‘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.

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.

Eighty-Six

With his silenced Sig Sauer in hand, Mr. J crossed the empty kitchen and paused by the door that led into the living room. No lights were on. He listened for an instant, but the only sound polluting the air around him was the incessant low humming of the old refrigerator pushed up against one of the corners in the kitchen. He peeked around the door, studying his next move.

The living room was small and uncluttered, which made things easier, because he needed to get to the short corridor on the other side of it. Five quick and silent steps got him there. Still no signs of Cory Russo.

Mr. J regarded the hallway before him. It offered four doors – two on the right, one on the left, and one at the far end of it. The one at the far end was wide open, with the lights switched off, as was the first door on the right. The other two were shut, but a sliver of bright light escaped from under the door on the left.

Mr. J stepped into the hallway and flattened his back against the left wall, before sidestepping four paces until he reached the door. He held his breath, placed his ear against it and listened carefully. Someone was definitely in there.

Mr. J stepped forward, away from the wall, and positioned himself directly in front of the door. Out of habit, he looked left, then right, before taking a deep breath and holding it in his lungs for a couple of seconds. With his left leg firmly grounded, he sent a kick to the door’s handle so powerful, the entire frame cracked.

Cory Russo, who was sitting on the toilet, flipping through a porn magazine, jumped back from the fright so hard, he smashed his head against the wall behind him, almost knocking himself out. The magazine fell to the floor. Russo came crashing back down against the toilet seat with a horrified look on his face.

‘Hey, big guy,’ Mr. J said, his gun pointed directly at Russo’s forehead. ‘So what do you say, want to try that kick to my chest again?’

Mr. J was wearing the exact same disguise he’d worn earlier when he’d knocked at Russo’s door.

Russo looked back at Mr. J, still a little groggy from the head slam. ‘Fuck, man.’ His eyes moved down to his bare legs for a quick second. ‘This is undignifying.’

‘You think?’ Only then did Mr. J catch a whiff of the smell in the room. His face screwed up. ‘Goddamn, man, did you just crap a rotten animal carcass?’

‘What?’ Russo couldn’t see the moment as a time for jokes.

‘I told you I would find you, didn’t I?’ Mr. J said.

Russo frowned at him.

‘Not that tough without that fucking mask, are you?’

The look inside Russo’s eyes hardened. He still hadn’t recognized him over his disguise, but he finally knew what Mr. J was talking about.

Eighty-Seven

A subconscious memory could be triggered back into the conscious mind by just about anything – an image, a sound, a smell, a place, a name . . . there really was no telling, and that was what had happened inside Hunter’s head. As he bent down and reached for the scattered files on the floor, his eyes settled on a lab report sheet, and something that was right at the top of the page opened a direct pathway to the memory he was searching for. It had indeed been a detail his eyes had noticed, but his brain had discarded as unessential, sending it straight into his subconscious, but he now knew that he hadn’t noticed that detail on a photograph.