Sinister Sudoku (9 page)

“Does this have to be done by the next of kin?” Liza found herself asking. “I mean, I taught a class at the prison. Chris Dalen was one of my students. If it’s all the same, I could—”

Mrs. Halvorsen drew herself up to her full height, which brought her up to about Liza’s shoulder. “I suppose I should appreciate your offer, but this is something I have to do.” The insistent tone in her voice brooked no argument, so Liza didn’t offer one.

“Come this way,” Doc Conyers said. The doctor was wearing his usual baggy suit with a pipe sticking out of the breast pocket like some sort of sooty periscope. He offered Mrs. H. his arm as he led the way into a chilly tiled room that smelled of antiseptic. Directly ahead of them stood one of those floor-to-ceiling curtains you usually see in hospital rooms, except this one seemed heavier, as if it were backed with rubber . . .

Ewwww, I don’t think I’m going to like this,
she thought.

“They don’t go for much in the way of amenities,” Doc Conyers apologized. He pulled the curtain over to reveal what looked like an operating room.

No, Liza realized, this wasn’t what she saw on the doctor shows. This was more like crime-scene TV. It was an autopsy room. A row of four small doors lined the far wall. They were all closed, but a hospital gurney stood in front of the last one. A sheet obscured the fact that someone lay on the stretcher.

Doc Conyers led Mrs. H. toward the gurney with slow steps. “I think you should get on her other side,” he told Liza. Without thinking, Liza took the older woman’s arm. The doctor stepped round, took hold of the top of the sheet, and gently brought it down so that only the face was exposed.

At least they had closed those horrible, staring eyes.

Mrs. Halvorsen began crying again. “That’s my brother,” she said.

“Yes, it’s Chris Dalen.” Liza was surprised to find her own voice choking up. Liza suspected this was not a part of the job Doc Conyers enjoyed. He led them away from the body with a flow of medical jargon that would have sounded like nervous babbling from a young intern.

“We’ll need to do a complete postmortem. But on initial examination, it appears Mr. Dalen was attacked and subsequently strangled. That might be the cause of death, but it’s possible that the stress brought on a fatal myocardial infarction.”

“So it could have been another heart attack?” Mrs. H. asked faintly. “He wasn’t—”

“I’m afraid it’s murder, dear,” Doc Conyers sounded grimly serious now. “Whatever killed your brother, someone else made it happen.”

Doc Conyers had a couple of forms for Mrs. H. to sign, and then they were out of there. Liza might have considered it the bum’s rush, except she was glad to leave the creepy environs of the morgue.

They drove most of the way back to Hackleberry Avenue in silence, until Mrs. Halvorsen finally said, “Chris was charming, even amusing. But he was a criminal. He told me that years ago, when he first wound up in prison, he had to fight and nearly got killed. I shouldn’t take it as such a big surprise.”

“He was an honest crook, Mrs. H.” Liza found herself repeating her dinner conversation with Kevin. “Everyone in my class had good reason to be in Seacoast Correctional. But Chris was the only one to face up to that and admit it. And he was your brother.”

Did that change things? Liza didn’t want to think about it. Knowing Ava and Michelle, both of them would keep pushing her to look into the case. They’d both provide what information they could.

Guess it wouldn’t kill me to use that,
Liza thought as they arrived back at Mrs. H’s house.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to come in for a cup of tea, would you?” Mrs. Halvorsen asked.

Liza suspected her neighbor was more in need of company than refreshment. “Be glad to,” she said.

They lurched over the plow-created snowbank at the end of the driveway, got out of the car, and walked along the shoveled path to the front door. “I was wondering,” Liza said. “You said earlier that you’d gotten letters from your brother. Did you keep any of them?”

If Dalen had sent his sister a map with a prominent X or the address of a storage warehouse in Seattle, Mrs. H. would doubtless have mentioned it. But letters might give an idea of his movements and his associates.

Mrs. Halvorsen paused with her key in the lock. “I’d have to remember where I stuck them. Are you thinking of this as a case, dear?”

“I’m not sure,” Liza admitted, “but I feel it would be worth a look.”

Mrs. H. took off her coat, then rubbed her arms. “It’s just about as chilly inside here as out.” She complained. “Do you feel a draft?”

It seemed to be coming from the living room—the area where the tree had invaded. The heavy, old-fashioned furniture had been pulled into the archway that served as an entrance to the space. Beyond that was an empty space with traces of construction. The smashed-in wall and window had been cleaned up and squared off, with heavy-duty plastic stretched across the opening to protect against the elements.

Now, however, cold air was puffing through a slit in the plastic. Liza stepped over to peek outside. Maybe something else had fallen during last night’s storm.

Instead, she found a trail of footprints leading up, then going off again.

“It looks as if someone walked up here and cut the plastic,” Liza reported.

“Do you think they came in?” Mrs. Halvorsen quickly took a look around. “Well, they didn’t get the TV or the video machine.”

They wouldn’t—unless they had an interest in antiques.
Liza kept that thought to herself as her neighbor bustled around. First she went to the kitchen, where she picked up an old shoe box and began fingering through envelopes marked FOOD, GAS, ELECTRICITY. “My monthly budget seems untouched.” Then she peeked into a sugar jar up on the third shelf of a cabinet—it turned out to contain a roll of bills. “And my mad money.”

A quick trip upstairs brought the report that Mrs. H.’s jewelry was intact, too.

“Maybe whoever it was had just cut the plastic as we arrived and got scared off,” Mrs. Halvorsen suggested.

Liza frowned, going over the area by the slit. “There’s a little puddle here, as if whoever it was either stomped off snow or slipped off boots.”

A considerate vandal,
she thought—that didn’t make much sense.
Unless whoever it was didn’t want us to know where he—or she—had been. Maybe I’m not the only one wondering if Mrs. H. wound up with a big X-marks-the-spot map.

She turned to her neighbor. “I think maybe someone came in here looking around—searching. Does everything look as if it’s where it’s supposed to be?”

Mrs. H. looked embarrassed. “With all the mess going on, I haven’t been as neat as usual.” She gestured to a corner of the dining room table, piled high with junk mail coming in and old newspapers on the way out. “I couldn’t tell if that had been moved around if I wanted to.”

“Do you want to call the police?” Liza asked.

Mrs. Halvorsen shook her head. “As far as I can see, nothing was taken. And the sheriff has more important business—a murder to solve.”

After using some duct tape to seal the cut as best she could, Liza returned to her house. Rusty raised his head companionably from his patch of sunlight, but he didn’t see the need to make a big point of her return. “No treats likely,” Liza put it more bluntly.

She shook her head. “No use putting it off,” she muttered, ringing up Ava Barnes.

Her boss on the
Oregon Daily
kept reasonably calm as Liza described everything that had happened the previous evening—although a sound suspiciously like a giggle came over the line a couple of times.

“It’s not funny,” Liza fumed into the phone. “You’re the one who’s all, ‘Let’s get ink about the syndicated column.’ What do you think this would do for my public image if it came out?”

“Well, it gave me a great idea for a new comic strip— ‘Nuda, Warrior Princess’—” Ava broke off at the gagging sounds Liza began to make. “Look, I think that even your friend Michelle would have to admit there’s no way to spin the story you just told me. All you can do is get people interested in a different story, like you trying to find the killer and the lost painting.”

“Very neat,” Liza complimented, “although maybe a bit self-serving.” She sighed. “There’s another wrinkle in the case you should be hearing soon. Chris Dalen is Mrs. Halvorsen’s brother.”

“You’re kidding!” Ava burst out. “I have to get Murph right over there—”

“Cool your pits,” Liza told her friend. “Mrs. H. isn’t in any shape to talk to your ace reporter. She just came home from identifying the body.”

“Murph is the right one for the job,” Ava insisted. “You may not think so from the way he treats you, but he’s very nice and polite with little old ladies. He says they remind him of his mother.”

“He always told me he was an orphan.”

“Well, maybe they remind him of the mother he never had.” Ava’s voice got a bit more sly. “It sounds as if this case is striking a lot closer to home than you thought at first.”

“Do you know that the insurance company has offered a reward for finding the painting?” Liza asked.

“We just got a press release on the subject,” Ava said.

“It’s just—Mrs. H. is really having money problems. If I could help out—”

She broke off, thinking, I’m probably not the only one looking. That cut in the plastic around Mrs. H.’s house while we were away, that can’t be a coincidence. While Sheriff Clements brought in Vinnie Tanino for questioning, Fritz Tarleton was probably free as a bird. And who knows? Maybe there are other people getting involved.

“So have you changed your mind?” Ava asked.

Liza sighed. “Let’s say I’m thinking about it, so I’ll do a little looking around.”

“I guess I’ll be happy enough with that as a start.” Ava went back to serious business mode. “I’ve got people beginning to stack up outside my office. Do we have any other items to discuss?”

“I think that’s enough,” Liza replied. Saying good-bye, she hung up.

Then the phone rang again.

Liza shook her head as she told Rusty, “Y’know, I’m getting kind of tired of this.” But her annoyance evaporated when she picked up the handset and heard Mrs. Halvorsen’s voice.

The older woman sounded upset again. “Oh, Liza, I think I’m really losing it. We were there at the morgue, and I never thought to ask when they’d release Chris for services or a burial. How am I supposed to make the arrangements? I tried to call Doc Conyers, and all I got was his answering service.”

“Well, I don’t know that I can do any better,” Liza started. Then she had an idea. “But maybe I have someone I can call.”

She got off the line with Mrs. H. and punched in the number of Sheriff Clements’s cell phone. “Liza,” he said genially enough. “I guess you’re safely home now.”

“Thank heavens,” Liza replied. “When I got back here, I discovered that my next-door neighbor is Chris Dalen’s sister.”

The sheriff’s voice got a bit more serious. “Elise Halvorsen?”

“We went to the morgue to make an identification, and Doc Conyers told us that there’d have to be an autopsy. But Mrs. H. has to make plans for Chris’s funeral, and she doesn’t know when you folks will be finished with her brother’s body.”

She heard a rumble of voices—Clements must have put his hand over the receiver while he spoke with someone. Then he came back on. “I bet you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you can’t throw a rock in downtown Killamook without hitting some media person. That’s why we’re sort of hiding out in the City Hall here in Maiden’s Bay. What say you come down?”

“There’s an invitation I don’t get every day,” Liza said. “Will I be there as a guest or a suspect?”

The hand must have gone over the receiver while Clements passed that along. Even so, Liza could hear the laughter.

“As a guest—we promise,” the sheriff said.

“Then how can I resist?” Liza exchanged good-byes with the sheriff, pulled on her coat, and got the snow shovel to clear a path to her car. Soon enough, she was back in downtown Maiden’s Bay. Unfortunately, Liza didn’t have Mrs. H.’s parking luck. She had to deal with several slushy blocks to get to City Hall.

The police had one wing of the building. The officer on duty at the front desk must have been told to expect Liza, because he waved her straight back to the sheriff’s office. Actually, it was more of a spare room/interrogation space equipped with a desk.

Sheriff Clements had installed himself behind the desk. Detective Ted Everard sat in another chair. Liza noticed he had gotten rid of his off-green suit. In fact, the state police investigator looked lanky but pretty good in a sweater and a pair of jeans, with what looked like a brand-new pair of duck boots on his feet.

Everard rose to hold another chair for Liza, but Clements spoke up. “Not that one, Ted. It’s reserved for suspects.”

“Ah.” Everard shook the chair back slightly. “One leg too short, to keep whoever’s being questioned from getting too comfortable?”

The sheriff looked bland. “I don’t think it’s forbidden by the Geneva Convention.”

Liza suspiciously rattled a different chair before she settled in it.

“So what do you think of Ted’s new duds?” Clements asked. “He just picked them up today at the army-navy.”

“I’ve been in three other counties this week, living out of my suitcase,” Everard groused. “I was down to my last clean shirt and my last clean pair of underwear.”

“That may verge on too much information,” Liza told him, thinking that at least the state cop had an excuse for the way he was dressed last night.

“I’ve asked Ted to stay on and give us the benefit of his experience,” the sheriff went on. “He was quite an investigator before he became a glorified accountant.”

“Yeah, well.” Everard’s embarrassment quickly turned to sour humor. “Besides, the way things seem to be going around here, I’ll be logging some more major crimes.”