“Yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shock you.”
He had to basically pry the phone from her hand.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Darnell said. “Maybe we’ll just describe the scenario to you?”
“Okay.”
Ivy had no idea why they hadn’t just done that in the first place. To impress on her how important this was? Was the presence of two detectives in her office not enough?
“Right, so we found these boxes. Some were smashed. Vaughn how many boxes in total?” The younger cop was staring at her. “Vaughn?”
“We think ten,” he said after a beat.
“So ten boxes. Each had a number on top, a prime number, and a different one inside. The victims—uh, theplayers—each had a number on their chest. That’s pretty much all we know,” Darnell said.
Victims. As in, plural? More than one?
This day could not possibly get any worse.
“I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Actually, we know a bit more. There were only ten numbers,” Vaughn said, finding his tongue. “We found ten numbers, all prime numbers, repeated twice. One on the outside of the box, one inside. In some of the boxes, anyway—most were smashed.”
“Three,” Darnell corrected.
“Huh?”
“Threesets of numbers. One on their chests, one on the top of the boxes, one inside.”
“Right. Three. Could they be, like—”
“Wait,” Ivy interrupted. “There weretenvictims?”
Darnell and Vaughn exchanged a look.
“Ten like...that?”?
?Chapter 28
This was fallingapart. And quickly.
The poor woman, stressed about her father (for some reason) and the TikTok video, was now trying to deal with wrapping her mind around the idea of ten dead bodies.
Vaughn had seen it in Ivy’s face.
Aaron Treadman was likely her first.
The first corpse that Vaughn had seen had been his grandmother’s—Betty Ryan. His parents had talked about an open casket, but he, being only seven at the time, had no idea what that meant.
It had been a rude awakening, seeing the woman who lying in a coffin so still—impossibly still.
Ivy Reeves was no seven-year-old, but that didn’t make it much easier. Darnell... God damn it, it had been his idea to come here.
“Dr.Reeves—I mean, Ivy—we shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“Ten boxes, you said?”
Ivy was deep in thought and her brow knitted.
