Lord knows she’d tried.
How did the old Mark Twain saying go?
Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead?
That wasn’t exactly true.
Two people could keep a secret if one of them was dead and the other mute.
She stood, a sad smile crossing her lips.
“Please speak to Zeke. And thanks for your time.”?
Asshole.
?Chapter 9
No matter howmany 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 Dräger X-am 5000—gas detection device. Picked up trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide gas in the air.”
