The Caller

Ninety-Two

Twelve hours later

Police Administration Building

Hunter and Garcia were both at their desks, filling in paperwork, when Captain Blake stepped into their office.

‘OK,’ she said in a half surprised, half confused tone. ‘How did this happen? Somebody please explain it to me.’

Both detectives paused and looked back at her.

‘Yesterday when I left my office,’ the captain began. ‘We had two victims and nothing else. No clues, no links between victims, no suspects, nothing. Our press office was getting ready to release a short, but expertly bullshit-filled statement.’

Garcia curbed a smile.

‘Don’t you start,’ the captain said, pointing a finger at him.

‘I didn’t say anything.’ Garcia surrendered with his hands up.

‘That was yesterday,’ Captain Blake continued. ‘I get in here today and I find out that not only did we have a brand new victim overnight, but the whole case has been wrapped up. Done and dusted. The “video-call killer” is sitting in a goddamn cell downstairs. And, as I understand it, he was one of the forensic agents who had been working the scenes?’ Her eyebrows lifted as the palms of her hands flipped upwards. ‘How did we move from “nothing” to “done” in just a few hours? What the hell happened overnight?’

Garcia pointed at Hunter. ‘Robert happened, Captain. What else? I was still wrapping things up at the crime scene.’ The look he gave Hunter could silence a small crowd. ‘He didn’t even give me a courtesy call to let me know what was going on. And I’m his partner.’

‘I didn’t really know what was going on.’ Hunter’s gaze moved first to Garcia then to Captain Blake. He then proceeded to tell her how the events of last night had unfolded. He showed her the screenshot Erica Barnes had captured on her cellphone and the upside-down heart-shaped blood clot in the killer’s left eye. He told her how he was certain he had seen that same blood clot before, but he just couldn’t remember where, or in whose eyes, until he knocked a file from his desk on to the floor. As he picked up the scattered pieces of paper, his eyes settled on a fingerprint sheet.

Fingerprints... fingerprints... fingerprints.

That was when his brain finally engaged. Nicholas Holden was a forensic fingerprint expert.

Hunter told Captain Blake about pulling Holden’s file, finding out about the accident, then pulling the report from the LAPD Collision Investigation Unit.

‘So the blood clot in his left eye had been a consequence of the accident,’ Captain Blake said. ‘That’s why you didn’t see it in his file picture.’

‘That’s right,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘Scar tissue left from the trauma and hemorrhage in his eye. The photo in his file was taken a few years before that.’

‘So how long had he been a forensic agent for?’

‘Seven years. The accident happened three and a half years into his career. He spent about five months in hospital and almost a year in counseling therapy, before he asked to be allowed back into work.’

‘Seven years? And you’ve never met him before?’ The captain’s stare bounced between both detectives.

‘Just a couple of times, Captain,’ Garcia jumped in. ‘Always at crime scenes, always with his nose mask on and the hood of his Tyvek pulled over his head.’

‘How come only a couple of times?’

‘He used to be a lab technician,’ Hunter explained. ‘And a very good one at that, apparently. He was also very clever, because he played his cards just right. He spent a year and seven months gathering information on his victims. During that time, he stayed as a lab technician. When he finally decided that he was ready to put his plan into action, he requested to be transferred to the crime-scene field team. That was five months ago.’

‘Convenient,’ the captain commented.

Hunter then explained that when he read the conclusion reached by the Collision Investigation Unit — that the accident that had claimed Holden’s entire family had been caused because the driver of the other vehicle was using her cellphone to take a selfie — something clicked inside Hunter’s brain and he remembered the driving selfies he had seen in Tanya Kaitlin and John Jenkinson’s social media pages. He remembered them because he had seen them that same day.

He showed Captain Blake both pictures.

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ she said, things finally starting to connect for her.

‘That’s not all,’ Hunter said. ‘We got a third victim last night, remember?’ He loaded one last picture to his computer screen: another driving selfie — Erica Barnes and her sister, Dr. Gwen Barnes.

For a moment, Captain Blake was lost for words. Just like Hunter and Garcia, she didn’t subscribe to the ‘coincidence’ fan club.

‘So if you knew Nicholas Holden was your man,’ she said at last, ‘why didn’t you get a SWAT team to storm his place? Why didn’t you call Garcia? Why the hell did you go down there by yourself?’

Garcia looked at Hunter with the same crowd-silencing look from before. ‘Yes, why didn’t you call your partner?’

‘Because my whole theory was based on a memory, Captain. No matter how certain I believed I was, I had no real proof that Holden was the “video-call” killer. For that I needed confirmation that he really did have that same heart-shaped blood clot in his left eye, because that was the only real piece of evidence we had that could identify the killer.’

‘Ha,’ Garcia laughed. ‘Now tell her about your plan on how to get that confirmation.’

Captain Blake looked at Hunter questioningly.

‘I didn’t really have a plan,’ Hunter began. ‘I didn’t really know what to do, but I knew that I had come across all of this new mind-boggling information in the space of an hour. Information that had potentially given us the killer’s identity, and I didn’t want to sit on it until the morning to get confirmation.’

‘So he grabbed a fingerprint sheet from a case.’ Garcia took over. ‘Any case, it didn’t matter, and drove to Holden’s house.’

Captain Blake began to understand Garcia’s amusement. ‘Oh, please don’t tell me that your plan was to knock on his door with the excuse of asking him for his expert opinion on something... at around two in the morning.’

Garcia’s smile brightened. ‘Got it in one, Captain. That was his plan. Foolproof, don’t you think?’

The captain laughed.

‘OK, I agree, it was a crap plan,’ Hunter said. ‘But it somehow worked out in the end.’

He then told Captain Blake about everything that had happened from the time he got into Holden’s house, until the time he called it in.

‘Twelve people on the board?’ the captain asked, the amusement gone from her voice, her eyes full of shock.

‘The daunting thing is,’ Hunter said. ‘That was supposed to be just the beginning. He wasn’t going to stop after those twelve.’

Shock morphed into bewilderment. ‘What?’

‘Nicholas Holden’s mind is... broken,’ Hunter said. ‘The anger, the pain, the guilt, the never-ending heartache... it had all become way too much for him to take. It was destroying him from inside. The only way his mind could cope was by finding some sort of escape valve. A release from everything — the pain, the guilt, the anger. In his own words: something that could give his life a new purpose — a new meaning.’

‘So he decided to blame every driver in the world for his family’s death?’ Anger accented her words.

‘No, not every driver,’ Hunter said. ‘Only the ones on whom he could find evidence that they had taken a selfie while driving. In his mind, because ultimately that had been the action that had caused the demise of his entire family, they were all as guilty as the driver of that blue Ford Fusion.’

‘That’s just ridiculous.’ The captain shook her head.

‘It happens every day and all around the world, Captain,’ Hunter commented. ‘Racism, sexism, homophobia... it’s all stereotyping. That’s what Holden was doing — stereotyping down to a very personal level.’

Captain Blake hadn’t thought about it in that way. ‘Is he talking?’ she asked. ‘Have you interviewed him yet?’

‘We’ve tried,’ Garcia confirmed, ‘but he lawyered up from the get-go. He isn’t saying a word.’

‘I would expect nothing else,’ the captain said.

‘We just got back from Holden’s house about an hour ago,’ Garcia informed her. ‘Our team is still there, searching it for more evidence, but one thing that we already know for sure is that the twelve people on his “death board” were really just the beginning. The few he had found since he started trolling social-media sites, the ones he already had everything planned for, including which questions to ask. IT forensics have just started working on the two laptops we’ve found down in his basement, so God knows what else we might find, but on paper notes alone we’ve found evidence that he was already collecting data on at least five new people. Five new victims.’

‘Ten,’ Hunter corrected him.

‘What?’ Captain Blake seemed unsure.

‘Every one of Holden’s victims counts for two,’ Hunter clarified. ‘The person he kills and the person he psychologically destroys, remember? The one who he considers his real target. The one he calls.’

‘OK,’ Captain Blake said, shattering the silence that had ruled the room for almost half a minute. ‘I can just about understand how his sick mind managed to blame all these innocent people for his family’s death. I can just about understand the reason for the video-calls, the question game, the guilt, the helplessness, all of that, but why the notes? Why the stalker MO?’

Hunter called her attention to the picture board. ‘Have a look at our investigation, Captain. Where do you think we were going with it?’

The penny finally dropped for Captain Blake. ‘Down the wrong path.’

‘His mind may be broken, but he’s not stupid,’ Garcia commented. ‘He’s a forensic agent. He has internal and detailed knowledge of how we work. He understands investigative procedures better than any criminal out there. He gives us something as real as a physical note found inside the victims’ houses and he’s got us chasing ghosts for years.’

‘Maybe forever,’ Hunter said. ‘Without Erica Barnes’ screenshot, I’m not sure how long it would’ve taken us to get to him. If we ever did. Holden didn’t make a mistake, Captain. We just got lucky.’

‘The worst of it all is,’ Garcia said, ‘I’m sure that they’re going to use the “broken mind” defense when the time comes. They’re going to say that his pain, his heartache, all of it, warped his perception of the world and of everyone around him. That he was acting with diminished mental capacity. That he was — and here’s that word we all love so much — “insane”, and with all that, he’ll probably be sent to a psychiatric institution.’

Captain Blake made her way to the door. ‘That’s up to a judge and a jury, Carlos, you know that. It’s not our concern. Our job was to catch him and stop him from killing again and we did exactly that, so congratulations on a job well done.’ She paused as she pulled the door open. ‘Once all that paperwork is done I want the both of you to take a break, do you understand? Take the next couple of days off. That’s an order. I see any of your faces in this building in the next two days and you’ll be issuing parking tickets in Compton.’

‘That’s an order that I won’t contest,’ Garcia said as the captain exited their office.

‘Neither will I,’ Hunter agreed.

‘Since we have a couple of days off, why don’t you come over for dinner tonight, Robert? Anna would love to see you.’ Garcia followed those words with a cheeky smile. ‘You can even bring your date, if you like.’

Hunter locked eyes with his partner.

‘You know, the one whose lipstick you were wearing last night.’

Hunter smiled back.

‘Who knows, maybe I will.’