?Chapter 24
“You don’t haveto be such an asshole to him,” Vaughn remarked after Delaney was gone. “He’s a good cop.”
“He’s a piece of shit.”
Vaughn sighed.
“Alright, well we gotta do something.” Vaughn sipped his coffee. Every cop he’d ever worked with made strong, thick as tar coffee. That was the cliché; that was the calling card.
Everyone except for Darnell. His coffee was like lightly tinted water.
Tasted like piss.
“I can take the laptop to Bowes and Caine, see if they can trace the phone number and email address. Probably a job for Delaney, but you sent him away,” Vaughn said.
A bit of veiled humor. A Darnell special. The man didn’t so much as crack a smile.
“Let me see that ad again?”
Vaughn swiveled the laptop.
“Amajor streaming network,huh?”
“Yeah, I highly doubt that any network would air people being gassed to death.”
“There was a camera,” Darnell remarked as he sat, his chair squeaking under his weight. He slurped his coffee loudly and took out his phone. Started swiping.
There was a camera, sure, but it was there so that whoever set this thing up could remotely release the gas if the ten participants failed the “simple puzzle.”
Now Vaughn was on his phone, his brow furrowed. He pulled up the crime scene photos. Smashed boxes, numbers on the victims’ chests and numbers in the boxes.
On the dirt ground, too.
Simple puzzle.
What kind of fucking simple puzzle was this? What kind of simple puzzle involved prime numbers?
“Hey, Vaughn?”
Vaughn raised his eyes.
“What’s up?”
“Check this out.”
Darnell made no move to get up, so Vaughn walked over to him.
His partner was on TikTok.
“Aren’t you a little old for TikTok?”
“Never too old for TikTok. Anyway, I started searching for puzzle shows and prime numbers and this came up. It’s going viral.”
He pressed play.
It was a video from a classroom of sorts, the kind that was shaped like a caldera, the main lectern and display board down below, the seats rising in a semi-circle above.
Darnell turned the volume up on his phone.
