Ghost Sudoku (12 page)

“After I left Chad, I had coffee with Ted Everard, a state cop,” she told the private eye. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

Buck wasn’t impressed, while Alvin actively worried. “Some people could see that as an attempt to set up an alibi.”

They continued through the course of events—going to the kennel to pick up Rusty, and then going home and bumping into Kevin. Michael got very interested in that, although Liza managed to keep Ray Massini’s name out of the encounter. Then came her phone conversations with Michelle and Ava, followed by Liza popping over to Mrs. H. to ask if she could use her neighbor’s Oldsmobile again.

“Do I still sound guilty?” Liza couldn’t quite keep the pleading note from her voice as she looked at Alvin.

He sat in silence for a moment. Then Alvin spoke to Buck. “The telephone calls can be checked exactly, and I suppose the state police sergeant can be reasonably exact on time.” Then he turned to Liza. “How busy was the kennel? Would the young woman there have a firm idea of the time? You were still in the other town—Killamook—then.” Back to Buck. “Do we know when the victim left work? Time of death? We want to make sure there’s no window of opportunity when Liza might have stopped off on the way home to kill Redbourne.”

Foreman consulted his notes. “They don’t have a solid time of death—still waiting on the coroner. Redbourne left his office a little early, but I think, considering the time it would take to string up the corpse . . .” He shook his head. “I guess it would depend on how firm Shepard is regarding her arrival around here.”

Great,
Liza thought.
Given the state he was in, I don’t think he was checking his watch when I came driving up.

“On the other end,” Buck said, “Liza, did you do your shopping at a supermarket or a small store?”

“Since I had the car, I drove to the big supermarket on the edge of town,” she answered.

“Good. A big operation probably means security cameras, and maybe a time-stamped picture of you pushing a shopping cart around.”

“And when I popped in on Mrs. H., she was watching one of her game shows.
Jeopardy
, I think. She should remember, and that will give an idea of when I left for the store.”

Alvin nodded. “The other end of the timeline lies with this political operative—what was his name?”

“Clark Hagen,” Liza and Buck both said.

“Well, they’ll have the dueling 911 calls,” Liza added.

“Right,” Foreman said tonelessly. “Let’s go over this again . . .”

 

 

The next morning, Liza gave a low groan as her alarm went off. It was earlier than she usually liked to get up, but she didn’t want to be rushing around. She rose, showered, and put some thought into the clothes she put on. Liza didn’t want to go as far as the Armani suit in the zip-up canvas bag at the end of the closet, but she didn’t want to go in looking like a ragpicker, either.

“Very nice,” Michael said from his nest of sheets on the couch. When they returned from Mrs. Halvorsen’s the night before, he’d just gone to the linen closet and started arranging a bed for himself. “After what you just went through, I figure the last thing you need is pleasure—er, pressure,” he’d said.

“Freudian slip,” she’d told him then, plodding up the stairs.

Now Liza asked, “Coffee?”

Michael stretched and pushed himself up on one elbow. “Yes, please.” He hesitated for a moment. “Want me to go with?”

“I went back and forth over that at least three times in the shower,” Liza admitted. “And my final choice is—no. I don’t think I want to go in there with an entourage—or even a husband.”

“Well, I guess I can take it easy here . . .” Michael broke off as Rusty trotted up to look at him nose to nose. A second later, the dog jumped back in alarm when Michael let out a thunderous sneeze.

Sighing—and then sneezing again—Michael swung round to sit up. “Where did I leave those allergy pills?”

While he went off in search of them, Liza headed for the coffeemaker in the kitchen. The rich smell of coffee filled the room as Michael reappeared, a large blue pill in one hand, the other over his mouth and nose. His brown eyes disappeared for a moment as his whole face scrunched up. Then he shook his head. “Don’t you hate it when you’re about to sneeze, and it doesn’t come?”

A second later, the sneeze did come, startling Rusty again.

Liza filled a mug and handed it to Michael, who immediately took the pill and a sip.

“Toast?” he asked, heading for the loaf of rye bread.

“Yeah, I think that’s all I need.” She patted her stomach. “Butterflies.”

Soon, she, Michael, and Rusty were fed. Liza kept the dog on a reel-in leash as he dashed out to do his business. Then she went back upstairs to put on her face. As she brushed her hair, Liza saw a bit more of a chestnut gleam thanks to her time in the sun.

“All right,” she told her reflection in the mirror. “Here we go.”

 

 

Liza banged a fist against her steering wheel in frustration as she headed downtown on Main Street. “Where the hell is this traffic coming from?” she muttered. “This isn’t rush hour on the 405. It’s eleven freaking o’clock.”

Maybe she should have turned on the radio for a traffic report. But she couldn’t stomach the idea of listening to the maunderings of the Killamook Krew.

In two blocks, she got a clue when she spotted a police cruiser parked on the side of the road. Deputy Brenna Ross waved her over. “Sheriff sent me here when the TV trucks started gathering in front of City Hall,” she said. “If you want, I can take you around back . . .”

But Liza shook her head. “I can’t say I like it, but when you come down to it, seeing me go in is the purpose of the exercise.”

She ended up parking a couple of blocks from City Hall and then walked into the crowd. It took a few moments for the newspeople to recognize her. She was actually mounting the steps before the cameras aimed and the bombardment of silly-ass questions began.

“What did you have against Chad Redbourne?”

“Was it a sick joke to hang Chad?”

“Are you really running for mayor?”

Liza had already schooled her face into a calm, mild mask. When she reached the door, she turned and gave her prepared statement. “The sheriff has asked me to come in and expand on my statement. I am happy to assist his investigation.”

Ignoring the storm of questions, she went inside.

The actual interrogation went much more gently than the practice ones Buck Foreman had conducted. They sat in the small room that doubled as the sheriff’s office when he was in town. Liza noticed that a cassette recorder was set up on the table and the chair with one short leg, usually reserved for people being questioned, was occupied by Bert Clements.

He clicked on the recorder, giving the date and time, identifying himself and Liza. Then the questions began. When he was done, he thanked Liza, then turned the recorder off.

“And I mean thank you, Liza,” Clements said. “For this—this—”

“Bit of political theater?” Liza asked.

The sheriff grimaced. “That’s as good a name as any. Lord, how I hate this political crap. I think I’m a good cop, but I’d rather face some nut with a gun than another speech.”

“Isn’t being a good cop what got you elected?” Liza said.

“I got elected because my predecessor screwed up,” Clements told her.

Liza basically remembered the former sheriff from parades and school visits as a kid. Newt McFarland had always worn a uniform more suited to the supreme potentate of some dictatorship, the fancy tailoring forced to deal with a figure growing steadily more portly. He stood in startling contrast to Clements’s plain khakis, distinguished from the deputies only by a gold badge.

“Newt was a cop who did a good job of keeping the streets clean and the budget balanced,” Clements said. “Police and criminal justice soaks up about a quarter of the twenty million bucks the country runs on each year.”

He shook his head. “But in the end, Newt got a little crazy over the way everybody else seemed to be lining their pockets. So he went out of the county to expand our cruiser fleet—and tried to get a kickback from a car dealer being investigated by the staties for tax fraud. The guy rolled on him to get a lighter sentence, and Killamook needed a new sheriff—preferably one without any political ties.”

“Someone like you,” Liza said. “And you’ve done a good job.”

“Yeah, but now voters have forgotten about Newt. And some folks in the machine figure they should exercise better ‘control.’ ”

“Especially over that five-million-dollar budget, I bet.” Liza’s voice got a bit more tart. “But somebody like Oscar Smutz?”

Clements shrugged. “He jumped to get out in front first. If he uses the murder case to make me look bad enough, he might get the nod. But if in doing that, he gets too much attention put on what Chad was doing for the machine, the boys in Killamook won’t know him. Either way, I’m going to take some lumps.”

He rose to open the door and found the desk deputy waiting for him. “The memorial for Mr. Redbourne has been pushed up to tonight,” the man reported. “Six thirty at Freney’s Funeral Home.”

Liza blinked. “Did the coroner even release Chad’s remains?”

Sheriff Clements shook his head. “And when they do, his parents want the remains shipped to Arizona. But if John Jacob and associates can’t bury Chad physically, they’ll do it politically.”

Liza snuck out the back door of City Hall and walked home unnoticed. She asked Michael to head downtown and recover her car. Then, aside from lunch, she worked on pieces for her column.

Late in the afternoon, though, she took a shower and looked in her closet to resurrect another work outfit—one in a dark color.

“Whoa!” Michael sat up straight on the couch, where he’d been reading printouts of Liza’s new columns. “Are we going out to dinner?”

“No,” Liza replied, “I’m going to crash the Killamook machine’s farewell to Chad Redbourne.”

 

 

 

When Liza opened the door, however, she found her way blocked by the tall, solid form of Buck Foreman. She’d caught him with his finger about an inch from the doorbell.

“What’s up?” she asked, stepping back.

Foreman came into the house, pulling out his ubiquitous cop’s notebook. “I’m back from a quick canvass south of town—that seems to be the direction our subjects took.”

Michael got up from the couch. “Motel people recognized Chad’s picture?”

Buck nodded. “Several places recognized him as a semiregular customer. Always paid in cash, signing himself in as ‘Frank Chambers.’ ”

“Well, I guess that’s better than ‘John Smith,’ ” Liza quipped.

Michael, however, frowned. “Very literary. Frank Chambers is the name of the character who gets into the adulterous affair in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
.”

Liza shook her head. “Well, all through school, Chad had his nose in a book.” Sometimes he was so busy reading, he didn’t even notice trouble—usually in the person of J.J. Pauncecombe—coming at him.

On the other hand . . . “So he actually signed a hotel register as a famous adulterer? That kind of gives away what he wanted the room for.”

Buck nodded. “Always the same sort of motel, too. The front desk located some distance from the actual units. One person could check in and the other could pull his or her car right up to the door.”

“So the question becomes, who was pulling up?” Michael asked.

“We got lucky there.” Buck consulted his notes. “One Jason Katz was working the front desk and had to go and quiet down a loud party in one of the rooms. He was walking past Room 119, registered to Frank Chambers, as a woman exited a car and entered the room. She passed directly under one of the porch lights, and he saw her clearly.”

Buck snapped the notebook shut. “It was Brandy Pauncecombe.”

“If you could find out that much with only an afternoon’s search, I bet anyone could find out a lot more,” Liza slowly said. “Could you give me a copy of what you just said? I’m going to a memorial for Chad Redbourne, and I’m sure Sheriff Clements will be in attendance. If I pass this to him, he can pick up the ball from there.”

Foreman opened to a new page on his notebook, scribbled away for a moment, then tore out the sheet of paper. “Y’know, you’re handing your pal the sheriff a ticking bomb here,” he warned. “Redbourne screwing around might offer a personal rather than political motive for his death. But if he’s screwing with the wife of the local political boss—well, that becomes a major political issue for a sheriff facing re-election.”

“Clements will be annoyed to find me getting involved in the investigation anyway. But . . .” Liza paused, looking up at Buck’s stern face in full tough-cop mode. “As a cop, would you rather have a lead on a murder case or not?”

Buck’s shoulders sank a little. “I’d rather have it,” he admitted.

Liza nodded and started out the door.

But she still heard Buck muttering behind her, “I just hope that Clements doesn’t disappoint you.”

 

 

Freney’s Funeral Home stood at the edge of Killamook, doing business in a vaguely colonial-looking building that always reminded Liza of Mount Vernon surrounded by a parking lot.

Maybe Washington didn’t sleep here, but he could have been laid out here,
that irreverent side of her brain suggested as she pulled into the lot. She found plenty of cars ahead of her, including a couple of police cruisers on traffic duty.

One of the deputies waving her along turned out to be Brenna Ross, who gave her a surprised look.

Liza rolled down her window. “Earning some overtime?” she asked with a grin.

Brenna replied with a grin of her own. “Yeah—thanks for justifying my presence here.”

Let’s just hope she doesn’t have to step in and rescue me from a raging mob,
Liza thought, her smile going a bit wry.