I already know who Samantha Hayes is hunting in Buried in Silence.
Sam doesn’t.
And that creates one of my favorite parts of writing a thriller.
I have to build a trail between them.
Not an obvious trail. If I make it too easy, Sam catches him in fifty pages and we have a very short book.
But I also can’t hide the truth so completely that the ending comes out of nowhere.
The clues have to be there.
The reader just can’t know which ones matter yet.
I Work Backward From the Answer
At this stage, I have something Sam doesn’t have.
The solution.
I know who did it. I know what happened. I know where the killer made mistakes, what he deliberately concealed, and which pieces of his past could eventually point Sam toward him.
So now I work backward.
What would Sam need to discover to reach the same answer?
That’s a very different question from simply asking what clues should appear in the book.
Every clue needs a reason to exist.
Some will move the investigation forward.
Some will seem important but lead somewhere else.
Some won’t make sense when they’re first discovered.
And a few need to sit quietly on the page until Sam learns something that changes their meaning completely.
Those are usually my favorites.
The Everglades Changes the Evidence
This case gives me another complication.
The Everglades isn’t going to politely preserve a crime scene for Sam.
Water moves things.
Animals disturb things.
Heat and humidity take their toll.
Vegetation conceals things.
And reaching a location can be an investigation all by itself.
That means I get to ask a question I couldn’t ask in Sam’s previous cases:
What happens when nature becomes part of the evidence?
Something that looks like deliberate destruction might not be.
Something that appears to have been moved might have another explanation.
And something the killer believes nature has erased may still leave just enough behind.
Sam has to separate what he did from what the Everglades did afterward.
Then There Are the Things He Does on Purpose
This killer doesn’t leave everything to chance.
Some details at a scene are intentional.
That creates another layer for Sam.
She has to determine which evidence exists because something happened naturally, which exists because the killer made a mistake, and which exists because he wanted it there.
That last category is dangerous.
Because once a killer deliberately leaves something behind, he’s communicating.
Maybe not with Sam specifically.
Not at first.
But he’s saying something.
And Sam is very good at listening.
One Clue Needs to Change Meaning
This is something I’m building deliberately into Buried in Silence.
I want at least one piece of evidence that readers encounter early and understand one way.
Then later, Sam discovers something new.
Suddenly that same clue means something completely different.
Nothing about the original evidence changes.
What changes is what Sam knows.
I love those moments in mysteries and thrillers because the answer was sitting there the entire time.
The writer didn’t hide it.
The reader simply didn’t have the information needed to interpret it correctly yet.
That’s the kind of clue I want Sam to find in the Everglades.
And Then There Are the Markers
This is where building this particular case has become especially interesting.
There is something associated with the places this killer chooses.
A marker.
I’m not going to tell you exactly what it is yet.
What matters is that when Sam first encounters one, it doesn’t announce itself as evidence.
It could belong there.
It could be old.
It could be damaged.
It could mean absolutely nothing.
And that’s exactly what I want.
Because later, another one appears.
Now coincidence becomes harder to dismiss.
And once Sam starts asking why the same seemingly insignificant thing is appearing in places connected to her investigation, the trail gets considerably narrower.
The Killer Can Make a Mistake Without Knowing It
Here’s the part I’m especially looking forward to writing.
The clue that helps Sam most may not be something the killer accidentally leaves behind.
It may be something he tries too hard to hide.
Sam notices people.
She notices behavior.
If someone steps differently because he doesn’t want her looking at a particular spot…
if his attention goes somewhere it shouldn’t…
if he interferes with something she might otherwise have ignored…
he has just told her to look.
That’s the danger of trying to control what Samantha Hayes sees.
Sometimes the attempt to hide something is exactly what makes her notice it.
That’s the Puzzle I’m Building Now
So I’m no longer simply creating the killer in Buried in Silence.
Now I’m creating the space between what he knows and what Sam knows.
At the beginning, that space is enormous.
He knows the Everglades.
He knows what happened.
He knows where the bodies have been.
He knows what matters.
Sam walks in knowing almost none of it.
Then, clue by clue, that distance begins to close.
A disturbed grave.
Evidence altered by the environment.
Something deliberately left behind.
A marker that doesn’t seem important.
A behavior Sam almost misses.
Until eventually, Sam knows enough to look at all those separate pieces and see what I’ve known from the beginning.
They’re not separate at all.
And somewhere in the Everglades, the person she’s hunting is going to realize that Samantha Hayes has finally learned how to follow his trail.