Mike Omer - In the Darkness

His phone rang. Mancuso.

“Zoe never checked in to any flight.” Mancuso’s voice was high with tension. “Any news on road accidents?”

“DPS sent patrol cars on every main route between San Angelo and Austin searching for her,” Tatum said. “But she must have taken Route 71, and it’s a good road. It’s not likely she would have lost her way. And if she had an accident on it, we’d have already . . .” His gut sank. “Known. Shit. Mancuso, I’ll call you back.”

He hung up and dashed out of the room.

She hadn’t gotten on any flight, and they couldn’t find her on the way to Austin, but there was one place he’d never checked. It hadn’t even occurred to him.

The parking lot was on the other side of the motel.

The rental still stood there. Zoe hadn’t taken it after all.

Could she have decided to take an Uber, realizing she couldn’t drive? Tatum doubted it. He doubled back, deciding to check her room.

He strolled inside the lobby, trying to seem as casual as he could. He could pull a badge to get a key to Zoe’s room, but the desk clerk might call the manager, and they’d say he needed a search warrant . . . he had no time. The girl behind the desk had seen him and Zoe pass through together multiple times. He forced a smile onto his face.

“Hey,” he said. “My friend locked herself out of her room. Do you have a spare key?”

She looked at him uncertainly. Tatum broke eye contact and coughed, feigning embarrassment. “She’s . . . um. Waiting in my room. She doesn’t have her clothing with her at the moment.”

The girl blushed and tried to hide her smile. She located a spare key and handed it to Tatum. It took a lot of self-control not to dash away with it.

His heart was in his throat as he opened the door. Zoe’s room was a mess. Papers were scattered on the bed, some on the floor. He went through them quickly—they were all related to the Schrodinger case. He found a pair of discarded stockings in the corner by the bed. Her toothbrush and the rest of her toiletries were still in the bathroom, and he guessed she’d forgotten to pack them in her haste. There were some pictures of the latest crime scene on the night table, and he picked them up to flip through them, then noticed a business card underneath.

Joseph Dodson. Air-conditioning technician and electrician. Tatum frowned, confused, then recalled the man he’d seen leaving Zoe’s room that morning a few days before.

A very large man.

He held the card between thumb and forefinger, trying to think this through, when his phone rang. The number was one he didn’t know, but he’d called a lot of people in the past couple of hours.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Agent Gray?” The man on the other side breathed heavily, voice unsteady. “It’s Harry. The reporter.”

“I don’t have time right now to—”

“I just got another email from Schrodinger. A video.” This didn’t sound like the cynical, smooth-talking reporter Tatum had spoken with. The man was on the verge of hysteria. “I’m sending you the link.”

He hung up.

A second later, the phone bleeped as it received an incoming message. It wasn’t one of the regular random URLs from before. This was a link to a YouTube video. Tatum tapped the link, and the video showed up on-screen.

Tatum’s knees buckled, and he sat on the bed heavily as he stared at Zoe’s face.

Darkness.

For a second, Zoe thought it was still night, that she’d pulled the blinds down. Her mouth was dry, woolly. She shifted, perhaps to reach for her phone, see what time it was.

She couldn’t move her hands. They were bound behind her back; she could feel the hard bite of something holding her wrists together. Her mouth was gagged.

A jumble of sensations and fragments of memory surfaced. Pain. Her body ached all over, an echo of a much worse pain from before.

She kicked with her foot, hit something hard just above it. She was dreaming. It sometimes happened—she was so focused on her cases that she had nightmares about them. But the pain in her body, the bite in her wrists, the feeling in her mouth: it was all too real.

And the darkness was absolute. The sort of darkness where she couldn’t tell the difference when she shut her eyes.

She tried to pull her hands free, wriggled, hitting wooden walls on both sides. Panicking, she tried to sit up, hit her forehead.

It wasn’t silent in the cramped, dark space. A muffled, consistent screeching filled the void around her. Only when her throat began burning did she realize it was her, screaming through the gag, consumed by terror.

It wasn’t a rational fear; it was something primal, the acute fear of being trapped in the dark, unable to move, the walls of the box closing in on her. Anywhere she moved, she felt the outline of a wall, sturdy, impregnable. And beyond it she suddenly knew was only earth. Rocks and soil in all directions. Even if her hands were untied, she’d still be trapped in this tiny abyss.

Zoe’s body took control as she shrieked, wriggled, and shook her head, all rational thoughts fading in the hurricane of fear that stormed through her mind.

She screamed again. Tatum stiffened; the sound was unbearable.

“Mute the damn thing,” Foster said, his voice cracking. He was talking on the phone.

Tatum was in the situation room with Foster and Lyons. They’d set a laptop on the table, the video constantly running on it. He knew that throughout the station, screens were displaying the same video, speakers emitting the same screams. He checked his watch, as he’d done more than a dozen times since he’d entered the room. It’d been an hour and twenty minutes since the video had started. It was impossible to know how long Zoe had been in that box. Two hours? Three?

Eight?

Lyons sat in front of the computer, her eyes shimmering. She didn’t mute the video, and they all knew why. There was a chance, however slight, that the same trick they’d used for Juliet Beach would work here. Foster had sent patrol cars blaring music at full volume as soon as Tatum had told him about the video.

But when Zoe was quiet, they could hear nothing else. And Tatum knew Schrodinger would never make the same mistake twice. Wherever she was buried, she was buried deep, well beyond sound.

“Another comment,” Lyons said. “‘This is a fake.’ Fake spelled with ck .”

For the first time, Schrodinger’s video had comments. They had a view count and even a “thumbs up, thumbs down” indication. Schrodinger had embraced YouTube wholeheartedly, creating his own channel, called Schrodinger. The video was named “Experiment Number Four.” FBI and DPS cyber fighting teams were attempting to trace the feed, but Tatum wasn’t hopeful.

He paced the room, but now he paused and stared at the screen again. The video feed was darker than before; it was hard to see the details. Zoe lay on her back, a gag in her mouth, hair disheveled, face wet with tears. Beyond her, Tatum could just glimpse the darkness of a wooden wall.

There were no props, no metal contraptions labeled as poison or explosives. The feed ran steadily, with no changes.

For a moment, his mind clouded, blind panic flooding his brain, his thought process washed away by huge frothing waves of pure fear for Zoe’s life. He forced himself to breathe, to think of it rationally. He would be of no use to Zoe like this. He checked the time again. An hour and twenty-three minutes since the video had started.

They had two GPR teams searching as fast as they could. Tatum had used Zoe’s formula to figure out the wider radius of the search parameter, and they were focusing on it, but of course, since Zoe’s grave was probably filled with a clay-rich soil, the chance they would find anything was almost zero, even if they stood right on top of her. The K-9 units were searching the same areas as well.