Ghost Sudoku (25 page)

“Ahhhhh, when you put it that way . . . ummmmmm . . . no,” she admitted. “That’s why we have to make the rest of this sound pretty good.”

Shaking his head, the sheriff whisked her out the back door before the local news vans arrived.

Brandy’s interrogation promised to run much longer and in an even less friendly fashion..

When she got home, Liza found Michael just about wearing a hole in the living room carpet with his pacing. His nervousness must have communicated itself to Rusty, because the dog trotted along in synch at Michael’s right heel.

“Thank God,” Michael muttered, wrapping Liza in a bearhug while Rusty capered around them. “When Ted Everard called and began asking about any other clues, it finally got through to me that you were out there following some sort of thread.”

He took a deep breath. “And I know whenever that happens, somebody tries to kill you.”

Michael pulled back, his eyes going wide as he took in the bandage on her cheek, the marks on her neck.

“It was Brandy,” Liza tried to reassure him. “She tried the same thing on me that she did to Chad, except I broke her nose—twice.”

He started to laugh. “Sounds like your high school fantasy come to life.”

Liza grinned back at him. “I was ready to kick her butt all the way back to Maiden’s Bay, except that the cops arrived.”

Then she sobered. “The bad part is that I have to tell Mrs. H. that her new boarder will end up a guest of the state.”

She tried to do the job over the phone, but Mrs. Halvorsen insisted on coming over to hear the whole story.

No sooner did Liza finish bringing both Michael and her neighbor up to date than she heard a knock at the kitchen door. She opened it to find Ted Everard standing outside.

“After what Bert Clements told me, I wanted to see you for myself.” The look he gave to her hurts seemed more aggravated than afraid, but Ted just shook his head. “And the sheriff wanted me to let you in on what happened when he questioned Brandy Pauncecombe.”

“Did she admit anything?” Liza asked.

He gave her a wry smile. “Brandy didn’t have much of a choice. The marks that snake belt of hers made on your neck are an exact match for the marks on Chad Redbourne’s throat.”

Liza nodded, remembering how she’d seen the belt around Brandy’s waist the afternoon of the murder. In fact, every time she’d seen Brandy since, the woman had worn the damned thing.

Maybe she was afraid to leave it out of her reach,
she thought grimly.
Hell, she could even have worn it at night, since she apparently didn’t share a bed with John Jacob.

“In fact, once she started talking, it was hard to get Brandy to stop,” Ted went on. “I guess our bumping into each other at Chad’s office really must have shaken Redbourne up. Brandy told us that he called her out of the blue—something he wasn’t supposed to do—and asked her to come to his place. She snuck in from a block away through the underbrush and found Chad waiting for her on the terrace. He started in immediately with some wild talk about being in too deep, ending up in jail with no help from his political cronies. He wanted them to leave town immediately, to go somewhere far from Killamook and the Pauncecombes.”

“Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me,” Michael said with a grin.

“Yeah, it was something they’d dreamed about,” Ted replied, “but of course, they never had the kind of money it would take to make it happen. This time around, Chad got so wound up he began to stammer and shake.”

“He used to do that sometimes in school,” Liza said sadly.

Ted nodded. “That’s what Brandy told us. She was just trying to stop him, to shock him out of it, when she looped her belt around his neck. She’d done it before—or so she claims.”

“Chad could get scary when his words got stuck,” Liza said. “But why wouldn’t she just slap him? I guess he never got to the part about financing their escape—or Brandy couldn’t understand it.”

“By dumb luck, she managed to pull a commando move.” Michael looked hard at Liza. “And it’s just dumb luck that it didn’t work on you.”

Liza ignored the comment, thinking back to something else Ted had said days ago, about how someone her size—or Brandy’s, for that matter—could have staged the phony suicide scene in the Grotto.

“So she couldn’t revive him, set up the scene to look like a suicide, then checked the house and found the suitcase. She frantically put everything where it was supposed to go, snuck out, and tried to go on with life as normal.”

Michael picked up the narrative. “But life didn’t stay normal. All sorts of dirt got stirred up about the Killamook machine, not to mention John Jacob and J.J. Then the whole story about the money came out, and the infighting began.”

“I wonder how Brandy felt when she heard what Chad had done to help them get away,” Liza said.

“According to Clements, she was crying a lot by then,” Ted told her.

“Probably practicing for convincing the jury to let her off,” Michael observed.

“And why shouldn’t she?” Mrs. H. suddenly demanded.

Michael blinked. “Play the jury?”

“No, get off.” Mrs. Halvorsen’s expression wavered between sympathy for Brandy and disgust for the Pauncecombes. “Living with that degenerate beast of a man—out skirt chasing, then apparently wearing himself out.” She made a face. “Probably popping those little blue pills. And that son of his . . . well, the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“With a definite emphasis on nuts,” Michael quipped.

“Or she could have been an opportunist who paid her pig of a husband in the same coin—bopping everything that moved—and feared one of her partners was going to crack, so she killed him to shut him up.” Liza put a hand around her throat. “And she was willing to do the same thing to me as soon as I found Chad’s money for her.”

“That doesn’t—” Mrs. H. broke off, suddenly abashed. “No, it
does
make sense, doesn’t it, when you consider what a nasty, spiteful brat she was growing up. I’m sorry, dear. Those awful Pauncecombes got me going.“ She stopped again. “And she played up to me pretty well, didn’t she?”

Ted glanced at his watch. “I guess the final verdict will depend on how she looks when she goes to court. Want to catch a preview? The perp walk is scheduled for any minute now.”

They immediately adjourned to the television set. As the image came on, Ted began to laugh. “Oh, Liza, you did a job on her.”

Flanked by a pair of deputies, Brandy Pauncecombe walked from the front of the Maiden’s Bay City Hall to a car waiting to deliver her to the Killamook jail. She didn’t exactly look like a femme fatale, not with a bandage on her nose and a pair of twin shiners.

It almost looks like one of those little masks you see on people in comic books,
Liza thought.
Superhero or super-villain? I guess only the court will decide—and that will depend on how well she heals and how often she crosses her legs.

Ted looked over at her. “Clements told me one other thing—you wanted no credit in this case.”

Michael swung around from the TV. “What?”

“That’s pretty much the same thing Ava said when I called her from the car,” Liza admitted with a lopsided smile. “I said that while I gave some technical help with the sudokus, he made the connection with the postal boxes and turned up the keys.”

“And how did you wind up getting attacked at the convenience store?” Michael asked skeptically.

“Luring Brandy out into the open,” Liza replied with an innocent look. “There was a slight problem with the surveillance, but it came out all right in the end.”

The phone rang, and Liza excused herself to answer it.

“Now what were you up to this time?” Michelle Markson wanted to know.

“Taking a backseat, for once,” Liza replied. “I don’t need another media circus right now. For one thing, I can’t afford another two-week vacation to recover from it.”

“So someone else will emerge from this whole fiasco as a celebrity,” Michelle said.

“Sheriff Clements?” Liza burst out in surprise.

“No, that amazingly foul-mouthed old man. He’s become quite a phenomenon on YouTube. Since the ResusaGen people are taking their program national, they thought he would make the perfect spokesperson. Apparently, they believe that such a . . . full-bodied response can be taken as proof of virility.”

Liza laughed, and Michelle cut off the call. Maybe that was just as well. Liza wouldn’t be able to ask how her partner had found out that particular tidbit about John Jacob Pauncecombe.

On second thought, maybe I wouldn’t want to know,
she thought.

Michael had followed her to the kitchen giving her a sidewise glance. “So now I know why you handed Clements the case with a polka-dot bow on top.”

“That, and of course, I wanted him to win the election.” Liza grinned at him. “I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have friends in high places.”

“He was your friend before,” Michael pointed out.

“You’re right,” Liza said lightly. “Okay, that’s it. I’m done with politics.”

“I hope not,” Michael told her, surprisingly serious.

Liza stared. “Why?”

“Because someone once said that politics is the art of the possible,” Michael replied softly. “And I still hope that, between us, anything is possible.”

Written by Oregon’s own leading sudoku columnist, Liza K

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let me express my personal opinion up front. I enjoy sudoku, and I’m happy to play the game by the rules that have now become classic. But I am aware that out in the fringes of Sudoku Nation, some folks have become bored with puzzle monogamy. So today we’ll take a look at what variations these sudoku swingers are up to.

Does size matter? Well, you can work in miniature with a puzzle like Rukodoku, with a six-by-six matrix, filling in the rows, columns, and three-by-two “boxes” with the digits 1 through 6. Or you can go bigger, with grids of ten on a side, or fifteen, sixteen . . . I’ve even seen a monster 81-by-81 puzzle, where, yes, each line and column takes the numbers 1 through 81, as do the nine nine-by-nine sub-grids. (In other words, one subgrid is equal to the usual sudoku puzzle.) It looked interesting, but I have to admit that although I enjoy sudoku, I’d like to do other things as well, such as eating, sleeping, and occasionally going to the bathroom.

Another way to spice up sudoku is, as our math-minded friends might say, to vary the constraints. Hmmm. Sounds kind of kinky, but what it actually means is simply changing the rules. In plain old sudoku, you use the numbers 1 through 9, under the constraints that each row, column, and box must contain all the digits without repetition. Slash sudoku keeps all these rules, but also extends the non-repetition constraint to one of the nine-space diagonals “slashing” across the puzzle. X-sudoku adds more constraints (kinky, kinky!), extending the exclusion rule to both diagonals.

For those who feel boxed in by sudoku society’s traditional folkways, there’s irregular sudoku, also called geometric or jigsaw sudoku. The usual row and column constraints still hold, but the subgrid boxes become nine-space “regions” in irregular shapes to be filled with the magic numbers.

Color sudoku also eliminates the usual boxes, replacing them with sets of nine spaces in different colors. Rows, columns, and color sets accept the nine digits with no repeats. It certainly requires a shift of mental gears and creates a sort of numerical modern art.

Odd and even sudoku adds a more monochromatic approach to the traditional sudoku grid. A number of the spaces (thirty-six, to be exact) are shaded. The regular sudoku rules hold, with the additional constraint that only even numbers have it made in the shade.

Folks have played with the shape of the puzzle, even going to the extent of solving related puzzles in 3-D, with three sudoku appearing on the visual facets of a cube. They’ve even stretched and twisted the grid to create toroidal sudoku, where the eighty-one spaces we know and love become the flat representation of a torus or donut. What we were taught to consider usual boundaries actually border one another, so that irregularly shaped regions (à la irregular sudoku) twist through space across what we could consider the “top,” “bottom,” or “sides.”

Some don’t care about size or constraints—they just want to bend their brains.

These folks do away with the famous phrase that always accompanies any description of “vanilla” sudoku—“You don’t need to do any math to solve this puzzle.”

I’ve seen sudoku grids where each nine-space box gets an additional decoration for the twelve interior dividing segments—the signs for “greater than” (>) or “less than” (<) as an additional constraint in placing the magic digits.

Killer sudoku brings in computation, abandoning the traditional boxes for irregularly shaped “cages” where the enclosed digits must add up to a sum posted in one of the spaces.

Kakuro bills itself as a number crossword, with shaded and clear spaces. Here segments of the puzzle are filled not with letters, but with numbers (our old friends 1-9) so that their sums equal the “across” or “down” clue.

Then there’s the newly ubiquitous kenken, where a grid is broken into cages (as in killer sudoku). But you have to obtain the posted result of the cage not merely by adding, but through a variety of math operations. What’s next—logarithmic or cosine kenken? Or maybe the puzzlers will get in touch with their feminine sides and create barbiebarbies?

I haven’t even touched on variants like word sudoku, where nine letters instead of digits get used, or domino puzzles, which affect pairs of spaces—I even stumbled across a two-player variant game using sudoku rules.

I have to admit, though, that the variant that most fascinates me doesn’t change any of sudoku’s traditional rules, but rather the symbols. Picture or image sudoku retires the homely digits we’re so familiar with and replaces them with . . . well, just about anything. I’ve seen puzzles with toys, cars, posters, photos of hamsters (check it out on
beckysweb.co.uk/sudoku/flickrsudoku.asp
) and Hollywood babes (on
yourhomeabroad.com/imdoku/adlin.lku.html
).