Mike Omer - In the Darkness

“Where was it?”

“It was in the trailer park, in a pile of junk.”

“The trailer park is fenced, right?” Zoe asked, excitement building. “Did anyone see a stranger drive in—”

“No one drove in for anything,” Lyons said. “There’s an old lady whose trailer is just by the gate. She says she sees everyone coming in or out. I believe her. She listed all the actions of her neighbors from the past week in a level of detail that makes me think she keeps a log. She didn’t see any stranger enter the trailer park in the past twenty-four hours. Do you think it’s possible the killer lives there?”

Zoe shook her head. “The killer is careful. He’d never draw us to his doorstep. Maybe he gave it to someone to plant there.”

“Or maybe he just tossed it over the fence. The pile of junk is just a few feet away from the edge of the trailer park.”

“This is what he wanted all along,” Zoe said.

“What do you mean?”

“He could have streamed this video from anywhere. But not only does he put it here—he uses one of the phones that he used in the previous murder. Despite the fact that he’d carefully made sure they were turned off the entire time in between. Because he knew we’d be monitoring it and would instantly show up here once the phone was turned on. He’s led us here because he wanted us to find the body.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the point of experiment number two. The test subject of his experiment wasn’t Maribel Howe. It was us. He wanted to see how we’d react if we assumed the video was live, like the first one was. He’s playing with us.”

Tatum watched as Foster interrogated yet another witness from the trailer park. A few of them took affront to the color of Foster’s skin. One of them was drunk to the point of slurred incoherent sentences, and a woman who lived in a ramshackle trailer painted a ghastly pink agreed to answer questions only through a closed door. It was not ideal.

The general consensus was that the residents hadn’t seen any stranger enter the trailer park for the past twenty-four hours, and none of them knew where the offending phone had come from. No one had seen anyone dig the pit or place a coffin-size box in it. In fact, none of them had seen anything interesting, not to mention illegal, ever, since the day they were born. Lucky lot.

Two of the residents did point out that there was a suspicious individual living inside the trailer park, right among them . This man could very well be a sinister murderer.

The residents’ names were Howard and Tommy. The suspicious individuals they referred to were, respectively, Tommy and Howard. Further questioning brought up an old grudge between the two originating in a drill one of them had borrowed and never returned, resulting in an escalating barrage of offenses that no one, not even themselves, could keep track of.

Tatum groaned, thrusting his hands in his pockets. It seemed like a pointless waste of time. He considered going to see how the officers talking to the gas station attendants were doing.

“Detective Foster,” a female officer called, motioning with her hand. “You’ll want to hear this.”

Foster approached her. “What is it, Wilson?”

Tatum moved closer to hear the conversation. The officer had been talking to a young teenager, maybe sixteen. He mostly talked to the officer’s chest, but she didn’t seem to mind. She had a certain intensity to her eyes that Tatum knew well. She’d latched on to something good.

“Okay, Paul, tell Detective Foster what you just told me,” she said to the boy.

He turned around, clearly miffed about the fact that he now had to address a middle-aged male detective who had nothing going for him in the cleavage department. “Well, like I said, me and Jeff—he don’ live here no more because he moved out with his mother because his parents got divorced, so he and his mom moved in with his grandparents down south—we were walking around a while ago, I think it was a year and a half ago, yeah, definitely a year and a half ago, because Jeff moved away last summer and it was just before then . . . I remember he was talking about how his parents were getting a divorce because they were fighting all the time, and we saw this guy.”

“What guy?” Foster asked.

“A guy where you built that tent over there. He dug a pit, he had a shovel and a bunch of other tools, and he wore some kind of maintenance suit, but we knew he wasn’t maintaining shit, because there are no pipes or wires or anything there, right? Jeff’s dad used to be a plumber working for the city before he got fired, because he drank all the time, so he knew there was nothing there—also this guy didn’t look like a plumber.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know, man. He was white for sure, but we were too far away, and we didn’t want to get any closer because we didn’t want him to see us.”

“Why not?”

The rhythm of the conversation was hypnotic, Foster asking pointed questions fast and short and the boy answering in long, serpentine sentences, their structure mazelike. Tatum could almost imagine this being a stage act accompanied by the strumming of a single guitar.

“Because Jeff said he was someone from the Mafia and that he dug a pit to stash drugs in or money or a body, and we didn’t want him to see us—we’re not idiots—we stayed away, but we were careful to see exactly what he was doing, and this guy dug there all day , like nonstop.”

“Did you tell your parents? Tell anyone?”

Paul seemed to hesitate for a moment and stared downward at his shoes, biting his lips.

“You didn’t want to,” Tatum said. “Because you were hoping he’d stash money there.”

“It ain’t against the law to say nothin’,” Paul muttered.

“So this guy digs a hole.” Frustration crept into Foster’s voice. “Then what?”

“Then he left. So we waited until it was dark, and we went there, because we figured maybe he stashed some money there, so we could take some of it—not too much, y’know. Jeff really wanted cash because his dad was unemployed, so he figured he could maybe help out a bit, and I wanted cash because . . .” He paused. His own motives probably hadn’t been as pure as Jeff’s.

“Because cash is a good thing to have,” Tatum said. “Go on.”

“So we go there, and at first we couldn’t find the hole, which was weird, man, because why dig a hole if you just fill it up, right? But after a while we hear this strange noise, and we notice that the ground is wobbling. It turns out this guy covered his hole with a few wooden planks, and then he hid them under the sand, so this hole was invisible if you didn’t know where to look. We removed the planks, but we found nothing there, no cash, no drugs. So I said, or maybe it was Jeff—no, it was definitely me—I said, ‘Maybe this guy dug the hole, and he intends to use it later, y’know?’ Like a good hiding spot. So we were thinking we’d keep an eye on this hole, maybe see that guy again, and once he puts his stash there, we’ll check it out, and if it’s cash, we could maybe take some, and if it’s drugs, we could, uuuuh . . . tell the police.”

Tatum rolled his eyes. Or steal it and sell it.

“But this guy never came back, and I checked this damn hole every night for like . . . a whole year. He never put anything there, so I figured he forgot where he put the hole, and Jeff already moved away, and I got kinda tired of going every night to check it and also one time a scorpion almost stung me—it ain’t fun to wander here at night, y’know?”

“And you never saw that guy again?” Foster asked.

“Nah, never. I mean, maybe, because I never got a good look at him, so I coulda seen him in the street or in the park or behind me at the movies, and I wouldn’t know. But I never seen the guy come back to his hole. No one ever came to that hole. Until you lot showed up.”