“Look here: ‘sulfurous fate.’ That’s gotta be the gas, right? The hydrogen sulfide gas?”
“I guess. I still don’t—” Vaughn stiffened. “You think it might be your boss? Dr.Moorehead? Could he be behind this?”
Ivy blinked.
“I don’t... I don’t know. But I don’t want anyone else to die.”
“Why the hell is this note addressed to you?”
“I don’t know, Vaughn—maybe... maybe whoever is behind this figured out that I was helping you. These are GPS coordinates. I don’t know what the rest means, but I think we should go there.Now. We have twenty-one minutes left.” She checked her phone. Shook her head. “No—only twenty now.”
Vaughn nodded, kicked the car into drive while Ivy punched the GPS coordinates into the app on her phone.
“It’s the Basin—the Princeton Basin,” she said.
“The Basin?”
“Yeah—go.”
The coordinates didn’t lead precisely to the Princeton Basin, but to a forested area just on the eastern side of the Delaware Canal. On the opposite bank, a residential subdivision, but this specific bordered on an area that was mostly trees and trails.
The perfect spot for another one of those retrofitted barns.
Perfect...
8001.
27 minutes.
Add the missing number, reveal the site.
“If it was Zeke who set this up, everything could still be on a timer. The gas could still go off,” Vaughn mused out loud.
He was picking up speed as he spoke, but Ivy was barely registering his words.
Perfect... perfect... not quite perfect, but close to right.
8001.
Something clicked.
“But if it’s your boss who—”
“Do you have a pen?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Vaughn popped open the middle armrest, pulled out a pen.
Ivy saw a PPD pad of paper inside and took that, too. As she wrote, she heard Vaughn’s phone ring. Saw him click decline the call out of the corner of her eye. The phone immediately chimed again, and he cursed under his breath before declining that call, too.
Focus, Ivy.
“What’s going on?” Vaughn asked.
Ivy didn’t answer.
Twenty-seven was a prime number. All of the numbers from the 100 prisoners problem were prime. Hell, come to think of it, Joshua Perry and his opponent’s scores—twenty-three and seventeen—were prime numbers, as well.
