The Tunnel

Missing Parents

Detective White started looking at the house in her head, she divided the house into different parts; she walked towards the front and started looking at the windows, the front porch, the door, and the door frame, but nothing was out of the ordinary. She then walked towards the right side of the house. The windows were too high to try to climb through them. Then she walked towards the back. There was another door and a couple more windows.

Once again, she looked at everything, but nothing looked to be out of the ordinary. Finally, she headed to the left side of the house, and there was a playground; an old car parked on the grass looked like it has not been moved in years. White looked at the house, and that side had two windows on the top and two at the bottom, but nothing seemed suspicious. At this point, White was starting to think that everything in the house looked normal, which was odd.

She heard a car approaching.

She walked towards the front of the house, and she saw that it was Hackman's car.

“I thought that you were never going to show up.”

“Sorry that some of us need to sleep to operate,” he rubbed his eyes, he was still sleepy.

“Yeah, yeah, let's get to work,” White said like she didn't care.

“Sheeez, someone needs some rest,” Hackman said lifting his hands in a sign of peace.

“I will go to sleep once I find this psycho, but for now, we have a lot of work and not so many leads,” she replied.

“We have to take the phone to the technician to see if we can trace where the call was made,” Hackman told her stretching his hand and asking her for the phone.

“I will take it personally just in case the killer calls again,”

“So, what did you find?”

“The tunnel is about 100m long; I found cigarette butts, syringes, condoms, and a lot of garbage that we will have to process tomorrow. That's when I found the phone.”

“I saw you coming from the side of the house; what were you doing out there?” Hackman pointed at the left side of the house.

“I was checking the house from different angles, and there was something strange going on. You said that Billie's room door was forced, right? The house has two doors, one in the front and one in the back. Neither of them had signs of a forced entry.” she affirmed.

“When I got here, an ambulance was leaving the house. Patrol was already here, and when I asked them, they only mentioned that Billie's room door was forced. Maybe the killer got lucky, and the babysitter left the door open.”

“That is really convenient,” she said while lifting her eyebrows in doubt. “Since I got here, I haven’t left the scene, and nobody came to the house. There is no sign of the parents or the babysitter.”

“Can you take me inside the house? I want to compare the pictures I have on the killer's phone to the pictures in the house.”

“Let me see them; if you have pictures of the whole family, you are the first one to see the parents because there are no photos of adults in the house, only photos of the kid.”

Hackman looked at the pictures.

“The kid is Billie. Send those pictures to me so I can send them to my office to see if we get a hit on the parents.” Hackman told her while looking at the phone.

“One out of six, we still need to find the babysitter, ID the adults in the picture, and compare them to the corpses to see if there is a match. I am going to go home, shower, change over, take a nap, and I will keep going around 5:00” she was demolished.

“You sleep?”

She moves her head from side to side and smiles.

Hackman got in his car and drove away.

Detective White checked her watch, and it was 3:00 am. She got to her house, parked her car got out of it and walked into the house. She played some music, turned on the shower, and walked to the kitchen while the water was heating up. She opened the fridge, grabbed a snack and a drink, and walked back to the bathroom. She looked herself in the mirror, and tears dripped down her face; she cleaned them up and started to get undressed. She turned the water off, got in the bathtub, sat down, rested her head on the back of the bathtub, and closed her eyes.

The images of the couple in the tunnel started to play in her head and the voice that she heard on the phone. It's crazy what some people can do to each other. This world is rotten and is getting worst every day. Wars are going on, people killing each other what is the point of having consciousness if we are going to behave like animals and even animals have more compassion than us sometimes. she thought.

She took a sip of her drink.

She got out of the bathtub and went to her room, put some pajamas on, sets the alarm, and went to bed.