Celebrity Sudoku (17 page)

The woman must have yelled at him, because Brant finally moved, circling the tub to help her out. But now her back was to the camera. All Chick got was a shot of a very cute butt wiggling its way toward a bathhouse in the distance.

Again the camera jerked.

The aftershock
, Liza thought.

This time, Benson came out with a “Whoa!” and some colorful cursing as the camera showed foliage and a tree trunk.

Liza turned to the cameraman. “You were up in a tree during the earthquake? Didn’t it occur to you that you might have fallen out and broken your neck?”

“Not until later,” Benson admitted. Liza wasn’t sure whether his look of embarrassment came from a belated sense of danger or disappointment over not catching his quarry.

“I kept hoping I could get the shot.” He sighed. “But you see, there was nothing we could use.”

Liza stopped by Don Lowe’s office to thank him—a publicist’s rather than a journalist’s move. No sense in burning a bridge she might want to revisit with more ammunition.

She heaved her walker along after Chick Benson until they were back at the security checkpoint. Then she headed down in the elevator alone.

Michael just about flew over to the door when he saw Liza coming out. “Well?”

“I’ll tell you everything,” Liza promised, “on the way home. All of a sudden, I feel very, very tired.”

As Michael drove back to Westwood, Liza reported her conversation with Don Lowe and the outtakes from Chick Benson’s camera.

“You could definitely hear Benson’s voice,” she finished. “Plus you see the earthquake—and Brant Lee naked and trashing his public image. The earthquake might have been faked, but I don’t think Mr. Lee would do much in the way of a favor for Chick.”

“With an alibi like that, it looks as if Benson was a pretty short-lived suspect,” Michael said, coming up to their driveway.

“But we still have Don Lowe,” Liza pointed out as Michael opened the door for her. She got out her walker and headed for the house. “I didn’t want to put him on his guard by asking where he was during the quake. But once we get inside, I’m going to sic Buck Foreman on him. He’ll see what kind of alibi Lowe has—if he’s got one.”

Liza was as good as her word. The first thing she did on getting into the living room was to call Buck.

“This may take a while,” he warned after she told him what she wanted. “Like a lot of people who specialize in invading people’s privacy, Lowe is very protective of his own.”

“I know you’ll do your best—and I’m betting that will be more than enough,” Liza told him. “Unless he really has something to hide.”

She hung up and then turned to Michael, who’d been running through messages on voice mail. Most of them he just skipped through. But then Liza heard a familiar voice.

“Hey, this is Ava.” Liza’s editor from the
Oregon Daily
sounded her usual slightly rushed, managing-editor self.

But then Ava switched over to her best-friend mode for a moment. “Kind of weird to call you at your old home. I hope you remember us up here in Maiden’s Bay—especially since your cushion is getting mighty thin.” Somewhere in the middle there, Ava had gone back to her professional persona again.

Liza and Michael shared a look.

“Message received,” she said, scooping up her papers from the couch and sitting on the seat. “I’m back at work.”

Within an hour, Liza had cleaned up the puzzles she’d been working on and drafted another one.

Michael came around to peek over her shoulder. “Wow, you’re just churning them out.”

Stung, she shot him a challenging look. “You got a problem? Try one and see.”

But Michael shook his head. “Sorry; I’m working on one already—it’s a download from my phone.”

It took Liza a moment to remember. “That’s one of the puzzles Lolly sent you? The ones she got from Ritz? How are they?”

“I also got a couple from Samantha Pang while I was waiting in the car for you,” Michael said.

Liza recalled the math girl’s comment. “She said they didn’t make any sense.”

Michael handed her one sheet of paper—a clean copy of a sudoku puzzle.

“Well, I solved this one. It was kind of messy.”

Liza frowned as she scanned the array of numbers. “I see what you mean. For a start, it’s not symmetrical.”

Symmetry—duplicating the pattern of clues either from side to side, top to bottom, or even on the diagonal—was highly prized among aficionados of classic sudoku. It didn’t have to be a mirror image—sometimes puzzle builders twisted the pattern around.

But this puzzle, as Michael said, was a mess. The numbers in the grid clotted together seemingly at random.

“Considering how poorly she did in my class, I guess I should be glad Ritz managed to construct a puzzle at all,” Liza finally said.

“Well, you won’t be so glad to see this one.” Michael gave her the other sheet—another hodgepodge of a puzzle.

Liza’s frown deepened as she looked at it. “This one definitely doesn’t work,” she said.

“You saw it, huh?” Michael’s finger ran across the three subgrids on the bottom of the puzzle. “Three threes in a row—and two of them almost side by side. It’s printed out in Solv-a-Doku style, but it looks as if she didn’t even use the program to check her work.”

Liza looked from puzzle to puzzle, more baffled by the discrepancy than she usually was by the most carefully crafted sudoku.

“If Ritz constructed a puzzle that worked,” Liza muttered, rattling one sheet of paper, “how could she go on to create one with such an obvious defect?”

Michael’s answering frown lightened into a look of reminiscence.

“Remember the case you stepped into the last time you came down to sunny California?” he asked. “One of the murder victims hid a number to remember by jotting down the digits on a sudoku puzzle. You noticed it because she filled in the wrong spaces.”

“I remember—not necessarily fondly,” Liza told him.

She poked at the failed puzzle as if it might blow up.

“So you’re suggesting that this is some sort of . . . message?”

After another meal of takeout—pizza this time—Liza sat in front of Michael’s miniature budget laptop, silently cursing the tiny keyboard and that funny little pad that was supposed to take the place of a mouse. It never worked for her; she always wound up typing gibberish because she was used to a human-sized keyboard.

But no, Michael had been determined to prove that he could be fiscally prudent—or as he said at the time, “I don’t want to buy this with Michelle Markson’s money.”

Come to think of it, that was probably the first intimation that things weren’t exactly copasetic between Michael and me,
Liza thought.

And she was still annoyed over that long-ago argument.

Focus,
she scolded herself.
You’re letting yourself get distracted.

Leaning over the keyboard, she played with the touch-pad, went online, called up her account, and clicked on instant messages. Picking the recipient she wanted, she began typing.

“Damn keyboard,” Liza muttered as she read over her typing.

On the bright side, however, she got an almost immediate response.

The letters appeared on the laptop screen.

Uncle Jim Watanabe’s office was in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo, where he supposedly worked as a low-level communications specialist. But, given his lifelong interest in sudoku and codes, Liza had her suspicions. Japan stood right on Russia’s doorstep, a perfect vantage point for signals intelligence—whether from an evil empire or a democratic federation.

Maybe it was a romantic notion, but Liza believed her uncle Jim was a spy.

Brain-picking,
she admitted as she typed.
I thought you’d gotten interested in the notion of hiding a message in a sudoku and wondered if you had any new ideas on how to do it.

I’ve gotten news of several sudoku-related cases that you managed to crack without any help from me.
Liza read that with a frown. Was Uncle Jim pleased with her success or not?

I was able to tease out some numbers hidden in puzzles,
she typed.
But this is a situation where I think an actual message may be stashed in a puzzle.

She gave the background on the celebrity
D-Kodas
competition and Ritz Tarleton’s demise, along with the fact that Ritz had sent sudoku to potential blackmail victims.

You’re back with Michael?
Uncle Jim interrupted.

“Great typing,” she sarcastically complimented herself.

It took so long for Uncle Jim to reply that Liza wondered if their connection had been cut. Finally letters appeared on the screen.

I can send them to you.
Liza arranged the downloaded puzzles as attachments for an e-mail and sent them to her uncle. Then she went back to the IM link and typed up her theory that the puzzles were, to an extent, time bombs—innocent-looking packages that contained a message to be decoded later. She sighed as she saw the snarled spelling when her fingers got ahead of her brain—and wandered around the tiny keyboard.

When she finished, she wondered if what she’d sent had made any sense. And it didn’t reassure her that she faced another long space of empty screen. Finally Uncle Jim typed,
Liza, placing hidden messages has to be a two-way street. Both message-sender and receiver must have a key to translate the code.

Liza blinked, trying to remember if she’d seen Ritz, Lolly, and Sam Pang even reading, much less the same book.

Wait a second—they all must have gotten the same briefing book from the
D-Kodas
producers that I did,
she thought, then shook her head. The inches-thick binders would make pretty unwieldy codebooks.

Still, she passed along the idea to Uncle Jim, who suggested that she try comparing groups of three clues to words in the book.

If you start getting something intelligible, you’ll have cracked the code,
he typed.

I suspect you won’t be holding your breath,
Liza typed back.

Uncle Jim’s reply appeared on the screen.
I’m sure it would take a while. And I have to admit, it’s not a sure thing.

They spent a little more time on the IM connection—Uncle Jim had a lot of questions about Michael—but it was just chitchat, nothing more to do with sudoku. Liza’s uncle did wish her good luck before they ended the session.

Michael looked up expectantly when Liza joined him on the couch. “From the look on your face, you didn’t get the magic spell to wring a message out of those puzzles,” he said.

She gave him the gist of her chat with her uncle.

Michael’s eyes lit up. “A book code! Did you bring that binder along?”

They went into her room, Michael carrying the mysterious sudoku. Liza dug out the briefing binder.

“You want to call out the numbers or page through the book?” she asked.