Mike Omer - In the Darkness

They marked the relevant roads painstakingly, one after the other. There were still a lot more than Zoe would have wanted, but searching that area with a ground-penetrating radar sounded doable. The work of a few days.

Finally, all roads were marked. They stepped back, staring at the map.

“I’m going to talk to Jensen,” Foster said. “Wrangle the budget for at least one radar from him. We need to start working on this as soon as possible.”

“Maybe the FBI field office can give you a hand there,” Tatum said. “I’ll check.”

“I need to talk to Harry,” Zoe told them. She’d filled them in regarding the email from the killer in the car. “Get another article ready.”

“I’ll also ask Shelton if we can get anything on that email address,” Tatum said.

Zoe nodded distractedly. “It’s a temporary email address. I doubt he’d ever use it again, but it’s worth a try.”

Foster and Tatum left to make their phone calls, leaving Zoe alone in the room. She was exhausted. Opening her laptop, she read the email the killer had sent several times more. Then she got up and wrote three phrases on the whiteboard.

Every step I took was necessary and unavoidable.

There’s a reason to all of this.

Wait until you have the full story.

She regarded the sentences, tapping her lips. Then she dialed Harry.

“I was just about to call you,” Harry said. “Did you read it?”

“Yes,” Zoe said. “I have a few ideas.”

“I looked into this Henry Lee Lucas he mentions. I suppose you already know who that is.”

“He was a serial killer. No one knows exactly how many people he killed, but he was prolific. At one point he claimed he killed three thousand people, which is what the unsub is referring to.”

“Yeah, but do you know where he was tried?”

Zoe frowned. “Somewhere in Texas. He was caught by a Texas Ranger, if I’m not mistaken.”

“He was supposed to be tried in Austin, but due to pretrial publicity, they moved the trial to San Angelo.”

Zoe exhaled and read the email again. “Everyone back then had a friend or family member in the jury,” she said.

“Your serial killer was raised in San Angelo.” Harry sounded pleased with himself. “He’s a local boy.”

“He mentions his parents talking about it,” Zoe said. “When was the trial?”

“It was . . . 1984.”

“So assuming he was between five and ten years old, that’d mean he’s now around forty, perhaps just a bit older.”

“Why assume he was between five and ten? What if he was thirteen?”

“Then he probably wouldn’t say he remembers his parents talking about it. He’d say he remembers the kids in class talking about it.” She recalled her own experience as a teenager, how the kids in school would talk about nothing else except the Maynard serial killer.

“Good point.”

“And I know how to talk to him now,” Zoe said. “This guy has concocted a whole story about his mission. This comparison to Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis ? This is him telling us that he has a grand plan. A vocation. His email is full of it. This is what he wants to share.”

“And what will his vocation tell you?” Harry asked. “How will that help the profile?”

Zoe snorted. “I couldn’t care less about his vocation. It’s just a story he tells himself. But talking about it might get him to accidentally give us a real hint, something we could use.”

“What do you mean, a story he tells himself?”

“People lie to themselves all the time, Harry. You should know it better than most. And this guy is telling himself one big elaborate lie to avoid seeing a very simple truth.”

“What truth?”

“That he gets off on burying women alive.”

Zoe was reading a report about Henry Lee Lucas in the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry when the door to the situation room was flung open. Lyons stood in the doorway, her face flushed.

“I have a suspect,” she said, out of breath.

Zoe felt a jolt of excitement, almost as if it were an airborne virus, highly infectious. “Who?” she asked.

“His name is Alfred Sheppard. He called the hotline.”

“When?”

“This morning.” Lyons paced back and forth in the room, her face animated. “This guy Sheppard phoned an hour and a half ago, said he remembered he saw someone who looked like Maribel Howe with a guy in a local pub.”

Zoe nodded, her attention rapt.

“They took some details from him. It turns out his van was one of the vehicles that drove through the roadblocks at 67 yesterday. It’s a white Ford Transit. We figured it merited closer inspection. And guess what?”

“I don’t guess.”

“He showed up twice at the Medina memorial site. His face matches one of the people we photographed there.”

There it was. Too many coincidences to ignore. Zoe stood up, unable to stay still any longer. “Do Nicole’s parents know who he is?”

“Not by name. I sent someone over with a picture to interview them, see if this guy looks familiar.”

“Is his story being verified?”

“Maribel Howe took a selfie in that pub with a friend, tagged the location, and posted it in her Instagram profile. The photo was posted three days before she disappeared. It checks out, but anyone could have come up with it.”

Zoe nodded. “Do you have enough for a search warrant?”

“Looking into it.”

“Maybe a professional opinion from me will sway a judge’s mind.”

“Couldn’t hurt.”

“Where is he now?”

“We asked him to come over and tell us more about Maribel Howe and the guy she was with. He’s in Interview Room One. As far as he knows, he’s here to help us out.”

“Anyone in there with him?”

“No. I took a quick statement from him and then asked him to wait. He’s been there for about fifteen minutes now. Foster was just about to enter, but we thought we’d talk to you about how to proceed. You can watch the interrogation from the monitor room. Come on.”

Zoe followed Lyons down the hallway, deeper into the station. The interview room was almost at the farthest side of the station, and that was not by chance. Anyone taken there would have to walk by the different departments, brushing past uniformed cops, detectives, detainees. Closed doors with plaques like “Homicide” and “Evidence Storage” and “Armory.” Civilians who were unused to the scenery of a police station were set instantly on edge by it all. And nervous people made mistakes.

The monitor room was small and dimly lit. Both left and right walls had large darkened one-way mirrors in them, looking into the adjacent interrogation rooms. Detective Foster, Lieutenant Jensen, and Tatum were already there, looking through the left mirror at the man who sat in Interview Room One.

He was bald and wore a white T-shirt and a pair of worn, stained jeans. His right foot tapped on the floor rapidly, his arms folded. He glanced at the mirror and then quickly looked away.

“How did he get here?” Zoe asked without preamble. “Did someone pick him up, or did he drive over?”

“He drove over. The van’s in the parking lot,” Foster said. “Someone’s checking it out right now.”

“Just from outside, I hope,” Jensen said. “We don’t have cause to—”

“Just looking through the van’s windows and taking some pictures,” Foster answered briskly. He was impatient and didn’t seem in the mood to coddle Jensen as he usually did.

“Okay,” Jensen said, his voice clipped. “Was he Mirandized?”

“No. He’s not under arrest,” Foster said.

“I don’t want another mess like the one with the Whitfield case, Detective. I want you to Mirandize him.”