Sinister Sudoku

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Praise for
Death by Sudoku

“The start of a great new amateur-sleuth series . . . Kaye Morgan is a talented storyteller who will go far in the mystery genre.” —
The Best Reviews

“The characters are likable . . . Sudoku plays an integral role, and puzzles are presented in various places for the reader to solve.” —
Gumshoe Review

“Will have readers sharpening their pencils and their wits as they tackle this complicated mystery . . . Edgy and amusing.” —
Romantic Times

DEATH BY SUDOKU
MURDER BY NUMBERS
SINISTER SUDOKU

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party wedsites or their content.

SINISTER SUDOKU

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / August 2008

Copyright © 2008 by The Berkley Publishing Group.

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eISBN : 978-1-4406-3506-9

BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
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The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design
are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

This one is for my family, who may occasionally find it disconcerting to have a writer in their midst, but they love me anyway.

And thanks as always to Michelle Vega, who suggested the green Mondrian. For all you Mondrian lovers out there, yes, I made up the painting.

PART ONE:
Naked Singles

It’s a sexy name for one of the simplest, most intuitive techniques in the sudoku solver’s arsenal. All it entails is looking for a space where clues in the intersecting row and column (and the surrounding nine-space subgrid) eliminate all but one candidate. A trained eye can spot a naked single even in a fairly sparse puzzle.

Oh, it’s a fairly humble technique compared to the higher-order methods that slash complicated chains of logic across a puzzle and require props like bingo chips or colored pencils. For some people, familiarity breeds contempt. But I always get a feeling of satisfaction whenever the naked single opens up the first space on a puzzle. As someone once said, without a little bit of familiarity, you can’t breed anything.

—Excerpt from
Sudo-cues
by Liza K

Liza Kelly opened the classroom door, her particular hall of learning, if a bit spartan—a large desk up front, smaller desks bolted to the floor. In spite of its recent construction, the room seemed to suffer from indifferent maintenance, the off-white paint still fresh but already getting dingy, the floor scuffed. Liza took a deep breath of slightly stale air as she stepped inside.
A typical institutional space,
she thought,
except I never expected to be in this kind of institution.

Beyond the heavily grated window she could see a high wall topped with razor wire. This was the minimum-security section of the Seacoast Correctional Facility, but it was a prison just the same.

Kevin Shepard entered the classroom behind her, pulling out a water bottle from his pocket and taking a sip. “Last class, huh?” he said, sounding relieved.

“You didn’t have to come along every time,” she told him.

“Maybe Ava and Michelle think it’s a good idea for you to teach sudoku in the joint,” Kevin growled. “I don’t.”

Liza’s sudoku column had proven its popularity locally in the
Oregon Daily
. In fact, other papers around the region had picked it up, partly because Liza had gotten involved in several widely covered murder cases. Now larger markets across the country had expressed interest in the column written by her alter ego, Liza K.

Ava Barnes, Liza’s childhood friend and managing editor of the
Oregon Daily
, couldn’t be happier about the free advertising for her syndication efforts. But Michelle Markson, Liza’s partner for several years in the trenches of Hollywood publicity, wanted more.

Her latest PR brainstorm had landed Liza in the grim confines of Seacoast Correctional, teaching inmates to sublimate their felonious impulses through sudoku. She thought she could detect Michelle’s fine hand in the choice of high-profile prisoners as her students, but it could be the corrections department playing safe, or even a reflection of her own semicelebrity status. In any case, she didn’t really see the need for Kevin to act as her bodyguard and said so.

“You know what Sheriff Clements calls this part of the prison?” she asked. “The penal extension.”

Liza said that just as Kevin took another sip of water. He choked, and she looked at him closely. “Did that just come out your nose?”

“Nurgle.” His denial came out more as a snort than a word.

Kevin coughed, took a deep breath, and chose a more diplomatic answer. “No comment.”

“I’ll take that as a yes, then.” Liza looked toward the door. “Brace yourself. Here comes murderers’ row.”

Actually, Liza felt a little bad about teasing Kevin. She’d come up to her hometown of Maiden’s Bay trying to clear her mind—her Hollywood career had estranged her from her husband and left her disillusioned with the celebrity rat race. Finding her old high school beau had been a pleasant surprise, and his more than warm welcome had been nicer still.

Then her husband, Michael, had turned up in town, hoping for reconciliation, and Liza found herself part of a very complicated triangle. It had started off isosceles, with Liza and Kevin pretty close and Michael at a distance. Finding out the seamy side of Kevin’s job running a high-scale rustic inn had skewed the triangle again, with Michael coming closer and Kevin off on a point on his own.

In fact, until Michael had returned to La-la Land on a film script job, he and Liza had been awfully close. But Kevin had been trying to make up lost ground, taking her out to dinner—and appointing himself her bodyguard here.

The first inmate entered giggling. Ritz Tarleton was a short-timer, in for ten days on a DUI and disorderly conduct charge. Portland had proven much less tolerant of all-night partying and high-speed chases than L.A. Ritz owed her name and her money to her daddy’s travel empire, Tarleton Tours. Liza wasn’t sure where the girl’s looks came from. Ritz wore her hair shaggy, dyed an improbable shade of red with a good inch of dirty blond roots showing along a ragged part. Liza knew this was The Look, but the combination with pretty but sharp features made Ritz resemble a fox—a rather vacuous, self-satisfied fox. Her forehead looked as if it had never suffered a wrinkle from worry or even thought. Liza wasn’t sure whether that was due to money, celebrity, or Botox.

The next member of murderers’ row was a cherubic-faced chubby guy a little younger than Liza and Kevin. Usually Cornelius (Conn) Lezat’s Cupid’s-bow lips seemed set in a pout about three seconds away from tears. In the days of his boy-genius glory, those overdone lips had usually been set in a cocky grin. Back then he seemed on the verge of forming a hardware and software empire to challenge Microsoft. Instead, he’d created a financial black hole to rival Enron—and got dubbed “the Scumsucker Lezat” by furious people all over the Northwest who’d lost investments and pensions in the debacle.

An even heavier man followed Conn, short and squat— the only real murderer in the group. In his earlier and leaner days, Fat Frankie Basso had gotten his hands pretty dirty. These days he called the shots for a good-sized criminal enterprise, trying to pitch that can-do American spirit against several Russian mobs operating in Portland. Basso nodded to Liza and Kevin, flashing them both a genial fat-man’s smile—one that never reached a pair of eyes that looked like chips of obsidian set under big, heavy brows. His thinning gray hair was brushed straight back. And although his jawline had softened along with his bulging belly, those cold eyes staring out over an eagle nose showed his former hardness—a murderous hardness that lived on within.