11. The Fourth Victim
At the moment Flanders entered the hut, the electricity inside got turned on. A bulb lit up the small room and revealed a man in a cage, desperately trying to escape. The man looked at the detective and said:
“You must be Flanders? Some crazy man kidnapped me and locked me here. He said that once you enter, you have exactly 13 minutes to set me free. After that, the entire place will blow up. Please hurry, we need to figure out the correct 4-digit combination which unlocks the safe over there. The key which opens my cage is inside.”
Flanders listened carefully, tried to calm the person down to the best of his abilities, then started examining the room. He could see Teddy’s peculiarities all around – a pair of mismatching shoes on the ground, a picture flipped upside down on the wall, three old electronic clocks, negligently thrown around… He noticed that even though the clocks were functional, all of them were few hours wrong, and also 15 of their segments were not working. The detective wondered for a moment why Teddy would even keep such useless items, then focused his attention on the safe.
Flanders spent the next few minutes trying to figure out the correct combination for the safe. Time was running out quickly, and he was getting more and more anxious. Suddenly, with just 2 minutes remaining on the clock, an insight hit him. He entered a 4-digit number and the safe cracked open.