Mike Omer - In the Darkness

“That list must be huge.”

“It was.” Sarah had an undertone of smugness to her voice. “So I narrowed it down. Just the perimeter around San Angelo. Got the exact time of that specific video on CNN and limited myself to CDRs of users who started watching the live stream within five minutes of that time. The list became quite short.”

“How short?” he asked, his voice tense.

“Eighteen phone numbers in San Angelo or the vicinity. And out of those eighteen, seventeen were deep in San Angelo, so they obviously aren’t our guy, right? Our guy was in the middle of nowhere.”

“Sarah . . .” Tatum felt his heart pound. “You have a location for me?”

“I’m sending you the GPS coordinates. And I already checked satellite images, Tatum. The location’s accuracy isn’t great, but the surroundings are a perfect match for the video.”

Zoe looked at the gravel path and its surroundings, trying to picture that night. It would have been almost pitch black without streetlights. The car with Nicole’s friends had dropped her off. She’d waved goodbye, and they’d driven away, leaving her in darkness. She’d probably moved fast to the door. The man who had taken her had hidden in the bushes by the yard—she was almost 100 percent sure. That was the most likely place. No chance he’d lurked there by accident. This had been planned.

“I have the location!” Tatum’s excited voice jolted her out of her reverie. He pointed at his phone emphatically. Foster was by his side in a second. Zoe hurried over to join them.

“Where?” Foster asked, breathless.

“Spillway Road,” Tatum said, indicating the map on the mobile’s screen. “It’s an approximate location, within five hundred feet.” He switched to a satellite image. They waited for a few seconds as the phone’s slow connection downloaded the image. Most of the area was covered with cacti, bushes, and trees.

Foster looked at the phone’s screen. “In that case, it could be Chalimar Road as well.”

“Not likely,” Zoe interjected. “Too close to the farm over here.” She indicated the farm.

“Five hundred feet along Spillway Road here?” Foster traced the satellite image with his finger. “Can’t be the northern part of the road—the foliage is too thick. He buried her in a clear patch of dirt. Has to be around here.” He pointed at a small area on the map, about fifty feet in diameter.

“I think you’re right,” Tatum agreed.

“I’ll send a patrol over there right now. If she’s there, we’ll find her.”

“No, wait!” Zoe blurted. “You have to get crime scene technicians with you to process the area.”

“You’re kidding.” Foster glanced at her, incredulous. “The girl might be suffocating in that box right now. There’s not a moment to—”

“If she’s in there, she’s been dead for three days,” Zoe said decisively. “Rushing to get a corpse out will only hurt our efforts to catch whoever did this later on.”

Foster glanced at the house as if worried Nicole’s mother was listening in on their discussion. “You don’t know that,” he hissed in a low voice.

“I do. Our analyst gave Medina a maximum of thirty-six hours.”

“That’s just conjecture.”

“It’s actually called math.”

Foster exhaled and shook his head. “I’m digging the girl up as soon as possible.” He marched away.

“Let’s call the lieutenant,” Zoe said urgently to Tatum. “We need them to preserve the crime scene.”

Tatum glanced at her, scrunching his eyebrows. “This is not our case,” he reminded her. “We’re just here to advise. And we definitely don’t want to get on the detective’s bad side.”

“But they might storm to that grave site with patrol cars or heavy machinery and trample any shred of evidence we’ll be able to use later.”

“It’s not our decision to make.”

It was a thirty-minute ride to Spillway Road, since Tatum made a wrong turn somewhere. By the time they arrived, it was easy to see that the police had found the exact location already—there were already two patrol cars there. Zoe groaned by his side when they saw them, four officers hard at work, digging. Three of them had spades; the other was digging with his hands, shoveling handfuls of earth out of the pit.

Tatum swerved off the road, the car’s tires scraping on the gravel. He opened the door and half jogged toward the four officers. As he got closer, one of the officers turned to face him, probably about to tell him to stay away.

“Agent Gray, FBI,” Tatum said, flashing his badge. “I’m just here to help.”

The officer seemed confused for a second, then shrugged and returned to the growing hole. The men were digging fast, almost frantically, and Tatum felt their excitement. He reminded himself Zoe was probably right. If the girl was underneath all that sand, she was long gone. His only hope was she wasn’t there at all. That the video had been fake, or that after burying her and pausing the video, the man had dug her up again. Why else pause the video? The only reason he could think of was that the man wanted to hide something.

Before he could think it through, Tatum was in the pit alongside one of the officers, scooping earth with his hands. It was easy to dig; the earth wasn’t compact, hadn’t had time to harden in the few days since the man on the video had spilled it into the grave.

As he tossed handful after handful of soil out of the pit, he tried to recall how deep the grave was. How much did they need to dig? It was about three or four feet, no more. The pace they were going, they could get there in ten minutes.

One of the men cried in pain, and they all paused. A shovel had hit his hand as he scooped dirt.

“Watch it, Ramirez!” the man snapped at the officer by his side.

“Sorry!” Ramirez apologized, taking a step sideways.

“Nearly took my finger off,” the hurt officer complained, but he was already shoveling sand again, ignoring the red streak of blood on his palm.

After a few minutes another car showed up. Tatum raised his eyes to see Detective Foster getting out of the car, holding a bunch of shovels. He hurried to the grave, gave a small pause as he saw Tatum in it, and then, with a curt nod, handed him a shovel.

Just seconds later, one of the shovels hit wood, emitting a loud thunk.

“I hit it!” Ramirez shouted. “It’s here.”

Tatum dug faster, feeling the buzz of frantic activity as the people beside him did the same. Soon he could see the wood—unpolished planks, pale and dirty. He found the shovel to be a burden since the thing kept bumping into the planks. He tossed the shovel out of the pit and began removing dirt with his hands again. All the other officers followed suit.

Scoop, straighten, toss, crouch, scoop, straighten, toss . . . Tatum suspected his back would hurt like hell later.

“Okay!” Foster called. “That’s good enough. Everyone out of the pit.”

The box’s lid was now mostly visible, covered by small mounds of sand in just a few spots. The only thing that prevented them from opening the thing were the four men currently standing on top of it. Tatum scrambled out, and the rest of them followed. One of the officers, a tall bald man with wide shoulders, bent into the pit, grabbing the edge of the box’s lid. For a moment it didn’t budge, the weight of the sand on it keeping it shut. But the man grunted, and with a sudden creak, the lid came off.

The smell that hit them told Tatum all he needed to know. As the people around him groaned, one of them running into the bushes to throw up, Tatum glanced into the coffin, looking at the discolored, bloated body.