As Mike was about to hit the “Send” button, he had an unpleasant sense of growing uneasiness, despite all the reasons to feel the opposite. He couldn’t explain a sudden and disobliging tremble inside his chest, manifesting itself with rapidly intensifying and loud heartbeats he never experienced before. The previously almost unnoticeable modest wall clock abruptly announced its presence with a thunderous ticking, as if purposely synchronizing itself with Mike’s pulse, which resonated simultaneously in his ears and in both temples. Mike involuntary put a palm on his left side, trying to pacify the alarming clenching of his heart, and took a few deep breaths, sitting motionless until his anxiety finally faded away.
He decided to read the email one last time and found it a bit too bold. He erased most of the text and spent the next ten minutes composing the message over and over again. He was still unhappy with it, as with each rewriting attempt his main points were interchangeably either too blunt or too dire. He glanced at the wall clock: six p.m. He’d been running late. With a deep sigh, he crossed out two strong adjectives from the last sentence and pressed the button. He’d finally made it.
It was quite a challenging task to finalize the proposal and make it look presentable. He knew he shaped some forecast numbers a bit more favorably to convince the board that Solutry Corporation had only one plausible direction in which to move forward, and that was to switch to his new software or face a slow but inevitable death. Unfortunately, all the damn board cared about was the next quarter’s profit. It would take a lot of convincing for them to agree on changing direction. Mike hoped that the numbers and the prospects in his presentation could win Houston’s approval this time. He closed his laptop, stuffed it into his backpack, and finally left the office.
The evening smelled very fresh. An early rain swept away all the dust and smog, and the air was uncharacteristically clear and crisp. Typically, downtown stank with heavy layer upon layer of city vapors, which created a cacophony of smells from smog and stiff airwaves coming from different corners and alleys. Today was an unusual day, with cloudless skies that miraculously cleared after the rain, like somebody took a heavenly broom and swept away all the clouds and, with them, all foul odors of the city, leaving the purest of the air for people to enjoy as long as it lasted.
Mike tried to shake off a thought about the next day’s possible battle with Solutry management prior to the board meeting as he stepped outside, hardly trying to convince himself that these were the worries of tomorrow. Today was the time to celebrate. Today was the day he would propose to Jenn.
Jenn, or Zhenya, as she was named at her birth, was the opposite of what you would expect from a Russian beauty: she never let her looks define and dominate her. That was her uncanny quality; she knew she was beautiful, yet this was secondary. She carried herself in a way that men weren’t afraid to talk to her, and she engaged in conversation as a friend or a sister and without any hint of sexuality or flirtation.
Jenn’s parents emigrated when she was nine years old, and despite her perfect, accent-free Russian, she felt much more American than Russian. Lacking any money and working at low-paying jobs, all her parents could afford to rent was a small one-bedroom apartment in a southern neighborhood, one of the most disadvantaged areas of the city. The warmth of her parents and her family’s strong connection to their cultural roots kept her from following the bad influence of the majority of her schoolmates. She was the only one in her class to get a college degree and, declining several promising high-salary job proposals, joined a nonprofit organization working with troubled kids. Despite a very modest income, she’d found her life’s calling.
Mike and Jenn were a bit of an odd couple; she was a beautiful five-ten, outgoing, and charming woman who quickly and naturally joined any social gathering, while Mike, looking unremarkable and taciturn, made great effort and worked hard to not be perceived as such. Small talk was a natural thing for Jenn. She could engage in conversation in the most flawless manner. For Mike, it was always an internal struggle. But with years of training, he became quite successful at hiding it. People could understand why Mike was in love with Jenn, but they were often puzzled by what she found in him.
But most people missed the real reason behind Mike and Jenn’s union. With constant self-doubt, despite his intelligence, Mike needed Jenn’s belief in him and her support; on his side, he gave her a feeling of being herself, and he genuinely accepted her as a person and not just as a beautiful woman, a feeling she’d never had with any other man. And, as she often told her friends, he made her laugh, with his sharp sense of humor and hilarious remarks that touched her own perspective with sniper’s precision.
Mike parked in front of Perfecto, an upscale Italian restaurant near downtown, trying very hard to justify its name and one Michelin Star. He patted a small box in his right pocket and climbed the stairs, sensing that today would mark the start of a completely different life. He had chosen this place for its sparse and deep niches, and it was the best location for the occasion, despite its prohibitive cost. You didn’t want to look stingy in such moments. He was surprised that Jenn was already waiting for him inside, browsing the menu when Mike entered.
“Hi, Mike.” Jenn smiled and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “There are so many things I want to try here! Let’s share, if you don’t mind.”
Jenn always took charge of choosing the food for both of them, and their typical dining experience involved ordering different dishes she wanted to try and sharing. Mike didn’t care. For him, food was rather a binary decision: either a juicy hamburger and fries, or whatever else. Perfecto didn’t offer hamburgers, and in any case, hamburgers did not fit the occasion, so anything Jenn had chosen would serve him well.
“Do you know how much they charge for just breathing their air?” asked Jenn when they were finally seated.
“That’s OK,” Mike said, his face turning red and big drops of sweat emerging on his forehead. He wiped them away with his sleeve and, catching a surprising look of Jenn, took a napkin. “Lis-s-s-ten, kh-kh, Jenn,” he stammered, then cleared his throat, tried to pour himself water from a bottle, spilling some on the table, and began to wipe it off with a napkin, which he still held in his hand. Jenn continued to look at him in astonishment, as his strange behavior was rather unusual. “Kh-kh, I am not sure how this should be done. Will you marry me?” If anything, Mike wasn’t a romantic person.
“Just like that, plain and without a ring?”
“Oh, sorry—here it is.” He searched for the ring in the wrong pocket, making the situation even more awkward.
“Mike, I love you a lot, and I will marry you! But what story will we tell our future kids about such a dull proposal? Where is a helicopter, where is the music, where are the flowers, and where is kneeling for me? What will I tell them? You forgot the ring and proposed over dinner with hamburgers?” Jenn laughed.
“It’s Perfecto, the most luxurious place in town. They don’t serve hamburgers!”
“Well, I will spice it up for the dramatization of the moment.” And with that, Jenn hugged and kissed her anti-romantic fiancé.
***
It was almost midnight, and Jenn was quietly sleeping on Mike’s shoulder. Mike was still wildly restless; events of the day continued to play in his mind, fiddling with his consciousness. Afraid to wake Jenn up, Mike eased out of the bed, put on shorts and a shirt, and went to the kitchen.
It’s March 31, thought Mike, realizing that April 1 was just about to hit the calendar. Every year, he brought a new prank to the office, and eventually, it had become a tradition. This time, however, April Fool’s was the last thing on his mind, thanks to all his preparation for new software development and the proposal to Jenn. He typed a few typical April Fool’s keywords into the search prompt. Skimming through the results, his glance stopped on an entry that piqued his curiosity.
“Breaking News of Tomorrow” was flashing with big and ugly red letters on the screen. It looked like a six-year-old’s experiment with size and color and immediately grabbed Mike’s attention. He visualized how he could play this idea in the office, and although the look of the opened page left no doubt about the author’s infantile design skills, Mike could not resist reading the content.
However, after he read the first few news items, he lost any possible respect for the page creator, the initially intriguing promise falling flat. The reported news was boring and lacked any sense of humor or originality. What a waste of such a brilliant idea, he thought, yet he continued to scroll through the rest of the page in hope that the real reason for this site was concealed at the bottom. His eyes came upon on the last item, mentioning a neighborhood and an apartment complex with the same name as his own.
Homicide in West Park
A man and woman, husband and wife, were shot and killed late afternoon on April 2 in the West Park neighborhood in the Evergreen apartment complex. The shooting was reported at about one p.m., according to the police. The victims were inside their second-floor apartment when they were fatally shot. Their names were not immediately released, pending formal identification and notification of their next of kin by the County Medical Examiner—Coroner’s Office. Police have not released any suspect information or a potential motive behind the shooting.
Geotagging, assumed Mike. Couldn’t be a coincidence, as it was apparent to him that the author used his IP address to insert his location name for authenticity. Some fleeting thought kept Mike from closing the page, but he could not identify what, exactly, felt misplaced. Clearly, whatever point the website author wanted to make was lost, and what initially seemed like a good idea was poorly executed. Disappointed, Mike opened a new tab in the browser and looked for other pranks, until he finally had chosen one and decided it was time to go to sleep.
***
Already two days engaged and feeling like a new man of a different status, a status confirming his worthiness in his own eyes, Mike was in a great mood as he drove home from the office, and he almost ran into a completely unexpected police barrier on his street.
“Sorry, sir, this street is closed for traffic.” A noticeably tired policeman tried to guide everybody to a detour.
“I live over there, the sixth house on the right. Can I park in my garage?” Mike knew it wouldn’t convince the officer.
“Sorry, sir, no exceptions.”
“What happened?” asked Mike, not expecting a reply.
“Homicide, sir.”
“Homicide, here?” This was truly a crime-free neighborhood, where running a four-way stop sign was the most severe violation. “What happened?”
“Sir, you’re blocking traffic, please move on.” The police officer impatiently waved for him to continue and went on to direct other passersby.
Mike parked his car on an adjacent street and was startled by Sam and John, who appeared out of nowhere in front of him as if they were ambushing him for precisely this moment. John and Sam were a lovely couple in their mid-sixties, comfortably retired, who spent most of their waking moments on their porch, feeding on every hint of something worth mentioning at least once to anyone in the area. Usually, Mike tried to avoid them, as he despised their gossiping, but now, his curiosity prevailed over his opinion about his neighbors. He walked toward his house quietly, trying to decipher relevant facts from Sam’s and John’s uninterrupted torrent of information.
“Can you believe it, Mike, somebody killed Martinez and his wife! You know the Martinezes, right? They are from 2F. Somebody shot them both to death! You know, here, right under our noses!” Sam chattered nonstop and with such enthusiasm, as if describing not a murder but a visiting rock star.
“I was the one who called the police!” added John, ignoring Sam’s angry look for his interruption.
“You called the police because I told you to!” Sam was unable to hold his annoyance at John. “I ran outside to see what happened and told you to call the police! If it weren’t for me, the police wouldn’t have even thought to come! Who can call them in the middle of the day in such a quiet neighborhood: everybody’s at work!” He turned to Mike again.
“I am sure that because of us, the police will be able to catch the killer in no time!” John added with visible pride.
Mike was struck with a strange sense of déjà vu. A man and his wife, homicide… He felt that he already somehow knew every detail. And then it occurred to him: this was the story he had read a couple of nights ago on that poorly designed webpage he’d stumbled across. A strange, uneasy feeling started to crawl inside his stomach, a feeling that he couldn’t yet attribute to anything.
Sam and John continued filling Mike in with every possible detail until, much to Mike’s relief, the police allowed him to go into his building.
Mike walked up the stairs to the second-floor apartment he and Jenn shared in an unnoticeable gray corner unit of the Evergreen apartment complex, with faded wall colors long overdue to be refreshed. Their apartment was as dull as the building itself and consisted of a living room, a tiny bedroom, and an uncharacteristically large kitchen.
“Do you know what happened?” Jenn greeted Mike with a kiss, pulling her earbuds off.
“No way, dear, you missed all this commotion!” Mike exclaimed, surprised by how Jenn could remain so oblivious to what was looking like a battle zone outside.
A single glance at the dining table in the kitchen confirmed his suspicion. The table was littered with dozens of glossy bridal magazines, made to test the nerve of the newly minted groom-to-be. Stopping himself from inquiring why a $10 magazine, let alone a dozen of them, was better than a free internet search, Mike kissed Jenn, mentally subtracting these costs from their already modest budget.
Jenn had stayed home to work on a presentation for new funding initiatives, but by the looks of it, she’d spent most of her time reading these bridal magazines, which she’d methodically bookmarked, judging by the Post-it notes sticking out of different pages. They had not yet set the date or venue or discussed any details, but Jenn said that merely fantasizing about the wedding yesterday made her day brighter and demanded that she take today off to continue dwelling on this subject. The first few days after a proposal were the sweetest, as the planning at this stage belonged more to a fantasyland than to the harsh reality of actual logistics, expenses, and arguments. She had been so engaged in her research, looking at different ideas and listening to her music, that she’d written off all the commotion outside as a noisy background.
“Since noon, there’ve been dozens of police cars on the street. Is there an accident?” she asked.
“Worse, a murder, a terrible one.” Mike told Jenn everything he’d heard on his way from where he’d parked the car. “You know, the rumors spread fast when John and Sam are around. Those guys have too much time on their hands, but I guess they will be useful to the detectives now. They live for this.”
Dinner was a Central Asian dish resembling pilaf. Well, that’s how it was defined in the recipe book. Mike’s one-word description of Jenn’s cooking was “unpredictability.” Jenn loved to experiment with the food, and she called herself a world-class assembler. Every dish she made was completely different each time. You wouldn’t be surprised if today it were pho, tomorrow a poke, then Russian pelmeni, or something Indian or Mexican, Italian or fusion. There was only one rule in her kitchen—she should not spend more than twenty minutes preparing the dish, excluding the time of actual cooking. And so her dinner planning was quite hectic—a little before dinnertime, she would search online for a quick recipe based on non-spoiled ingredients she found in a fridge or kitchen cabinets. Often, the recipe called for some additional ingredients, but such nuances never stopped Jenn from improvising, for who could say that fresh lamb with a bit of fat on it couldn’t be replaced with a lean chicken breast?
“You know, Jenn,” said Mike, forking unidentified pieces onto his plate and shoveling them into the mouth. “There’s something strange about this murder. It’s freaking me out.”
“Of course, it’s terrible! Poor family! I cannot even imagine it! So shocking!”
“Well, not that. I mean, of course, it’s terrible and all, don’t get me wrong, but something else bothers me. Errhh, it’s like I knew about it all along. Like, errhh…I read about the victims and their murder a couple of days ago.”
Jenn gave him a strange look. “You couldn’t have read about the victims and their murder a couple of days ago—it happened just a few hours ago. Maybe you read something about some other murder.”
“No, every detail of this case, including the name of our neighborhood and our apartment complex, is exactly as it was described.” And with that, Mike told Jenn he hadn’t been able to fall asleep from his excitement on the day of their engagement and had silently gone to the kitchen and opened his computer, and then he’d stumbled upon this archaically designed page that portended tomorrow’s news.
“My first thought was that predicting tomorrow’s news is a great idea for an office prank. But now, after the precisely described murder really happened in our complex, I think this is something else.”
“What can it be?” asked Jenn, totally confused.
“I now think that the murderer wanted to announce his plans for some sick reason. Look at the details—the place, the time, the family all match the real story. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Let me show you.” Mike turned on his laptop and launched the browser.
“Why would he do it?” asked Jenn, waiting for Mike to fetch the page. Her tone showed little signs of buying into his story. “Wouldn’t a killer want to avoid being caught?”
“I think he would, but… Here it is!” Mike found a link in his browser history and hit the “Enter” button.
“Breaking News of Tomorrow” was flashing with the same big ugly red letters, except the page was empty of any content but a single line under the title, typed in all-capital green letters, almost as big as the title: “NEXT UPDATE—APRIL 3, 12:01 A.M.”
***
Mike was almost finished with his work emails when he looked at his antique wall clock, which loudly announced midnight. Some vague feeling of curiosity pulled him back to his browser. He hit the “Refresh” button, and for a second, the screen went blank. Then the same ugly red flashing letters appeared, followed by new articles, loading one after another.
“Jenn, come over; it’s here again!” Mike was in complete ecstasy, like a little boy solving an Agatha Christie mystery. “Take a look!”
Jenn walked into the kitchen, tying her bathrobe, her hair still dripping from the shower. “What? What? I’m not even done taking my shower.”
“Read this!” he said triumphantly and turned the screen to Jenn. She pulled the chair from under the table, sat, and leaned toward the computer. As she read, Mike could see her face tense up and her right leg start bobbing up and down—a clear signal that she was disturbed.
Double Murder in Orchard Valley
A man in his late thirties and his wife were found murdered in their house on Orchard Valley Street, close to Pine Mountain Boulevard. Both were shot by what seems to be an automatic weapon and were killed on the spot. Around noon, the shooting was reported by a passerby after he heard a loud argument coming from the victim’s house, followed by a rapid fire that killed the victims. It is the second murder of an entire family in the span of three days. The police are investigating a possible connection between the two.
“You know it’s here, a few blocks from my office,” said Mike, pointing to an area on Google Maps where the alleged murder was supposed to happen. “We often go to lunch at the mall plaza nearby.”
They sat silently, concurrently pinching the screen in and out.
“Do you have any doubts now that the killer published his intention to kill tomorrow?” Mike finally said.
“Why, for God’s sake, would a killer want to do that? It doesn’t make any sense, Mike!”
“No, it doesn’t. Yet it’s here.”
“Should we call the police?”
“I don’t think so. This would be the strangest call they ever received. Can you imagine their reaction?” He mocked their potential call: “Hello, is this the police? Tomorrow, a serial killer will kill two people on Orchard Valley Street. Oh, no, I am not the killer myself, just learned of his intentions. Sorry, I cannot give you my name, but I know this is gonna happen, and please don’t trace my call. I have nothing to do with tomorrow’s murder, pinky promise!”
“Yeah, they’ll say you dialed the wrong number and need to call a psychiatrist instead…” Jenn scrolled back to the beginning of the page, but before she reached it, the screen went blank and then changed to a new one, completely blank with only one line of large green letters, all capitals: “NEXT UPDATE—APRIL 4, 12:01 AM.”
After a few minutes of sitting in complete silence, Mike finally spoke in a low voice. “Do you believe now it’s a serial killer? I think he initiated some sort of a game and is thrilled to walk on the edge of the potential to be caught.”
Jenn did not reply but went to the front door to verify it was locked. When she spoke, her words were languid: “If this is a serial killer case, Mike, I am scared to death because we could find ourselves targeted too…”
“How come? What do we have to do with it? We were just browsing through the internet and reading some random stuff. How could we possibly be targets? Even if he is a serial killer, how in the world could he potentially think of us? Do you know how many millions can read this freaking page?”
“Can he get us if we talk to the police? Like somehow get our names and go after us?”
The idea gradually sank in, and for a moment, a mix of fear and confusion occupied Mike’s thoughts.
“You are right, Jenn, he could make us his next targets. I need to take care of that,” Mike said, and spent the next few minutes clicking on his laptop’s keyboard.
“I installed the VPN, just in case, so he won’t be able to track us here,” he said when he finished, and then asked an obvious question: “So, why all the other articles? What purpose do they have?”
“Clues? Deception? I don’t really know. Do you remember what they are about?”
“Frankly, I didn’t pay that pay much attention to them; I went directly to the murder section. I recollect there was some politician giving testimony to Congress, something about a new movie release, some boring stuff. Oh, yes, there was something about the Miami Open sensation, but I really didn’t focus on any of them, just scrolled down.”
“Mike, don’t you find it really”—Jenn searched for the right word—“ah, disturbing, that these murders happen around you, either where you live or where you work?”
Mike looked at her, and his eyes visibly widened. “Do you think he somehow is targeting me?”
“I don’t know, but what is the probability that there is another person that reads this freaking website at midnight and spends his days near the murder sites? I am frightened to death.” Jenn went to the window and closed the blinds. “Mike, tell me we are not in danger, please tell me!”
