Mike Omer - In the Darkness

Sure.

Feeling relieved, Zoe stood up and paced the room. It was time to change tack, to start again. She couldn’t figure out anything conclusive yet, but she could theorize. Nicole, in all likelihood, had been killed by a stranger. If she’d been killed by someone who knew her for one of the common motives—say, greed or jealousy—the killer wouldn’t go to all that length of burying her alive, filming it, posting it online. No. The drive that had propelled the killer here was different.

A couple of markers lay by the whiteboard. Taking one, she began to make a list.

Buried alive. Remote location. Online video.

After circling the words Buried alive , she drew a line from it, ending with the word Claustrophobia. Then, hesitating, she checked online for the term for the fear of being buried alive and wrote it down— Taphephobia . She’d already seen indications that the killer had been sexually stimulated. Now she sat down in front of the laptop, clicked the video file, and followed the killer’s actions.

Twice during the video, the killer stopped filling the grave and disappeared from the frame. In the second instance, it took him three minutes to return. By the third time she watched the video, she was positive. When he left, his posture was rigid and hurried. When he returned, he was relaxed and calm.

He’d stepped out of the frame to masturbate.

Her confidence bolstered, she connected two more words to the diagram. Dominance and Control . These two drives were common with sexual serial killers and certainly applied here.

She moved on to Remote Location . She drew new lines from it and wrote down Planning and Van . Time for the third bullet— Online video .

This was what concerned her the most, and it was the main reason she wanted the police to keep a lid on the press as long as possible. She could think of only one reason for him to post the video, and she wrote it down, underlining it three times. Fame.

Some serial killers weren’t just driven by fantasies. They were driven by the desire for fame. The Son of Sam and BTK were classic examples, sending letters to the press, boasting of their actions. And now, with the internet’s wide grasp, the killer didn’t even need to reach out to the press.

But in this age of endless distractions and TL;DRs, he couldn’t just post long rambling letters like the Son of Sam had. No one would read them. He had to move on with the times. He’d posted a video.

This could have serious consequences for his killing rate. When a serial killer acted on his fantasies, there would often be long stretches of time between the killings. The memory of the murder and its reenactment in their mind was good enough to curb the compulsion to kill, at least for a while.

But if a killer murdered for attention, he might kill again whenever he felt he was losing the focus of the crowd. And these days, when news went stale fast, it meant he’d start getting that frustrating sensation very soon.

The meeting room door opened, startling her out of her focus. Foster and Lyons stepped into the room.

“Bentley, there you are,” Foster said. “The autopsy is . . .” The words faded as he inspected the whiteboard. “Is this the profile?”

Zoe shook her head. “No. Just ideas. I won’t have anything concrete until tomorrow.”

“What’s taphephobia?” he asked.

“The fear of being buried alive,” Zoe answered.

“Specific.” Lyons quirked her eyebrow.

“You think the killer is taphephobic?” Foster asked.

“I don’t know. But he’s sexually aroused by the act of burying a woman alive. It’s common for fear and sexual stimulation to be connected. I’m almost certain he masturbated at a certain point in the video . . . off camera, of course.”

“Really?” Lyons twisted her mouth in disgust.

“You should canvass the crime scene with a UV camera, search for spots of semen. We might get lucky.”

“Lucky,” Foster remarked dryly. He exchanged looks with Lyons.

Zoe ignored their reaction. She had no patience for coddling them. “This is a sexual killing, through and through.” She frowned at the whiteboard, focusing on the word planning . “Except . . . something here doesn’t fit.”

“What?” Lyons asked.

“Serial killers usually harbor their sexual fantasies in a sort of gestation phase until something stressful happens. We call it the stressor. It could be a relationship ending or getting fired . . . something that weighs heavily on them. The stress gets too much, and they snap and kill, fulfilling their original fantasy. Once they cross that barrier, make that first killing, the next one comes easier. They plan it more thoroughly, think of all the things they could do to improve their technique. But that first murder is almost always an impulsive act.”

“No planning.” Foster glanced at the whiteboard.

“Exactly. This murder was elaborately planned. He had to build or order the box, find a location, get the website ready. He was very careful with his burner phone and cleaned up after himself as well. These are not impulsive actions. I believe it took him a month or two to do some research and plan them out.”

“Maybe this killer is different,” Lyons suggested.

“He could be.” Zoe shrugged. “But there’s a simpler explanation. Something stressed him. He snapped and killed, probably on the same week. And then, after a while, he planned his next murders.”

“Then . . . are you saying—”

“There’s at least one more victim we haven’t found yet,” Zoe said.

“But . . . he called this experiment number one,” Lyons pointed out weakly.

“I wouldn’t subscribe too much to that. There could be endless reasons why he did that. I think there’s a good chance he buried another girl sometime in the past. Not too long ago. A few months.”

Lyons seemed pale. “Excuse me,” she said faintly and left.

Zoe considered asking Foster what was wrong with Lyons, then decided it was none of her business. If the woman got a fainting fit whenever murder was involved, perhaps she was in the wrong line of work.

“I actually came here to tell you the autopsy is done,” Foster said. “We were about to talk to the medical examiner. Do you want to tag along?”

“I’ll come in a moment.” Zoe regarded the whiteboard. She wanted to think this through while the ideas were fresh in her mind.

Tatum followed Detective Foster into the autopsy room. It was the first time since they’d landed in Texas he’d felt chilly. He wore a thin white buttoned shirt and immediately regretted the absence of his jacket.

But then, as the smell hit, his discomfort with the temperature took a back seat. The scents of formalin, disinfectant, raw flesh, and blood all mixed together into an unbearable stench that had him breathing shallowly through his mouth. He never got used to this smell. A box of face masks stood on a shiny steel cabinet by the door, and Foster snagged two, handing one to Tatum.

Nicole Medina’s body lay naked on a steel bed in the middle of the room, a Y-shaped scar of an autopsy operation covering her torso. The body’s skin was gray in the room’s cold light, but even in its current state, Tatum could easily see the girl from the video.

The medical examiner was hunched over a microscope. He was dressed in white coveralls, stained brown in several places, and his mouth and nose were covered by a mask as well. His head was bald, and the white fluorescent light made his scalp seem even paler than it was. As they stepped closer, he straightened, peering at them through a pair of thick glasses.