Mike Omer - In the Darkness

It was the second date, and unlike the first date, which had been a series of awkward silences glued together by small talk, it was going more or less well. He’d followed his roommate’s suggestion and taken her to a movie, because the movie did the talking for you. And he’d been right: it was as if the movie provided the meat for the conversation. Before the movie had started, it was logistics: Which movie should we go to; do you want popcorn; do you want to sit in the front or the back . And after it ended, they could talk about the movie and its oh-so-surprising twist. Which he had seen coming a mile away. For the past week, all people had talked about was “the amazing surprising twist,” pretty much guaranteeing the twist would be neither amazing nor surprising.

“What was your favorite part?” Elise asked him.

He took a moment, not because he didn’t know which part was his absolute favorite but because he had to find an alternative. “The part in the end,” he said dutifully. “The twist.”

The best part had been when they’d locked the kid in the small dark room. It had set his heart racing. But she might not understand.

They reached her dorm, and she invited him inside for a little drink. He was tense when he followed her to her room. Unlike him, she had the entire room for herself. Her dorm was an apartment of five bedrooms with one shared bathroom and kitchen. After he’d been smelling his roommate’s socks for an entire week, it was paradise.

She brought them two glasses and a bottle of cheap wine and poured each a large glass. The wine’s taste lingered unpleasantly in his mouth, and he was dizzy in minutes. He hardly ever drank, hated the sensations that followed. But his roommate, an ever-flowing fountain of unsought-for advice, had told him it would help him loosen up.

It was Elise that loosened up first, though, kissing him. She pushed herself on him in a needy and aggressive manner, her fingers scratching at his back, removing his shirt. He tried to be more active, to kiss her back, to caress her, to lead. But when he touched her waist, she grabbed his hand, moved it to her thigh. When he kissed her neck, she whispered that he should bite her. When he struggled with her bra, she lost her patience, removing it herself.

Endless instructions and corrections. She took control. And the good feeling that had settled in him during the movie, when he’d felt like a man, dissipated. He was a kid again, getting lectured about how to eat politely, how to dress, how to talk when there was company, how to be a good boy.

And despite the fact that usually he couldn’t go an hour without getting an unwanted, potentially embarrassing erection, now there was nothing. He had a condom in his pocket, and Elise had another one she took out of her purse, but both were equally useless.

She tried to help him, but that only made it worse. He could feel rage building up. It was her fault, not his. The way she pawed at him, the way she acted as if nothing he did was right. He could do her all night if she’d just stop nagging and interrupting his focus.

He grabbed her wrist and squeezed it, pulling her hand away.

“Hey, you’re hurting me!” she hissed.

He didn’t let go, clenching his jaw, his heart throbbing, pulling at her hand, twisting it, until she fell from the bed.

“What the hell is your problem?” she half screamed at him. He knew that tone of voice. His mother used it often. When she wanted to scream but knew people might hear them. Of course, it was still a dorm room with four other bedrooms and paper-thin walls.

He didn’t answer, just stared at her.

Her eyes filled with tears. She wrapped herself with a towel. “I’m going to wash up. You better get out of here.”

She stumbled out, leaving the door open, although he was naked. He heard the bathroom door close.

He put on his clothes, a steady ring in his ears. His mind was filled with violent images. He would follow her into the bathroom, grab her head, smash it against the wall. Then he’d show her he could function just fine. He’d use both condoms.

But he also knew he wouldn’t. No. He would leave and go home. And when his roommate asked him how the date went, he’d just say A gentleman never tells , har-har. And perhaps, if he was really careful, he could go through the rest of his college studies without running into Elise or any of her friends.

He stepped out of the room, closing the door behind him. He was about to walk out of the dorm, but then he glanced at the bathroom door. He heard the noise of water running beyond it.

A bunch of chairs stood in the shared kitchen, and he took one of them. He jammed it under the doorknob of the bathroom. He tried the handle softly, making sure it couldn’t budge.

Then he flicked off the bathroom light.

“Hey,” Elise said from inside. “I’m in here. Hello?”

The sound of water stopped. He put his ear to the door, listening. He heard a thud and a grunt of pain as she ran into something. Then a slight rattle as she tried the doorknob.

“Hello? The door is stuck. Hello?”

She spoke in a low voice. Four bedrooms. She wouldn’t want to wake them all up, let them find her locked naked in the bathroom. Wouldn’t that be humiliating.

His rage ebbed as she tried the door again. Locked in a dark place. A good place to think. A good place to contemplate her behavior.

“Hello? Let me out!” Alarm filled her voice now.

She thumped at the door and raised her voice, calling for help again. Soon, she was screaming. And her screams didn’t grate on his nerves anymore.

There was that erection after all.

As soon as they reached the station, they went straight to the situation room. Foster eyed the map on the wall. It was a large-scale map of San Angelo and the area around it, spanning about ten miles in each direction.

“Okay.” Foster handed Zoe and Tatum blue markers. “Let’s mark the areas that Yermilov said were easier to dig in.”

“We should mark Tulia soil in a different color,” Zoe said. “So far the killer always focused on Tulia.”

“A different color.” Foster muttered. “You feds sure have fancy ideas.” He left the room and returned a minute later, clutching a bunch of markers in his hand. “Here.” He tossed a green marker over to Zoe.

She caught it in her left hand, feeling ridiculously proud of herself, and tried to act as if she always caught things thrown at her and it was no big thing.

“Okay,” Foster said. “You have the list?”

“I have it.” Tatum unfolded a page. It was a list of areas they’d composed from Dr. Yermilov’s instructions.

He took it to the nearby photocopier and copied it twice, handing one page to Zoe and one to Foster. Zoe located the cluster of Tulia locations. Each was a list of a pair of coordinates and a radius. She marked them on the map with her green marker. One area around the place where Nicole Medina was buried, another for Maribel Howe. And then additional areas all over the western part of the map.

Foster and Tatum stood by her, crowding her, drawing circles of their own. Soon, the entire map was filled with green and blue circles.

“We can narrow it further, at least for now,” Zoe said. “Both victims were buried less than six miles from town. I think we can focus on a six-mile radius for the initial search. We can widen it later.”

Foster drew a squiggly circle on the map, using a bit of crime scene tape as an improvised drafting compass. It defined a six-mile radius around San Angelo.

“The pits the killer would dig will be nearby roads, but they’d be side roads,” Tatum said. “Also, he’d avoid any highly populated area, so we can ignore the area around Grape Creek. And we only need to mark the roads in the easy-to-dig soil.”