Almostnormal, anyway.
“You keep staring at me like that and I’m going to get back into my skivvies.”
Vaughn tossed the cans into the garbage. It was overflowing and the lid refused to close.
“Let’s get out of here. It stinks. And don’t forget to lock up—door was open this morning.”
Darnell shrugged. “Don’t have anything left to steal.”
They got into Vaughn’s unmarked car and he started the engine. “Well? What’ve we got?”
“Let me ask you something: one person killed is a homicide. Two, a double homicide. Three, a triple.” Vaughn pulled out of the driveway. “What do you call ten homicides?”
“Ten?” Vaughn’s eyes bulged.
“Ten.”
“I don’t... I don’t know.”
“Tenuple? Double quintuple?”
“No idea.”
But he did. Vaughn knew what it was called because Darnell had already said it.
A nasty one. Afuckingnasty one.
It was too soon for another nasty one.?
?Chapter 6
“Everything okay?”
Ivy didn’t immediately answer her TA. She exhaled as she took a seat behind her desk.
“Yeah.”
Not really.
When Tristan didn’t say anything else, she shot a glance in his direction.
He quickly looked away, red pen in hand, his attention focused on the stack of papers on his desk—a much smaller version of hers.
Ivy logged into her computer and checked her emails. There were only three. Well, only three that mattered. The rest were spam, countless spam.
She opened the one from the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.
EC ‘25 cordially invites you to present at our upcoming conference. As a Clay Research Fellow...
Ivy stopped reading. She couldn’t focus, couldn’t concentrate.
How many times had her father presented at the EC? Six? Eight? Adozen?
Keynote, guest lecturer, career achievement award. You name it, Eugene Reeves had done it.
Ivy closed the email and continued to scroll.
Found one called “Anniversary” from an unknown email address. Normally, Ivy wouldn’t open such a thing, but she needed a distraction.
