Chris Carter - The Caller

‘Female victim,’ Brian continued. ‘Forty-two years old. Her name is Cassandra Jenkinson.’

‘Any doubt about her identity?’ Mr. J asked. His hope was now just fantasy.

‘Not according to the team at the scene. Official identification is just a matter of protocol. The victim’s driver’s license was found inside her handbag.’

The invisible dagger dug deeper into Mr. J’s heart. He could feel it lacerating everything inside of him.

‘Have they found her cellphone?’ Mr. J asked. Once again his voice was as cold and as emotionless as ever.

‘Cellphone? That I won’t know until a manifesto is logged into the system. Hopefully in the morning.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mr. J thought. He would find that out before Brian could anyway.

‘She was married to...’ Brian tried to move on, but Mr. J cut him short.

‘It’s OK. For now this was everything I needed.’ A short pause. ‘Now. As I’ve told you, I need everything about this investigation ghosted. Same format as always. Same untraceable email as always. Any new discoveries you deem important, call me on this number ASAP. If I need any other information, I’ll be in touch.’

The call disconnected.

Mr. J peeked at the speedometer one more time. Seventy miles an hour just wouldn’t do. His Cadillac CTS-V went from zero to sixty in 3.7 seconds. It packed a 6.2-liter supercharged V8 engine under the hood, with a top speed of two hundred miles an hour. It was also equipped with a state of the art radar detector that could pick up a speed gun or camera from a mile away. The car was, without a shadow of a doubt, a super sedan. It was time to put all that power into use.

By 2:00 a.m., Hunter, Garcia and Dr. Slater were just finishing up at the crime scene. In accordance to protocol, after being photographed and documented from all possible angles in relation to the location and position in which she’d been found, Cassandra Jenkinson’s body had finally been taken to the coroner’s office. The heavy rain that had started falling as they arrived had continued for over an hour, washing away any potential clues, including footprints that the killer might’ve left behind as he either approached or left the grounds of the house. Thanks to his quick work, the agent in charge of the driveway had succeeded in preserving the partial tire track he had come across earlier. After the rain had stopped, he had managed to lift an impression of it using a gelatin lifter — a sheet of rubber with a low-adhesive gelatin layer on one side that can lift prints from almost anywhere, including porous, rough, curved and textured surfaces.

‘Any luck?’ Garcia asked Nicholas Holden, who for the past two hours had been dusting doors, windows, and all relevant indoor surfaces and objects.

‘Depends on what you call luck,’ he replied with a shrug, as he finished packing up his equipment.

Garcia enquired with a subtle eyebrow raise.

‘How many people in this household?’ Holden asked almost rhetorically, as he’d seen plenty of pictures throughout the house.

‘The victim and her husband,’ Garcia replied.

‘No one else?’ The question was dusted with a little surprise.

‘Not according to the info we got.’ Garcia paused, thought about it, then rephrased. ‘Well, they’ve got a twenty-year-old son, but he doesn’t live here anymore. He goes to college in Boston. Why?’

Holden nodded as if that information explained a lot.

‘From a simple pattern comparison, I can tell you that I’ve retrieved three different sets of fingerprints,’ he explained. ‘One of them belongs to the victim herself. The other two are undoubtedly male. Of those, one reoccurs prominently all throughout the house — kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, living room, hallway... it’s everywhere. The second set doesn’t show up as much as the first one, but it still reoccurs frequently enough to suggest that neither of them belong to a stranger to this household.’

Garcia scratched his chin. ‘The husband and the son.’

Holden agreed with a head movement. He had just finished zipping up his bag when they all heard a loud commotion coming from outside the front door. Before anyone was able to react, a tall and well-built man with a shaved head pushed his way into the living room. The look on his face was a mixture of fear and bewilderment. Two angry officers followed him inside.

‘Sir,’ one of the officers said, hastily reaching for the man’s arm. ‘This is still an open crime scene and you’re contaminating it. I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.’

The man jerked his arm away from the officer’s grip.

‘It’s OK,’ Hunter said, turning to face them and signaling the officers to let the man go. He didn’t have to ask. He recognized the man from the pictures on the mantelpiece. ‘We’re all done here, right?’ He looked at Dr. Slater.

She nodded in response. ‘We’ve collected everything we needed. There’s no more risk of contamination.’

The officers looked at each other before nodding back at Hunter and exiting the house.

‘Where is she?’ Mr. J asked in an unsteady voice, his crazed eyes searching the entire room.

Hunter stepped forward to meet him. ‘Mr. Jenkinson, I’m Detective Robert Hunter with the LA—’

‘Where’s my wife?’ Mr. J cut Hunter short. His gaze moved past the detective to first find the lone dining chair by the east wall then the pool of blood underneath it. His wife’s blood. For a moment, he stopped breathing.

‘Her body had to be transferred to the coroner’s office,’ Hunter replied in a conservative tone.

Mr. J didn’t ask for an explanation because he didn’t really need one. If there was something he understood very well, it was police protocol.

Catatonically, he walked past Hunter, Garcia and Dr. Slater in the direction of the chair. Everyone and the world around him disappeared and all of a sudden there she was, sitting directly in front of him, her eyes full of fear and sadness, imploring him to know the simplest of answers. An answer he should’ve known.

Slowly, his right arm extended in the direction of the chair, as if Cassandra was really still there. As if he could touch her face... caress her hair... wipe away her tears.

‘I’m so, so sorry.’ The words escaped his lips without him even noticing it.

In respect, no one said anything, giving Mr. J his moment alone.

Dr. Slater silently signaled her team to leave.

Mr. J felt his stomach pirouetting inside of him and his legs threatened to buckle under his weight. To steady himself, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When they reopened, just a couple of seconds later, Hunter saw something in them that no one else in that room did — tremendous anger, coated by unwavering focus and determination.

‘OK,’ he said, finally meeting Hunter’s gaze. His tone of voice was arctic cold. ‘I guess you want to ask me a few questions.’

Back in his hotel room, with his face still buried in his hands, Mr. J had thought very hard about what to do next. He would’ve preferred to have left the LAPD completely out of it, and if he had seen any way around the problem, that was exactly what he would’ve done, but even with all his connections, he knew that there was no way he could pull that off.

His second thought was to maybe pretend that he had never received that damn video-call in the first place. That would’ve given him some much-needed advantage over the LAPD. He knew that he could’ve made it back to LA by 2:00 a.m. His car was certainly fast enough and his radar detector system would’ve kept him from being pulled over. Once home, and without the interference of the police or a forensic team, he could’ve studied the undisturbed crime scene for as long as he needed. He could’ve crawled through his living room looking for possible clues before anyone got there. Clues that, if they existed, he knew the LAPD would’ve never shared with him. But most of all, he could’ve touched Cassandra’s face one last time before she was taken away from their home. He could’ve kneeled down in front of her and begged her for her forgiveness. Forgiveness he could never and would never give himself. Then and only then, he would’ve made the nine-one-one call and pretended that he’d just got back home from a business trip to find his wife murdered in their own living room. But that plan would’ve also collapsed at the first hurdle.