Mike Omer - In the Darkness

Last night, before Andrea had called—her mind lingered there for a second, and she forced it away—she had been focused on Debra Miller. Debra Miller was the first victim, the one who’d prodded the killer to act.

If the killer knew who Debra was and that she was running away, he could figure no one would report her missing. Could that be all there was?

No. There were endless homeless girls who had no one to look for them. They’d probably be easier to pick up since many of them were prostitutes. But this killer always focused on girls who had a home and a life. Debra might have been messed up, but she also came from a family who loved her, and she had a place to come back to.

She tried to find a common trait between Debra and the rest of the girls, but there was none. Debra was significantly older than the rest of the victims. She was a drug addict, unhealthy; the others were fine. Debra was searching for a way out of her current life, which might resemble Maribel Howe, but not Juliet and Nicole.

She decided to try to attack the problem differently. See what the three other victims had in common and try to figure out how this applied to Debra Miller.

Physically, the three women were different, but all three were good looking. Juliet Beach was quite stunning, in fact, but all three would make heads turn. Could the killer have seen Debra as good looking? She was thin, as were Juliet and Nicole, but Maribel was curvy and had plump cheeks. Zoe doubted just looks could be the answer.

He stalked the girls using social media. She’d reviewed the accounts of all three extensively. They all posted frequently. All seemed happy, though that was hardly extraordinary on social media, the land of fake smiles. All took photos with various men—maybe that was what set him off. Perhaps Debra Miller had propositioned him somehow, making him think of her as slutty, just like the other girls.

But that felt wrong. As far as Zoe could tell, all three girls’ profiles were quite pure, in social media standards. No teasing photos, no bikinis or bare-backed shots or even kissy faces. Just photos of girls having fun, going out with friends.

Friends. They were popular. Or at least, the social media equivalent of popular. A lot of pictures with different people and lots of followers. All three had over five hundred followers in their Instagram accounts.

So the three girls were beautiful and popular while Debra was lonely and sick looking.

Did he target them because they were the opposite of Debra or—

Her mind latched on to something Debra’s father had said. She’d been the sweetest, happiest kid when she was at school. So popular, surrounded by friends. In the sensory-deprivation chamber Zoe was trapped in, she could hear his voice in her ear, as if he were next to her.

When she was at school.

As far as the killer was concerned, the four victims were the same. Beautiful. Popular.

But Debra had become unhappy and lonely as soon as school had ended.

He was a local boy. He’d gone to school with her.

She was suddenly completely sure of it. He’d gone to school with her—she, the popular, happy girl; him, the weird kid who had no friends. Hours upon hours to fantasize about her in class. His profile clearly painted him as obsessive, and the same tendencies would have been there as a boy. It would be a fixation that would never completely dissipate. Then he met her, all those years later. Already stressed, probably because of something at work—maybe he was fired or skipped for promotion or got a boss who hated him. And there she was. After more than twenty years, back in his life. It would be enough to trigger a reaction to fulfill his fantasy.

That was enough to hone down on him. How many students in one high school? A thousand? Cross-check them with her profile, maybe fingerprint them to match the partial fingerprint they already had, and that was it.

Unfortunately, those were not things she could do right now. But the police could. And Tatum. She had to communicate this somehow.

A uniformed officer opened the door of the situation room. “Foster, Joseph Dodson is here.”

“Good,” Foster said. “Be right there.”

The man closed the door, and Foster turned to face Tatum and Lyons.

“Okay, we need to be smart here. We don’t have much time.”

Tatum nodded. Usually, they’d let the man sweat a bit before storming in, playing good cop, bad cop. But every minute the suspect was waiting, Zoe was suffocating. Tatum glanced at the screen. For the past twenty minutes, she’d been lying with her eyes closed, not moving. It was almost worse than before, when she’d struggled and screamed.

“How do you think we should play this?” he asked.

“You go in first,” Foster said. “He already saw you once; he knows that you know who he is. It might unsettle him. We should probably get you some props like last time with Sheppard. Pictures from crime scenes, a thick folder, his business card in an evidence bag. We already have the phone records, so we can act it out a bit, make it sound like we know a lot more than we actually do. Then I come in, tell him I can keep the feds off his back if he tells us where Zoe is right now . . . something like that?”

Tatum hesitated. It sounded like a reasonable strategy with an everyday criminal, but for this serial killer?

“What about the warrant to his house?” he asked. “We might be able to interrogate him better if we had something concrete.”

Foster sighed. “Lyons is working on it. If we don’t get it in ten minutes, I think we’ll just . . .” He waved his hand ambiguously, clearly not wanting to spell it out. Tatum already caught the drift. Foster was intent on searching the man’s house, legal or not. He appreciated it.

He had something else that held him back.

Zoe had apparently slept with this man. Would she really have been so blind, not to see the signs? As a child, she’d been on friendly terms with Rod Glover, and she still carried the emotional scars. Tatum wanted to believe his partner would never let herself be intimate with someone who could possibly be a killer.

Of course, some psychopaths were very good actors.

This interrogation could take hours. If they were wrong about Dodson, Zoe’s chances would decrease from slim to none.

“Tell you what,” he said. “You go first. Props and all. Then, in half an hour I’ll join in, do the whole FBI spiel, while hopefully Lyons gets whatever we need from this guy’s apartment.”

“You sure?” Foster frowned.

“Yeah. I want to think it through a bit. Get my ducks in a row.”

Foster glanced at the laptop for a long second, exhaled, and left the room, closing the door behind him.

Tatum turned to the laptop. Zoe lay with her eyes open now, still not moving. The only thing that indicated she was still alive was her occasional blinking. The view counter was in six digits by now. The story had hit all the main news channels, and the link to the video had become viral. The killer was getting what he wanted. The world was watching.

“What would you say if you were here?” he asked the screen. He got up and paced back and forth in the room. Even if Joseph was the wrong man, what else could he do? What would Zoe do?

She’d analyze what they knew. Estimate what it meant. Try to reach new conclusions.

Zoe screamed through her gag again, thrashing from side to side. Tatum took three steps to the laptop and muted the sound. Enough people were watching the damn video. If there was anything worth hearing, they’d let him know.

He sat by the table, took out his notebook, and bit his lower lip. Then he wrote down, The unsub attacked her in the parking lot .