Chapter 37
Vaughn wasn’t keen on the idea of bringing Ivy into the crime scene. Liked the idea of sending her home alone less.
He entered first. Scoped it out before indicating for Ivy to follow.
His first impression was that the interior of the barn was eerily similar to the first. Same unpainted walls. Same vent, same speaker. Cheap doors, expensive locks. Hint of rotten egg smell, muted by the mask, but still detectable.
This is where the similarities ended, however.
No boxes, broken or otherwise. No numbers.
As Delaney had told them outside, the first room they entered contained a generic table. A chair, too. Tipped over, lying in the dirt.
A tarp masked the outline of a body half under the desk.
Sitting atop the desk were two raised buttons roughly the size of drink coasters: one green, one red. Opposite the desk, hanging from the wall, a digital display, like a stock ticker, three feet long, maybe ten inches high. It showed green and red dots in a line. Ten of them. No apparent pattern.
To Vaughn, anyway.
“What the hell is this?” he said quietly. His words rebounded off the mask, echoed.
The door they entered, the one that Delaney had said they’d used a crowbar to open, was on one side. There was an identical door on the other.
Like the first, the frame had also been splintered near the lock on this one.
“Delaney, you—” Vaughn was turning as he spoke, but stopped when he saw Ivy. Her eyes were locked on the tarp-covered body on the ground. “Ivy?”
She stood in place, unmoving.
“Ivy.” He placed a hand on her shoulder and she jumped. “Don’t look down.”
A slow nod.
She obliged, raising her head, and Vaughn addressed Delaney again.
“This door,” he said, pointing at the one to their right. “You crack it open?”
“Horowitz did. Same kind of digital locks as the first scene.”
Vaughn glanced at Ivy again, checked to see if she was okay.
Her attention was firmly locked on the digital display hanging from the wall.
She nodded to herself.
Vaughn stepped around the body, pushed the door to the adjoining room open with the back of his hand.
An identical room. desk, chair. Buttons, display.
Just no body.
There was a different pattern of red and green dots on this digital screen.
Vaughn scratched his head, and his eyes drifted to a third door. The frame was intact. Vaughn tried the knob, was surprised to find it unlocked.
It opened to the outside.
“Delaney?”
“Oh,” the man said. “That’s weird. I didn’t check that one. Thought it was locked like the other two.”
This was strange. Vaughn inspected the knob, the keypad. Digital. WiFi symbol on the black, matte finish.
He located a camera mounted in the corner of the room.
“You think someone got out?” Delaney asked.
It sure looked that way to Vaughn. The door might have been unlocked remotely by whoever was watching the live feed. Alternatively, the passcode could have been given over the speaker.
One person exits, the other stays behind, locked in, and is gassed. It certainly did seem like some sort of game. Red light, green light.
Wasn’t that a Squid Game, too?
Vaughn considered another option: the person in this room had been their unsub, posing as a contestant. He was mulling this possibility over when Ivy, who had been silent until this point, suddenly spoke up.
“You said you saw someone running from the scene?” she asked in a small voice.
“Yeah, when I first drove up. Thought it was your father, but—”
“It wasn’t.”
“I guess not. I’m thinking it might be the guy who set this thing up, whatever the fuck it is.”
“It wasn’t him either.”
Vaughn admired the woman’s confidence. She was rattled from seeing the body, covered or not, probably thinking about the photo he’d stupidly shown her of Aaron Treadman. But even so, when Ivy spoke, there was no hesitation to her words. No suggestion of doubt. No maybe, perhaps, could be.
Before visiting Ivy the first time, Darnell had done a quick background check on the woman.
Dr. Ivy Reeves had just turned twenty-six years old.
She was the youngest tenured mathematics professor in Princeton University’s nearly three hundred-year history.
Won a bunch of awards that sounded prestigious, although Vaughn had never heard of them before.
And now this stuff about her father, which had clearly her rattled.
Out of her element, wearing a mask, seeing a dead body for the first time. And yet she was still confident.
“Who was it then?” Delaney asked.
Ivy looked directly at Vaughn when she answered.
“The person you saw wasn’t my father, and it wasn’t the person behind this. It was the person who won.”