Mike Omer - In the Darkness

Nicole Medina had been in there after all. And she was long dead.

Zoe had been told repeatedly throughout her life that she was insensitive and tactless. Nevertheless, when Tatum turned to face her for the first time since they’d arrived at the grave site, she knew it was a good time to bite her tongue. His suit, which was usually straight and immaculate, was now dusty and smudged, the fabric creased, one of the buttons of his white shirt open. His hair was ruffled, and his face was tired and sad. For a moment, she felt an urge to hug him.

He walked over to her. “She’s been dead for two days at the very least.”

Zoe gave him a short nod. A few yards away, Detective Foster took charge, telling the men to step away, to establish a perimeter around the crime scene. Because that was what it was now, of course: a murder crime scene.

She approached the grave. Peering inside, she scrutinized the body. Medina was fully clothed in the outfit she’d presumably worn to the party. Zoe made a mental note to verify with her friends that it was indeed what she’d worn. Her shirt was disheveled but intact. Her eyes were shut. Perhaps she’d mercifully lost consciousness long before she’d completely run out of air. Her veins and arteries were discolored and dark, crisscrossing the pallid skin. A fly landed on her face, but it was the first one. No insects crawled around the body. Perhaps it had been buried too deep, or maybe the soil was too dry for insect life.

A small device was embedded into the box just by the body’s head. The camera. Zoe crouched to look at it more carefully. A bit of the wire snaked out of it, through a hole in the box. She examined the uneven side of the dug hole, seeing two sections where the wire had been partially uncovered. She wondered where the tip of the wire broke through the ground.

She frowned, looking back at the box and the body. The box was a bit taller and significantly wider than the body was. Maybe these were standard measurements—she would have to check. But she had a hunch that the box was larger than it needed to be.

Had the killer had Nicole in mind when he’d built the box, or had he built a box that would fit any random victim?

“Agent, do you mind signing this?” Foster was by her side, handing her a clipboard and a pen.

She glanced at it. It was a crime scene log. “Of course.” She plucked the pen from his hand and scribbled her name under Tatum’s. “I’m not an agent, Detective Foster. I’m a civilian consultant.”

Foster nodded distractedly, the distinction far from his mind. He peered down at the grave. “What sort of monster would do something like that?”

“It’s not a monster,” Zoe said automatically. As Foster narrowed his eyes, she added, “It’s a man you’re dealing with. Not a monster. He can be studied and understood. He can be caught.”

“Do you think there’ll be more? Is this a serial killer?”

She considered it. “I think it’s best to talk once we have a thorough report on the crime scene.”

Foster looked up at the sky, the setting sun. “That’ll happen tomorrow. We’ll do what we can in the darkness, with spotlights, but I think we’ll want to do another sweep in the morning.” His phone rang, and he stepped away to answer the call.

An officer, his uniform dusty from the digging, twisted crime scene tape around the low bushes that surrounded the grave. Zoe moved away, scanning the area around her. A wall of trees hid the grave site from the road, their branches contorted and thorny, covered in nettles. Cacti growing between the trees supplied additional camouflage, their thick green arms creating an almost-impenetrable wall. The road itself was a long narrow stretch with almost no traffic, everything beige or gray or dusty green. It felt like a road to nowhere.

The perfect place to bury a body. Or, in this case, to bury a living victim.

She turned around, looking back. There was an opening in the wall of cacti and trees about six feet wide. Two patrol cars were parked in it, one after the other. Zoe sighed. Obviously, this was the path the killer had used to get his own vehicle through. They’d probably eliminated any tire marks. She stepped to the narrow path and crouched, frowning.

“What is it?” Tatum asked behind her.

“There were plants here as well.” She pointed at a branch protruding from the ground. “Someone clipped them.”

“You think it was the killer?”

She stood up. “Probably. See how the path leads directly to the grave site? He’d prepared a driveway.”

“He had the grave site planned in advance,” Tatum said. After a second he added, “He probably dug the grave before he even kidnapped his victim.”

“But why here?” Zoe asked. “We’re in the middle of the desert. There are probably a million places to bury someone. Why choose a place where he had to work so hard just to get it ready?”

Tatum didn’t answer, inspecting the clipped branch closely. Finally, he stood up and turned to her. “I just updated Mancuso. She wants to know if we think there’ll be more victims.”

“It’s too soon to say.”

“But you have a hunch, right? I know I do.”

“We can’t act on a hunch.”

Tatum sighed. “What does your gut tell you, Zoe?”

She bit her lip. “There’ll be more. This wasn’t about killing Nicole Medina. This was about burying someone alive. This was a fantasy.”

“That’s what I think as well,” Tatum said. “And if the killer called this experiment number one—”

“There’s a good chance he’s already planning experiment number two.”

He was disappointed by the internet. Though he hadn’t thought his video would be an instant viral success, he’d assumed watching a woman being buried alive would elicit a bit more than the paltry 1,903 views his video currently had.

None of the ten blogs and reporters he’d originally sent this to had published anything about it. The majority of his views came from a website that collected videos of people getting hurt and dying, and even there, his popularity was quite low. One of the users said it was lame that they didn’t get to see the woman suffocate to death. Another commented this was clearly staged and that both participants were lousy actors.

It didn’t matter. The next one would get their attention.

He switched to Instagram and began scrolling through his targets’ feeds. He almost never followed them in person anymore. Why risk getting caught when women went out of their way to do his dirty work for him? He took in the new selfies, the poses, the teasing captions. He made notes of the ones who had new boyfriends and the ones who went out to party because they were “free at last.”

Those were his preferable targets. Boyfriends made things more complicated.

He paused for a moment over a profile of one Gloria King. Gloria had just tagged herself in a picture with friends on a night out. In the selfie, the three of them were holding bottles of beer, smiling at the camera. Gloria wore a sleeveless pink shirt, leaving her golden skin exposed. The picture was recent, uploaded only twenty minutes ago.

A night out, getting drunk. She would return home wasted, well beyond midnight, her parents long asleep. He knew where she lived, of course. They had a dog, but it was tied up near the front door. And the path up to her house was long and dark, the neighboring houses too far to matter.

An opportunity there. He considered it. Gloria King’s fate hung by a thread.

It was too soon. He wasn’t in a hurry. He had plenty of time.

He minimized the browser and double-clicked the video thumbnail on the desktop. The face of the young woman appeared on-screen, just as she slowly woke up. He could already sense the excitement building up inside him as she screamed her very first scream. He tried not to watch this video too many times. Anything could get dull with repetition, even this. But for now, it was still almost as exciting as being there for the very first time.