Chapter 24
“You don’t have to 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.
“A major 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.
The professor, a woman, three-quarter turned to the camera, was saying, “Let’s say that the probability of a first-year student of having an STI is 5 percent.”
She wrote on the lectern, her words magically appearing on the board behind her.
“Now, let’s say you were a bit . . . concerned after a particularly eventful weekend.
You decide to get tested. The test isn’t perfect—they rarely are.
If you have an STI, it’s pretty accurate—95 percent of the time, it will come back positive.
But if you don’t actually have an STI, the false positive rate is 10 percent. ”
The class chuckled.
“I don’t get it,” Vaughn admitted. “What’s the link?”
“They’re calling her the Bae-sian Prof.”
“The what?”
“Bae-sian Prof.”
“No, I heard you—what does it mean?”
Darnell pulled up the comments. There were hundreds of them.
“Looks like she was teaching Bayesian statistics. And, before you ask, I have no idea what that is. But ‘bae’ means, like, girlfriend or something in millennial speak.”
Vaughn frowned.
“Cute. What does this have to do with the barn? The gas?”
“Dunno. Searched for math, prime numbers, game show, New Jersey, and this popped up.” Darnell shrugged. “Maybe she knows what the hell those boxes are all about.”
“Got a name?”
Darnell scrolled.
“Dr. Ivy Reeves—math prof at Princeton.” Princeton .
. . this was getting more interesting. The idea of visiting someone at the university who might have a clue what the numbers meant had already crossed Vaughn’s mind.
But with everything going on—Dr. McGill and the gas canisters, searching Aaron Treadman’s apartment, and Dr. Button at the morgue—it had slipped from his thoughts. “Wanna go have a chat with Dr. Reeves?”
“Why not? We can drop the laptop off with Bowes on the way.” Vaughn set his full mug down. “And we can also pick up some real coffee.”
“What do you mean? What’s wrong with my coffee?”
“Tastes about as good as your pajamas look.”
This, Darnell chuckled at.