Killer Sudoku (5 page)

Smiling silently, Liza hunted on.

Twenty-five minutes later, she finished tracing her third swordfish, a pattern of either-or choices regarding the placing of 9s across six spaces in the grid. It allowed her to remove five 9s from other spaces . . .

The sudden noise from behind shattered Liza’s concentration. She glanced around to see Ian Quirk standing at his place. Damn! Had he finished the puzzle already? Maybe those Vegas people knew what they were talking about, saying he’d come in first.

Liza felt a stab of annoyance. Still, did he have to make such a production out of it? As she glared at him, it began to dawn on her that maybe Ian’s face wasn’t flushed with triumph.

His right hand clutched at his throat and his left waved wildly as he wobbled on his feet, making choking noises.

So much for not trying to psyche people out,
Liza thought sourly.
Well, if he’s giving us a sample of Ian Quirk’s Allergy Theater, he’s really hamming it up. I mean, who would believe such an over-the-top—

Her critique was interrupted as Ian dropped to the floor in convulsions.

“Ohmigod!” Liza leapt to her feet, staring down at Ian Quirk. The painful-looking contortions of his body didn’t look like faking anymore. The question was, what to do about it?

Liza wasn’t sure, and to judge from the babble of voices rising ever louder around her, nobody else seemed to know, either. A lot of people couldn’t even see the twisting figure on the floor—they were yelling to find out what was going on.

A tall, skinny figure pushed through the growing circle around Quirk. Oliver Roche tossed the clipboard from his hand and pulled Ian away from the furniture into the open aisle—and also out of view of the camera on the gallery above.

Roche’s voice rose in a shout over the hubbub. “Someone call 911.” Dropping to one knee, he pulled out a handkerchief, folded it into a thick wad, and put it between the twitching man’s lips. Then he moved Quirk onto his side. “He may vomit,” Roche warned.

He looked up at the surrounding crowd. “Does anyone know if he’s an epileptic?”

Liza spoke up, surprised at how tentative her voice sounded. “He’s supposed to have allergies.”

Roche shot to his feet. “Anyone on the phone to 911?”

An answer came out of the crowd.

“Tell them to hurry the ambulance. This may be a case of anaphylactic shock.”

He dropped back down again, feeling for a pulse, and got on the phone himself.

It seemed like forever before Fergus Fleming burst through the doors, leading a team of paramedics.

They quickly loaded Quirk onto a gurney. Liza couldn’t help seeing the grim expressions as the ambulance team wheeled him off.

Fleming glared up at the cameras aiming down at the stretcher team, obviously not delighted with this kind of publicity for his resort.

“Ladies—gentlemen!” Liza barely heard Will Singleton over the buzz of the crowd. Then Charley Ormond appeared beside him with a microphone, and his voice blared from the public-address system. “EXCUSE ME!”

That shut up most of the contestants.

Will continued a little less emphatically, “This is a terrible occurrence. I hope Mr. Quirk will be all right. We must also face the fact that this round of competition has been interrupted.” He pointed to the digital timer, which continued to count down the seconds.

“That’s unfair to those of us who didn’t allow ourselves to be distracted!” Babs Basset climbed onto a chair, her puzzle in hand.

I guess some people are so self-absorbed, you’d have to set a bomb off under them to get their attention,
Liza thought.

Will looked unhappily at the cameras recording this impromptu debate. Charley leaned forward. “We’ve already cut the sound and gone to the news desk. That will hold for a couple of minutes, but we need something to cover if this round is canceled. How about the promotional bit we were going to do? The Cirque de Soleil people are ready.”

Will nodded. “You just need the puzzle.”

Charley turned to Fergus Fleming. “And the fax machine.”

He led her off as Kevin and Michael came through the crowd like a two-man flying wedge, Mrs. H. trailing behind them. “What was that all about?” she asked.

“I’m really not sure,” Liza admitted.

Meanwhile, Will tried to reestablish control over the circus. “If you’d kindly return to your seats.”

“Excuse me, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Oliver Roche came out of the crowd, his clipboard at the ready. “I think everyone should clear the room in case the police want to examine the scene.”

“Why would they want to do that?” Scottie Terhune burst out. “I mean, it was just an accident.”

Roche whipped round, and for a second Liza thought he was going to lash out at Scottie with his trusty clipboard.

“Well, Mr. Roche is the security manager. Perhaps we should do as he suggests,” Will said.

Babs Basset still complained loudly. Gemma Vereker headed for the doors without a word. Scottie Terhune just shrugged and, like most of the puzzle solvers, followed the movie star. Liza looked up. All of a sudden, the Skye Room’s imitation blue sky looked more like a storm on the way.

Roche consulted his seating plan and started calling out names, including Liza’s. “You were all seated closest to Mr. Quirk. I’d like you to tell me what you observed.”

Liza shrugged at her friends and joined the tail end of the exodus. Once outside, she joined the knot of people around Oliver Roche, who was already locking the doors.

A short, potbellied guy in shorts and a T-shirt stepped up to complain. “I don’t know why you had to chase us out of there. You wouldn’t even let us bring anything. I mean, the guy just keeled over. Maybe the puzzle was too much for him. It was for me. I figured I’d at least last the first couple of rounds, but that Singleton guy started out with a killer.”

Roche loomed over the complainer. Then, if anything, the muscles in his face tightened further. “What’s that on your breath?”

“Hey,” said Potbelly, “no need to get offensive.”

Roche shook his head in exasperation. “It smells like peanuts.”

“Well, yeah. I pretty much gave up on the puzzle. So I checked out the goody bag and found some candy.”

Oliver Roche began rapidly paging through the contents of his clipboard. “The guest packages included Mr. Singleton’s latest sudoku book in paperback, samples of quality toiletries, fragrances for both men and women, and imported chocolates and caramels. No peanut products.”

The potbellied complainer shrugged. “I found a bunch of those little foil-wrapped, chocolate-covered Peanut Pellets.”

Roche drew himself up. “The Rancho Pacificano would never include an item you could find at your local food mart.”

Potbelly shrugged. “Well, maybe they were new and improved in dark chocolate. I dunno. I just ate them.”

The security man began making the rounds of the other supposed eyewitnesses, sniffing their breath. “Did you have candy? Did you?”

“No,” Liza told the nose thrusting at her mouth. “I was working on the puzzle. The first hint I had that anything was out of the ordinary was when Ian pushed his chair back.”

Quite a few of the others, however, had just been marking time and enjoying a snack. Roche’s jaw tightened so much, little Popeye muscles appeared in his cheeks. He shot a sudden glance at Liza. “You said he had allergies.”

“To what, I couldn’t say,” Liza told him. “I just know that in the past he’d disrupted other tournaments, complaining that the arrangements weren’t healthy.” She took a deep breath. “But he also told me that he used threats like that as a sort of psychological warfare.”

Roche pulled out his cell phone. Whoever he wanted to talk to, he had the number on speed dial. “Pete? Oliver Roche here. Did you hear about the guest collapsing at the hotel? Yeah, I expected you would. Look, could you come down here for a quick look around? I found some things that don’t seem kosher. There’s a good chance someone apparently tampered with the gift packages, introducing contraband that may have had a bad effect on this guy.”

He glanced at Liza. “Apparently he wasn’t exactly popular . . . but he was expected to win this tournament. No, I secured the scene. Thanks, Pete, I appreciate it.”

Roche closed his phone and looked around at the people he’d been questioning. “Please don’t go far. For one thing, I expect Mr. Singleton will be making some sort of announcement about a makeup puzzle or whatever. Also, Detective Janacek of the local police may want to speak with you.”

The group broke up, Liza heading for her friends, who stood nearby.

“Well, that was kind of intense,” Kevin said.

“Are you all right, dear?” Mrs. H. inquired anxiously.

Michael, however, was less impressed. “Is this the OC, or the OCD?” he asked. “The guy’s trying to make a deep, dark mystery where there isn’t any. I expect those goody bags weren’t stuffed in a NASA white room, and the people doing the work were probably volunteers or hotel workers. It’s not exactly a situation where it’s unheard of for expensive candy to go missing and something cheaper to get substituted. Maybe the house dick over there should go sticking his nose in the staff’s faces, looking for chocolate breath.”

“One good thing,” Kevin said. “If he’s too sick to go on, one of your major competitors is out of the game.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d been closer when he went down,” Liza told him. “It was pretty scary. I don’t know what would have happened if Mr. Roche hadn’t stepped in.”

She turned to Mrs. H. “Did you happen to hear what they’re showing instead of the first round of puzzle solving?” Not for the first time, she wished she’d been able to come down for the orientation day on Thursday. Unfortunately, Liza’s schedule just hadn’t allowed for that.

“The guy in the
Star Trek
shirt said he was trying to arrange something,” Michael replied.

As if on cue, Scottie Terhune came down the hallway with Fergus Fleming, wheeling a large-screen television on a metal cart. Shambling along behind them came a weedy-looking guy whose staff uniform didn’t seem to fit him right.

Once in the AV squad, always in the AV squad,
Liza thought as the geeky-looking guy knelt, using some sort of tool to open an inconspicuous plate set in the baseboard. Seconds later, he had the set plugged in and a cable running to a connector in the wall.

A picture blossomed on the screen with the SINN logo in the lower-right corner and the words LIVE FROM IRVINE, CA running across the bottom. The picture itself showed the blank wall of a medium-sized office tower, covered with what seemed to be one of those fabric billboards bearing an enormous version of the network’s logo.

“That’s the SINN headquarters over in Irvine,” Scottie explained.

As he spoke, the huge swath of fabric began to fall like a furling sail, and small human figures appeared, traveling down the expanse of revealed concrete in strangely dream-like bounds. Liza gasped, then realized the people must be wearing some sort of tethers and that these were controlled falls, a sort of vertical ballet.

Vaguely, she remembered Charley Ormond making some comment about Cirque de Soleil.

Meanwhile, the logo covering had dropped out of sight, revealing a familiar nine-by-nine gridwork painted on the wall. In this case, though, each space probably took up more square footage than Liza’s whole house back home in Maiden’s Bay.

The vertical dancers moved into boxes, and numbers began to appear. The tethered performers must have had extra-large cans of spray paint. They’d go flying up, then come bounding down again, like spiders creating a very mathematical web indeed.

Liza ran a professional eye over the developing puzzle. Will wasn’t out to eliminate anyone here. This looked to be a simple puzzle, solvable by people with only rudimentary sudoku skills.

Even as the top row of subgrids took form, she spotted a hidden single that would let a solver place a 6 immediately.

Well, it was supposed to be a promo. People would be able to see it from miles away, and they should be able to solve it. She smiled, appreciating a publicity coup for SINN, for Will, and for the West Coast Sudoku Summit.

Liza glanced at her companions. Mrs. Halvorsen stared, entranced, sighing, “Oh, my.”

Kevin tried to be more practical. “That had to set them back a few bucks.”

Not to be outdone, Michael aimed a critical frown at the screen. “Didn’t Microsoft use a stunt like this a couple of years ago to launch Vista?”

Liza said nothing as she watched the second set of three rows take shape. The flying sign painters must have done some intensive practice to create numerals so quickly. Especially, Liza realized, since they were essentially doing the job blind. Charley Ormond had only faxed the final puzzle to the crew at headquarters mere moments ago.

The aerialists leapfrogged down to paint clues into the final three rows of the gargantuan puzzle. Hardly had they begun, though, when a gasp ran through most of the people watching.

Mrs. H. turned confused eyes to Liza. “What’s the matter?”

But Liza felt too sick to explain. All that money, time, and talent . . . and in the end it was all for nothing.

Michael, the other sudoku fanatic in their little group, spoke up to explain. “They made a mistake in the puzzle. The rules forbid having the same numbers in any row or column. But look at that second-to-last row.”