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.
