Mike Omer - In the Darkness

“If I may, Lieutenant,” Detective Lyons interjected. “I have an additional inquiry line in mind.”

“Oh?” Jensen blinked at her in surprise.

“We are currently working under the assumption that Medina was kidnapped right after being dropped off by her friends, before she entered the house. We should make sure this assumption holds. Interview all her friends again, get our timeline as detailed as possible. Also, if she really was taken then, the killer either waited for her by her home, or he followed them from the party. We should check the red light camera footage for any vehicles that went by in close proximity to the friend’s car.”

Foster kept his gaze on Lyons, his mouth twitching in a slight smile. They were playing the lieutenant—Zoe was sure of it. Lyons did the talking because they knew, for whatever reason, that Jensen would be more susceptible to it.

“Also, once we have the tech results,” Lyons continued, “it’s likely we’ll have a lead on the box’s maker. If the killer didn’t make it himself, we could follow that lead. And of course, we’ll try to monitor the killer’s phone number.”

Jensen blinked and cleared his throat. “Of course. That sounds like a reasonable course of action.”

“We’re trying to determine the digital traces that the killer left,” Agent Shelton said. “We’ll let you know if anything pops up. And there’s the issue of the upload origin.”

“Yes.” Jensen’s face was blank. “Upload origin.”

“The video was uploaded on-site.” Shelton scrunched his forehead, and the eyebrow bird folded its wings as if about to dive. “The murderer must have used a cellular modem.”

“He could have used his phone as a hotspot,” Foster pointed out.

“We already checked all the phone’s activity,” Shelton said. “The CNN footage is the only thing it was used for. We’ll pull all the data we have on the nearby cell towers. Since the crime scene is in a remote area, that won’t be a very long list. If he uploaded from the site, we’ll find the record for it, and then we might be able to use it to track the killer.”

Jensen kept nodding throughout that explanation. Satisfied, he glanced at Tatum. “Agent, anything you want to add?”

“Dr. Bentley and I will start working on an initial profile,” Tatum said. “We would appreciate full access to all the evidence collected from the crime scene, including the photographs.”

“Of course.” Jensen made an elaborate gesture. It would have looked reasonable on a king granting his subjects’ wishes but was utterly absurd in this context. “Let’s get to work.”

Tatum was almost by the door when Zoe grabbed his arm.

“Can you hang on for just a second?” she asked.

He went rigid at her touch. “Sure.”

They stood by the doorway as the rest of the meeting’s participants walked out the door. Agent Shelton was the last to leave, and he gave them a querying look. Tatum nodded at him and gave him a small polite smile. The agent shrugged and left as well.

“We need to decide how to approach this case,” Zoe said. “There’s a lot of work to do.”

Tatum had guessed she wasn’t about to talk about what she’d said the night before, let alone apologize. Still, he felt a pang of anger and disappointment. He needed to vent. If she’d told him to stop acting like a child, at least he’d have a good opportunity to snap back. He’d spent half the night before thinking of all the things he should have said when Zoe had casually called him a murderer. But saying them now would be pointless. Comebacks had a very limited expiration date.

“Of course,” he said. “We need to look at past crime reports in the area. Assuming the killer’s fantasy has a claustrophobic angle, we can check anything that involves shutting people in small cramped spaces.”

“Maybe see if any prostitutes reported anything like that. A customer who made them lie in a closed box for a long time or a car’s trunk.”

“Okay. I’ll look at past cases in the area.”

“I’ll try ViCAP.” Zoe sighed.

Tatum understood her tone. ViCAP should have been perfect for this kind of investigation. The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was supposed to be a database of all violent crimes across the country. If the killer had committed violent crimes in other states before, it should have been reported and logged. Theoretically, all Zoe would need to do was to search for other incidents of people being buried alive, and voilà, she’d get a list of similar cases.

Except there were a few snags. The major one was that less than 1 percent of all violent crimes were logged in the ViCAP database. The second problem was, of course, that there was no checkbox in the ViCAP entry form for “buried alive.” However, Tatum’s sympathy ran low at the moment, and he didn’t offer to help out with the workload.

“The nickname of the uploader is Schrodinger, and it’s probably not a coincidence. We should both study Schrodinger, as well,” Zoe said. “If he’s really referencing Schrodinger’s cat, we should understand the experiment better.”

“It’s pretty straightforward. You put a cat in a box, you close the box . . . and for some reason the cat might die at some point. So the cat is alive . . . but also dead.”

“Why is he alive and also dead? He’s either alive or dead.”

“I mean . . . because we don’t really know. It’s a physics thing, I guess.”

A second of silence.

“We should both study Schrodinger,” Zoe said again.

Zoe sat alone in the meeting room, her laptop in front of her, papers and printed photographs scattered all over the table. She’d asked Jensen earlier if she could use the room to work, and after a lot of hemming and hawing, he’d agreed. Tatum was in the detective division, sitting in the cubicle belonging to the man who was on vacation. This worked out nicely as far as Zoe was concerned. With Tatum’s present state of mind, she found him quite unbearable.

The laptop was open on the ViCAP search screen. She’d run eight different searches that morning and ended up with over two hundred cases that could be connected to the Medina case. Sifting through them was both difficult and unproductive.

She had questions she needed answered. How had the victim been taken? What did the toxicology report say? Where was the box from? Questions that would be answered in due time, but Zoe was used to being consulted when a case stalled and all the immediate questions had been answered already. One of the things she’d heard a lot in the BAU was “If only they’d called us sooner.” As if the profilers could show up after one act of violence, point out the guilty party like some sort of real-life Poirot, and prevent all the other crimes that followed. And now here she was, pretty much as soon as she could possibly be, and it turned out she was as clueless as the rest of them.

She massaged her forehead, knowing she wasn’t in her element. She was distracted by Tatum’s anger and by her distance from Andrea. At the thought of her sister, she instantly imagined Andrea carelessly going to the parking lot, not noticing the dark figure waiting by her car, holding a gray tie in his clenched fists.

She clenched her jaw and grabbed her phone. She tapped a quick message to Andrea. Hey, how are you this morning?

To her surprise, the chat window indicated that Andrea opened it almost instantly—a significant change for the better.

Fine. How’s the case?

Zoe sighed and answered, A bit messy. And Tatum’s angry at me.

What did you do?

Nothing. He’s just being a baby.

Andrea sent an emoji with its eyebrow raised, and Zoe found its suspicious expression quite annoying. I need to go back to work, she tapped. Talk later?