Chris Carter - The Caller

Russo’s hand shot up to his ear like a rocket.

There it was, the vanishing of the defiant grin. The crumbling of the badass attitude. The crying would come soon.

‘What the fuck, man?’ Russo yelled. ‘Are you fucking nuts?’

Another squeeze of the trigger. This time, the bullet missed Russo’s right ear. More shards. More dust.

Up came the other hand. ‘Fuuuuuuuck. What are you doing? Stop, man. Stop.’

Mr. J said nothing. He simply tapped his finger on the photograph.

‘OK, man, OK,’ Russo said. ‘You’ve got the wrong guy, though. She wasn’t one of mine.’

Mr. J found the answer a little odd. ‘One of yours? You better start talking plain English.’ He nodded with the barrel of his gun.

‘Yeah, man, she wasn’t one of mine,’ Russo said again. ‘She was supposed to be one of Toby’s.’ His chin jerked up slightly.

‘No. That still makes no sense,’ Mr. J said.

Russo saw the determination in Mr. J’s eyes and knew that he was about to squeeze the trigger again.

‘Wait, wait!’ he yelled, lifting his hands in surrender. ‘That’s how we did it, man,’ Russo began, his voice a lot less steady. ‘I scouted the ones for him, he scouted the ones for me, then we’d swop info. We live across town from each other and we thought that there was no way anyone could link the women back to us. On his nights, I made sure that I was in a place full of people, and I made sure that they remembered me, you know what I’m saying? On my nights, he did the same.’ Russo paused and nodded at the photograph. ‘But Toby never got to her, man. I did scout her out for him, yes. Gave him her picture and all, but he never did her, man. Not yet. She was... still to come.’

Mr. J was stunned. He now realized that he had the wrong guy. Cory Russo was a scumbag, but not the scumbag who had murdered Cassandra. He and his pothead friend, Toby, were two sack-of-shit rapists, who had devised a cunning plan so as not to be caught. In his job as a plumber, Russo would no doubt visit several homes a week. Toby would have a similar kind of job and did the same. They would then pick victims out for each other, probably based on some sick criteria. They would swop information, then choose a day. When Russo was out raping some poor woman that Toby had chosen for him, Toby would be at a bar, or at a park... somewhere with lots of people, and he would make sure that he was noticed. If the victim reported the crime, and Mr. J knew that the sad reality in the USA was that less than 50 percent of rape victims would report the attack, there was a chance that the investigating team would come knocking on Toby’s door, but Toby would have a number of witnesses who could vouch for his whereabouts on the day or night of the crime. The process would work the other way around when Toby was out raping.

A brand-new pit of hate began digging its way through Mr. J’s heart.

‘What was the time frame?’ Mr. J asked. Despite his anger, his voice remained unaltered.

‘What?’

‘The time frame. How long between the picking of the victims and the attack?’

Russo stayed quiet.

Big mistake. Mr. J squeezed the trigger for the third time. This one exploded against Russo’s right hand, splattering blood and flesh against the wall, fracturing several bones, and severing two fingers. They bounced against the cold tiled floor.

Russo went flying back, crashing against the wall, his face contorted in pain. Blood flowed from his mutilated hand.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ Russo’s left hand moved to what was left of his right one. ‘Are you fucking insane? You’re a fucking cop, man. You can’t do this.’

‘The time frame.’

‘We waited six to eight months, man. Six to eight months.’ Spit flew from Russo’s mouth. ‘I’m going to fucking sue your ass, you motherfucker. I’m going to fucking sue the whole police department for this shit. You can say goodbye to your fucking badge, do you hear me?’

‘You’re as stupid as you look, do you know that?’ Mr. J said. ‘Let me ask you something. Do you know what this tube, this extension to the barrel of my gun is?’

The pain in Russo’s face was blurred by confusion.

‘Well, do you?’

‘Yeah, it’s a fucking muffler, a silencer, so what?’

The smirk was now on Mr. J’s lips. ‘How many cops do you know walk around with a silenced gun?’

Russo’s eyes widened.

The bullet hit him inch-perfect right between them.

As Mr. J exited the house through the kitchen door, he stopped by Toby, still unconscious on the floor.

Calmly, Mr. J grabbed Toby’s head with both hands and, in one swift but firm move, snapped his neck from left to right.

Hunter stood before a large organizational board divided into twelve columns. Each column started with a photograph of the person it represented. There were eight women and four men. Underneath each image, a printed sheet carried all sorts of information about the subject on the picture — name, address, age, phone number and so on. The very last item on every sheet read: ‘Question to be asked’. A red ‘X’ had been drawn over the faces of three of the twelve subjects. Three faces which were now very familiar to Hunter, but the twist was, they didn’t belong to the three victims of the ‘video-call killer’.

As Hunter’s eyes studied the subject pictures, he felt sick, his stomach twisting inside of him, because he had been right.

The photographs on the board had all been downloaded from social media websites. They were the exact same photographs Hunter had been looking at back in his office.

‘How could I have failed to notice this before?’

Click.

The sound of a round being chambered into a semi-automatic pistol came from just a few feet behind Hunter.

‘If I were you, I’d put that gun down, Detective.’

As Hunter recognized the male voice, his muscles tensed and his finger curved itself firmly over the trigger of his H&K Mark 23.

‘Do you really think you’re fast enough?’ the killer asked, as if reading Hunter’s thoughts.

Hunter was a great marksman and a very fast mover, he knew that, but being able to spin around and squeeze a shot before the killer’s bullet got to him first was a trick he didn’t think he could pull off.

‘Drop the gun, Detective,’ the killer said one more time, his voice unaltered, ‘or I’ll blow your head off, and since the weapon I’m holding is a three fifty-seven Magnum, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, it will blow your head clean off your shoulders. The only way that they will be able to identify you, after scooping your brains off that wall, will be through fingerprints or DNA.’

‘You should know that well enough, Nick,’ Hunter replied. ‘After all, that’s where your expertise lies, isn’t it? Fingerprints.’

Nicholas Holden, the fingerprint expert forensic agent from Dr. Slater’s team, smiled. ‘Well, since you are in my basement uninvited, it’s obvious that you figured out who I was. I’m intrigued by how you did it, because I know I’ve made no mistakes, but we’ll get to that soon enough. Now, drop your weapon, or this conversation is about to end very badly, at least for you.’

Hunter closed his eyes and cursed himself. Walking into that basement alone had been a mistake. He should’ve trusted the tingling sensation he’d got moments earlier. He should’ve called for backup. There were too many shelving units down in that basement. Too many places one could hide behind. There was no way that he could’ve secured that whole area single-handed. What he should’ve done was have a SWAT team with him.

All a little too late now.

‘Arms wide open, Detective. Weapon dangling from your left index finger.’