‘Who are you logged in as?’ Hunter asked.
‘Myself,’ Garcia replied, making a face. He knew why the question. ‘Which means that Pete’s profile is public, and so was this post. Anyone could’ve seen this. There’s no way of tracking who did and who didn’t.’ He looked back at Hunter. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if this post was what gave the killer the idea for his sick video-call game. Right here in one place, he would’ve had everything he needed — Karen telling him that Tanya was her best friend, and Tanya telling him that without looking at her phone, she couldn’t remember Karen’s number. You were right, Robert, he knew beforehand that she wouldn’t know the answer to his question.’
Hunter took a step back from his partner’s desk and breathed out. Karen was going to die, no matter what, Hunter was sure of it, and he knew that so was the killer. The game was just a front, but a front for what? To pleasure the killer’s innermost sadistic desires? Possible. To fill Tanya with guilt that would probably torment her for the rest of her life? Also possible, but right now Hunter could offer no answer to his own questions.
‘How about Karen or Tanya’s profile?’ Hunter queried. ‘Have you checked? Are they also public?’
‘I’ve checked, yes,’ Garcia replied. ‘Karen’s profile isn’t. If she weren’t friends with you in here, you would barely be able to see any information on her.’
‘And Tanya’s?’
Garcia laughed. ‘The complete opposite. Open to absolutely everyone.’
The fact that in this day and age people would so freely splash all sorts of information about their lives and their day-to-day activities over the Internet in the way they did had always amazed Hunter. Images, names, locations, dates, likes, dislikes... it was all out there, and it didn’t take a genius to grab hold of it all.
‘Are we absolutely certain that this Pete Harris character has really been in Europe for the past month?’ he asked.
Garcia’s head jerked slightly to the right. ‘We haven’t officially checked, but he has been posting entries from Berlin for over three weeks now. Most of them are like the one I just showed you, with him in the forefront of the picture and some very famous Berlin sites on the background, so unless this guy has been Photoshopping his life for the past month, he’s in Germany, Robert.’
Hunter accepted it, but didn’t give up. ‘Let’s get it checked anyway. For someone who has gone through the sort of preparation that this killer has gone through, Photoshopping photographs for an alibi would’ve been the easiest of all his tasks.’
‘I’ll get someone on it,’ Garcia said, reaching for the phone on his desk. The call lasted less than two minutes.
Twenty-Nine
Mr. J stepped out of the elevator on the fifth floor of the hotel he was staying in and calmly walked down the brightly lit corridor in the direction of his room — 515. As he stepped through the door, he placed the ‘do not disturb’ sign outside it and locked it behind him. A subtle and very pleasant scent of jasmine and vanilla hung in the air, courtesy of the aromatherapy treatment the hotel provided.
Mr. J dropped his briefcase and his jacket on to the sumptuous queen-sized bed, kicked off his shoes, and made his way into the white-tiled bathroom. In there, he turned on the washbasin faucet, bent forward over it, and began splashing his face and the back of his neck with ice-cold water. Some of it splattered on to his shirt collar and trickled down on to his chest and back, but Mr. J didn’t mind it. In fact, he welcomed the cooling sensation. A whole minute went by before he looked up again and faced his reflection in the mirror.
He looked so different.
Staring into his own eyes, Mr. J inhaled an overly deep breath and held it in his lungs. A few seconds later, with his lips pursed, he let go of it slowly.
‘Just breathe,’ he silently told himself. ‘Just breathe.’
He repeated the process five more times before he finally turned off the water faucet.
Time to go back to normal.
Mr. J brought his left hand to his face and, with the tips of his fingers, pulled down on his right-eye bottom lid. Then, using his right thumb and index finger, he carefully pinched and collected the baby-blue contact lens he’d been wearing for the past twelve hours. After collecting the one from his left eye, he dumped them both into the toilet and flushed them away. Eyes back to their original color, Mr. J proceeded to rid his face of the fake moustache, the goatee, and the false teeth, securely placing them to one side. He spent the next sixty seconds opening and closing his mouth in a stretching exercise and rubbing his chin and upper lip to do away with the awkward sensation.
Mr. J was starting to look like Mr. J again.
The last step was to carefully detach the blond wig from his head. That done, he took another minute and massaged his scalp with his fingertips.
Boy, did that feel good?
At that particular moment, Mr. J could think of only one thing he needed more than a shower. He returned to the bedroom and from the small fridge he grabbed a couple of mini-bottles of whisky and emptied them into a tumbler — no ice, no water. As he sipped his drink, he closed his eyes and allowed the golden liquid to envelop his palate. It wasn’t good-quality whisky, but the alcohol was strong enough. He had one more sip and placed the glass on the bedside table. As he reached for his briefcase, Mr. J heard his cellphone ring inside his jacket pocket. He identified the ring as coming from his personal phone, not his work one. He reached for it, checked the display screen and frowned. The call was coming from Cassandra, but it wasn’t a regular call, it was a request for a video-call.
Mr. J had only video-called with his wife once before, eleven months ago, to test the feature in Cassandra’s new phone. Neither of them liked it very much.
She’s probably calling to find out when I’m coming home, he thought. But why a video-call? The next thought that came into Mr. J’s head filled him with relief: Good job I’ve got all that crap off my face.
He held the phone in front of him and accepted the call, but as the image materialized on the small screen, Mr. J looked even more puzzled. All he could see was one of the walls in his living room. He knew it was his living room because he recognized the wall clock and framed Gauguin print his wife had bought a few years back.
‘Hello? Cass?’ he called in an unsure voice. ‘Where are you? Everything OK?’
No reply.
‘Cass?’
Silence.
‘Honey, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m not sure if this thing is working OK. I can’t see or hear you.’
Still no reply, but the camera slowly panned right and Cassandra’s face finally came into focus.
Mr. J felt an awkward chill grab hold of the back of his neck. Something was off. Something was really off.
Cassandra was sitting down on one of their dinner chairs, with her hair tied back into a ponytail. Her head was low, obscuring part of her face, but Mr. J could still see enough of it, and what he saw shook him. His wife had been crying, and judging by the redness of her nose and blotted eye makeup, which had run all the way down to her chin, she’d been doing so for a while.
Emotionally, Cassandra was the strongest woman he had ever met. It took a lot to make her cry. Mr. J had only seen it happen once, when her mother passed away eight years ago.
‘Cassandra, honey, what’s going on? Are you all right? Why are you crying?’ There was real concern in his voice.