The Caller

Sixty-Five

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.’