Chapter 9
No matter how many crime scenes you attend, no matter how many murders, suicides, rapes, or mutilations you encounter in your career, the first thing that comes to mind is that its all just a horrible accident.
The brain was a curious organ.
It could ignore the locked doors, the chains on the outside of the barn. The strange room within a room. The speaker, the vent.
The claw marks on the drywall.
It was all an accident. A team of men were renovating this barn when a pipe burst, leaking toxic gas into the room. By mistake, someone—the crew chief, perhaps leaving for his late dinner—locked the door behind him. Silly, but this was where Vaughn’s mind went first.
The carnage in the second room made this assumption a feat of mental gymnastics—a floor routine, if you will, something even Simone Biles would have had a hard time completing.
Another body on the ground. Cloudy eyes, foamy mouth.
And . . . boxes? There were three cheap wooden boxes, all on thin legs, standing upright. Countless others smashed to pieces on the dirt ground.
There were also numbers. Lots of numbers.
“What the hell is this?” Darnell grumbled. He was close enough that Vaughn could detect undertones of alcohol beneath a thick, minty layer of mouthwash.
There were numbers engraved on the lids of the boxes, sheets of paper with large numbers printed on them scattered throughout the room.
Vaughn read: three, nineteen, twenty-seven, and others.
The closest number to the corpse, face down on the ground, was thirteen. The way it was slightly crumpled suggested he was holding it when he died.
“We waited for you guys to arrive before we disturbed anything,” CSU tech Landon informed them. “Once you give us the go-ahead, we’ll document everything, make a list of the numbers.”
“You guys have one of them fancy new cameras?” Darnell asked. “The kind that takes a 3D image of the entire room? Like they use for some of those expensive real estate listings in Robbinsville?”
“We do.”
“Good. Use it to take photos of everything before you disturb the bodies. Any idea of what they might have died from?”
“Probably the gas.”
Vaughn could almost hear Darnell roll his eyes.
“Specifically? What was that little doohickey you were holding when we got here?”
“A Dr?ger X-am 5000—gas detection device. Picked up trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide gas in the air.”
That explained the noxious egg smell.
“Landon, can you please lead with that next time?” Darnell said.
“Sorry.”
Vaughn noticed a door opposite the one he’d just come through. The doorknob was dented. He also spotted a cable dangling through a hole in the wall and plastic on the ground.
He pointed at the latter.
“I see it. Looks like it was a camera,” Darnell said.
Vaughn pointed at the door next.
“Locked as well?”
“Yes. Same digital lock. Pried it open.”
Vaughn trudged through the dirt, pushed the door open with his elbow. He inhaled sharply.
Seven more bodies, same as the first three. Not all were on their backs, however, and Vaughn saw numbers stuck to their shirts with tape. Straight ahead, a final door, this one likely leading to the outside. Three separate rooms, all connected, all locked, all filled with bodies.
“Looks like some sort of fucked up Squid Game.”
“Delaney, I thought I told you to check with Cedar Ridge security,” Darnell said.
Vaughn had been concentrating so hard on the scene that he hadn’t noticed the cop join them.
“I put a coupla junior officers on it.”
“What’d you say, Delaney?” Vaughn asked.
“Sent two PPD officers—”
“Before that,” he clarified.
“Oh, Squid Game . . . this looks kinda like some sort of Squid Game.”
When neither Vaughn nor Darnell said anything, Delaney added hesitantly, “You know, that Netflix show? Like an extreme version of The Price is Right?”
“The price is wrong, Bob,” Darnell muttered.
Vaughn was familiar with Squid Game. It wasn’t his cup of tea, but he understood the allure of the show.
It was the subtitles that got him. Vaughn spent so much time reading the damn screen that he missed half of what was happening.
And the dubbed version was just terrible.
But he had to admit, with all the numbers and strange boxes inside the barn, mostly destroyed, the scene did appear to be part of some sort of deadly game show.
“How long until the medical examiner arrives?” Darnell asked.
“Put a call in about an hour ago,” Delaney said. “Middlesex is sending someone over. My guess? Another thirty minutes or so before he gets here.”
“Call him back. Tell him to get his ass over here now. Tell him to bring extra gurneys, too.”
Ten dead. Ten.
The word came to Vaughn then: decuple. This was a decuple homicide.
Vaughn thought he still liked Darnell’s term better: a nasty one.