“He was wearing a mask.”
“Right. Okay, thanks. Do me a favor?” Vaughn handed the man a card. This is what his job had come down to: handing out cards like candy at a carnival. For fuck’s sake. “Give me a call when Gene comes back?”
“Sure.”
Vaughn returned to his car, thinking about colostomy holes, grapefruit-sized prostates, a rook lying on its side on a miniature chess board.
The Bae-sian Prof.
Zeke posted the video of Ivy. Zeke paid bots to pump it up. Zeke drew attention to himself even though he was engrossed in a complex plan to murder people in the name of math?
Ugh,he didn’t like it.
Vaughn pulled up the TikTok video on his phone.
It wasn’t as popular as it had been when it was first posted—welcome to the new age where your fifteen minutes was cut down to mere seconds—but it had still amassed nearly two million views. Someone did call out during the lecture, as Ivy had told him, joking about Zeke maybe not having the clap after all. This, in turn, made him think of Ms. Murphy and her colostomy adventures.
Another shudder.
Vaughn was about to close his phone when he noticed something in the video. Ivy had told him that she always confiscated the students’ cell phones before class. Only, on this particular day, she’d been late.
Vaughn had just assumed that no one had taken their phones. But while the video showed all of the students, he could only see three-quarters of Ivy. Vaughn had never been in the classroom that Ivy taught in, but could get the gist of it from the video.
Lower bowl, podium at the center, digital screen behind—barely visible. The angle was off. If a student had taken the video, he would have seen Ivy straight on. Vaughn paused the video.
There—Zeke. Clearly visible. Scowling, angry.
How was that possible? Vaughn thought back—thought hard.
The TA. If Ivy took the phones every day and she was late, it made sense that the TA would have done the same in her absence.
Vaughn immediately called Bowes.
“Detective Ryan, the captain was—”
“Bowes, I need you to do something for me. I need you to look into Dr.Reeves’s TA. His name is Tristan something...”?
?Chapter 70
After the fire,Ivy had never gone back to her father’s partner’s house.
She found herself there now. Unlike her own house, which she’d inherited from her father, Steve Neely’s place was—had been—a sprawling estate. Beautiful, worth seven figures, easy.
Eugene had been secretive about his work, as was to be expected. Gene and Steve had spent the better part of their adult lives investigating the Riemann hypothesis, a way to map out all known prime numbers. Solving the equation had widespread implications for everything from AI to cryptocurrency, to codebreaking, to financial markets.
The one million-dollar Clay Millennium Prize that was on permanent offer for the solution was a drop in the bucket, a mere hundred or thousand times less than the actual value. Governments, private investors, hedge funds, hell, even defense contractors would want the solution.
As Ivy pulled up to the burnt exterior of Steve Neely’s home, she closed her eyes. Thought about that night. As usual, her fingers started to ache where she’d burned herself.
Ivy had been visiting town after wrapping up her PhD when she’d gotten the desperate call from her father.
“Ivy—”
“Dad? Everything okay?”
“I need you to listen.”
Gene’s tone was all business. More so than usual. Ivy listened. Couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was surreal. Like something out of a movie.
