Death by Sudoku (12 page)

Michelle’s big blue eyes narrowed. “Consider the alternative. If we build Jenny up as innocent, where does that leave you?”

“Has it got to be either-or?” Liza asked. “It could be something unrelated, like a home invasion, or it could tie in with what I was telling the police.”

“We’re not going with that code thing.” Michelle didn’t raise her voice, but there was no missing her dead-set opposition.

“Vasquez wouldn’t like it,” Buck agreed.

“Hell with that,” Michelle spat. “
I
don’t like it. And, long term, the whole sudoku thing won’t help Liza’s rep.” She glanced at her partner. “You are still part of the firm.”

“The sudoku thing may not go away.” Liza outlined what she’d learned and suspected since coming up from Santa Barbara.

“We’re definitely not going with any of that,” Michelle almost glared at Liza. “If you want to play Nancy Drew, don’t expect us to back your play.”

Michelle frowned. “At this point, we’ll stick with the theory that Derrick Robbins was killed by intruder or intruders unknown.” She glanced at Buck. “Unless you’ve got something to say about the disappearing niece.”

Foreman reverted to his best cop form, a sort of menacing Joe Friday, as he ran through the results of his background check. “The late Mr. Robbins wasn’t necessarily a saint, but he wasn’t into anything that should have gotten him killed. As for the girl, since she graduated, she’s been renting a house up in the hills. Apparently, she went up to Santa Barbara the afternoon that Derrick went to Orange County. In terms of career, she’s been considered for a couple of small roles, and Derrick has been trying to pull together a production for her.”

Liza glanced at Michelle. “Quick sidebar. Did you get hold of a copy of Jenny’s screen test?”

“I saw it,” Michelle admitted. “And the kid does have potential.” She raised a warning finger. “If—”

“If she’s alive,” Buck finished for her. “The search around the house didn’t turn up anything. That leaves three possibilities. One, Jenny left before Derrick was murdered. If so, where is she?”

Where indeed?
Liza wondered.

“Two, the girl discovered Derrick dead and got out of there,” Buck went on. “Again, where is she? Vasquez has a solid rep. You can bet he’s working hard to find any kind of trail—credit cards, car registrations, BOLOs, all the usual cop stuff.”

“What’s the third possibility?” Liza asked.

“That’s the one none of us is going to like the answer to,” Buck said. “What if Jenny was there when the murder took place? In that case, she’s tied to the killer, either as an accomplice . . . or because he took her along.”

Neither Liza nor Michelle had anything to say to that.

Buck nodded heavily. “Either way, her future may not be as bright as either of you guys hope.”

“So,” Michelle said, filling the sudden silence, “we continue with the approach as planned—unknown intruders.”

She wasn’t being cold-blooded, Liza knew. Michelle would call it being practical. Or was it a case of avoiding what she couldn’t control?

The desk phone rang. Michelle snatched it up. “I thought I said no—” She sighed, covered the receiver, and said, “Alden Benedict.”

Alden was the new flavor of the decade, apparently—“a real hyphenate,” as Michelle would say. Golden boy on the screen, acclaimed director and producer behind the scenes, political activist in his spare time. His last Oscar acceptance came off like a campaign speech for the next election.

When Michelle used the word “hyphenate,” though, it didn’t mean “actor-writer-producer.” She used the term as private code for “pain-in-the-ass.”

Listening on the phone, Michelle rolled her eyes, then removed her hand from the receiver. “I’m sure the Caucus of Concerned Voters is an important cause, Alden,” she said, “it’s just not the cause we’ve got to concentrate on. That’s launching your film. Because if this thing doesn’t take off, the caucus and a lot of other people won’t be returning your calls next week.”

Liza could hear the slam of the cut connection from where she was standing, but Michelle wasn’t much moved. “I’ll have somebody call later and smooth down his feathers. It’s not enough that we got him a Wednesday premiere for this windy epic of his, so he’ll have two extra days of box office over other films opening this week. We got him Grauman’s Chinese, so he can act like a movie star. But no, we’ve also got half a dozen pressure groups and action committees trying to ride on his media coattails. You’ll have to excuse me.”

When Michelle stepped around her desk, she might as well have been stepping into another room. Buck glanced over at Liza. “Want to go out and grab a bite before you head back?”

“I’m trying for a quick turnaround,” Liza replied. “After all, your friend Detective Vasquez and his colleagues expect me to be up in Maiden’s Bay.”

“He’s not my friend,” Buck said, hiding his eyes behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses. “You take it easy, Liza.”

 
Liza tried to do exactly that on the way home. She needed to. When she’d started out in Hollywood, it was like plugging into a crazy generator that left her almost overcharged. Now, though, even her brief brush with the rat race seemed to have the opposite effect, sucking the energy right out of her.

She sat quietly in the back of the hired car that took her to LAX and was silently glad to find no seatmate on the plane. The return flight passed quickly enough, with Liza trying to get some sort of handle on the mystery sudoku master’s style.

By the time she guided her car through the exit for Maiden’s Bay, Liza felt as if she’d gotten back on an even keel.

Damn!
she suddenly thought.
I forgot to call Mrs. H.
Passing the strip mall with the
Oregon Daily
offices reminded her of other obligations.
I’ll take care of it all after supper. Damn again!

Liza realized she had no food in the house except for some frozen solid stuff in the freezer and canned soup. A quick stop at the supermarket fixed that, though. Liza was busy debating the benefits of sautéed versus roasted chicken breasts as she approached her back door.

The kitchen light was on—Mrs. Halvorsen must have come over after all. Juggling packages, Liza reached for the doorknob—and realized something was wrong with this picture. One of the panes of glass was missing.

This isn’t good
, a little voice inside her warned. But Liza couldn’t help herself. She peered through.

Her heart lurched. Across the faded linoleum tile of the kitchen floor, Rusty lay sprawled and motionless.

PART THREE: Forcing the Chain

Any sudoku puzzle is, by definition, a chain of logic. Working a difficult puzzle, you may face a situation where you’ve whittled down the available candidates in a number of spaces to a pair of choices. Unfortunately, in all of these cases, either candidate seems equally valid.

In such a case, you have to act as if either is right. You force the chain by choosing one option and seeing how the rest of the choices play out—how the dominoes fall. Then you do the same thing, using the other available choice as your starting point. As the competing chains of logic twist across the puzzle, you stay on the lookout for a space where, by either line of reasoning, only one candidate is chosen. That space then becomes the solid source for a new chain of logic—after you erase both sets of links leading to that spot. They are only guesswork. Many sudoku mavens suggest using an overlay and special marks to force a chain of logic—otherwise, your puzzle gets very, very messy . . .

 
—Excerpt from
Sudo-cues
by Liza K

Liza was halfway to Mrs. Halvorsen’s house before her bag of groceries hit the ground. She dashed for her neighbor’s back door and pounded on it.

Mrs. H. opened the door and stared.

“Break-in,” Liza gasped. “Rusty—”

“I’ve got 911 on speed-dial,” the older woman said, pulling Liza inside. While her neighbor spoke on the phone, Liza stood staring out the window toward her house. She wanted to go and help Rusty, but if someone was still inside . . .

She couldn’t quite get a grip on her thoughts, which seemed to swim over her brain, refusing to mix like oil and water. One set of images showed Hank Lonebaugh breaking in to fill her bedroom with “I Love You” balloons, reducing Rusty to ecstatic immobility through forty-five minutes of belly rubs. Or maybe he used a tiny sleeping pill in a piece of steak. But then the images darkened. Hank was smashing a kitchen chair over the dog.

Somehow in the course of this chain of thought, Hank Lovelorn had morphed into another figure. Liza realized it was the portrait of Neanderthal Man from the old encyclopedia they’d had in the house when she was a kid. But the brutal-looking caveman had traded in his wildcat skin for a black sweat suit. This was her image of whoever it was who had thrown Derrick Robbins down the mountainside to his death. However, now her brain insisted on creating visions of this hulking character throwing poor Rusty against the wall to lie like a broken toy . . .

The first thing to show that deputies had arrived was a knock at the front door. Liza found herself staring at another old classmate, Curt Walters. She’d heard he’d become lead deputy in the sheriff’s office. He smiled at her expression. “We don’t always come up with sirens blaring.”

Curt and his partner went up to Liza’s back door, their guns drawn. Moments later, Curt was back outside, beckoning. Liza ran over.

“The dog is breathing, but we can’t rouse him,” Curt reported. “There’s nobody else in the house.”

And not much room to hide in
, Liza thought ruefully. Whatever storage space she had was still filled with moving boxes.

“One other thing.” Curt conducted her to the corner of the living room where she’d constructed her home office. Now it had been deconstructed, even more messily than Derrick’s study had been searched. Liza needed a moment to trace the loose wires by the hutch to where they all should have come together.

“Somebody stole my computer box?” she burst out in disbelief.

“The CPU, they call it,” Curt said. “Though why they left the monitor and everything else . . . maybe you spooked them off when you came home.”

Or maybe . . .
Liza’s brain just shut down.
Maybe this is getting too weird for me.

Curt took a statement from Liza and also spent some time with Mrs. Halvorsen. In spite of not getting a call from Liza, the older woman had gone across to feed Rusty and let him out. She was sure she had locked the back door behind her and hadn’t heard anything suspicious. “I was just sitting here with the Good Book,” she said, patting her old family Bible.

Mrs. H. took Liza by the arm. “I have a spare room upstairs. It’s not the Ritz, but you’re welcome to use it tonight, or however long you need to.”

“No. No. Thank you, but no.” Liza stared across at her house. It wasn’t much, but she was damned if somebody—Hank, the killer, whoever—was going to scare her out of it.

In the end, Mrs. Halvorsen offered more practical help, rousting the local veterinarian. Curt and his partner were kind enough to get the comatose Rusty off the kitchen floor and into Liza’s car.

She brought Rusty to the vet’s office and spent a long, anxious chunk of forever in the waiting room. At last, Dr. Prestwick came out, still wiping his hands. “It looks as if someone fed Rusty a fairly massive dose of painkiller wrapped in hamburger,” he said. “I think we should keep him overnight, but that will mainly involve Rusty sleeping off the effects. Your dog ought to be fine.”

Liza thanked him, breathing a sigh of relief that turned into a yawn of jaw-dislocating proportions.

“You weren’t nibbling on any hamburger, too, were you?” Prestwick tried to joke. “I’d be careful driving back home.”

Liza was a good girl and didn’t wrap her car around any trees. When she pulled up to her house, she found a welcoming committee—a uniformed sheriff’s deputy she didn’t know.

“Brenna Ross,” the young woman introduced herself. “Curt asked me to stay around until you got back. He did a little work—”

Liza noticed that the broken pane had been covered over with a piece of scrap plywood.

“And he wanted you to know that I’d be passing by at various times during the night.”

“I appreciate that,” Liza began, then broke off as she saw Mrs. H. bustling over from her house.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather use my guest room?” Mrs. Halvorsen said. “It really wouldn’t be any trouble.”

“Thanks, Mrs. H., but I prefer my own bed.” Liza fought another yawn. “And if I don’t get there soon, I’ll be falling asleep out here on the porch.”

She got rid of the delegation, got the door closed and locked—then turned to the kitchen table, pulled a chair over to the door, and set it under the doorknob.

After doing the same with the front door, Liza dragged herself up the stairs. She didn’t even remember getting undressed. By the time her head hit the pillow, she was out like a light.

The next morning was typical Oregon overcast, which suited Liza just fine—she seemed to be operating under a cloud, anyway. Only after she’d already muzzily staggered down to the kitchen had she realized that Rusty wasn’t there to be fed.

Looking around, she saw that Curt had swept up the broken glass from the floor—a good thing, considering Liza’s bare feet. She also saw that Curt had retrieved the groceries she’d dropped on the way to Mrs. Halvorsen’s. Unfortunately, they’d only gotten as far as the kitchen table.

Liza gingerly went through the contents separating them into two piles, Keep and Toss. Meat—toss. Fresh squash—keep. Milk . . .

She hefted the half-gallon container and found it warm. This was not a good sign. Liza knew for a fact that there was no cow juice in the refrigerator. She’d used the last dribble to put some color in her pre-run coffee yesterday morning.

Shaking her head, Liza added the milk to the collection of things to go out. Then she bundled up the Toss pile to join the rest of the trash outside. Then up the stairs for a shower. She needed to be more awake before operating the car. She needed to drive the car to get into town and get some coffee (milk required). And she definitely needed some coffee to face the rest of the day’s workload.