The Caller

Sixty-Three

Once Hunter had left, Garcia went back to his computer. He had two separate browsers and several applications open at the same time. Essentially, what he’d been trying to do was find some sort of link between the two victims — places they both could’ve been to in the past, activities they enjoyed, groups they could’ve belonged to... anything.

Serial murderers rarely chose their victims at random. There was always something that would grab the killer’s attention and attract him to them. It could be a physical attribute, a mannerism, a tone of voice, a belief... the possibilities were almost endless and most of the time obscure, because in truth, they didn’t have to make sense to anyone else but the killer. To the outside world, it could be something as silly and insignificant as wiping their mouth from right to left, instead of left to right, but to the killer, for some reason, that insignificant action made him mad. Mad enough to want to kill.

Garcia knew that he was clutching at straws, but straws were really all they had at the moment.

He spent another half an hour or so trying a few new combinations, but they all ended up at a brick wall. Frustrated, Garcia got to his feet. What he really needed was a break.

He refilled his coffee mug and placed it on his desk. After a quick trip to the bathroom, he began pacing the room. Just like Hunter, he liked walking when he was thinking. He spent five minutes punishing the office floor before he got back to his seat.

Think out of the box, Carlos, he told himself. Think out of the box, because that’s exactly what this killer is doing. A few minutes later, he’d had a couple of very odd ideas. ‘Oh, what the hell! What have I got to lose, anyway?’

For the next forty minutes he scrolled through pages and pages of information, some of it mind-numbing. His eyes were watering and a ghost of a headache began haunting him. He decided to take another break and try something completely different, but just as he closed the browser tab he was on, something at the bottom of the page caught his eye for a fraction of a second.

‘Shit! What was that?’ he said, blinking a couple of times. Immediately, Garcia right-clicked on the browser window and selected ‘reopen closed tab’. The tab popped back up on his screen. He scrolled down and slowly read the entry.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’