That explained the noxious egg smell.
“Landon, can you please lead with that next time?” Darnell said.
“Sorry.”
Vaughn noticed a door opposite the one he’d just come through. The doorknob was dented. He also spotted a cable dangling through a hole in the wall and plastic on the ground.
He pointed at the latter.
“I see it. Looks like it was a camera,” Darnell said.
Vaughn pointed at the door next.
“Locked as well?”
“Yes. Same digital lock. Pried it open.”
Vaughn trudged through the dirt, pushed the door open with his elbow. He inhaled sharply.
Seven more bodies, same as the first three. Not all were on their backs, however, and Vaughn saw numbers stuck to their shirts with tape. Straight ahead, a final door, this one likely leading to the outside. Three separate rooms, all connected, all locked, all filled with bodies.
“Looks like some sort of fucked up Squid Game.”
“Delaney, I thought I told you to check with Cedar Ridge security,” Darnell said.
Vaughn had been concentrating so hard on the scene that he hadn’t noticed the cop join them.
“I put a coupla junior officers on it.”
“What’d you say, Delaney?” Vaughn asked.
“Sent two PPD officers—”
“Before that,” he clarified.
“Oh, Squid Game... this looks kinda like some sort of Squid Game.”
When neither Vaughn nor Darnell said anything, Delaney added hesitantly, “You know, that Netflix show? Like an extreme version ofThe Price is Right?”
“The price is wrong, Bob,” Darnell muttered.
Vaughn was familiar withSquid Game. It wasn’t his cup of tea, but he understood the allure of the show. It was the subtitles that got him. Vaughn spent so much time reading the damn screen that he missed half of what was happening. And the dubbed version was just terrible. But he had to admit, with all the numbers and strange boxes inside the barn, mostly destroyed, the scene did appear to be part of some sort of deadly game show.
“How long until the medical examiner arrives?” Darnell asked.
“Put a call in about an hour ago,” Delaney said. “Middlesex is sending someone over. My guess? Another thirty minutes or so before he gets here.”
“Call him back. Tell him to get his ass over here now. Tell him to bring extra gurneys, too.”
Ten dead.Ten.
The word came to Vaughn then:decuple.This was a decuple homicide.
Vaughn thought he still liked Darnell’s term better: a nasty one.?
?Chapter 10
Ivy reluctantly acceptedthe invitation to present at the ACM. She went through several iterations of a title—“Emergent Cooperation in Chaotic Strategic Environments” was the sexiest option—but ended up going with the nondescript “TBD.”
