Chapter 66
“What the hell is wrong with you, Darnell?”
Captain Daniels had already chewed the detective out for the way he’d handled the interview. Went as far as to pull him from the presser.
The room that Ivy had been in didn’t have an adjacent viewing area behind one-way glass, but Vaughn had been close enough to the door to hear almost everything.
“Not the time, Vaughn.”
“It wasn’t the time for you to bring up Ivy’s father. And it wasn’t time to tell the captain that she was at the other crime scene.”
“I brought up Ivy’s father because I got a hunch. This whole ‘can’t speak, can’t write’ thing is a farce. He—”
“He’s a fucking vegetable, Darnell!”
Darnell looked apathetic. Went so far as to shrug.
Ho hum, that’s your opinion.
“I’m trying to figure this shit out, Vaughn. I got my hunches, you know that. Sorry if I hurt your girlfriend’s feelings.”
That was it.
Vaughn lost it.
“Fuck your hunches! Nothing you’ve fucking done is helping figure this out. Nothing. It’s just been about you. How many times have I covered for you? Huh?”
Darnell balled his fists and Vaughn took notice.
“You gonna grab me by the throat, too? ‘Cause I’ll tell you what, I’m not Delaney. That shit won’t fly with me.”
It looked like Darnell would do just that, and Vaughn tensed. Then the man spread his fingers.
“Go home, Darnell. Go the fuck home. Get your shit together.”
The senior detective bowed his head. Turned and left without another word.
Vaughn waited for him to disappear out the rear doors of the police station before finally exhaling.
Shit, that was intense.
Vaughn wanted to heed his own advice: Go home. It had been an insane day.
Night, week. Whatever.
He breathed again.
No—he still had to work. There was one tank of gas still out there.
Vaughn just had no idea where to look. He found himself back in his office staring at the murder board.
No help there.
Vaughn refused to follow Darnell’s hunch and look into Eugene Reeves. Not yet, anyway. His mind turned to something Ivy had said during her interview about a man in the bar. An unlikely suspect, but somewhere to start, at least.
Vaughn called the Marriott at Forrestal, gave his credentials, then asked if someone named Blake was staying there.
The ma?tre d’, a slow-speaking Latino man, searched the database and told him that a Blake Lane had stayed at the hotel, but he’d checked out a day ago.
Vaughn pressed his luck by asking if they had an address on file for Blake, but the ma?tre d’ informed him that he couldn’t give out that information. He thanked the man and hung up.
Probably just a dead end anyway.
Vaughn had calmed down considerably when he approached Bowes, this time with his tech partner Caine, in the bullpen.
“Hey, Bowes, did Darnell give you some printer pages to compare?”
The man glanced up from his laptop.
“Sure did. Actually, I’m surprised that Darnell brought them to me. Didn’t think you guys listened to anything I say.”
“Not in the mood, Bowes.”
Bowes eyed Vaughn.
“Right—shitty deal for that department head. Fuck, man, that whole Princeton math department is cursed or something. First those two math geniuses, then the student, now—”
“Bowes,” Vaughn snapped.
“My bad. Yeah, I compared the two sheets.” He produced the pieces of paper—one from the ad on Joshua Perry’s windshield, the other some random shit that Darnell printed out from Gene’s assisted living home—from a folder. “They’re an exact match.”
Vaughn was shocked, didn’t think he’d heard correctly.
“What?”
Bowes nodded.
“Exact match. Same printer made the ad and this . . . whatever this is.”
“Are you sure?”
Now it was Bowes’s turn to give him the side eye.
“Sorry.”
“Hey, Detective Ryan?”
Caine.
Ernie to Bowes’s Burt. Heavyset, no glasses, but his thick eyebrows might very well have been trendy frames.
“Yeah?”
“I looked into that TikTok video, the one of Dr. Reeves.”
Vaughn felt himself becoming defensive.
I didn’t ask you to do that.
He let it go.
“And?”
“Did some digging. The account that posted it is new, and the guy who started it used a Proton email address to register—impossible to trace.”
“Great.”
“It’s not all bad—found out that a lot of the initial reposts and likes are from a popular boosting service.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Means that it initially went viral because someone paid a service to get the ball rolling. They wanted this to go viral.”
“Can you track the payment made to the service? Credit card?”
“Naw, security’s pretty good. Wouldn’t matter anyway. They only accept crypto for payment, and that shit is completely untraceable.”
“Huh.”
Another dead end.
“Buuuut . . .” Caine continued. “New email account, but not a new phone. Tracked the embedded metadata to a specific device using the IEMI number. The phone is registered to a business called Impact Investing.”
Or maybe not. Still, the name didn’t ring a bell, and Vaughn felt his forehead crinkle.
“Majority owner is Devon Godfrey,” Caine said with a grin.
“No shit.” Vaughn scratched his chin. “Zeke posted the video.”
“Sure looks that way.”
“Anything else?”
“’Bout it,” Caine said. “You not going to the presser?”
“No. Thanks, fellas.”
The rest of the precinct was fairly quiet. Most officers were hovering on the ground floor or outside, watching Captain Daniels do his thing.
Vaughn returned to his office, addressed the murder board again. Added two more pieces of information: the printer and the cell phone.
Vaughn squinted. As much as he hated to admit it, maybe Darnell was right. Objectively, there were strong links between these crimes and the math department. And Gene Reeves specifically.
Did he know Zeke? Probably not. The fire took place three years ago.
Vaughn knew that Captain Daniels liked Zeke for this, for the gassings. The kid was not right in the head. But his crimes—killing Rebecca Quinn and assaulting Ivy—were crimes of passion. The gassings showed forethought, planning, patience.
In Vaughn’s experience, unsubs usually fell into one camp or the other: plotters or impulsive. Even though crimes of this nature were plotted on a spectrum, and criminals often slid back and forth, they never went from one extreme to another this soon, this quickly.
Vaughn opened his computer, started looking into Zeke, then changed course. Dr. Moorehead. He linked both Zeke and Gene Reeves. The man had been the head of the Princeton mathematics and statistics department for eleven years. He’d been Eugene Reeves’s boss.
Vaughn closed his eyes.
And now he was dead. This fucking case . . .
Darnell’s face appeared out of the darkness. Vaughn saw his lips move.
This whole ‘can’t speak, can’t write’ thing is a farce.
When Vaughn had mentioned Ivy’s name, he thought he saw Dr. Reeves cock his head. It had been subtle, but noticeable. Nothing else registered with the man, but that seemed to.
Was his mental deficiency all an act? Was Darnell right?
Despite his reservations, Vaughn found himself pulling up the police report from the fire. Read the part about the brain injury, the damage to Broca’s area. Hesitated before firing off a text to Dr. Button, attaching Eugene Reeves’ medical file from the case.
Then he stared off into space, wondering what in the fuck he was supposed to do next. If only he had a senior detective here to guide him . . .
Vaughn’s head jerked.
Unbelievably, he’d fallen asleep in his fucking chair.
Have to move. Have to keep moving.
Maybe it was time to speak to Dr. Eugene Reeves again. Or at least try.