Chapter 73
“Steve Neely’s kid,” Vaughn repeated softly. This was for his own benefit, but Bowes confirmed it anyway.
“Yep. His only kid. Mom’s not in the picture. Died of breast cancer nearly a decade ago.”
What the actual fuck?
Tristan Coates, née Tristan Neely, was Steve’s son.
Ivy’s father and Steve worked together before a mysterious fire resulted in the latter’s death and the former being burnt and turned into a living vegetable.
A fire that the retired detective who worked the case was convinced Gene had started.
Did Ivy know? Did she know that Tristan Coates was actually Tristan Neely?
No, she couldn’t have; she would have said something.
Wouldn’t she?
“How?”
“It’s not hard to change your name. All you have to do is—”
“No, I mean how the hell did he become Ivy’s TA?”
“Well, I did some digging. Tristan applied to be Dr. Reeves’s TA at the end of last term.”
“Okay, then why? Why did he change his name? Wouldn’t letting everyone know he was Steve Neely’s kid help him? I mean, his father was a legend in the math world.”
“I’m guessing because he didn’t want people to know.”
He didn’t want Ivy to know, Vaughn mentally corrected.
Vaughn blinked, shook his head. Tried to lock in.
He still didn’t get it.
Zeke, Dr. Moorehead, now Tristan.
“There is something weird,” Bowes said. Colostomy hole weird? “Weirder, I mean. Tristan’s grades . . . they weren’t great.”
“Not great?” Stalling, trying to give himself time to figure this out.
“I don’t know much about math,” Bowes continued after a slurp of what was undoubtedly an energy drink of some sort, “but Princeton’s math department is one of the best in the country, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Well, Tristan was a B+ student. So I did a little more digging.”
Vaughn had no idea how Bowes had done all this in a matter of what? A half hour? Twenty minutes?
“And?”
“And he was the only applicant.”
Vaughn wasn’t following and asked Bowes to clarify.
“Tristan Coates was the only applicant for the TA position. I looked back at previous years and there were dozens of them. Top candidates had perfect 4.0 GPAs, awards, etc.”
The VPNs. The remote nozzles for the gas that couldn’t be traced. The cameras.
Speakers.
“He hacked in, didn’t he?”
“Yep,” Bowes said, a little too cheerily for Vaughn’s taste. “Someone erased all other applicants, leaving Tristan as the only one. They were subtle, but not great. Wasn’t as careful back then, I guess. I traced the delete actions back to a specific computer.”
“Ivy’s stolen laptop.”
“Yeah, but here’s the thing: it—”
“Bowes, I think Ivy’s in trouble. You have an address for Tristan Coates?”
“I wasn’t done—”
“Bowes, I need an address.”
“Okay, hold on.” Vaughn looked back at Abby’s house, the dark windows, as he pulled onto the main road. “I’ve got it.”
Vaughn punched it into his GPS.
It was close, less than fifteen minutes away. A townhouse on a winding road, relatively secluded. Nearest neighbor a couple hundred yards away.
“Thanks, Bowes.”
Bowes tried to say something, but Vaughn had already ended the call. Bowes had done good work, but Bowes liked to talk.
This wasn’t time for talking. This was time for acting.
Vaughn hadn’t been willing to break into Abby Granger’s place. But Tristan Coates/Neely?
Fuck a warrant.
The door gave inward with just a few mid-strength shoulder pops.
“Tristan?” Vaughn drew his gun.
Eyes trained ahead, he searched blindly with his hand for the light switch. Turned it on, squinting preemptively so as to not be blinded by the light.
“Tristan?”
The house was quiet. Sparsely decorated. Reminded Vaughn a little of Gene’s room.
Vaughn swept the front hall, then the kitchen. Both were impeccably clean.
“Tristan!”
The house wasn’t particularly large. One story. He cleared the two bedrooms, then the bathroom.
Vaughn found a door tucked on the other side of the kitchen.
Probably a pantry. Only, no one he knew locked a pantry with both a digital padlock and an old-fashioned one.
To be fair, no one he knew had an actual pantry, but still.
Vaughn hadn’t knocked on the exterior door, but he knocked on this one.
“Tristan! PPD! Open the fucking door!”
Impossible, not with the padlock on the outside.
“Ivy?”
Nothing.
He tried the door. It didn’t budge. The locks were solid. But the thing about locked doors was that you could have a lock worthy of the Pentagon, but if your door and frame were shit . . .
Weakest link—ha, ha—and all that.
Another fucking game show.
Not as easy for Vaughn to break through this one—weak-ass shoulder pops didn’t do the trick. But three solid, well-placed kicks and the frame split.
Two more and the lock portion that was bolted to the door broke free.
Vaughn found the lights.
He didn’t even make it into the pantry—modified pantry, as it was—before he froze.
“Holy shit.”
It wasn’t the tools, the hammer, the boxes of drywall screws that made him stop. Nor the actual sheets of drywall, all different sizes, leaning up against one wall.
It was the photographs, the printouts, the red writing.
What Vaughn saw made his murder board back at PPD look like a children’s science fair project.
The far wall was completely covered in pages.
A lot of text. Printouts of newspaper articles and what was most likely a series of text messages. Front and center was a photograph of two men, probably in their mid-forties. One was hunched over some sort of document, signing it with his left hand. The other standing behind him. Both smiling.
The caption revealed that the man signing the document was Eugene Reeves, the other, Steve Neely. Hard to believe that this was the same man as the one at the home, his face so scarred that he was forced to wear a mask so as to not disturb the other residents.
There were photos from the fire, too. Newspaper articles, actual printed photographs.
“Two esteemed math professors caught in deadly fire. One dead, one in critical condition.”
The word “LAPTOP” was written in red ink across several sheets. Circled. “Riemann hypothesis,” too.
One of shaggy-haired Zeke. Another of his father, Devon Godfrey. A printout of Impact Investing’s prospectus.
And then Vaughn saw Ivy.
Photos of her receiving a degree of some sort.
Another winning an award, following in her father’s footsteps.
Then there were the more intimate ones. Photos that wouldn’t have appeared in any newspaper or university circulation.
Images of her in class, unaware that her picture was being taken.
Similar angle to the TikTok video. Another of her sleeping in her bed.
“Fucking hell.”
Vaughn holstered his gun and clicked a contact on his phone as he continued to stare at the manic board.
“27 MINUTES.”
That was written more than a dozen times, most with accompanied arrows pointing at the caption of a newspaper article from the fire.
“First on scene was Dr. Eugene Reeves’s daughter, Ivy Reeves.”
Another: the date of the fire. Three years ago, to the day. The location.
“Detective Ryan?”
“Delaney, I need you to come here. Document everything.”
“What? Where?”
Vaughn gave Delaney Tristan’s address. Repeated it twice, got him to say it back just to be sure. He didn’t plan on being there when the cop arrived.
Vaughn ran out of the house.
With all of the shit pasted to the back wall, Vaughn hadn’t thought of looking behind him. If he had, he would have seen the small camera in the upper right-hand corner of the room, aimed directly at the door.
Would have seen the red indicator light glowing brightly.