Death by Sudoku (17 page)

She frowned in puzzlement, thinking,
Well,
that
didn’t turn out the way I expected.

Maybe it was because of Michael’s flip comment earlier, but she’d half assumed she’d unearth some kind of fire-and-brimstone exhortation to smite the heathen. “Correction” wasn’t even in the same league with her expectations.

And the second part of the verse—“he shall not die”—didn’t sound like an order to assassinate someone.
Quite the opposite
, Liza thought. It seemed more as if the order was to administer a beating.

Well, that made a certain kind of sense. Killing Derrick had brought a whole lot of attention in the form of a police investigation—and, Liza had to admit, unwelcome attention from one Liza Kelly and the
Oregon Daily.
If someone had come and quietly put the arm on Derrick the day before, would he even have mentioned his suspicions to Liza on Saturday evening?

The only one who could have answered that question was Derrick Robbins, and Liza wasn’t going to hear from him again.

If I show this to Ava or Michael, they’ll find it pretty iffy
, Liza thought. Then she looked to see if there was a hidden date as well. There was—for the very day of the puzzle. So it was a hurry-up job, and given this group’s track record, maybe a messed-up job.

She went on to Sunday’s puzzle. The letters E, Z, and K showed up in the top three boxes. Quickly checking, Liza found a book of Ezekiel. Looking in the Good Book for chapter 26, verse 5, she found this: “It shall be a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord God: and it shall become a spoil to the nations.”

Liza was about to toss that as a dud message when she stopped to check for a hidden date. There was one—again, the same day as the puzzle came out.
Too bad it doesn’t seem to make much sense
, Liza thought. Could there be a code inside a code here?

On to Monday’s puzzle, a mystery puzzle she hadn’t gotten to yet. “J-D-G,” she said, examining the top row of boxes. Then she went on to the list of abbreviations. Those letters could stand for the book of Judges. Okay, chapter 16, verse 29. Opening the Bible to the indicated passage, Liza read: “And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left.”

This looked like a quote from a well-known Bible story, but Liza read on just to make sure. Yes, in just a few verses, Samson literally brought down the house, toppling the pillars and dropping the roof of the Philistine temple down to kill thousands.

This doesn’t look good, Liza thought. She checked the date—it was today!

Jumping out of her seat, she ran to Ava’s office, only to find it empty. She finally tracked down her friend under a desk in the newsroom, deep in conference with Hank. He took one glance at Liza and then buried his head deeper into the router or whatever it was, unwilling to sully his eyes with the sight of a computer killer.

Maybe someday, when he was a bit calmer, Hank might wonder how an unsolicited e-mail slipped its way past his security protocols, all his antispam and spyware defenses, carrying something that could nuke this whole system,
Liza thought.
Or rather, how someone managed to worm past all that protection with a killer virus. Maybe then Mr. Tech under there wouldn’t put all the blame on Liza.

Till then, though, Liza would be free of his attentions—and free to feel a little guilty. What could she do to make Hank feel a bit better? What he really needed was to be hooked up with someone more in his age and interest range.

Now, who . . . ?
Liza began running through possibilities, then shook her head. She wasn’t the matchmaker type.

But, she realized, she knew someone who was—Mrs. Halvorsen. The only question was, would siccing Mrs. H. on Hank fall under the heading of “doing him a favor” or “getting revenge”?

Ava scooted out from under the desk and looked up at Liza. “Is there something you need?” she asked.

Pulled back to business, Liza nodded. “I just wanted to see if there were any reports about . . . uh . . .” she glanced at Hank’s lower half, then decided he was up to his ears in electronics. “Was there anything untoward that happened to a church, or maybe a synagogue, today?”

“Nothing that I’ve heard about.” Ava poked her head up above desk level. “Of course, right now we’re kind of reduced to getting our reports from news radio.” She turned to one of the reporters, who was keeping up a machine-gun flow of two-finger typing on a laptop computer. “Hey, Murph, you’re plugged in with the local pastors. Anything going on with churches or synagogues?”

The heavyset man looked up from his screen. “Nothing I’ve heard. Should I make some calls?”

“Should he?” Ava asked.

Liza waved the puzzle in her hand. “It was dated today.”

Murph made the calls, but ended up shaking his massive head. “Nothing going on.”

The look that Ava sent at Liza indicated a serious loss of credibility, so Liza retreated to her office, just in time to meet Michael coming in.

“Here’s the
Prospect
’s sudoku for today,” he said, waving a printout. “At a quick look, it seems pretty difficult for an early-in-the-week puzzle. And the top three boxes give a G-E-N. Even I know the book of Genesis.”

Liza stepped over to her desk and all but pounced on the Bible, picking it up and turning pages. “What’s the rest of the citation?”

“Chapter 19, verse 24.”

It was toward the front of the book—but then, Genesis was the first book of the Bible. Liza read aloud, “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.”

Liza’s eyes snapped round to Michael. “This is even worse than the last one—is there a date in the sixth box?”

She was hoping there wasn’t, that this was just a fluke.

But that hope died when she saw the look on Michael’s face. “There is a date,” he said tightly. “It’s tomorrow.”

“This is terrible!” Liza’s voice grew a little wild. Just two puzzles ago, she’d wanted fire and brimstone, something more definitive in the coded quote she suspected was an order to attack Derrick. Now she was afraid she was getting too much. This was the story of Lot, the only just person in the wicked city, warned by angels to escape and never to look back. By the end of chapter 19 of Genesis, the Lord smote several cities, wiping out their whole populations except for Lot’s family.

Whatever was being ordered, it probably meant more than attacking a single person, or even a truckload.

More like a temple full of them
, Liza thought.

“No,” Michael argued, “it’s not terrible. It’s—I was going to say wonderful, but that’s not the right word. Let’s call it an opportunity, instead. Figure out what this message is about, and you’ll be able to predict what the bad guys are going to do. That’s what that Vasquez guy wanted, wasn’t it? If you could predict something from the code, he’d have to believe you.”

He paused for a second. “And I’m betting that you can do exactly that. The bad guys are afraid of you, Liza. They think you can figure this message out. That’s why they’re threatening Jenny. They want to distract you—or shut you up.”

The fear, worry, and responsibility roiling around in Liza’s head vented itself in one angry eruption. “Well, thanks, Michael. Don’t put any pressure on me or anything.”

The weird thing, though, was that she couldn’t shake the idea that Michael was right.

It was crazy. For the last two months, she’d been about one step away from being a hermit. She’d come up to Maiden’s Bay, trying to clear her mind and create a new life. She’d been up to her neck in sudoku, and even though she’d been working in a newspaper office, nobody could exactly say that she’d been keeping her finger on the pulse of the media. So where did this strange idea come from?

Liza tried to find a logical connection between her recent life and this threat. No actual temples in town. There was a Jewish Center about three exits down the highway and a Hindu or Buddhist temple an exit farther along.
Hmm . . . does the Zen meditation storefront here in the strip mall rate as a temple?

Maybe I’m being too literal
, Liza told herself. A temple could mean a house of worship, like a church. Since coming back to Maiden’s Bay, she’d attended functions at several local churches—that was part of small-town life.

After a moment’s mental straining, she shook her head. No, there wasn’t any clue to be found in the pair of musical concerts she’d attended. And while some of the concoctions at the bake sales might seem pretty deadly to a cholesterol-conscious Californian, she couldn’t quite tie them into a plot for mass murder.

“What might I know about that would be threatened with fire and brimstone?” she asked aloud, annoyed that the idea still kept niggling at her.

Michael shrugged. “There are a lot of people—and not too far from here—who’d tell you that Hollywood is at least as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“That’s true, but—wait a minute.” Liza went back to the pile on her work space for the last puzzle she’d decoded. “You weren’t here when I did this one.” She showed him the citation and got the Bible, reading the quote.

“All the other quotes have been pretty obscure,” Michael said. “Then we get two famous Bible stories in a row. Could that mean something?”

“There were two really obscure ones before these.” Liza brought him up-to-date on the other messages she’d decoded. “Do they mean something? Do they mean nothing?”

“I don’t know,” Michael admitted. “But you had a look in your eye when you started talking about Sodom and Gomorrah—and Samson.”

“I think they may be connected.” Liza said it quickly before she’d have a chance to pick holes in the idea.

“When I saw the quote from the book of Judges, I immediately asked whether anything had happened to a church or temple today. Nothing had. Reading it again . . . well, here—listen.”

Turning to the quote again, she read aloud.“‘And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left.’ Why did whoever is giving the orders choose that passage, Michael? Why not choose the part where Samson actually brought the temple down?”

“Well, Samson brought the roof down on himself, too. I don’t think these guys are suicide attackers.”

“Okay,” Liza admitted. “That’s a point. But here’s what I think. In the quote that came out yesterday, Samson is just putting his hands on the pillars—he’s
getting ready
to destroy the temple.”

“And you say nothing happened today?” Michael scowled in thought. “Of course, this could be like the attempt on the research lab—maybe it just didn’t work.”

“Or maybe the Samson quote is about getting things ready, and the Sodom and Gomorrah quote is about when it all comes down.”

Liza put her hands on her temples, as if she could squeeze whatever was hiding in her brain out into the open. “You don’t usually think of a temple in Sodom and Gomorrah,” she muttered. “So why do they seem connected to me?”

She tried to clear her mind and try free association, a brainstorming method that Michelle sometimes used.
Michelle—Hollywood—Sodom and Gomorrah—temple—Hollywood—Michelle . . .

Her eyes popped open. “Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.”

“What?” Michael stared at her, completely lost now.

“What’s the theater supposed to look like?” Liza asked.

“A Chinese building,” Michael replied.

Liza raised a finger. “A Chinese
temple
. And it’s on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“Downtown Sodom and Gomorrah,” Michael agreed.

“And there’s a movie premiering there tomorrow. Michelle mentioned it when I met with her down in L.A. The studio is trying to give it a big buildup. That’s why they’re opening in Grauman’s Chinese—and on a Wednesday, hoping to boost the box office. From the way Michelle was talking, they’ll need all the help they can get. It’s a windy, lefty political epic. And the star is Alden Benedict.”

“Ah.” Comprehension dawned in Michael’s eyes. “A lot of right-wingers would love to see a roof fall on him, followed with lots of fire and brimstone.”

Liza tried to pace back and forth in her tiny office, which involved bumping into Michael quite a bit. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? The bad guys would be worried that I might make the connection. A couple of months ago, I’d have known all about the premiere.”

But she’d only learned about it by dumb luck, because she’d been called down to see Michelle after Derrick’s murder.

“It covers both messages,” Michael said, doing his best to dodge Liza’s pacing form in the cramped quarters. “So where do we go with it?”

“We go to Ava, first.”

They found Ava still with Hank, trying to resurrect the dead computer network. He was so busy with some kind of ticklish reboot that he never noticed Liza and Michael hauling her away from the master computer or whatever it was. At first Ava was too astonished to say anything, but she did begin to protest as they all but frog-marched her to her office.

Her attitude changed radically as Liza showed off the new message Michael had brought in and explained her theory. “I want to get in touch with Detective Vasquez—” Liza began.

“To hell with that,” Ava said decisively. “We’ve got to get down there!” She reached for her phone. “I’ll book us on the next flight to LAX—”

Both Ava and Liza stared as Michael pushed the handset back down. “You don’t want to be doing that—at least not on that phone,” he warned.

“What are you talking about?” Ava demanded.

“After you began searching for stories to tie in with the coded messages—and Liza called the Santa Barbara police—we suddenly got a message to knock off what we were doing.”