started running out of the building.

  Will came closer to Evelyn and whispered “thanks for everything Evelyn, but I have to go now” he said and jumped on the ledge and into the window of the office below and ran away in this chaos.

  “LIKE YOUR FATHER”

  ‘It’s mesmerizing’ she thought as she looked at a bunch of multicolored cupcakes, arranged in a big round bowl, comparing them to the blobs of dough in a tray ready to be fed to the oven. Her big blind eyes kept looking around the kitchen as she moved forward, picked up the big tray, leaned down and pushed it inside the oven. Just as she was about to shut the door of the oven, she stopped. Her eyes brightened up and her face turned happy.

  “I am so glad that you came back, Willie” said Emily, Will’s mother, as she slowly turned around and looked at the door, through her blind eyes. There he was, Will, broken like a used straw, standing at the door.

  “Come on in, son. Have a seat. You look like a guy who can have a cupcake” she said as she took out a small bowl from the utensil drawer and proceeded to put a blue colored cup cake, with a fork in it, while Will slowly walked in and sat on the couch. She then slowly walked towards the couch and handed him over the bowl.

  “Here you go, son” she said smiling and continued “I still make them good.”

  Will slowly took a bite of the cake, still lost in his thoughts as his mother sat beside him on the same couch.

  “Have things been any better, Wille?” she asked.

  Will turned around and looked at her in anger. He then got up from his seat and moved a few steps aways from her. Gazing at the wall opposite to the couch he said “you know mother, they think I am a killer,” he paused looked around at his mother and continued “and for the last few days, I have tried to prove them wrong. I have tried to prove my innocence. And I have failed.”

  “Failed? I don’t understand” she countered.

  “Yes, I failed. And now, they think I killed my family too. And I just don’t know what to think and to do anymore. Because I know, that I could never kill anyone. Because, I am not a killer. I am not you, mother” he paused for a brief moment, turned around at his mother and continued “ I got into my own memory and I did not see myself killing anyone. I did see a murder though, committed by you. I am not a killer, you are!”

  Her mother’s eyes filled themselves with water the moment she heard this.

  “So, now you know…” she said.

  “Yes. I saw it with my own eyes. How could you do that mother? How could you kill dad? You’re a cold blooded killer.”

  “I am sorry, Willie, I disappointed you” she replied.

  “Over the last few days, my world has come tumbling down around me. But I always knew for sure that this is all some confusion and I never killed anyone. I just had to prove that. But what I saw in
my own memories, I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  His mother kept listening silently as tears dropped from her eyes.

  “I don’t want your apology or your tears mother. I want an answer. Why did you kill dad?”

  Emily slowly rubbed her tears off her face. She looked straight at Will and said “your father and I met while we were at college. I was attracted to him because of his charm, his personality and more than anything else, his wit. He was by far the cleverest man I had met in my life. We dated for a couple of years before we got married” she said and after a brief moment, continued “your father was the one who first told me about the concept of mind reading, which is today popularly known as Mind Hunting. He taught me ways to focus on someone’s mind and get into their heads. We practiced together for years. You probably know this, but there is some guilty pleasure one gets from reading someone else’s thoughts. Of course, we never got to the stage where we could read someone’s thoughts, but we did find a way to explore memories. This happened after years of practice. This was our favorite pastime. This is all we did. We went into each other’s memories, Snapped out and discussed them in detail. This was fun. I got to know your father’s memories and he got to know mine. This was very romantic. But then…” she stopped.

  Will came closer to his mom and sat by her knees “then what, mother?”

  “After five years of being happily married, you were born. I couldn’t be happier. After you were born, even though we did not get the same amount of time to spend with each other, with whatever little time we could find, we kept exploring each other’s Memory Palaces, checking out all the doors and going deep inside the Palace. And then the problem started. As I kept going deep into your father’s memories, I realized that the memories kept becoming darker and darker. Initially, I saw him being violent towards animals. Then one day I saw him kill a dog. When I asked him about these, he said he didn’t remember any of these. He kept denying doing these, ever. And then…” she paused.

  “What?” asked Will, anxiously.

  “Something happened that I had feared all along. I saw him…. kill a woman.”

  “What?” asked Will, surprised.

  “Yes. This memory was buried deep inside his Memory Palace, after a number of doors. I didn’t tell him about this initially, as I couldn’t believe it myself. I honestly thought we have discovered some kind of loop hole of this entire process where the mind does not show you what actually happened but maybe shows you some fantasies. I kept going deep and I saw not one but several women he had killed. Some more recent than others. In each of these memories, he wore a long leather trench coat, his face covered by a black mask and a black colored hat with black gloves.”

  Will’s face turned pale as he heard the description of the killer, as this was very similar to what he saw on Mr Zhu’s killer. Meanwhile, Emily continued “I started to get more worried as the number of killings increased. Every time I saw one of these, I came back from the session and lied to him about what I saw. I knew my husband could never kill anyone. He had always denied being cruel to animals in the first place, leave alone killing a human being. Until one day…” she paused.

  “What?” asked Will.

  His mother got up and walked slowly to the closet and opened it. There was a locked iron trunk at the bottom of the closet. She slowly bent down and opened the trunk.

  “Until one day, I saw this, hidden cleverly, inside this secret cabinet, inside the closet” she said and took out the leather trench coat, black mask, black hat and gloves.

  Will was shocked. These were exactly the ones he had seen on the killer, while Hunting Ms White. Meanwhile his mother continued “the day I found these, I realized that I had married a killer. He never remembered killing anyone but he always did. He was a psychopath. For people like him, killing a human being is not such a big deal. It does not generate the same amount of emotional trauma as normal people get. This was the reason why these murders did not show up in the first few doors of his Memory Palace — because these were not big events his mind needed to remember.”

  She paused for a brief moment and continued “I started getting more and more worried as I had you, Willie. Every time he was with you, I got worried that he would harm you. I could not live with this feeling anymore. I asked him about these clothes, I asked him why he was always late from work, I asked him where he used to go, late at night, and he could never give me any answers. His disease was getting worse. And one day, just to protect you from him, I killed him. I had a feeling you probably saw me do that, which is why I never showed you how to explore your own mind. But when you told me that you are being suspected of having killed someone, I had to tell you this in the hopes that you will actually see yourself killing that person, and this would be in your first door, Will.”

  Tears dropped from Will’s eyes as he slowly started to understand what his mother was getting at. His mother came closer to Will and continued “so my son, you not seeing yourself killing Mr Zhu in the first door is actually a bad thing. I think…you are like your father”

  “No” said Will out loud with tears poring out of his eyes.

  “I wish I am wrong, son. But so far, what I have seen in you, is what I had seen in your father.”

  Will, who was kneeling, fell down to the ground, crying, and said “so, I am a killer. I killed people. This is all true.”

  “Looks like it my son” she said and continued “I can’t afford to lose you, Willie. We need to find a way out for you, from this mess.”

  Will, who was still crying said “there’s no way out of this mess, mother.”

  “Tell me something, what does the police have against you? Do they have any evidence of you killing anyone, apart from your own testimony of seeing yourself kill that person, which I believe is not sufficient in the court of law?”

  “They apparently have some circumstantial evidence and they want to bring me in for questioning” replied Will.

  “The woman who made you see murdering this man, she probably knows about you. She probably saw you kill her husband, that is the only possible explanation of how you saw this in her memory. She knows who you are” she said.

  “I know” he said and continued “I know what to do, mother. For me to survive, she has to go.”

  “What do you mean, Willie?” asked his mother.

  “She knows about me, mother. She has seen me kill Mr Zhu. For me to survive, she needs to go” said Will. After a brief moment, he continued “I have to do it. I have to kill her.”

  “I KNOW YOU’RE THERE”

  ‘It’s the perfect storm’ thought Evelyn as she gazed out through her office window, watching the rain come down heavily.

  “It’s strange!” interrupted Kate as she waked into her office.“Strange?” Evelyn questioned back as she turned around and looked at her.

  “Yes. I guess it’s the global warming, or something. I mean not too long ago, we had this devastating earthquake. And now, this storm. It’s been raining cats and dogs since last night. They say the storm is going to be active for another few hours at least, through tonight.”

  “I guess the storm is following the same trajectory, like this case” said Evelyn.

  “It’s certainly been a crazy week, boss. I mean, not too long ago, we were investigating these cases with Will. Now, we are investigating his case. So much has changed over the last week. It’s unimaginable”

  “Yeah. How did your operation at the Rivermark go?” asked Evelyn.

  “Well, I just sat there like a fool for a few hours, till we got the call from Harry. Will really managed to fool everyone” said Kate and after a brief moment continued “do you believe that he is a murderer, boss?”

  “The evidence, though circumstantial, is overwhelming, Kate” responded Evelyn.

  “Yeah, but do you believe it?” asked Kate.

  “I don’t want to” said Evelyn when they got interrupted by Dan.

  “Ms White’s lawyer is here in Harry’s o
ffice. They let Ms White go ma'am” said Dan as he walked in.

  “What? They can’t let her go. Not just yet” said Evelyn as she rushed out of her office.

  In the meanwhile, Will was sitting inside his car in this heavy rain, wearing the same black leather trench coat his mother had showed him. He was carefully watching the big house as rain came pouring down. He looked at his watch, which showed him 8 PM. He looked outside his car window and saw water gushing down the streets. There were still a few cars passing him by and he understood that he had to wait it out. He slowly took out his phone and called Evelyn. After a few rings, Evelyn’s phone went to the voicemail service.

  “Evelyn, I am about to do something that I never thought I would do. I am lost and this seems to be the only way out. I am sorry about what I am going to do. It’s very likely that we may not see each other again, so I just wanted to say, thank you. Thank you for being a great friend. You are the only person who comes close to being called my family. What I am going to do will disappoint you very much. But please, be assured that this was the only option. Thank you for everything. I am sorry. Will”

  As Evelyn barged into Harry’s office, she saw Harry and Cas, talking to a lean, bald Indian descent lawyer, named Murthy.

  “You don’t have do this, Mr Murthy” said Harry.

  “We are done speaking, sir. It’s already done. Ms White is safe at her home. This is the court’s order, restricting all of you from getting even close to the house” warned Murthy while handing over a piece of paper to Harry.

  “You have no idea about what’s going on, do you?” interrupted Evelyn.

  Mr Murthy turn around, his eyes red in anger, looked at Evelyn and said “and who are you?”

  “I am Special Agent Evelyn Monroe. I am the chief investigator on this case” she replied.

  “Well, Ms Monroe, do me the courtesy of not teaching me my job. You guys should be grateful to my client for not pressing charges against you all” said Murthy.