Death by Sudoku (16 page)

Michael paged through the Bible, then read,“‘And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Himmon, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech.’”

“Well, that’s illuminating,” Ava said, appearing in the doorway.

“My grandfather used to swear by Tophet,” Michael said. “I wonder if that’s connected.”

“I wonder if your code breaking is only turning out gibberish.” Ava’s voice got a bit sharp.

“Let’s try another. This is JOS:10:11. ‘And when they were fleeing from the children of Israel, and were on the descent of Beth-horon, the Lord cast down upon them great stones from heaven as far as Azeca; and many more were killed with the hailstones than were slain by the swords of the children of Israel.’”

“You’re not knocking my socks off here,” Ava warned.

Michael turned to the keyboard and began a rapid-fire inputting job. “I’ll type these up and print them out, then go on to the others that Liza found.”

Ava took the printout and walked off shaking her head.

They continued working up a list of quotations, but even Liza had to admit that their collection was obscure to say the least.

“What were you expecting?” Michael asked. “A Bible quote that said, ‘And thou shalt go forth, yea, as far as Santa Barbara, and smite the nosey actor till he dieth a nasty death’?”

“That’s not funny—” Liza began, but shut up as Ava again appeared at her door. This time, the managing editor had a slightly shell-shocked expression.

She waved the piece of paper in her hand—the printout Michael had worked up. “That story about stones from the sky? I had Hank do a search on the date you gave me. It didn’t turn up hail, but a truckload of farmworkers—illegals—was wiped out that day by a landslide. When the highway patrol investigated, they found the slide had been caused by explosives.”

The only noise in the small office was the hum of the computer.

“The other one was a little more difficult for us to get a handle on.” Ava was trying hard to stay in her usual impassive managing editor mode. “Finally, Hank ended up doing a search on Molech. Turns out he’s an ancient god whose preferred sacrifice was burnt children. That set some new parameters for our search, and we wound up with a right-wing politician commenting on sacrificing children.” She took a deep breath. “The story was about an attempt to bomb the stem cell lab at Coastal University. The date of the attempt—April fourteen.”

“I’m surprised a story like that didn’t get wider coverage,” Michael said with a frown.

Ava shrugged. “The bomb didn’t actually go off. Apparently, whoever made it messed up the recipe from
The Anarchist’s Cookbook
.”

“Another job by the lame detachment of the militia,” Liza muttered.

“What?”

But Liza waved Ava off. “It doesn’t matter.”

Michael, meanwhile, printed out his new list. “Maybe this doesn’t look so much like gibberish anymore.”

Ava snatched it away and raced back to her office. “I’ll let you know.”

She came back more than an hour later, looking a bit bleary-eyed. “Some of them didn’t pan out, but I’ve got at least three more examples of sabotage and intimidation. Looks like these guys have been busy.”

Liza, however, was busy shooing Michael out of her desk chair. “Looks like I have a phone call to make to Santa Barbara.”

She managed to find Detective Vasquez at his desk. His greeting wasn’t encouraging. “Oh. It’s you.”

Well, this time he’ll have to listen
, Liza thought. “Detective, I know you thought I was way off base when I talked about Derrick and the whole coded message thing.”

“Didn’t stop you from telling me then, and I don’t think it will stop you now,” he grunted.

Liza plowed on. “Detective Vasquez, I think I’ve managed to decode some of those puzzles. You see, the top three boxes—”

A very audible sigh from the other end warned her this was the wrong approach. “We’ve got two manufactured road accidents and a bombing attempt at a research center.” Better to go with the more serious incidents, she decided.

“And the Bible told someone to do this?”

“We think it might be several people at least, over a large geographic area,” Liza said. “The Bible citations refer to actions that have been planned in advance. You might say they’re just the trigger. But there are also dates in the messages. And on those dates, these events took place.”

“So you’ve got some crazy line from the Bible, and a date, and you’re saying that because
something
happened on that date, it happened because of a secret message.” The detective’s voice was like a bucket of ice water right in the face.

“Cause and effect doesn’t always work that way. I know. I rubbed my lucky rabbit foot this morning, and I still haven’t caught any killers yet today.” Vasquez took in a large amount of air and let it out again. “I’ll give you another example that’s maybe a little closer. My wife is one of those pyramidology nuts. Do you know what that is?”

“Ah—no,” Liza said.

“She and a bunch of other people believe that all of history—and the future—is set out in the Great Pyramid of Geezer, or some such. All you have to do is measure along the hallways and whatnot with this thing they call the pyramid inch, and you find out all sorts of amazing things.

“There are these certain marks that were put down in 2141 BC, or so they tell me. Measure down this passageway from there, at one inch for every year, and when you come to the next passage, it’s 33 AD—the year of the crucifixion. The next gallery is 1881 pyramid inches long. That was supposed to be the end of the world, but the date came and went, so instead it’s just 1914—a prophecy for the beginning of World War I. Now they have to measure along other hallways to make new discoveries.”

The exasperation in the back of the detective’s voice came to the foreground now. “But you know what? Every time they announce a prediction, it never happens. Yet they find all sorts of things
after the fact
. You know why? It’s nothing to do with mystic powers or secret messages. It’s just dumb luck. If you search enough telephone directories and make the calls, you’ll probably find someone with my name who’ll believe this stuff. But if you want to convince
me
, lady, you’ll need more than the luck of the draw. You’ll have to predict an event before it happens.”

There wasn’t much to say after that. Liza hung up the phone. “He says it’s just coincidence that these things happened after the puzzles came out. Dumb luck.”

“That’s just one flatfoot’s opinion,” Ava responded with a true newsperson’s glint in her eye. “Other people might think otherwise when we go to press with this.”

Liza thought for a long moment. If the story ran in the newspaper, there was no way she could keep her name out of it. That would mean the end of Liza K’s secret identity. Liza Kelly and sudoku would be forever mixed in the public’s mind.

And maybe we’ll finally see if Michelle Markson’s head really will explode if she gets angry enough
, Liza thought.

On the other hand, maybe revealing what this crazy militia was up to would finally end this . . . what? “Reign of terror” seemed a bit melodramatic, but that’s really what it was.

Ava apparently took Liza’s silence for assent. “What would we call it?” she said. “Maybe ‘Dead Man’s Message’—or maybe ‘Criminal Code.’”

She was busily sketching out other headline concepts when Liza’s computer announced that she had incoming mail.

Liza looked at the garble of letters and numbers that made up the sender’s address. Nobody she knew. But the heading was intriguing—“Stop the presses.”

She opened the file, but there wasn’t any message, except for a box that said, “EXECUTING.”

Slowly, line by pixelated line, a picture took form. It was sort of blurry, the kind of “photo” that you got by using your cell phone. Even so, she recognized the face of the girl looking fearfully out at her.

“That’s Jenny Robbins!” Liza yelled.

Ava and Michael both swung around to stare at the screen. Jenny looked as if she hadn’t washed her hair in days. Her features looked pinched, and she was huddled in on herself, either from cold or from fear.

There was no other message, but Liza didn’t need to be a puzzle expert to connect the dots. Whoever was behind the militia knew they had gathered information for a story. This was a wordless warning that if they ran with it, Jenny would suffer.

“Save that picture!” Ava’s voice was like a whiplash. She pointed at the screen. “If we can show this to that detective—”

Ava shoved past the gawking Liza, lunging for the keyboard. But before she even touched a key, the screen went blank.

No, that’s not blank
, Liza thought.
It’s gone off.

Judging from the chorus of yells and swearing outside in the newsroom, the problem wasn’t just with Liza’s machine.

“I think that self-loading attachment had more than a picture,” Michael said grimly. “Probably a virus—something really ugly. By the time it’s finished, there’ll be no trace of that picture—and probably not much left of your network.”

Hank Lonebaugh flung himself through Liza’s door, his face ashen, his incipient jowls quivering. “What—what did you do?” he yelled. “Whatever this is, it started at your station.” He glared at Liza, repeating, “What did you do?”

“I just opened an e-mail,” Liza began.

She stopped at the expression on Hank’s face. It was the kind of look she’d have used on someone who’d just run over Rusty. No, it was worse—the kind of look reserved for someone who’d run over that cute little toddler who’d fooled with her on the plane to the sudoku tournament.

Ava spoke up. “We got suckered, downloading something we thought was an important clue for a story we’re working on.”

Liza was silently thankful for Ava’s “we.” Finding the boss involved, Hank ratcheted back his reaction a bit. “Too late to do anything here—this node will end up shot. I think I caught it early enough so it didn’t spread to the rest of the paper’s Net.”

He didn’t say anything to Liza—verbally. But his face, his posture, his whole body language showed that the scales had fallen from his eyes. The woman he’d tried to give his heart to had turned out to be a cybercide. And though he would struggle mightily to save his beloved system, he’d be doing so with a heavy and broken heart.

Liza stifled a sigh of relief as her would-be stalker went down the hall, back to damage control.

Guess there really is something to that old saying about clouds and silver linings
, she thought.

“These guys may be hit and miss when it comes to local help, but they’re certainly on the cutting edge when it comes to technology.” Michael’s eyes went from the dead computer to the telephone. “Either they got a hint that we were onto something from the computer searches, or they’ve got a tap on the telephone and heard Liza talking with Detective Vasquez.”

“That’s—” Ava began.

“About as crazy as anything in the half-assed scripts I doctor for a living,” Michael finished for her. “Funny thing is, I told Liza the exact same thing just a couple of days ago.”

Liza’s eyes went back to the screen of her disabled computer, trying to call Jenny’s picture back from her memory. It had been grainy, kind of flat—a cell phone picture blown up too large. “Did either of you notice anything odd in the background of that photo?” she suddenly asked.

“Odd? Like what?” Ava responded in surprise.

Liza closed her eyes, trying to call up every detail. “I thought I saw a haystack behind the girl.”

“Haystack?” Michael almost yelped out his protest. “I’m pretty sure the background was water, not fields, Liza.”

Liza opened her eyes to give him a look. “That’s where you find haystacks around here.”

“What? Floating around?”

Now Ava started giving him the same look. “It’s a local geological formation,” she told Michael. “They’re rocks that look like giant piles—”

“Of hay, I guess,” Michael said.

“Rising up from the water off the shore,” Ava finished. She frowned. “So now we know two things about Jenny Robbins. She’s still alive, and she’s not all that far away.”

“I guess it’s too much to hope that there’s a single formation known as the Haystack,” Michael said.

“No, Oregon has a lot of them, up and down the coast,” Liza said. “But we know that whoever took her brought her up here.”

She turned back to the pile of sudoku puzzles they’d collected. “I want to go over these again, especially the ones from just before Derrick died—and after. There may be some hint about where Jenny was taken.”

“I guess I’ll have to deal with the madhouse out there.” Ava straightened her shoulders and marched out.

“So what are my marching orders, General?” Michael asked with a smile.

“I want you to go to the local library,” Liza told him. “Download the latest puzzles from the
Seattle Prospect
.” She gestured at her out-of-commission computer—now just a very large paperweight taking up most of her work space. “Obviously, we won’t be getting anything out of this system for a while.”

Michael took off, and Liza tried to restore some order to the pile of sudoku, which had grown progressively messier as she’d weeded through it searching for mystery puzzles. She’d already filtered out puzzles which hadn’t belonged—brain-busters appearing early in the week. But she’d skipped over the possibility of easy puzzles at the end of the week.

Derrick had been killed either late Saturday night or early Sunday. If some order had been given by puzzle, it should have appeared on Friday or Saturday morning.

Liza got out those puzzles and began decoding. The top line of boxes on the Friday puzzle didn’t seem to fit with any abbreviation scheme for biblical books.

Saturday’s puzzle yielded the letters P-R-O. Liza retrieved the Bible and looked through the list of abbreviations. She found that there was a book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. The rest of the citation was chapter 23, verse 13. Thumbing through the pages, Liza found these words: “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.”