Murder by Numbers (21 page)

“That's right,” Clements said.

“Well, I've got a puzzle here with eighty-one numbers.”

The sheriff shook his head. “Have to be a pretty big bank, with an account number that long.”

“It's a pretty tough sudoku—way out of Jenny's league. Maybe she wasn't expected to finish it.” She started counting the clues. “There are twenty-six numbers given. That would probably be enough to give an account number and the password.”

“Maybe,” Clements said, “if you knew how to arrange them.”

“Maybe that's in the message on top,” Liza said excitedly. She dug out her notebook and read out the note to Jenny. “She told me Derrick's favorite sandwich was a Reuben.”

Clements extended a hand. “Could I see that, please?”

Liza handed over the book. The sheriff read, frowning. “You copied this exactly?”

“Yes.”

“So it refers to ‘the losing Democratic presidential candidates.' Not the candidate or the running mate. Would you consider your friend Mr. Robbins to be a careful man?”

“When it came to puzzles, I'd say definitely yes,” Liza said.

“Puzzles, perhaps—or codes?” the sheriff added. “Because either this is an inexcusable typographical error, or there's something more going on in those three lines.”

Liza shook her head. “Seems like there's always something more in this case.”

“Tell me about it,” Clements said, “or maybe I'll tell you—provided you don't pass it along to the
Oregon Daily
.”

“I can keep my mouth shut,” Liza replied.

Clements clapped a hand on top of his reading matter. “This pile of paper here is the medical examiner's report. It tells me a whole lot of stuff I already know or could guess. Stomach contents—Italian seafood. But we already knew Chissel had dinner at Fruit of the Sea.”

Where he had words with Ray Massini, noted lover—and fighter
, Liza thought.

“It says he drowned—there's a surprise. I didn't think Chissel died from old age waiting for the tide to come in.”

The sheriff rattled some papers. “And then we get a surprise.”

Liza tried to look interested, figuring she was going to hear about the broken glass—this time from an official source.

“The ME found traces of adhesive around Chissel's mouth.”

Liza's memory immediately flew to an image of Jenny Robbins lying in the sand at Bayocean, tied up…and with a length of duct tape slapped across her lips.

“Had Chissel managed to get it off?” she asked.

“As far as they can tell, the tape probably came off while Chissel was submerged,” Clements went on. “Apparently it wasn't your standard duct or packing tape. No, it's just something more. Like you said, this case is full of that.”

He looked at her and shook his head. “Why the hell would someone use surgical tape for a job like that?”

Exchanging mutual regrets over their mutual cluelessness (or rather, over-cluefulness), Liza and the sheriff said good-bye. She came out of City Hall and walked up Main Street to Hackleberry Avenue.

Arriving home, Liza got out of her publicist clothes and pulled on some more comfortable sweats. She made herself some dinner and fed Rusty. Then she took her dog out for a walk.

As soon as she opened the front door, she heard the upstairs window next door scraping open. Liza stopped and looked up at the guest bedroom. “Still keeping a watchful eye on me?” she asked.

“Only in a general way,” Michael assured her. “Could I join you?”

“We're just going for a walk.”

“I could use the exercise,” he said. “While you were away, I spent the whole day hunched over my computer.” He gave her a half smile. “It's a nice house, but not exactly built for modern business. You either sink waist deep in the chairs or perch on the edge. Either way is murder on my back.”

“Well, if you want to go.” Liza gestured to the dog. “But Rusty is coming, too.”

“I'll risk it.” Michael disappeared from the window and came out Mrs. Halvorsen's door a moment later. “I mean, as long as we stay in the open. I shouldn't—”

He was interrupted by a huge sneeze. “I don't—”

Another sneeze hit him. Michael tried to bring his hand up to his face, but the next sneeze almost bent him double.

Rusty had jumped at the first outburst. As they continued, he barked, then growled. Rusty was willing to tolerate occasional thunderous noises from his human, as he had during Liza's cold. But from a comparative stranger, well, Rusty didn't like that. At all.

Michael managed to dig out a wad of tissues and wiped his streaming eyes. “What did you get there?” He managed to stifle the next in the sneeze cycle. “The super-dander dog muta—” Another sneeze hit. He managed to muffle it with the tissues, but he stepped back from Liza and Rusty.

Tugging on Rusty's leash, she moved even farther away. “Sorry, Michael. I guess this isn't going to work,” she said, regret in her voice.

“Where have I heard that before?” Michael asked ruefully.

He headed back to Mrs. Halvorsen's.

Liza allowed Rusty to trot around, sniff the smells, and do his business. Then she headed home, too.

Rusty got himself comfortable on the living room floor, and Liza took a seat in front of her computer. In a moment, she was online and trying her luck with an IM. The last time she'd tried an instant message to her Uncle Jim, he'd answered right away, even though it was an ungodly hour in faraway Tokyo.

Jim Watanabe had some sort of foreign service job in the US Embassy. At least that was what he told everyone. The fact that he'd served there for a good twenty years might have something to do with his knowledge of Japanese. Or, as Liza had come to suspect, it might have something to do with his knowledge of codes. All through the Cold War, Japan had been the staging ground for intercepting Soviet communications. In today's world, similar tabs would have to be kept on the Russian Federation.

If Uncle Jim was a spy, he was a pleasant, jovial one. When Liza spent some time in Japan after college, he'd helped an awkward Hibernasian girl get along with her Watanabe relatives when they claimed her Japanese had an unintelligible Irish-American accent. In fact, Uncle Jim was the one who'd gotten her started with sudoku, as a sort of bridge between cultures made of numbers.

Hey, Uncle Jim. Are you there?
Liza typed.

When the response window didn't show anything, she sighed. Well, too much to hope that she'd always be lucky. Maybe a more formal e-mail would help, forcing her to organize her thoughts.

Just as she was about to close the window, words appeared.

What's up, Liza?

I didn't think I'd catch you.
Her fingers dashed along her keyboard.
What time is it over there?

It's my lunch hour. I decided to do a little surfing.

Liza smiled at that image. What would Uncle Jim go trolling for—sudoku challenges? Secret coded messages?

That expression turned into a frown of thought as she typed away, trying to outline her problem while keeping the story short and snappy.
How can I help Jenny make sense of all this
, she finished,
so she can find out where her uncle's money went?

Liza was sure that it would take her uncle a little while to take in all she had sent. But she waited long enough until she began to wonder if the connection had broken.

Finally, Uncle Jim's answer appeared.
This is even harder than the last time you asked me about codes.

Back then, you thought someone was using coded messages to pass along orders to people. At least in that situation, both the one giving orders and the ones receiving them both know the code
, he wrote.

Now you're suggesting that the person passing along information is putting it into a code that the message receiver has to figure out without any clues. I don't know how anyone can do that.

Liza jumped onto her keyboard.
There was a note with the puzzle.
She slowed down her typing, making sure she transcribed the note accurately.

Do you have an answer for the first question?
Uncle Jim asked.

Jenny told me D.'s favorite sandwich was a Reuben. By the way, that is “candidates” in the second question. Either D. made a mistake, or is there a message in there?

Liza eagerly looked at her screen as her uncle's answer rolled in.
If it is a mistake, the answer would be MONDALE. Interesting. No letters repeated in that name. And if you spell the sandwich as RUBEN, no letters repeat there, either.

Why is that important?
Liza asked.

We already discussed letter-to-number codes. Do you remember?

Sure
, Liza typed.
A=1, B=2, and so on.

Uncle Jim's answer came quickly.
You can make it a little harder to crack by adding a word at the front of your alphabet, eliminating those letters later on. Say RUBEN goes in front. Then the code becomes R=1, U=2, B=3, E=4, N=5, A=6, C=7, and so on.

Liza nodded.
Okay, give me a minute.

She began jotting away on a sheet of paper, creating both codes:

The digits one through nine appeared in the puzzle, but no zeroes. That meant in the RUBEN code, there could be no
G
(the tenth letter) or
S
(the twentieth). Liza frowned. That would cramp any message-writer's style. The MONDALE code wouldn't have any
F
s or
T
s.

Though she was now feeling doubtful, Liza attempted to use the codes to “read” the eighty-one numbers in the finished puzzle. The result was gibberish. She tried the process backward, with the same results.

When she reported this to Uncle Jim, he responded,
There are other ways to read through blocks of numbers, like going left on the first row, right on the second, and so on. Also, did you try reading down the columns?

Liza followed his suggestions and got a big, fat goose egg. She tried to apply the code just to the clue numbers in the puzzle, again getting nothing she could read.

Then Uncle Jim wrote,
What if we aren't supposed to get letters, but numbers? You think the money is in a numbered account, right?

Puzzled, Liza typed,
Right.

His answer came immediately, as if he'd been typing without waiting for her response.
Maybe RUBEN and MONDALE are key words to find certain spaces in the sudoku? If you follow a straight letter-to-number transposition, M would mean space 13 on the puzzle, O would be space 15, and so on. MONDALE, as the longer string, would be the account number. RUBEN would be the password.

Liza ran through the grid, getting an apparently random set of digits.

More appeared on her screen.
Possibly RUBEN is to be read from the beginning of the puzzle, and MONDALE, who suffered a reverse, should be read from the back. Also, RUBEN could be REUBEN. Too many variables.

Liza grimly nodded. How was Jenny supposed to figure this out?

She typed,
And we get all of this because we suppose that Derrick made a perfect puzzle, and then was sloppy writing his message. Any suggestions on the “candidates” problem?

The answer screen quickly filled.
Frankly, I don't know. If you take MONDALE/FERRARO together, you get a very long account number. If you take FERRARO as an additional key, I have no idea what it refers to.

The screen filled again, this time not with code theory but with reminiscence.
I remember Mondale pounding away on Reagan's deficit spending, saying it was a swindle across the generations, robbing our children and grandchildren.

Liza stared as the word “swindle” seemed to jump off the screen, followed by “generations” and “grandchildren.” Pulling herself together, she typed,
Sorry, Uncle Jim, I just realized I have to take care of something. Do you mind if we postpone this discussion?

His reply was quick.
It's okay. I should be getting back to work anyway.

They signed off, Liza went offline, and then she began shutting down her computer. A strange line of logic was forming in her mind, ricocheting off disparate bits of information like a hyperactive pinball.

Peter Hake talking about Chissel's early career.

Mrs. Halvorsen's offhand mention of a piece of ancient gossip.

Broken glass found with Chissel's body—and the destruction of the windows downtown.

And finally, there was the point Sheriff Clements had gleaned from the autopsy reports, about traces of a gag on the corpse—a gag of surgical tape.

Liza glanced at the clock on the mantel. Would she be too late?

She quickly headed out the door, then called up to the window next door. “Michael?”

He quickly levered up the sticky window and peered out. “What's up, Liza?”

“I need a lift downtown,” she said. “It's kind of important that I get there before the stores close.”

“Okay.”

A moment later, he joined her, car keys jingling in his hand. “Is it some kind of emergency?”

Liza wasn't quite sure what to tell him. “Just something I'd rather not put off till tomorrow.”

They got into his rental car. As soon as they were sitting together in the enclosed space, Michael began to sneeze.

“I guess I still have traces of Rusty on me,” Liza said.

“It's not as bad as him in person,” Michael replied through some tissues.

In a moment, they pulled off onto Hackleberry Avenue, heading for Main Street.

When he brought the car to a stop in front of Schilling's Pharmacy, Michael said, “Maybe I'll come in with you, see if I can get a pill to clear my nose.”

“I'll pick something up for you,” Liza promised. “But I need to talk to Mrs. Schilling alone.”

She walked into an empty store, except for Nora Schilling standing behind the rear counter. She was reading something and looked up in surprise. “Oh, you startled me, dear.”

Nora glanced at the clock behind her. “You're lucky. We were just about to close. How can I help you?”

“I need something or I won't be able to sleep tonight,” Liza replied.

“I don't suppose you have a prescription. Well, there are some over-the-counter sleep aids. I could ask—”

“I don't need a pill, Mrs. Schilling,” Liza interrupted, “just some information, to prove or disprove this crazy idea I've gotten.”