Free Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller by Ambrose Ibsen Page B

screen.
    Kenji read off the results in a dispirited monotone. “First three hits all deal with a comet that was passing by Earth on that day. I guess there was a big meteor shower afterward. Second link has something to do with people in South America acting weird afterward, but I'm not going to bother reading that. Oh, this one talks about some political assassination in Africa.” He scrolled further.
    “You think anyone else will end up at that shack? Like, you think anyone else out there has picked up on this? What if more people get in on... whatever this is?” mused Dylan, cleaning his mouth off with a napkin. His glasses, usually so neat and clean, were marked up with frosted fingerprints. A red sprinkle clung to the white rims.
    Kenji ignored him. It was possible that other people had heard the voice, however neither the album nor the documentary were especially well-known, and it occurred to him that only certain kinds of people would ever care enough about such a thing to investigate further. How many people out there would really bother to isolate certain sounds on an MP3 like he and Dylan had done? How many people out there would pay such close attention to a documentary that they'd zero in on the anomalous, mumbling woman in the background of a single scene? If anything united the three of them, it was a tendency towards neuroticism or OCD.
    “Next one is a missing person's notice.” Kenji very nearly scrolled past it, but something he glimpsed in the preview made him pause. It was a new listing, led to a public social media group centered around missing person's cases in the State of Minnesota. “That's weird,” he said. “Think this could be something?” He pointed to the link, and both Dylan and Reggie glanced at it. “It looks like someone put out a missing person's report on this social media site, trying to find some old friend of theirs. They were last seen on May 10 th , 2006.”
    Reggie nodded. “Why not? Click on it.”
    Kenji did so. This was a small social media site, not particularly popular, but he was familiar enough with it to navigate it with ease. He scrolled down the newer posts on the page and singled out the one that'd drew him there, posted just four days previously.
    And then, the three of them loosed a collective gasp.
    The listing was brief. A woman with the username MARA_ANTALL had made the post, and in it she wrote only the most salient details. She was seeking any information that might help her find her friend, a woman by the name of Agnes Pasztor, a fellow Hungarian immigrant, who'd last been seen on May 10 th , 2006, in rural Minnesota. A contact phone number for user MARA_ANTALL was listed.
    But it was not these details that shocked the three of them into a momentary silence.
    Offered beneath these few lines of text was a photo of the missing woman, allegedly taken shortly before her disappearance ten years ago, and it was this that stunned the trio. Kenji stared at the photo long and hard. Suddenly his gums began to itch and he had to clench his jaw to ease them.
    The woman staring back at the three of them in the photograph was the very same woman who'd been in the documentary.
    Kenji whispered the name under his breath, trying it on for size. “ Agnes Pasztor ...”
    Reggie loosed a shudder and sank back down into his seat at hearing it. “Ah, hell no,” he mumbled into his coffee cup.

THIRTEEN

    The three of them had a name.
    The woman whose voice Kenji had heard on the recording, the very same woman the three of them had seen on the tape, feeding them the coordinates to the remote shack, was Agnes Pasztor. She'd been missing for just over ten years and had last been seen in rural Minnesota.
    This was a step forward, but all the same Kenji felt as though they'd taken two steps back in their investigation.
    “Do you think she went missing at the shack?” asked Dylan, eyes wide. He ran a hand through his sandy hair and held his breath. “Holy shit, dude. This is