Chris Carter - The Caller

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.

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.

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.

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.