Death by Sudoku (20 page)

She made a hard landing, hard enough to drive the breath from her. Stars flickered at the edges of her vision, and her eyes squeezed shut as a more deafening noise filled the stairwell—a real gunshot.

When her eyes opened again, she saw a large form bouncing down the stairs—a large form in ill-fitting coveralls. Looming over them on the stairs was the other large figure in a denim jacket and jeans. She recognized the features—large but handsome with a hard expression. That changed slightly as Buck Foreman smiled. “Michelle’s got another ex-assistant—your message made no sense at all. Luckily, the message on my machine did. Who is this bird?”

On hearing what Liza and Ava had to report, the hardness came back to Buck’s face. He leaned down and hauled up the groggy maintenance man by his collar. “Come on, we have to go outside. My cell phone gets no reception in these old fortresses.”

Buck still had some friends on the LAPD. A couple of calls brought a serious response. Soon the big guy was being hustled off downtown, with Liza and Ava going as witnesses, while the bomb squad cleared the building and headed upstairs.

This time when she gave her statement, Liza had an interested and attentive audience. After she finished, she found Buck and Ava waiting for her.

“Leo Carruthers is busy talking his head off,” Buck reported.

“Also known as ‘big creepy guy with bomb and gun,’” Ava put in.

“From what he said, you were right on the money,” Buck said. “Carruthers told his interrogators that he’d get orders through the sudoku puzzles in the
Seattle Prospect
. This looks like a pretty loosely organized group, but one with lots of money behind it. They didn’t just use the newspaper. Carruthers said he got a series of single-use cell phones in the mail, each of them programmed with a number. He was supposed to use them to report on the progress of this bomb plot. Usually, it was only when things were about to go down that the go-ahead came through the coded puzzles.”

“I wasn’t right on the money,” Liza said quietly. “Derrick Robbins was.”

“There’s something else.” Ava’s voice grew solemn. “Carruthers said he was involved in Derrick’s death.”

“What?” Liza stared at them, not knowing what to say.

Buck Foreman’s face had reverted to its most forbidding cop expression, giving nothing away. “Apparently, it was a hurried job. Leo got it because he lives here in Southern California.”

Liza nodded, feeling numb. “He was pretty close to Santa Barbara.”

“Leo got a cell phone and called the Captain—”

“The who?”

“The Captain of the Host,” Ava said. “Sounds very biblical, doesn’t it? Anyway, he seems to be the head wacko, the one who gives the orders in this little conspiracy.”

“There was one wrinkle in the coded puzzles that you missed,” Buck told her. “The bottom three—” He paused.

“What? Rows? Boxes?”

“It was boxes,” Buck said. “Apparently, they held code numbers referring to members who would be involved. Leo had a partner for the visit to Derrick Robbins, a big guy who’d help intimidate him. They went to Derrick’s place, and—well, maybe you’d better hear the way he tells it.”

Buck brought up a small voice recorder. “They didn’t realize I had this on me when they let me into the observation room.”

He activated the device, and Liza heard a voice. It was tinier and tinnier coming out of the small speaker, but it was definitely the same voice that had growled at them up in the VIP box—although now it held a distinct whine as well.

“Nothing was supposed to happen. We were just supposed to put the fear of God into this guy.” Leo gulped noisily at some sort of drink. “So I remembered something I’d seen in this movie. It had two of the guys from Monty Python, and the babe with the big jugs from
Halloween
.”

“What—?” Liza began, but Ava shushed her. “I think he means
A Fish Called Wanda
.”

Liza vaguely remembered the movie. Wasn’t that where Kevin Kline had held John Cleese out a window by his ankles?

As if on cue, the taped voice said, “We were going to hang him over the side of this terrace place by his ankles. I figured that would put the message across pretty well.” Another loud slurp, followed by a half-smothered burp. “Turns out that trick’s a lot harder to do in real life. I lost my grip, and the other guy let the actor fall.”

Now the whine became even more evident. “So you see, it wasn’t my fault. Everything would have been fine if that big jerk hadn’t let the actor guy slip through his fingers. Then the girl turned up, and we had to get out of there. So we took her with us. The Captain was pissed about that when he heard, I can tell you for damned sure.”

“What happened after that?” another voice came in.

“I keep telling you, I don’t know.” Carruthers’s voice whined on the tape. “I had the task at the theater to take care of. Three months I’ve been working maintenance there—lousy job. But the Captain figured someday, there would be a movie premiere there, and we could make a statement—”

Buck Foreman cut off the rest of whatever Carruthers had to say. “That’s about it. They split up, with the other guy heading back up north with Jenny Robbins.”

Liza nodded. “That’s what we thought. Do you think he’s holding anything back? Could he know where Jenny is being kept?”

Buck’s face might not give anything away, but his shrug said a lot. “They didn’t even have to sweat anything out of him. This guy is just about gushing information. I think if he knew, he’d be talking.”

A familiar face appeared at his elbow—almost literally. Michelle Markson looked like the evilly triumphant pixie queen today. She was all but rubbing her hands together in wicked anticipation.

“Fasten your seat belts,” she said. “When this hits the news cycle, we’ll be off for a long ride. Network news, the morning shows, late night, the newsmagazine shows,
People
,
Us
. . . hell,
Time
and
Newsweek
, too!”

“I’ve got a question,” Ava put in crisply. “The only way this story works is if you reveal that Liza Kelly is actually Liza K, the sudoku expert for the
Oregon Daily
. Up to now, you’ve been a hundred percent against that. Are you changing your mind now?”

Michelle’s delicate features congealed into a female version of Buck’s cop face. “Who is this person?”

After the introductions and discovering that Ava was in the print media, Michelle grudgingly admitted that the paper had won itself a scoop. “And I guess we do have to go with the sudoku angle as well. Before, it was just some mental equivalent of thumb twiddling. But now—” She made a gesture worthy of a conjurer. “It’s solved a murder.”

Liza decided this was the time to step in. “Before you go any further with this publicity campaign, you might as well stop here.”

Michelle stared at her as if she’d suffered brain damage, not attempted murder. “Whatever do you mean?”

“I’m glad we stopped this bomb plot, but we’ve got to keep it in the dark,” Liza said.

Now even Ava looked ready to kill her. Liza raised both hands. “If the news gets out—if we let it get out—we may as well be signing Jenny Robbins’s death warrant. All we know right now is that she’s somewhere on the Oregon coast in the hands of a large nut. The head bad guy—this Captain character—already threatened her when it looked likely that we might break the story.”

She looked from Ava to Buck to Michelle. “What do you think her life will be worth if this is splashed all over the media?”

After a moment’s silence, Michelle spoke, her voice almost compassionate. “Liza,
you’ve
got to think about this for a moment. I wasn’t talking about breaking the story, but how to spin it. Like it or not, this is out already.”

Buck nodded, his stone face gone sour. “There are so many glory hounds in this place, they’re probably burning out the local cell node, leaking stuff to press people. That’s how it is, Liza—you scratch my back, et cetera, et cetera.”

“They’re right.” Ava stretched out a hand to Liza’s shoulder. “You’ve been in the business long enough yourself to know there’s no way to keep the wraps on a story like this. Look at it—Hollywood, a movie star almost killed at a world premiere, wacko politics, both right and left, secret messages, revelations, even the Bible. This is guaranteed to sell papers—”

“Or airtime,” Michelle put in. “And the media people will all cut one another’s throats to get it out first.”

“You’re right.” Liza felt as if they’d all just dropped a heavy stone on her chest. “You’re right, dammit, but I don’t have to like it. Because it means, unless Michael and Kevin get very, very lucky, that Jenny is dead.”

Kevin Shepard sighed as he cleared the last bits of paperwork from his desk. He’d been letting things slide, spending so much time up in Maiden’s Bay lately. Oh, he could kid himself that he was doing stuff for Mrs. Halvorsen, but the real reason was Liza Kelly. All they’d had was a walk in the dark and a breakfast devoted to pretty grim stuff, but he was still willing to get in the car and drive over if Liza asked.

And that’s exactly what I’m doing
, he thought with a rueful smile, wondering what Mrs. Halvorsen would have in store for him when he arrived at her place.
I don’t know why she couldn’t call me herself. Unless maybe now she’s convinced herself she’s got laryngitis.

Driving up Route 101, he debated whether he should be stopping off for gargle or throat spray. That whimsical mood vanished when he saw a strange car in front of the elderly woman’s house.

It looked too late model and sporty to belong to old Doc Conyers, the general practitioner who still made house calls around Maiden’s Bay.
Maybe it belongs to a visiting nurse
, he thought, almost running up the front porch to ring the doorbell.
Lord, I hope the poor old soul doesn’t have something serious.

Kevin felt a stab of relief when Mrs. H. answered the door herself. Things couldn’t be all that bad. He felt a stab of a different sort when Mrs. H. led him into the living room, where Michael Langley sat ensconced (or was that trapped?) in an overstuffed armchair, an old photo album across his lap.

It took him a moment to struggle out of the too-plush upholstery, and when he got to his feet, he took up something suspiciously close to a boxer’s stance. But he just held out an envelope, saying, “It’s from Liza.”

Kevin took the letter and stepped back, using the light coming in through the window as his excuse. By the time he finished reading, he could feel his features tightening into what his old football teammates had called his game face.

He looked up from Liza’s words, obviously scrawled in haste, to appraise—well, his rival, he’d have to say.
No use mincing words.

Michael, interestingly, didn’t look much happier—just maybe more resigned.

“You know,” Kevin challenged, “from what I saw and heard of you, you weren’t all that enthusiastic about what Liza was trying to do.”

Michael looked on the brink of a sharp retort, but took a deep breath and throttled back that response. “I also know Liza well enough to figure my chances of stopping her once she’s made up her mind.”

He glanced at the paper in Kevin’s hand. “Since I didn’t read that note, I don’t know what she told you. We managed to crack the code in those sudoku puzzles—not all that hard, once we figured it out. It led to quotations from the Bible, which turned out to be orders for all sorts of nastiness.

“Liza couldn’t convince that cop in Santa Barbara—Vasquez—that there really were messages in the puzzles. The only way she could convince him would be to show him a message that predicted something going down. Then, when we debated going public with all we’d figured out, we got an e-mail to stop us from doing that—a picture of Jenny Robbins, along with a virus that crashed the system at the newspaper.”

Michael drew a long, exasperated breath. “Well, we did manage to predict something. Liza believes there’s a bomb or something hidden at a big Hollywood premiere.” He explained about the two messages they’d decoded, and how Liza had connected them. “I can’t say I’m overjoyed at her going to L.A. looking for a bomb, especially when she asked me to stay here. But I promised to help her.” He shot Kevin a challenging glance of his own. “Besides, that poor girl is in danger, too.”

“So are you two going to work together?” Mrs. H. looked ready to box their ears if they refused.

“I’m sure we’ll do whatever we can,” Kevin assured her, and she went off to brew some peacemaking tea. He noticed a nearly full china cup sitting beside the chair where Michael had waited.

Kevin turned to his reluctant partner. “Okay, so you saw a picture of Jenny, and Liza’s note said it seems to be somewhere along the coast.”

Michael nodded. “She told us that she’d spotted a haystack in the background.”

“What did it look like?” Kevin frowned at Michael’s reaction. “Didn’t you see it?”

“I barely got a glimpse,” Liza’s husband protested. “It was a digital photo, probably downloaded from a cell phone and blown up. Not the clearest thing I ever saw, and it was only on the monitor for seconds. I scarcely saw anything, and then the whole computer network began crapping out.”

“So what
did
you see?”

“A good-looking girl, not looking her best. Kind of haggard—pretty much what you might expect after having your uncle killed and then getting kidnapped. She was in jeans and I think a tourist T-shirt, with water and sky behind her. It could have been anywhere on the coast out here north of Santa Monica, except Liza mentioned this haystack thing.”

“But you didn’t see it? Any kind of rock in the water?” Kevin pressed.

Michael shook his head, looking a bit harassed himself. “You can’t expect me to describe something I didn’t see. I don’t know how Liza could be so sure. For all we know, it could have been the shadow of the picture-taker’s finger—these guys aren’t too swift—or it could have been a speck of something on the lens.”