Available Darkness Season 1

bit hard on his inner cheek. The copper taste of blood flooded his gums.
    He told his agents to send stills of the video to headquarters to cross-check the system for matches. They had already issued regional Be On the Look Outs for the victim’s presumably stolen vehicle. If they couldn’t find a name to match the killer’s face, they would continue to the next step, releasing info to the media to see if anybody could provide an identity or location of their suspect.
    Caleb loathed releasing the details of this case to the press. He’d prefer to keep things quiet and make his job simple.
    Beneath the white-hot heat of the media spotlight, tt would be hard to kill the man once he found him.
    Hard, but not impossible.
    Caleb’s radio crackled through the silence. “Boss, you need to see this. In the master bedroom upstairs.”
    Caleb ascended the steps two at a time. He entered the room and felt an all too familiar sinking in his gut as he saw hundreds of DVD’s and photographs poured onto the bed, and two agents watching something on a laptop.
    Caleb knew what was on the video before his eyes hit the screen.
    A young dark-haired girl no more than 11, underneath a naked bald man ― the one from downstairs. The camera was zoomed in on the girl’s glazed dark eyes ― this was not the first time she’d been raped.
    She simply stared into the camera, which was being held by someone, likely the girlfriend, judging from what the lens most focused on — the girl’s eyes. The camera woman was likely a victim at one point, too, Caleb guessed.
    The numbness in the child’s expression as the bald man raped her, stabbed Caleb in the guts. Whoever the girl was, that person had died long ago, leaving a shell not unlike those downstairs.
    He averted his gaze, turning it to the bed, toward the pile of evidence. Caleb spotted a few other children in the photos, though none with the bald man. They were likely gathered from internet newsgroups or traded with other pedophiles. The mind boggled at how many children’s slow deaths were chronicled in the mound of evidence.
    Agent Ramirez handed Caleb a photograph of the girl from the video, the image no less shocking.
    “Found that in his printer tray, which allowed us to secure an emergency search warrant,” Ramirez explained. “Then we found all this in the closet.”
    If the rapist weren’t already a roasted slab of pork, Caleb would surely have run downstairs and put the gun to the man’s head and pulled the trigger. Twice.
    “Did you see that?” Ramirez asked, pointing to something on the screen.
    Ramirez looked around the room and back at the screen. “The closet in the video… it’s this closet! He shot the video right here.”
    Caleb looked at the screen. Sure enough, this was the room in the video. But who was the victim? The neighbors said the couple lived alone and the other rooms in the home served as storage, showing no sign of any children living with them. Perhaps it was a niece, a neighbor girl, or…
    Then something in the video caught his eyes.
    “Rewind it,” Caleb said as he pointed quickly at the corner of the screen, “okay, stop. Pause it there!”
    Ramirez, puzzled, looked at the screen, “What are you looking at?”
    It was hard to look beyond the evil in the foreground, but just beyond the monster, inside the closet, Caleb saw something that made his heart leap in his chest and then into his throat.
    He raced to the closet.
    Light already on, stuff thrown about from the search of the evidence.
    He threw clothes and half empty boxes aside. Hands furiously searching along the back wall. Only it wasn’t a wall.
    But rather a hidden door.
    On the floor, just behind a men’s size 12 Nike, an open padlock, the key sticking out like an arrow in a bulls-eye. Caleb’s eyes locked on the door as if he could will his eyes to see through it.
    He wanted to spin around and ask how the fuck everyone in the room managed to miss the fact that there was a goddamned hidden door in the closet, but he didn’t want to alert whoever might be on the other side to his discovery.
    He drew his gun and glanced back at his agents to make sure they were doing the same ― every one of them was.
    Caleb pressed against the door. It clicked and then moved forward a half inch. He pulled it open the rest of the way, gun ready, revealing a 10 by 10 room, or rather a holding cell, painted in garish pink with a mattress on the floor.
    Dirty sheets with some children’s