Mike Omer - In the Darkness

As far as Tatum could see, the entire police force was now tasked with finding Schrodinger’s Killer. Petty thieves, abusive husbands, drug dealers, and drunk drivers all got the day off from police scrutiny, free to break the law at leisure. Because unless you happened to bury women alive, the San Angelo police didn’t care.

Officially, Jensen was in charge of the operation, but a tectonic shift was transpiring. The Texas Department of Public Safety had joined the circus. Texas Rangers roamed the division, and one of them, a gray-haired, stocky man, was slowly taking control of the investigation. Jensen appeared helpless against the sudden coup. Tatum guessed they’d have a day or two at most until DPS would be formally in charge.

Meanwhile, Foster was the one who actually called the shots. He assigned people to go through security cam footage, interview witnesses who had seen Juliet the night of the party, go through social media profiles of possible future victims, and do whatever else occurred to him.

They had no morning meeting, no time to talk . It was time to do . Talking could come later. And besides, Jensen was distracted because there was a press conference at nine in the morning, and the DPS major intended to join him. The citizens of San Angelo—and, in fact, the rest of Texas—all wanted to hear about the brilliant police operation that had led to the rescue of the beautiful and heroic Juliet Beach. Those were actual words Tatum had heard on the radio that morning. Beautiful and heroic.

Tatum found it hard to concentrate. His desk was opposite Foster’s, and every few minutes someone would approach Foster, often leaning on Foster’s desk and thus pointing their ass toward Tatum as they reported their findings or asked a question. The narrow passageway between the desks guaranteed that the said backsides were often inches from Tatum’s head. He’d seen a plethora of rear ends that morning, of all kinds and shapes. That was not a position he enjoyed.

He gritted his teeth as yet another bum was pointed at him, this one belonging to a uniformed cop, and continued reading through the crime scene report. This time, they had a lot more to work with.

Juliet Beach had been buried inside a box almost identical to the previous boxes. A metal contraption was placed in one corner with the drawing of a skull and bones—the supposed acid container. It was empty and wasn’t wired to anything—a prop, just like Zoe had intuited. Tatum saw the twisted sense in it. The so-called “experiment” involved constantly turning the feed on and off, leaving the viewers in suspense when the feed was offline. But there wouldn’t be enough suspense without an imminent threat.

Several dents and scratches marred the box’s wooden lid. One dent was 0.6 inches deep, and its shape indicated a heavy tool with a blunt rectangular edge, which didn’t match the shovels the police had used to dig up the box. The tool had nearly gone through the lid, which was just over an inch thick.

Tatum imagined the murderer, a shadowy, faceless man slamming the heavy tool at the lid, trying to smash it to kill Juliet Beach before the police could get to her.

As in the previous instances, they found no fingerprints, hairs, fabrics, or anything similar on the box’s exterior. The interior was filled with fingerprints, broken fingernails, blood, and skin cells, all probably belonging to the victim. It had all been sent to the lab.

They’d found track marks in the sand, and some were fairly recent. They’d matched a portion of the tracks to similar markings found at Nicole Medina’s crime scene.

The cable that ran up from the infrared camera in the box was unclipped this time, protruding from the sand. They’d found a single fingerprint on the plastic plug. It had been checked against AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, but the print was partial and smudged, and they’d found no match.

Contrary to popular belief, fingerprinting wasn’t a magical method of identification. Given a good fingerprint or two, the system could spit a long list of possible matches after a couple of hours. But there was only so much it could do with a smudge. The database was just too large.

Still, Tatum mentally noted this. He had an idea that he wanted to check later.

The box had been buried about three feet below the surface. Underneath it was a hollow space that had caved in. This was the reason the killer hadn’t been able to bury Juliet as deep as before, and this lucky happenstance was the only reason Juliet was still alive.

There were several photographs of the crime scene. Tatum wished that someone had taken a photograph before they’d begun digging. But of course, their attention had been elsewhere. Even Zoe didn’t grumble about it this time. The location was a bit more remote than before, in a large field of fenced private land. The killer had presumably opened the unlocked gate in the fence to drive through. Numerous fingerprints on the gate had been matched to the officers who’d opened it and to the owner. The tire tracks of the killer’s vehicle led to a different portion of the fence, which had been cut with wire cutters. No fingerprints anywhere.

How close had they been to catching him?

Tatum couldn’t dislodge the “could haves,” “should haves,” and “if onlys” that always followed moments like these. He let himself drift on a daydream in which they’d thought to set up roadblocks on Burma Road, the serial killer had been caught, and the San Angelo citizens were throwing a parade in their—

A set of buttocks brushed his shoulders.

“Oops, sorry,” the young detective apologized, shifting a bit closer to Foster’s desk.

Tatum got up and strode outside. Somehow, the baking sun was better than the air-conditioned chaos inside the station.

He took out his phone and dialed the one and only Sarah Lee, his private analyst.

“Tatum, I’m not your private analyst,” she said as she answered the phone. “I have actual important work here.”

“That’s what I admire about you—the way you manage to multitask all those different things. And on top of that to take care of a dog. How is Grace, by the way?”

“Grace is fine, Tatum.” She tried to hide the smile in her voice, quite unsuccessfully. “What do you want?”

“I have a fingerprint.”

“I’d say you have ten. That’s how fingerprints usually work.”

“It’s from a crime scene.”

“Run it against AFIS, and you’ll have your results in no time.”

“It’s a crap fingerprint. AFIS can’t match it.”

“What do you want from me?”

“You remember the Klaus case back in LA? It was . . . about three years ago.”

She took a second to recall it. “Oh yeah, bank robbery, right?”

“Right. We had two partial fingerprints, and you did some magic incantation and got a match to a similar crime.”

“It wasn’t a magic incantation.”

“You mixed it in your witch’s cauldron—”

“Tatum.”

“And added a newt’s eye and some pixie dust, and then opened your spell book—”

“That’s not how it went.”

“And spoke the magic words—”

“I just ran it against a much smaller database.”

“Well.” Tatum grinned. “It felt like magic to me. Can you do it with my fingerprint?”

She sighed. “What I did then was run it against fingerprints found at other robbery crime scenes in the area in the previous three months. And even then, you might remember, I got a bunch of false matches.”

“And one true match,” Tatum pointed out.

“Okay, fine.”

“Can you run my fingerprint against crimes in Texas from the last ten years?”

“That’s your definition of small ?” she asked. “I’d never get a match like that.”