Chris Carter - The Caller

Mr. J walked to the front door and looked outside to see if anyone had seen what had happened. The street was as dead as it was when he got there. He calmly closed the door and began searching Michael Williams’ house.

Garcia was just getting off the phone with the LAPD Cyber Crime Unit when Hunter got back to their office.

‘Robert, you’ve got to come have a look at this.’

Garcia’s tone filled Hunter with intrigue. He walked over to his partner’s desk.

‘I’ll admit that I made a huge mistake,’ Garcia explained. ‘I spent a lot of time going over Cassandra and John Jenkinson’s social media pages, searching through entries, looking at photos... everything.’

‘How’s that a mistake?’

‘It’s the same mistake I made the first time around, Robert. I looked through everything in both Karen Ward and Tanya Kaitlin’s personal pages, remember? But I found absolutely nothing there. The break came when I looked at their friend’s page, Pete Harris, and that was when I remembered something very important about our second victim — she’s got a son, Patrick Jenkinson, who is twenty years old and goes to college in Boston. To his generation, social media is like oxygen. They can barely function without it.’

‘So you checked his page.’

‘Pages,’ Garcia corrected Hunter.

‘He’s got more than one?’

‘Not exactly, but he’s a member of several different groups,’ Garcia explained. ‘Each one with their own page, so I spent the whole morning bouncing from one page to another, reading entries, replies, basically everything I could find, until I came across this.’ He loaded a page on to his browser and scrolled down until he found the entry he was after. ‘Check it out,’ he said, tapping his finger on the screen.

Hunter leaned forward by his partner’s left shoulder.

‘You only have to read up to the fourth reply to know what I’m talking about.’

The thread had been created on a group page, not by Patrick Jenkinson, but by another member. A woman named Isabel.

Isabel: Oh, my father is in so much with my mom after last night. He’ll be sleeping in the living room for a month.

The first question came from another female member named Martha:

Why? What happened? . Tell. Tell. Tell.

Isabel: He forgot their wedding anniversary. Turned up after work with nothing — no , , not even a shitty card from a gas station. Didn’t mention a thing. My mom was , but she also didn’t say anything. This morning, at breakfast, she was all quiet. My dad asked — ‘are you OK, hon?’ That was when the shit hit the fan, and let me tell you, that fan is still spinning lol

Martha: Oh that’s bad. That’s real bad. . My dad is awesome when it comes to that. Twenty-three years married, never forgot it once.

The next comment came from Patrick Jenkinson:

I know exactly what you’re talking about, Isabel. My dad doesn’t remember his and my mom’s wedding anniversary anymore either. Hasn’t for several years. My mom used to remind him, but not without getting into an argument at the same time. She gave up after a few years. If he couldn’t remember it by himself, what was the point?

Hunter looked at Garcia.

‘You were right again,’ Garcia said. ‘The killer knew beforehand that Mr. Jenkinson wouldn’t know the answer to his question.’

Mr. J’s ribs hurt as if they were broken. The kick Michael Williams had delivered to his abdomen had gotten him completely by surprise. At the time his body wasn’t exactly relaxed, but it wasn’t rigid or foreseeing an attack so soon either, so the kick had penetrated with maximum force.

‘You should’ve expected that, J,’ he whispered to himself, while opening another drawer inside Michael Williams’ bedroom. ‘What the fuck were you thinking? You turn up unannounced, pretending to be a cop, and you thought he would just invite you in for donuts and milk?’ He lifted his shirt to take a look. Bruising was already starting to come through.

Mr. J had already gone through every drawer, every box, every hole he had found in Michael Williams’ living room. So far, he’d found nothing that could give him a lead as to where he could’ve run to, but the search wasn’t over yet. Inside a box that had been slid under an old display unit, he’d found receipts, house bills, and some documents regarding NoLeaks Plumbing. The company had been established two and a half years earlier, and it belonged to Michael Williams himself. As far as Mr. J could tell, he was also its only employee.

Once he was satisfied that he had looked absolutely everywhere in the living room, Mr. J moved his search operation to Michael Williams’ bedroom. Just like the living room, the bedroom was small, lightly furnished, and it smelled of stale sweat and fried food.

Mr. J started with the chest of drawers that was pushed up against the east wall. His living room search had already told him that Michael Williams was an extremely organized man. Every object seemed to have its specific place, but the bedroom told him that Mr. Williams was undoubtedly OCD. Every item of clothing he’d found inside the drawers had been folded to perfection, completely maximizing the use of space, but the obsession didn’t end there. The items had also been color- and type-coordinated.

Mr. J unfolded and looked through each and every single item, including pockets. He found nothing, not even a scrap of paper.

Next, he tried the small wooden wardrobe, where he found a gray suit that looked to have been purchased from a charity shop, two white button-up shirts, one striped tie, a pair of heavy-duty working boots, and a pair of black shoes, which had certainly seen better days.

He checked all the clothing before looking on top and under the wardrobe but, once again, Mr. J found nothing.

There was only one bedside table, set on the right side of the bed, closer to the door, and that was where things began getting exciting. In the drawer, Mr. J found a Beretta 96 A1.40-caliber pistol. Next to it, two boxes of 180-grain full-metal-jacket ammunition.

‘I don’t suppose I’ll find a permit for this anywhere,’ Mr. J said, as he picked up the weapon and released its twelve-round magazine. None were missing. He brought the gun’s chamber up to his nose. It didn’t smell of gunpowder, but of oil and lubricants.

After securing the pistol between his trousers’ waistband and his lower back, Mr. J got down on all fours and checked under the bed — nothing except for a dark-gray suitcase. He reached for it and dragged it towards him.

It was a polycarbonate suitcase, with a two-way zipper, held shut by a three-digit combination locking mechanism. It felt very light, as if it was empty, but if that was the case, why was it locked?

Mr. J reached for his pocketknife. The average commercial suitcase locking mechanism is there more as a deterrent, rather than as a security feature. All it really takes is a quick flick with the tip of a knife and the system comes apart. It took Mr. J less than three seconds to breach this one.