Killer Sudoku (13 page)

“I think it would take a large organization to get to the bottom of them,” Will went on. “An organization like the police. And if I—or we—went to them, it would let the cat out of the bag with SINN.”

“Big organization or small, it comes down to the same things,” Liza told them, “motive, opportunity, and means. My friends and I have been looking at motive—who might have a grudge against the people who died, or against you, or this resort . . . or maybe sudoku in general.”

She paused with a frown. “That’s a lot of ground to cover. Maybe we should focus on opportunity. Why is all this stuff happening here and now?”

Will nodded. “I see what you’re saying. Well, the tournament brings people from a fairly large geographic area together in one spot.”

“And it brings them to this spot,” Gemma added. “If someone had a grudge against the resort, this would be the perfect time to make trouble—I mean, with TV cameras on hand to spread it all over the country or the world.”

“Two incidents did take place on camera, as it were,” Will said. “Quirk’s collapse and the grand unveiling that went awry. But poor Terhune getting poisoned—that happened at a private function.”

“That would still be sure to get a lot of publicity after those first two episodes.” Gemma turned to Liza. “Am I right?”

“And what about the incidents themselves?” Will objected. “Don’t you feel it’s a pretty big jump from petty sabotage—that what happened at the promo comes down to that, in spite of the scale—and killing people?”

“Not so big, if the person only expected to sicken the people who died,” Liza argued. “I don’t know how carefully you can measure out an allergen. Maybe the person just administered too large a dose. Whoever did it might have expected Quirk to choke or Scottie to puke, and just disrupt things.”

“Which brings us to the question of means,” Gemma said. “Attacking people through their allergies—that’s kind of twisted. It also seems to suggest that whoever did it had a certain amount of knowledge about the people attending.”

Liza nodded. “Ian Quirk was famous for trading on his allergies to get what he wanted in competitions. Scottie, though—I’ve known him for years, and I had no clue about any problem. Okay, he didn’t want to go to any fish places, but I thought that was because he was a beer, burger, and fries kind of guy.”

“That suggests that the perpetrator had to go to all the trouble of researching potential victims—and then got it wrong.” Will’s tidy mind evidently couldn’t accept that.

“If I were you, Will, I’d worry more about myself,” Gemma warned. “Do you have any allergies?”

Jolted, he stared at the actress. “Why—why, no.”

“Because you definitely have enemies,” Gemma went on. “That Quirk guy got pretty busy running you down, and his girlfriend Babs Whatsername is still doing a job on you. I’ve noticed her giving Fergus Fleming the old skunk-eye, too. If this went to a vote, she’d be my number one candidate.”

Liza decided not to mention what she’d learned about Babs’s last marriage. But she had to appreciate Gemma’s view from the trenches of the dog-eat-dog entertainment business.

Will visibly shuddered at the thought of accusing Babs Basset of anything. “She’d have lawyers all over me,” he muttered. But oddly when he looked at them again, he seemed much less agitated. “Whatever we do, we’ll need irrefutable proof.”

Liza figured it was the difference between failing to get any sort of grasp on a problem and having a plan, no matter how hazy.

Will took a deep breath, apparently free now to worry over other things. “At the moment, I have to deal with a more pressing problem. Roy Conklin has offered to give a talk on solving techniques this morning.”

“Oh, right—he used preparing for that as an excuse not to attend last night,” Liza said. “I thought he just wanted to avoid the crowd. Although, come to think of it, teaching a class doesn’t exactly do that.”

“He stipulated no more than forty participants.” Will looked down at the table. “We’ve only had three people sign up.”

“Well, perhaps I can help with that.” Gemma rose from the table, leaving most of her breakfast uneaten. She just about dragged Will to the improvised food court in the lobby, with Liza trailing behind.

Joining the back of the line, Gemma turned on her actor’s voice. “Coffee or tea for you, darling? And tell me more about that special class this morning. I’m definitely going.”

Word spread quickly. Within fifteen minutes, the sign-up sheet was completely filled, with about a dozen more people on standby. Gemma insisted on adding Liza to the list. “Just in case there’s any public relations to be handled,” she said.

They had no problem finding the event room where Roy was speaking—it had a crowd in front. Liza spotted Roy peeking out the door with a mildly shell-shocked expression. Turning to hide a grin, she almost collided with Fergus Fleming, who strode down the hallway with a guy in a handyman’s outfit.

“We’ve got a bunch of bees nesting under the roof overhang,” he said. “I want you to figure out how we can smoke them out—do we need a ladder to come up from the ground, or can we get at them from the rooftop pool area?”

When she turned back, Liza found Roy gone—but the doors wide open and the participants filing in.

Actually, Roy’s talk was pretty interesting. He used the puzzle from the ill-fated first round as a vehicle to discuss the various strategies. The attendees, especially those who had been stumped by the relative difficulty of Will’s puzzle, probably learned something. For Liza it was stuff she’d all heard before and written about a lot. Still, it was interesting to hear someone else explore this familiar territory.

Roy’s math background peeped out in some of the terminology he used. A puzzle became a matrix or an array. Candidates became variables, filling in answers became placements, things like naked pairs became conjugate pairs, and in one occasion, Roy referred to the whole solution as a subset.

Well, everybody’s jargon was a little different. And bearing that in mind, Roy did a workmanlike job of running the puzzle and displaying the techniques most likely to lead to a solution.

Roy got a big hand, which made him blush. But he showed a teacher’s skill in avoiding the people who wanted to make one more point and reaching Gemma and Liza. “Could we have a brief word?” he asked.

They ended up back on the patio, considerably emptier now that the breakfast rush was finished. Liza had managed to get coffee and some leftover pastries to make up for her drastically curtailed breakfast. Gemma had done the same.

Roy hid his cup of tea behind interlaced fingers, a look of chagrin on his boyish features. “I had a look at the sign-up sheet this morning,” he said, “and when I saw you at my presentation—well, it didn’t require a very long chain of logic to explain the suddenly packed house. I suppose I should thank you—no, that sounds ungracious. I
do
thank you for saving me some embarrassment.”

Gemma gave him a smile. “I think I still hear a ‘but’ lurking around somewhere in the background.” She shrugged. “It’s just as I said when I first came here. It doesn’t hurt to add a little celebrity to help a good cause—I’ve been involved in worse ones, I promise you.”

He nodded. “I can understand that. Yet—”

“ ‘Yet’ instead of ‘but.’ It comes out to the same thing, though,” Gemma said with a bit more perception than Liza expected. “In a perfect world, wouldn’t it be nice if the content of your brains—or your character—were enough to fill the house, instead of getting help from some movie star?”

“Well . . . yes. And no,” Roy quickly added. “I didn’t want to fill the house.”

“You just wanted to talk about something that was important to you and have people hear it,” Gemma said. “Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world, and people want a little icing on everything—even broccoli, I think. Like it or not, Dr. Conklin—”

“Oh, please call me Roy,” he said.

“Like it or not, Roy, attractiveness and celebrity have an effect on what you do, what I do, and what Liza does.”

“Especially me,” Liza said with a smile. “I’m in the business, after all.”

“You’re an attractive man,” Gemma went on. “That didn’t hurt you in putting over a fairly technical discussion on sudoku.”

“I enjoy sudoku,” Roy said. “For the general run of students, it’s a nonthreatening way to do something with numbers. For the more mathematically minded, it’s a springboard to more complicated topics. And for anybody, it’s a way into logical thinking—strengthening mental muscles that don’t get exercised, say, in a computer shoot-’em-up. I want to foster sudoku, promote it—”

He waved his hands in frustration. “But to do that, do I need to be an eccentric—a huckster, a diva, or a clown?”

“No,” Gemma said. “But if you want to deal with the larger public, you do have to come to grips with celebrity, even if you keep it low-key.”

Her perfect features took on a wry smile. “I’ll talk about this in terms of my line of business, if you don’t mind. It’s what I’ve lived with . . . about as long as either of you have been alive.

“I started out as a kid model, and it was somewhere between playing and a job that helped bring in money for my family. Acting jobs seemed pretty much the same. When I got a bit older and had to start thinking of acting as a career, I began to see there were two kinds of people in front of the cameras in movies and TV. I called them actors and personalities. Actors portray different roles from project to project. Personalities generally play themselves—or what people believe them to be. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—for a lot of people it’s a dependable thing.”

She frowned, trying to figure out her next words. “Then, there’s the way you choose to interact with the public, whether you’re approachable or unapproachable. For instance, do you court the gossip magazines and celebrity news shows? Being approachable means putting up with a lot of crap. Liza can tell you that.”

“And how do you rate yourself?” Liza asked with some interest.

“Oh, I’m basically an unapproachable actor. I do different kinds of movies, there’s a long time between visits when I do late-night TV, and I don’t act as if my personal life is news.” Gemma gave them a cynical smile. “Again, Liza can explain how much publicity you can wring out of protecting your privacy.”

Roy took a quick sip of his tea, pulling a face as if there weren’t enough sugar in the cup. “I guess I can see what you’re saying. But it seems awfully—”

“Cold-blooded?” Gemma finished for him. “It’s a strategy, a logical chain of decisions where you try to stay as consistent as possible. So you end up becoming the guy who plays clever, handsome fellows and gets involved in one political cause after another. Or the ditzy blonde who’s so adorable, she just about gets away with murder. I thought about being her for my career, but it gets a lot harder as you get older. You’ve got to find good, quirky roles, or you end up as a B-list character actor on TV.”

She shrugged. “I really don’t know how these strategies work outside of Hollywood. Maybe Liza could tell you. But I do know that if you’re going to deal with more than your family, friends, and classes, you have to choose a strategy and stick with it.”

Gemma smiled as if she were looking back at her own decision. “Just choose a line you can be comfortable with—you’ve heard the old saying about how once you can fake sincerity, you’ve got the system beat? If you can find a strategy that lets you be consistent, you can create a system. People will know what to expect, and you’ll have a way to deal with them.”

She leaned back, her face suddenly grim. “The only drawback is, the more famous you become, the less you can trust anyone around you.”

Liza didn’t know what to say to that. Luckily, she didn’t have to. Mrs. H. appeared on the patio, looking around. Liza waved and took the opportunity to introduce her friend and neighbor to Gemma and Roy.

“You’re up late,” Liza said.

“That’s because I was up later than usual last night,” Mrs. Halvorsen replied. “I guess I’m not used to going out gallivanting in the evening,”

“I’m sure you noticed the breakfast buffet in the lobby,” Roy said. “Although I don’t know if there’s much left by now.”

The older woman smiled. “I’m not one for loading my plate. A cup of tea and a piece of fruit will do. Then, I’ve got my book and my sun hat.” The light straw brim gave a flutter as she spoke. “All I need is a pleasant place to sit while you do your puzzle, dear. Forgive me for not waiting for word with the others, but all that standing yesterday began to get to me.”

“No problem, Mrs. H.,” Liza said. “I brought you here so you could enjoy yourself. Take a rest.”

“While the rest of us get ready to strain our brains,” Gemma said, looking at her wristwatch. “I don’t know if you have any last-minute things to take care of, but I do.”

She rose, as did Roy, reminded of his own preparations. “I took a peek on the way here,” he said. “We’ll have two rooms for this round. And remember, the solving time is five minutes less.”

“How could we forget?” Gemma asked as she walked back into the building. Liza trailed along while Mrs. Halvorsen chose the makings of a light breakfast, then Liza left as her neighbor went back out to the patio.

Heading back to her suite, Liza took care of the results of the two cups of coffee she’d drunk. She had no intention of trying competitive sudoku on a full bladder.

Then Liza washed up, ran a cool cloth across her face and behind her neck, toweled off, and went to the suite’s sitting room. She could still enjoy a few minutes of quiet time, but she didn’t quite trust herself to lie in bed.

Just my luck to drop off and snore through the competition,
she thought, trying out the springs in the cushions on the large armchair. To quote Mrs. Halvorsen, it was not too “mooshy.”

Liza settled herself and tried to blank her mind for a few minutes before getting up and preparing for battle. When she heard the door open, she turned with a little bit of irritation.
Hell of a time for the cleaning crew to show up,
she silently complained.