Ghost Sudoku (3 page)

In Killamook politics, I guess that should be, “The stink of low quality remains long after the high kickbacks get paid off,”
she thought as she set off in quest of the elections office. Years of practical publicity work had taught her to avoid bureaucratic roadblocks by striding purposefully rather than appearing lost.

She had fewer problems than she’d expected. No heads came up for a glance at the stranger passing by. In fact, the office workers seemed to avoid her eyes, as if strangers meant trouble . . . as if they were afraid.

Off in a dingy corner with an even stronger mildew problem, Liza spotted a door marked C. REDBOURNE. She breezed past and opened it before the secretary even realized she was there.

The heavyset woman stared, her mouth dropping open. “Hey! No one sees Mr. Redbourne without an appointment.”

“Well, it’s either him or J.J. Pauncecombe.” Liza didn’t get a chance to say more because she was pulled into the office, the door slamming shut. She was about to make a sharp remark but instead found herself staring.

“Chad?” she gasped in disbelief. “Chad Redbourne?”

You shouldn’t be so surprised,
that little voice in the back of her head chimed in.
How many Redbournes could there be in Killamook?

Still, Liza hadn’t expected to see the class nerd from her days at Killamook High.

Chad had actually improved over the last twenty years or so. His nose still had an extra inch to it, and so did his chin. His mouth was still too wide, and now his mouse brown hair was getting a little sparse at the hairline. But he’d ditched the Coke-bottle glasses—probably for contacts. And he’d finally grown into that scarecrow frame with the ankles and wrists sticking out of his clothes. He’d also learned to dress, if the suit jacket hanging from the back of the office door was any indication.

“Liza Kelly!” Chad responded in the same tones of disbelief.

“The very same,” Liza replied. “How are you doing? The last I heard, you were off to law school.” Chad’s grand-father was a judge. His career path had probably been determined while he was still in the womb.

“Yeah, well, I passed the bar but didn’t do too well in the courtroom.” His shoulders jerked in the same hapless gesture Liza remembered from the Killamook High cafeteria.

Come to think of it, a back office functionary’s job would make a better fit for the painfully shy Chad.

His head bobbed and he smiled as he walked over to his desk. “I see your name all the time in the newspaper,” Chad said. “That’s a great column you do on sudoku. Have you ever considered doing a book?”

“Nobody’s asked me,” Liza told him.

“I’ve been trying my hand . . .” With a self-deprecating smile, Chad opened a drawer and extracted a sheaf of paper—all half-sheets.

Then Liza realized they were full sheets, folded in half, then meticulously stapled into small booklets. And each page held two familiar-looking boxed arrays—sudoku puzzles. Liza looked at the first.

“You did these?” she asked.

“I find it relaxes me after a long day in the office,” Chad said.

“I wish I could say the same—but it’s a little different when you’re working against a deadline to produce one every day.” Liza hefted the collection, shaking her head. You never knew where you’d encounter a fan, it seemed. “Still, this is quite an accomplishment. You do have a book here.”

She took in Chad’s eager expression. “As for getting it published, though, I’m not sure—maybe I could ask a few friends—have you considered doing something on the Internet?”

He shook his head. “Just a thought. To get a real book deal, I expect you’d have to be famous—like you.”

“Speaking of which, some people seem to want me even more famous,” Liza said, switching conversational gears. “They’re popping out of the woodwork with petitions to run me for mayor of Maiden’s Bay.”

“Ah.” Chad’s wide lips curled into a bigger—and considerably less genuine—smile. Just one look told Liza he knew all about the “Kelly for Mayor” campaign. “Well, if your friends and neighbors think that highly of you, it must be quite a compliment.”

“It might be,” Liza said, “if they hadn’t waited till my back was turned before they started in.”

“Perhaps they wanted to dip a toe in the water before approaching you,” Chad suggested.

“Dip a toe?” Liza burst out. “They had a float blocking half the traffic in downtown Maiden’s Bay!” She leaned forward across the desk. “What I want to know is how to stop them.”

“I’m not sure . . .” Chad gave her a pretty theatrical frown. “I don’t know of any electoral rule barring concerned citizens from expressing support for a candidate—or advocating others to support that candidate.”

It came out so smoothly, Liza wondered how long Chad had practiced that particular speech. Two weeks, maybe?

“So it’s just a question of free speech, is that it?”

Liza’s voice oozed sarcasm as she quoted Bert Clements, but Chad pounced on her words gratefully. “That’s it exactly. I regret to say there’s nothing this office can do.”

He carefully replaced his sudoku collection in its drawer, then gestured to the array of papers marshaled across the top of his desk. “It was great to see you again, Liza. Now I’m afraid I have someone coming in for an important meeting . . .”

He ushered her back to the door and opened it. But Liza wasn’t about to let him off that easily. She paused in the open doorway. “I suppose you think you’ve been very nice about this—slick, even. But I think this whole situation stinks as much as the air in here does. Someone’s going to swing for it, you can take my word on that.”

It was a pretty hollow threat, but the best she could come up with. Liza spun on her heel to make a dramatic exit—and instead collided with Chad’s next meeting.

“Hey, I’m always up for swinging,” Sergeant Ted Everard told her, catching her by the arm before she landed on her butt and made a complete fool of herself.

“Ted! It’s been a while. What brings you back to this part of the state?” Everard worked for the state police, compiling crime-scene statistics. He’d come to Maiden’s

Bay to investigate a spike in serious crime there, had gotten involved in a case with Liza—and then gotten involved with Liza in a more personal way.

His long, thin face shut down, going into a version of cop mode. “I’m doing some field work for a state task force.”

Then his expression softened a little. “But I hope I’ll get the chance to see you again.”

Liza nodded, hoping her own face hid the calculations going on inside. At least she was sincere when she said, “I hope so, Ted. And soon.”

 

 

 

Liza left the county center a lot more slowly than she’d entered, a thoughtful frown on her face. She’d already pushed her next errand—rescuing Rusty from the kennel here in town—to the bottom of her mental list. What she needed now was a nice, cool drink and a shady spot where she could watch the exit from the county center’s parking lot without being disturbed.

The first problem was solved with a quick visit back at the business district, where Liza dashed into a coffee shop and emerged with an oversized plastic cup of iced coffee. Judging from the pile of papers on Chad Redbourne’s desk, his meeting with Ted wasn’t going to be a five-minute deal. She should have ample time to get back before Ted tried to make his escape.

Liza came back to the county center and, just to make sure, toured the parking lot until she spotted the official car that Ted had used on his last visit to town. It was a state police cruiser that had seen better days, being demoted first to an unmarked car and now to mere bureaucratic transportation.

Ted had grown quite profane about his set of government wheels, not just for the way it ran but also for what it represented. He’d been a damned good investigator until he’d gotten seriously shot up in a bad bust and found himself driving a desk. His accounting degree and facility with numbers had kept him there, massaging crime statistics and occasionally getting out in the field on the trail of some sort of business shenanigans.

That’s why Liza wanted to talk with Ted—to find out why he’d come to visit Chad Redbourne.

Driving back to the street, she found a spot under one of the ornamental trees and settled down to wait Ted out.

Liza greedily sucked down the iced coffee—she hadn’t realized how parched she’d gotten on the trip up from California to Killamook. It didn’t take her long to realize she’d committed one of the classic rookie stakeout mistakes. The caffeine she’d drunk had its usual effect, and by the time Ted finally appeared, Liza feared she was about to disgrace herself.

Her wave as Ted pulled out was considerably more frantic than she’d intended it to be.

Ted stopped his car beside Liza’s borrowed Oldsmobile. “Why am I not completely astonished at this turn of events?”

“Maybe it was seeing me at Chad’s office,” Liza replied.

“So, you want to get a cup of coffee or something?”

Liza repressed a twinge at hearing that, saying, “I’ll follow you anywhere—as long as there’s a clean bathroom at the end.”

“Hmmm . . . sounds like the quicker, the better,” Ted replied. He led the way back to Broad Street and a restaurant that just about screamed “Ye Olde Inne.”

Liza didn’t pay much attention to the décor as she hurried to the ladies’ room. She returned to find Ted seated at a table, a steaming bowl in front of him. “Hope you don’t mind that I ordered some clam chowder.”

“That’s what I hate about this place!” Liza burst out.

Ted blinked, a little nonplussed. “The chowder? The table? That they didn’t wait for you? The john?”

She shook her head, plumping down into the not-too-comfortable wooden captain’s chair. “I just realized where the hell we are. You wouldn’t have been around here twenty years ago.”

“I guess not, since I grew up in Portland,” Ted said.

“Well, when I went to high school, this was Paul’s, our favorite burger joint. Everybody went here after classes. Even when the chains moved in, old Paul’s was the favorite—they made the best burgers in town.”

A pair of creases appeared between Ted’s eyebrows. “I don’t see—”

“You sure as hell don’t see Paul’s,” Liza cut in. “The Preservation Council decided a lowly burger joint didn’t enhance the historical ambience of Broad Street, even though Paul had opened the place more than thirty years ago. So good-bye, great burgers, hello, chowder out of a big can—because the clientele would be tourists who won’t know any better.”

Everard put down his spoon. “Well, that certainly makes it extra delicious. But I guess I can understand your bitterness.”

Liza shook her head. “That’s just the start of it.” She stabbed a finger toward the front window of the restaurant. “See that boutique with the overpriced outdoor gear across the street? That was a saloon back in the day. My dad would bring me in there for a soda when I was growing up. His picture was on the wall behind the bar—part of a championship softball team from before I was born. Dad looked about seventeen. That place had been part of the community—just about forever. The original owner opened the doors a year before the Depression.”

Liza shifted in her uncomfortable chair—designed to keep the tourists from hanging around too long, she figured. “The Preservation Council decided this was no place for a blue-collar bar and banished them to a strip mall outside of town. The joint was gone in a year.”

She scowled. “I’m surprised they didn’t fob them off on Maiden’s Bay instead—although then the bar might have survived.”

Ted frowned in puzzlement. “Fob them off?”

“Whatever the powers that be don’t want in Killamook, they stick in Maiden’s Bay,” Liza said. “Killamook gets a Broad Street that never was and the tourist business, Maiden’s Bay gets the smelly cannery. Fishing boats berth in Maiden’s Bay, but the yacht harbor is down the block over there. I hate to think about it, but my hometown has become the dumping ground of Killamook County. And a lot of it has to do with the people in the county center.”

“You mean it has to do with the Killamook machine and John Jacob Pauncecombe,” Ted said in a low voice.

Liza leaned across the table. “If you know that name, that suggests you’re here after big game.”

“Not that big.” Ted raised both hands in a cautioning gesture. “I don’t know how up you are on all the political ins and outs since you came back to Oregon. But the government has been working to create a statewide voter database for some time now, and the deadline is coming up. I got assigned to the compliance taskforce, following up with counties that can’t quite seem to get their acts together.”

“Like Killamook and the machine.” Liza gave a short, sharp laugh. “God knows how many make-believe voters they’ve got stocked away.”

“It can’t be like Chicago in the old days,” Ted said. “They used to register whole cemeteries to pad the vote.”