Mike Omer - In the Darkness

Another paper shredded. And another. And another.

“Where. Is. Zoe?”

Prescott clenched his teeth tightly, as if forcing himself to be quiet.

“I saw on your laptop that you bought a cellular signal booster online on Sunday. Why? Where did you put her that you needed a cellular booster?”

No answer.

Almost there. Just a bit more. Hang in there, Zoe.

“You know what?” Tatum said brightly. “I didn’t even tell you the best part of our profile. Zoe figured it out, and seeing your library at home, I realize she was spot on. You had some medical books, a bunch of serial killer biographies. And a book called Buried Alive , which I didn’t need to open to guess what it’s about.”

“So what?” Prescott asked, sneering. “I do my research.”

“Right! Except you know what was missing? I didn’t find one book about Schrodinger or physics or quantum mechanics. And I didn’t see even a pamphlet about humanity or the process of thought or any sort of philosophy. Almost as if those things didn’t really interest you. Isn’t that strange?”

Prescott didn’t answer.

“Here, let me read you from Zoe’s notes.” He put down the pages left from the draft, picked up the notebook, flipping another page. “The unsub is obsessed with his mission, his goal. He wants to believe this is what drives him, what makes him kill. This is why he created the website, why he streams those videos, why he’s constantly naming himself Schrodinger, and why he calls the murders ‘experiments.’ But it’s a lie he tells himself.”

Tatum paused, raised his eyes for a moment to meet Prescott’s, then kept reading. “The truth is, the unsub kills those women for one reason. He derives sexual stimulation from the act of burying women alive. He uses his obsession as a facade to avoid the shame in acknowledging that to himself.”

Tatum put the notebook back. Took a page from the leftover autobiography. Shredded it. Shredded another one.

“She used big words. Zoe’s like that,” he said. “But what she meant was this dude has a kinky taste and likes to get it off while burying women alive. And he’s so damn embarrassed by his weird fetish that he invented a whole story just so he doesn’t feel like a weirdo loser.”

Another page shredded. Prescott’s body was trembling.

“What I’ll do once I finish shredding this piece of shit you call a book here,” Tatum said, “is call a press conference. And tell them we caught the Digging Killer. And this sad sack of shit used to polish his knob while watching his own videos. And that’s why he did all this. That’s how people will remember you.”

Page shredded.

“Unless you tell me. Where. Zoe. Is.”

“You can keep going,” Prescott said, his voice trembling with rage. “But you won’t get anything from me. And your precious Dr. Bentley can rot underground. She was right under your noses, and you never even realized it.”

Tatum put down the draft, feeling a twitch of excitement. “She was right under our noses.”

“That’s right,” Prescott sputtered, flushing. “She’s right under your fucking noses.”

“Language, Doctor. You didn’t say she is under our nose. You said she was under our nose. Did you move her?” Tatum looked at the man intently, thinking hard. He’d bought a cellular signal booster. What had changed?

For some reason, Prescott hadn’t been able to stretch a cable from the box to the surface. He’d had to boost the signal of the transmission. The puzzle pieces shifted, the truth taking shape. “No. Of course you didn’t move her. It was us. We’re the ones who moved her. She was under our noses just before .”

Tatum lunged from his chair, and Prescott tightened, as if worried that he would strike him. But Tatum was already striding toward the door. He knew where Zoe was.

It was hard to tell how long she’d been there. Zoe knew she couldn’t trust her own measurement of time. Sleep tried to grab hold of her, and she struggled to stay awake. It didn’t make sense. She would spend less air if she were sleeping. But she knew that in all probability, once she fell asleep, she would never wake up. She couldn’t make herself give up. Not yet. She kept wondering whether there was anything else she could do. Any message she could try to pass along.

After her initial message of school , she’d switched to Debra school , which was a nightmare to get right. She’d tried three times, feeling that she managed to garble it completely each time, blinking too much, pausing in the wrong moments, fumbling a letter. Her focus and concentration were shot to hell.

Finally, she’d given up and just lay there, thoughts flickering in and out in her mind like a swarm of fireflies, out of sync with each other.

She was dizzy, and her head pounded. Was it exhaustion, thirst, or the low amount of oxygen in the air?

For the millionth time, she wondered if she’d screwed herself by trying to communicate with people outside. After all, they’d been searching for her, and then she’d given them a single word, school . It must’ve been easy to assume that she meant she was buried in a school. Had she pulled them away from a promising lead, sending them on a fool’s errand?

She wanted to believe that Tatum, at least, would know the killer would never risk burying her somewhere so public, with so many possible witnesses.

Fading away, she began hallucinating again, hearing voices. Andrea, her parents, old colleagues and friends. It was reassuring that her mind had finally stopped obsessing about serial murderers and psychopaths, letting her relax, surrounded by people who cared about her.

A sudden thunk made her eyes open wide to no perceivable effect. It was still dark.

But she heard sounds, real sounds. The muffled voices of people, the scraping and thumping. After so long in a dark silence, it was an overwhelming sensation to hear something aside from her own breathing and sounds. She tried to let out a scream for help, couldn’t.

A creaking sound was followed by sudden sunlight. She instantly shut her eyes, and even through her eyelids, the light shot a sharp pain through her skull.

Someone was by her side, pulling the gag from her mouth. She moved her tongue around, the sudden freedom of it feeling sublime. She wanted water but couldn’t ask for it, couldn’t talk.

A voice murmured by her ear, soft, tense, full of worry. Tatum. His arms helped her up, pulling her close. She let go then, her feet buckling, and he had to grab her to keep her upright. Someone cut the binding on her wrists. People were shouting around her, hurried instructions for a medic.

A bottle to her lips, a slight sip of water. She let it roll in her mouth, almost crying at the sensation.

An arm around her shoulders, a strong hand, and Tatum’s voice. “You’re all right. We got you, you’re—”

She shifted, pulling herself away from the hand sharply. She didn’t want anyone to touch her. It was too close, too limiting, like the box. She wanted nothing to contain her body.

Forcing one eye open to a slit, she expected a familiar scenery from the previous crime scenes. Desert soil, pebbles, rocks, and cacti around her.

But that wasn’t what she saw. The ground was green, for some reason, and there were trees around her and large white shapes . . . rocks?

She opened the other eye, holding a hand to shade her face, feeling Tatum’s silent presence by her side.

A . . . cemetery?

“Where?” she croaked.

“Fairmount Cemetery,” Tatum said. “We’re in San Angelo.”

A cemetery. She’d been buried alive in a cemetery. Her brain was already churning up ideas, but they were disjointed, broken. She turned around, stared at the large pit they’d pulled her out of and the coffin at the bottom. A coffin, not a box.