Mike Omer - In the Darkness

She sighed. “Of course you are. Why would I tell Larson about it otherwise?”

Tatum seemed at a loss. “What do you want me to do, exactly?”

“I want to know more about this internal affairs case,” she said. “And I’m working on it. But I need time. You have to lay low for a few days, at least, until I can sort this out.”

Tatum nodded, but Christine noticed that now both his fists were clenched. If she had to guess, in less than twenty-four hours, Tatum would start making calls, trying to handle this mess himself. And that would make this much worse.

The news about the reopening of the internal investigation left Tatum with a bitter taste. He’d thought he was done with this. Now the whole thing was crawling back from the murky past.

He spent an hour or so trying to bury himself in work, finally giving up and trying to find comfort in the office kitchenette. But hoping for anything uplifting in the kitchenette was an exercise in futility. Munching a dry, hostile cookie, he walked back, past Zoe’s office, then paused, thinking that he could use a friendly face.

He knocked on the door. Behind it he could hear a disturbing muffled sound, as if someone was crying.

“Come in,” Zoe answered, and he opened the door. She sat behind her desk, transfixed by her laptop.

She was much smaller than Tatum—or most women, for that matter. Her eyes were the most prominent fixture of her face, green and mesmerizing. Tatum had once overheard one of the agents call Zoe “the Vulture” behind her back, and he could see why. Her gaze had a predatory look to it, and it almost seemed like she was able to look through people, reading their innermost thoughts. And her nose was long and slightly curved, like a beak.

The crying sound he’d heard emanated from Zoe’s computer. She glanced at him, then hit a key, pausing it. Tatum relaxed his shoulders as the crying stopped.

“Sorry. I can come back at another time,” he said.

“Okay.” She turned back to the screen.

Tatum raised an eyebrow. She hadn’t seen him since Friday; it would have been nice if she at least showed a passing interest in his well-being. He turned to leave, deciding that if he was looking for a friendly face, perhaps Zoe’s office wasn’t the best place to find one.

“Tatum, hang on.”

“Yeah?”

“I could use another pair of eyes here. Would you mind taking a look?”

“Sure.” He blinked in surprise. Zoe usually worked alone. He circled her desk and peered at her screen. It showed a video clip paused at 43:32. The entire length of the video was just under an hour. The paused frame was of a young woman lying inside a tight, dark space, her face twisted in fear. The video was in black and white, and Tatum guessed it had been taken using a thermal camera. Zoe restarted the video.

The video started with the screen split. The bottom half showed the same woman in black and white, lying in the dark space, but now she was screaming. The top half showed sandy terrain, perhaps a desert. There was a rectangular pit in the ground that looked like a grave. The lower part of a man’s body moved around the hole as the man appeared to be shoveling sand into it.

The woman’s screaming was unbearable. Tatum glanced at the office door. He’d left it open. He hurried over to the door and shut it.

“Can you lower the volume, please?” he said.

Zoe nodded, clicking her mouse, and the screaming’s volume decreased slightly. Tatum looked back at the screen. The man filling the grave went over to a large bin. He tipped it over with his foot, and soil dropped in clumps from the bin into the large hole. The man scraped the bin with the shovel. The woman thumped with both her hands on whatever was on top of her.

The dissonance between the cool, calm movements of the man on top of the screen and the hysteria of the woman on the bottom made Tatum shudder. He leaned over Zoe and paused the video. The screaming stopped, and he sagged in relief. “What is this?”

“It’s a video of a woman being buried alive. Or at least, that’s what it looks like.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Mancuso forwarded it to me. It was sent to the FBI by the San Angelo police, in Texas. She asked me to take a look and tell her what I think.” Zoe’s hand moved to resume the video.

“Wait,” Tatum said hurriedly.

Her hand hovered for a second over the mouse, then retreated.

“What do we know?” Tatum asked, staring at the screen. The caption below the video read “Experiment Number One.” The uploader’s user name was displayed in gray beside the caption—Schrodinger. A time stamp for the upload read “09/02/16 08:32.” Those were the only details on the screen beyond the video itself. The rest of the web page was blank. Tatum glanced at the URL on the top—it appeared to be a random sequence of letters and digits.

Zoe switched to her email account and quickly scanned the email displayed. “The buried person in the video was identified by the San Angelo police as Nicole Medina. She’s nineteen years old, lives with her mother in San Angelo. She was reported missing three days ago by her mother. Then, a few hours after she was reported missing, this link was sent to eight bloggers and two journalists from a temporary mailbox.”

Tatum read the email from behind her shoulder. “They haven’t found her yet.”

“No, they haven’t.” Zoe pointed at the email, a few lines below where Tatum was reading. “Her mother said that she would never have disappeared like that.”

“Could be a publicity stunt. Faking this video. The mother could even be involved.”

“It could be.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Let’s see the rest.”

Zoe resumed the video clip. Nicole’s screams filled the room again, and Tatum listened to them, gritting his teeth. He forced himself to look away from the tortured face and focus on the man filling the grave instead. The top half of the video was the important one. Any clue there could help them identify the location where the video had been recorded. The camera was positioned so that the only things visible were the ground, the man’s feet and hands, the bins, and the slowly filling grave. He was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, his hands covered in thick gloves. No part of his skin was exposed. The sound of the feed originated solely from the video of the woman, who had stopped screaming and begun sobbing in fear.

Something in the grave drew his attention. “Look.” He pointed at one of the grave’s corners, where something snaked upward. “A cable.”

“You’re right. Maybe it’s for air?”

Tatum scrutinized it carefully. “I don’t think so,” he finally said. “It looks like an electrical cable. It could explain how the feed from the buried woman is streamed. If she’s really in there.”

“Why use a cable? Why not just send it via Bluetooth or something?”

“If she’s buried under a lot of earth, it would interfere with reception.”

“Right.” Zoe nodded, intent on the screen.

The man worked at emptying the bins for seven minutes. At one point he stepped out of the frame, and the top half remained still for a few minutes, while on the bottom, Nicole screamed again. He finished tipping the bins of soil into the grave, then tidied the ground with a shovel. They could hardly see any indication that there was anything there. He then paused and turned to the camera.

“What’s he doing?” Tatum asked.

“I think he’s just resting, but hang on—look.”

The man approached the camera, taking something from his pocket. A phone. He flipped it to display the mobile’s screen. Tatum frowned. It was footage of the president talking behind a podium. The only sound was the soft exhausted sobs of Nicole Medina.