“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. Theywantedthis 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.
