The Caller

Eighty-Four

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.