Misery

15. WAIT

Cessier's POV

A curated list of loners if that's what we have to call it. We could quite well predict where the next murder would occur, if not to whom. We could also quite well predict when such an instance would occur, if not exactly how.

There wasn't much to search for if one had their entire internet history swiped off, that's for sure, but that didn't allow us from reviving their 'history', reviving the dead. Surely it took some time.

Those odd, cryptic websites that we got hammered with. We continued getting those in concerningly incredulous bulks a day after the first one.

No, it wasn't a fruition plucked out of divulging each one of these and wasting valuable time and resource, to find yet another "dead end"; rather using these tiny notes as a verdict to his likes, a sneering snare which wasn't as bulletproof as it once appeared.

You need addresses to send letters to, and you need someone to deliver your messages. Interrogating the town post office led us to nowhere. Needless to say , if your letter is primarily a suicide note to some restrictively significant individual who'd help you carry out that very act, you'd have to be more cautious.

And they were, each one of them was.

So you send your mails through sources that lead you somewhere, but that somewhere in question being totally made up.

'Richard Walker', 'Henry Brown', 'Jefferson Griffins ' - I wonder why a high school student  would send letters on random, scattered days to dead men or men in their deathbed, ready for eternal getaways.

I wonder how a woman, supposedly, unconcerned and unaffected by the 'outside world' would have eleven deleted call logs on eleven different days with five different burner phones? Each 'unspoken' call toppling over a little more than just half an hour.

I wonder why a bipolar, friendless, miserable movie star would go to the extent of sending long unwarranted messages to anonymous accounts across different social media platforms, and by different it signified ten of them, recounting to these familiar strangers his life and discussing possible steps circling around ending everything.

I wonder how an inherently gifted Ivy league student who hardly ever veered off the path of academics, never attending parties or events, would go to the extent of missing classes and ditching her friends to meet up with yet another unknown man every other week exactly at half past one in the afternoon.

Apparently she was seeing someone.  Except the fact that her friends never saw him, except she didn't have his number, except they never talked outside of these meetings, except their meetings never lasted for more than an hour.

And lastly it's a strikingly remarkable coincidence how all of them would log into the same website, get a complementary call from an unknown ID before doing so, a message on blinking bright red on their screen asking followups

"Are you ready?"
"It won't hurt."

Definitely all of it a huge coincidence.

How come this was never noted or reported by people close to them?

As for the possible fifth victim, whom we are  giving our all to protect, in Arizona; we are still thrown off a little by the idea. The number of people over the age of thirteen, assuming this would at least exempt children from participating,  whose birthday fell between 12th December to the 1st of January still got down to thousands.

On narrowing down the scale furthermore by snipping away on the dates , we still had around eight thousand people of interest. On top of that, it was likely that if the next victim did receive a phone call or cryptic message directed on a similar website, they might not have used their device to begin with.

Like in the cases of Zoe Martinez and Coby Dilian; irrespective of that just gaining insights on this piece of information was enough to track down the person.

It took way too many days than we had planned to dig out Jewel's deleted call logs, not through her phone of course but a burner phone the killer forgot to dispose off. Or intentionally hid it beneath a conspicuous spot in the garden right where an isolated mud-smeared dog collar sunk to the ground.

The receiver either barely spoke or used a voice changer in every phone call - a high pitched whiny woman, a forty year old chronic cigar-smoker with half-destroyed lungs, an adolescent touching the shores of half-baked adulthood.

In almost all of these phone Calls, Jewel would go off fervently about yet another gruesome incident branching from her woebegone 'family', as if the person on the other side was an all-knowing, all-perceiving, self-appointed therapist she hired. The other end was mostly quiet, punctuated by silent sighs of consolation every now and then as if to say, "how tragic" with a wry smirk.

At the end of these elusive therapy sessions, the other end would finally awaken and instruct with a whispery, tender lilt about their next meeting spot. Uncharacteristically, these meeting spots really meant her grey couch in the living room. This went on for about eleven weeks.

No one knew who this gentleman was. No one saw him appear. We do wish more than anyone else that this man ends up being some mythical hermit in the woods, with transparent wings and transforming vocal cords.

From everything we gathered through the cyber forensics, it was clear that the website bit of this entire sanctimonious killing ritual took place roughly a week before the act was so sacredly carried out, a confirmation, the last one.

We fixated entirely on finding out who the next victim might be as soon as Zoe's body was found, again detritus from her once-named body, not the whole of it as usual. Team C headed by Victor took exactly three days to find out this next victim. All we got was the address of an old, boxy computer in an old shabby library nestled in some lonesome, abandoned street in Tucson. Littered , collapsing buildings all around. The part of the city people barely took notice of, and if they did, it was always in hushed, scolded whispers.

Centralizing this particular exact location , we started taking measures to ensure not a single part of executing this could go wrong in any way. Installing hidden cameras in around four kilometer radius of this library, posting members who would go undercover and me trying to specify the person of interest at this very moment.

It wasn't exactly difficult for me to go through the proceedings and mechanisms of this exact website and create a slightly tethered duplication of it. And how exactly was I so sure of this.

Well how couldn't I be when the yellow-tinged screen of my age old computer blinked conspiratorially highlighting the 'it won't hurt' on a iridescent loop, at this very moment.

It has been there since I opened it up, meaning an estimated time of 16 hours 46 minutes. Switching off the device and shaking it on, it was still there transfixed on to the lock screen. A 'Yes or no' dialogue box sitting untouched.