Vaughn looked away.
“Let’s just find this fucking guy.”
Delaney wasn’t in the bullpen. Vaughn and Darnell had missed the morning briefing, which wasn’t terribly uncommon while working a case. The whiteboard on the back wall was filled with manic scribblings.
Vaughn recognized Captain Daniels’s terrible writing.
This was a little odd. Captain Daniels rarely attended these meetings, leaving Lieutenant Carlo to run the briefings.
Vaughn found Bowes tucked into the corner of the room, a half dozen cell phones in front of him, a laptop open. The man had headphones on and didn’t notice either Vaughn or Darnell.
“Bowes? You seen Delaney?” Vaughn asked.
The man was bobbing his head to a song that Vaughn recognized when he got closer.
“Save Me,” by Jelly Roll.
Vaughn reached out and pulled one of the headphone cups off his ear.
“Oh—hey. Captain was in this morning.” He hadn’t heard Vaughn’s question. “Looked pissed.”
“Why?”
Bowes shrugged.
It was barely nine, and there were already two energy drinks—Ghost and C4 this time, both open—on his desk.
“Dunno. I was just going through the phones that Delaney brought in. And—”
“Phones?” Darnell asked.
“Yeah. He found two more, one in each of the cars at the pizza joint. Belong to,uh,” Bowes’s eyes flicked to his screen, “Thomas Altman and Geoff Lane.”
The names meant nothing to Vaughn, but he assumed that they were two of the first ten victims. Likely the two that Aaron had shared his final slice of pizza with.
“And?” Darnell said.
“And they all got the same text messages, the ones with the rules.”
Made sense; their cars were parked at CiCi’s Pizza.
“Where is Delaney, anyway?”
“Haven’t seen him. But I don’t think he clocked out last night.”
“Really? I sent him home after—”
The bullpen door opened.
“Sacker, Ryan, my office.”
It was Captain Daniels, and Bowes was right. He did look pissed. The PPD Captain was in his sixties, but on any given day, he could have passed as eighty or fifty. Hard eyes, thick gray, almost white hair. Built like a slab of granite. Today, he was eighty.
“Bowes, you working the gas case with them?”
“He’s helping with the tech,” Vaughn offered.
“You too, then. In my office,now.”?
