Mike Omer - In the Darkness

Eating dinner with Tatum was different. It was a struggle to put her finger on the exact reason. Perhaps because they worked together. Though she’d partnered with people before, and she wasn’t sure it felt the same. It had bothered her when he’d been furious with her, and she didn’t usually care what people thought about her.

They’d never really talked through their argument. The Schrodinger case and the urgency with Andrea had swept it down the current of time. It was for the best.

Or maybe it wasn’t?

Maybe giving the matter the closure it deserved was better. She’d tried to apologize once, but Tatum had been furious at the time, and perhaps she’d managed to botch the entire thing. It was time she apologized again. And then they’d have dinner because she was starving .

She left her room and walked over to Tatum’s door. She rapped on it, and a moment later she heard him say sleepily, “Just a moment.”

As she waited, her thoughts went back to the last crime scene. Different than the previous ones, for sure. The box with the girl hadn’t been entirely covered, for some reason. And the network cable hadn’t been clipped—it had simply been disconnected. Why had the killer changed his pattern?

Of course, serial killers changed their signatures and MO all the time. It was part of the fantasy’s evolution. With every murder, every iteration, they fine-tuned their methods to match their experience and their needs. So why had he left the coffin partly uncovered? She frowned.

The door opened, and Tatum stood in the doorway, blinking at her sleepily. His shirt was a bit rumpled, his hair shooting to all sides.

“I just fell asleep with all my clothes on,” he said. “I guess I was exhausted.”

“I know how you feel,” Zoe muttered. “Listen . . . I wanted to . . .”

Why had the camera been disconnected? Surely the killer wanted the entire video of the buried girl and not just part of it.

“Something you wanted?” Tatum asked.

She looked at him, her mind spinning.

“The killer,” she said. “He figured out we were about to find her. That’s why he disconnected the camera. And that’s why . . . oh! He tried to dig her up to kill her. So she wouldn’t be able to give us anything!”

“I guess it’s possible.”

“I’m sure of it!” She brushed past him into his room, pacing back and forth excitedly.

“Why don’t you come in?” Tatum raised an eyebrow. He shut the door.

“He doesn’t have a gun, just like you said,” Zoe said. “Or he would have shot Juliet through the lid.” Her heart thrummed in her chest.

“So . . . why didn’t he finish the job?”

“He must have heard the cops approaching. He panicked and fled. They must have missed him by minutes.”

“Do you want to grab something to eat?” Tatum suggested. “I’m a bit hungry.”

She glanced at him. Right, that was why she’d come here. To eat. “Good idea. Let’s order a pizza or something. I want to think this through.”

He sat in the basement for hours, waiting. Coming up with endless plans and actions and panicky ideas, letting them spin and churn in his head while his body hardly moved. Every second, the cops might barge into his house. Maybe someone had seen his van driving away from the burial site, mere minutes before the police showed up. Maybe the girl had seen his face, had described it in perfect detail, enough for even the shabbiest sketch artist to come up with a reasonable impression.

He’d always known the chances were against him. After all, he was hardly trying to keep a low profile. Eventually he would slip up or miss something, and he’d be caught.

But so soon?

He had a list he kept on his desk in the basement, a numbered list of all his planned experiments, slowly escalating. He crossed off each experiment as he finished it. There were twenty.

He’d managed two . And botched the third.

Grabbing the list, he tore it up in rage, crumpling the pieces in his fist.

And then kept waiting.

He contemplated checking out the unfinished video of the girl, but his heart wasn’t in it. He kept imagining he heard footsteps upstairs, that the SWAT team was just outside the basement door. Soon they’d break open the door, shouting, “Move, move, move,” perhaps tossing a flash grenade to stun him, before filling the room, slamming him to the floor, hands behind his back.

Finally, he couldn’t take the tension anymore and dialed his cop friend, Dick.

The phone rang. Was Dick at the station right now, mouthing to the surrounding cops, It’s him ? Maybe they were motioning frantically for someone to trace the call. Telling Dick to act natural. He could feel his heart in his throat, nearly hung up.

“Hey!” Dick sounded cheerful when he answered. Too cheerful. It was probably a trap. They knew.

“Hey yourself,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “How’d it go today?”

“We found the girl. Alive! She’s in shock but unharmed.”

“That’s amazing.”

“You’re telling me! I was sure it was going to end up with another body. This is one of those rare days that it’s good to be a cop.”

“Wanna celebrate with some steak?” he asked, stopping himself from asking the question on the tip of his tongue: Did she see his face?

“Nah, sorry. I’m exhausted. I spent the whole goddamn day securing the scene. Next week?”

“Sure. So the girl’s all right?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t remember a thing, though. I guess it’s shock. Doctors say it’s possible the memories might return later.”

He shut his eyes. Dick could be stringing him along . . . but he was such a bad liar. He remembered that time they’d thrown a surprise birthday party for Dick’s wife. He hadn’t been able to stop fidgeting the entire day.

“Here’s hoping,” he said, realizing he’d let the silence stretch out.

“I’m holding on to that promise for steak, okay?”

“If you bring the beer.”

“Don’t I always?” Dick laughed. “See ya, man.”

“Bye.”

His palms were sweating as he put the phone on the table. Was he really off the hook?

For now, apparently he was.

But it was only a matter of time. The girl might remember. Or they’d match the tire tracks at the burial site to his van. Or they’d figure out he’d been tipped off about the search, start questioning everyone, asking who they talked to. And Dick would say, “No one. Who would I tell? Oh, right, I remember—it’s probably nothing, but . . .”

He unfurled his left fist, the torn, crumpled pieces from the list of experiments still in it. He wanted to go on. How many more experiments would he manage before they got him? Two? Three? Five?

One?

He had to make it count.

Item twenty on the list was his masterpiece. The one that would nail his spot in the pages of history. He could afford to skip a few. He’d have to buy a signal booster for it to work, but he’d already done his research. He knew where to get it so it would be delivered the next day.

And maybe this time he could take the one victim who could really turn him into a legend.

The constant noise in the police station on Monday morning reminded Tatum of an angry swarm of bees, if bees constantly drank coffee, shouted instructions on the phone, and walked briskly down corridors, muttering to themselves. There was a definite sense that stuff needed to get done, and if you weren’t getting things done, you’d better make damn sure you found something to get done or at least look like you were getting something done.