Death by Sudoku (15 page)

“I guess so,” Liza said. “Does that change anything?” She turned back to the computer. “Speaking of which, I’ve got a whole bunch of puzzle solutions to e-mail to Professor Frisch.”

While she did that, Michael went back to the mystery puzzle she’d taken from him, his frown deepening as his fingers went at a speed freak’s pace across the sudoku grid.

“This is almost a joke,” he muttered. “Why stick it on a day people would expect a real puzzle?”

Liza heard a quick tap at the door, and Hank poked an apprehensive head in. “Janey said this fax was for you,” he said, handing over a piece of paper.

“Thanks, Hank. I’m glad you’re here. See all these puzzles?” Liza gestured with her free hand to the three-month collection of sudoku from the
Seattle Prospect
. “Ava downloaded them, but now I have to e-mail them to Dr. Frisch at Coastal University so he can run a search—”

“I could do that,” Hank cut in.

“You’ve got some sort of bulk e-mail?”

“No, I mean I could do the search for you. Frisch may have the big machines, but we’ve got lots of them. If I could divert—”

“You’d divert the paper’s computer network for some personal project?” Ava asked, appearing behind him.

“Why, yes.” Hank was still puffing himself up at Liza. Then he realized who was asking. “That is, no. Just that it’s, er, possible.”

“You keep telling me our network is held together with spit and good luck as it is. Don’t go diverting anything. Just get that stuff wherever Liza needs it.” Ava walked off down the corridor, and Hank slunk away in the opposite direction.

Liza finally got to read the fax. “This is from my neighbor. It’s the passage she read.” Liza held out the page. Being copied and then faxed had not done wonders for the old-fashioned printing, but it was still legible. Mrs. H. had circled the passage, printing in bold letters in the margin, “NUM:11:1.”

Michael pointed at the notation. “Is that the usual way to give chapter and verse?”

“I’ll ask,” Liza said, picking up the phone.

“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Halvorsen told her, “Bible citations are usually divided by colons, with the name of the particular book abbreviated. Most of those are three-letter abbreviations—GEN, NUM, and so on. Exodus is just two—EX, and Deuteronomy is four—DEUT. But mostly it’s three letters in the Old Testament.”

Michael’s eyes went from the paper in Liza’s hand to the puzzle in his as she explained what she’d just heard. “So, some of these numbers might possibly represent letters,” he said glumly. “Maybe that would explain the weird puzzles. Fitting something in might require a horrendous set of clues, or ridiculously easy ones.”

He scowled, squinting at the finished puzzle he’d just bombed through. “Or could it be something you turn up in the process of solving the stupid things?” Michael rattled the paper as if he expected an answer to fall off into his lap.

“What?” Liza said.“‘The X-wing marks the spot,’ or ‘Seek the secret Swordfish’?”

“Have you worked all of these through?” Michael asked, putting down the puzzle he’d solved.

“No—although I was starting on the killer ones first.” Liza glanced from her computer to the short pile of mystery puzzles. “I thought I might use some of them as the basis for columns—if only as a guide for what to stay away from.”

She passed them over to Michael, who riffled through the collection while she tried to work up her notes on the puzzle Will Singleton had given her at the tournament. She didn’t get very far, since she spent more time watching Michael’s reactions than looking at the screen. In the end, she gave up the pretense of work altogether when Michael held out a puzzle she’d only half finished. “Yeah, that one really annoyed me.”

Liza took that one while he took a blank puzzle. The little room filled with a companionable silence, broken only by the
skritch
of pen and pencil points, the occasional wordless murmur of triumph or a
tsk
as a promising line of logic disintegrated.

Liza looked over at Michael. It had been a long time since she’d shared her private vice. He was bent over a puzzle, scowling.
He needs a haircut
, she realized. Michael tended not to notice things like that unless someone—i.e., Liza—reminded him. Well, he obviously hadn’t been getting reminders lately.

One of the tousled, unruly dark curls fell across his forehead. Impatiently, he blew up at it as he filled another space.

The action was so Michael—and so useless—she unconsciously reached out to brush the curl back.

He looked up at her almost in shock, then said, “I’ve missed this. Maybe I made a mistake.”

“In the puzzle?” Liza found her throat had unaccountably gotten very tight around her words.

Michael put the page down. “In a bigger puzzle than this,” he said, his voice very low. “I thought I could go off by myself and solve it all, but maybe that was the wrong strategy—the wrong technique.” He looked up at Liza, fumbling for sudoku terms to get his feelings across. “Maybe it’s not about finishing a puzzle at all, it’s the fun of working it out together . . .”

“That’s it!” Liza jumped up.

Michael recoiled so fast, he almost fell out of his chair. “I didn’t mean—”

“I’m sorry, Michael, it’s not something you said . . .” Her face got warm. “Or rather, not exactly the way you meant it. We’ve been working either on solving the puzzles or their solutions. Maybe that’s the wrong strategy.”

Michael was having worse trouble switching gears. “Wha-what?”

“I mentioned that there may be a militia connection with this whole code thing, but I didn’t mention something Kevin said about those guys. What it boils down to, he doubted that the people waiting for these messages would have the brains to work out the sudoku and get them.”

“So the message isn’t in the puzzle?” Michael asked in confusion.

“Oh, it’s in the puzzle, but it’s not about finishing it,” Liza said. “What if the message we’re looking for is already there—in the clues?”

She scrabbled around for a mystery puzzle they hadn’t started solving. “Okay, we’ve been looking for a string of numbers, thanks to what Uncle Jim told me about book codes. But suppose . . .”

Liza grabbed her pen, outlining the nine boxes in the puzzle with quick bold strokes. “Suppose we break it down this way.” She tapped the top three boxes with the pen. “Mrs. H. told us most Old Testament books have three-letter abbreviations. What if the numbers in each box represent or add up to the equivalent of a letter? You know, one is A, two is B . . .”

She looked at the numbers in the first box, a 2 and a 5. “If I add these together, I get seven.” She began counting off on her fingers. “A, B, C, D, E, F, G—”

Grabbing a pencil and a piece of paper, Michael began scribbling furiously. “If you do that as twenty-five, it’s a Y,” he said.

“Could be Genesis, or it could be nothing.” Liza put that puzzle down. “We’re looking for a puzzle that leads to the book of Numbers.”

They went through several puzzles in growing frustration. What happened when a box had four digits? Should they just go with the first two, or one?

“Your pal said these people have simple minds, so let’s keep it simple,” Michael suggested. “No more than two numbers per box, and we’ll read them from left to right.”

“Okay,” Liza agreed. “And speaking of simple, let’s use the puzzle you ripped through at the beginning—the easy one that shouldn’t have been easy.” She picked up the paper, ruthlessly using a marker to obliterate Michael’s solution.

“The first two clues in the first box are right in the first row—a 1 and a 4.”

Michael consulted his list. “Fourteen—that’s an N.”

“Second box, second row—we’ve got a 2 and 1.” Liza peered over Michael’s shoulder. “That’s a U?”

She quickly moved to the top right box. “The first two numbers are in the third row—”

“Am I beginning to detect a pattern here?” Michael asked.

Liza ignored him. “And those numbers are 1 and 3.”

“Thirteen—that would make the whole thing N-U-M.”

Liza was already searching the next trio of boxes to find the chapter and verse. “Look here—the first two numbers in the next box are in the second row—9 and 2.”

She frowned. “That must be a heck of a long book, with ninety-two chapters.”

“It is the Bible, after all.” Michael aimed suspicious eyes at the offending numbers. “On the other hand, this is the first time we’ve seen a high number in the first spot. Suppose that means to add the next one?”

“That would give us eleven.” Liza moved on to the next box. “Huh. Here’s a difference, too. The first number is a four, but it’s not in the leftmost column.”

Michael leaned over to look, too. “It’s also in the same row as the last clue. If we go down—”

“There’s a 1 in the leftmost column,” Liza finished for him. “And an 8. That makes eighteen.”

“Unless the difference means something,” Michael cautioned.

“Like ‘skip the next number’? Then we have forty-eight.”

“Or maybe it’s ‘only use the next number’ and we have a single 1.”

Liza jotted down that possibility and stopped.

“NUM:11:1,” Michael muttered in disbelief, staring over her shoulder. “Right in front of us, and pretty damned simple.” He hesitated for a second. “Unless we forced the solution. We did make a couple of big jumps along the way.”

Liza didn’t answer, her eyes riveted on the clues in the middle row’s final box. Suddenly, she tore over to her bag, pulling out the fat file she’d left in there.

“What is it?” Michael asked, alarmed.

“Not sure. Gotta see—” She nearly tore through sheets of printout. “The car crash that killed the reporters. I need to see the first story . . . here.”

Liza held it up and sucked in her breath. “The newspaper story is dated February sixteen, which means the crash happened the day before. Look in the sixth box on that puzzle and read out the first three numbers.”

Michael ran his fingers along the spaces in that box. “That would be 2, 1, and 5.”

“Two-one-five, or two-fifteen?” Liza asked with numb lips. “Remind me of the date on the puzzle?”

Michael returned to the puzzle as if the print might bite him. “Sunday, February eleven.”

“Just about three months ago, a couple of days before the accident. But it wasn’t an accident, was it?” She took a deep breath. “Somebody used this puzzle to order a car-load of people killed!”

“You have a car?” Liza asked, abruptly turning to Michael. “There’s a mall about an exit away on the highway—they have a bookstore. We need a Bible.”

Michael put a hand in his pocket and came out with car keys. “I’ll ask the girl in reception for directions,” he said, heading off immediately.

Liza headed in the opposite direction, to Ava’s office. She brought the puzzle they’d decoded with her and barged right in. “Check this out, Chief,” she told her managing editor before Ava could even say anything.

She showed their solution, then read the passage from the book of Numbers. Finally, she gave Ava the date, then passed over the sheaf of stories about the journalists burning in the car crash.

“So you think that’s what happens to people who complain?” Ava asked.

“I’d have thought—hoped—it was just a fluke, except for finding the date,” Liza replied. “We’ve got a bunch of other puzzles in my office, and Michael is off getting a Bible. What we need, though, is research help, someone to connect any messages we find with events out in the real world.”

“I can do that, provided you have something,” Ava promised. “Or rather, Hank will do it—and he can divert as much computer power as he needs for the job.”

“Great—I’ll be back as soon as we get anything more.” Liza went back to her office and began running through that sheaf of mystery puzzles. Here was G-E-N—maybe it was from the book of Genesis. She frowned in puzzlement when the first three boxes of the next puzzle yielded J-O-S. Was that a book of the Bible?

By the time Michael arrived with a new Bible, Liza had a sheet of paper filled with possible citations. She passed it to him, continuing to work on decoding puzzles.

“Could we switch chairs?” he asked, nodding toward the computer. “I want to type up the citation we end up with.”

Liza rose from her seat. “I guess you won’t have to worry about this one,” she said, waving the puzzle in her hand. “I got the letters B-K-G in the top boxes. Hey, there are probably lots of publicity people who’d love a Gospel according to Burger King, but I don’t think—”

“Wait a minute.” Michael stood thumbing through pages of his new Bible. “One of the reasons I got this edition was because they have a section on the different abbreviations for biblical books. There isn’t a BKG, but there is a book called Second Kings—or 2KG.”

“All righty, then.” Liza squinted at the other boxes in the puzzle. “Then it’s Second Kings, chapter 23, verse 10. And the date is April fourteen.”