Chris Carter - The Caller

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.

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 walls closed in further. His finger moved off the scrolling ball on his mouse as his eyes locked on to a specific thumbnail.