The Caller

Eighty-Five

The odds of two people having identically shaped blood clots at the exact same spot on the sclera of their eyes were one in sixty million. Hunter had to look that up.

He pushed his chair away from his desk, stood up, took a couple of steps back and stared at his screen again.

He could feel his legs shivering under him.

‘Where? Where have I seen it before? Where?’ He urged his brain to remember, but that was something that Hunter had never been able to control. He had always been highly perceptive, even as a kid. His eyes would notice the smallest of details on people, objects, locations, images, whatever, but his brain, fearing an overload, would automatically push what it considered to be ‘excess information’ into his subconscious mind. Once there, retrieving it wasn’t a fun game. That aside, Hunter also faced a second challenge — the number of faces he had seen in the past few days, even in the past few hours, had been overwhelming.

Once Dennis Baxter sent him the two bogus social-media identities he’d requested earlier, Hunter had spent the rest of the day browsing through social media sites. He had started with the victims’ pages. He looked through all their photos, and scanned through all their posts going back two years. That done, he moved on to the people who the killer had called and did the same. More photos. More posts. After that he began cross-referencing the victims’ friends.

Hunter wasn’t really sure what he was looking for, but he was certain that the killer had been using social media sites to acquire information on his victims, so maybe, if he was lucky, something would catch his eye. The result had been an image overload but, in one of them, he had seen that same upside-down, heart-shaped blood clot. In one of them, he had seen the killer. He was sure of it.

Hunter knew that there was no easy way of doing this. He would have to start browsing through everything again. He took a deep breath, stretched his six-foot frame to try to get rid of the muscle stiffness, and got back to his computer.

As he dumped himself on to his chair and began typing, his right elbow brushed against some files that were at the edge of his desk, sending everything to the floor. Pages and photographs scattered by his feet in all directions. Hunter reached for them, but as he picked up an old report, the entire room span around him.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he whispered almost catatonically, because that was when he realized that he had been wrong. He had been very wrong.

Hunter hadn’t seen that upside-down, heart-shaped blood clot on a photograph over the Internet.

He had seen it face to face.