Sinister Sudoku (18 page)

But his obvious camaraderie with his student and colleague, that was a surprise. Chris Dalen had always struck her as an island, in solitary even in the midst of the prison population.

He must have missed Matt after he got parole,
Liza thought. Then she shook her head.
I might have heard a lot about Chris Dalen the human being, but I got no further figuring him out as a code maker
. Sighing, she took the exit for Maiden’s Bay and drove through town.

When she got home to Hackleberry Avenue, Liza quite disappointed Rusty by pretty much walking past his capering welcome. Instead, she plumped herself down at her improvised desk in the living room, spreading out the two sheets of paper Chris Dalen had sent in front of her.

What a difference,
she thought, looking from one to the other. The photocopy of Dalen’s note was wildly scrawled. But the miniature reproduction of the Mondrian was carefully, even lovingly, crafted, the lines as precisely drawn as if this were a drafting blueprint, the colors, even in the photocopy applied evenly, not daubed or blotched. There was even a little “T” written by the upper left and an equally small “B” at the lower right. Chris had wanted to make sure this version of the Mondrian avoided the ignominy of hanging upside down like the original.

The note gave every suggestion of something created at the very last minute. But the picture must have been done some time well in advance.

“So what does that tell me?” Liza muttered, frowning at the enigmatic pair of clues.

Feeling left out, Rusty crept over and gently insinuated his muzzle between Liza’s right arm and her ribs. Then he shook his head vigorously, jerking her arm aside. Startled, Liza looked down. “Sorry for ignoring you, big guy.”>

She reached down to scratch his head, then squinted at a crumpled piece of paper on the floor. It was the sudoku puzzle that Chris had created for her course—a piece of paper that should have been on her workspace.

“Rusty!” Liza’s voice grew stern. “Have you been jumping up on the table again?”

The dog’s head immediately slipped from under her hand as he began slinking away.

“Bad dog!” Liza called after him. She got out of the chair and knelt to retrieve the puzzle. The solution had fallen farther under the table, but further searching failed to turn up any other papers that might have been knocked down. Reaching up blindly, she stuck the puzzle and solution on the tabletop.

“Nothing else,” she said, “unless a big, dopey dog carried it away.” She glared after Rusty, who sped up his slinking off to a scurry. Liza crawled out from under the table and got back in her chair. The paper she had tossed up half-covered Chris Dalen’s posthumous communications.

“Hunh?” Liza said as she went to remove the puzzle from over the picture. “They’re almost the same size . . .”

Her gaze fell on the note. The top of the page was covered by Dalen’s puzzle solution, but she could see the last sentence.
If you can put this over . . .

Her IM discussion with Uncle Jim had talked about code overlays. Maybe she’d just been laying them over the wrong message. The translucent Mondrian wasn’t supposed to go over Chris Dalen’s note. It was supposed to overlay the puzzle.

But what was she supposed to see? Liza pulled out he note and read the first line:
Maybe I’m just in a blue funk.
The title of the stolen Mondrian was
Composition in Blue, Red, and Green
.

And Dalen continually gave the telephone the joking name of “der telefunken.”

Liza abruptly turned to her computer and began running Google to find color images of
Composition in Blue, Red, and Green
. Once she got that, Liza started comparing the image on her computer monitor with the photocopy in her hand, trying to see which of the spaces were blue, green, and red. The red areas were pretty easy to distinguish— they appeared almost black on the photocopy.

The blues and greens came out in shades of gray, and that’s where Liza had to be careful telling one from the other.

Once she got the colored areas correctly marked, she set the Mondrian copy over Dalen’s sudoku and held it up to the light from her monitor. It wasn’t as clear as it would have been with the translucent paper, but she could see numbers showing up in the blue sections.

However, there were very few numbers at all in the seventeen-clue puzzle.

Liza aligned the puzzle solution with the mini-Mondrian. Then she grabbed a pencil and began scribbling down all the numbers she found in blue-colored areas.

She wound up with ten digits. The first three were 9, 7, and 1. Her breath came a little faster. That was an area code used around Portland.

The rest of the digits weren’t so familiar: 5, 5, 5, 4, 3, 9, and 4.

“No, I don’t recognize it,” Liza murmured. “But it could be a phone number.”

She sat for a long moment, staring at the sequence of numbers. Then, taking a deep breath, she picked up the handset of her phone and began tapping the numbers into the keypad with a trembling finger.

“I’m gonna feel pretty stupid if I end up getting a Chinese restaurant in Beaverton,” she told Rusty over her shoulder. “For one thing, I don’t think they’ll deliver this far out of town.”

The number connected, and Liza heard the bleep of a phone ringing on the other end of the line. One, two . . . it kept up for five rings, and then voice mail came on.

“Hello there,” a voice said.

Liza gasped as she recognized Chris Dalen speaking.

“Looks like you’ve figured things out to get this far. All I can say is go ahead. Everything should be a go.”

One of the comforting things about sudoku is that after beating your brains out on the most difficult puzzle, the end of a solution brings you back to the most simple techniques. Rows and columns will be filled in except for one measly space, so it’s just a case of turning off your brain and filling things in, right?

Actually, this is the point where you can get distracted and suddenly find a space that holds
no
candidates, completely invalidating your solution.

As the great Yogi Berra put it, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” So pay attention and try to avoid any unpleasant last-minute surprises.

—Excerpt from
Sudo-cues
by Liza K

As the dead man’s voice died away, Liza’s mood quickly shifted from awe to aggravation. She wasn’t about to leave a message. Instead, she set the receiver down with a bang and let rip with a few choice words until Rusty began to bark.

She glanced guiltily over at her dog. “Yes,” she told him defensively, “I know those words. Sorry to offend your virgin ears.” Then she shook her head at her own foolishness. No doubt Rusty was reacting more to her tone of voice than to her vocabulary.

As she patted the dog to calm him down, her eyes went back to the telephone. She’d made a breakthrough, figuring out some of Chris Dalen’s thought processes. But he definitely had the kind of mind that would fit around a corkscrew. Obviously, there were some more twists and turns to negotiate before she had the full message.

Liza turned to the telephone again and began dialing. Her first call was next door to Mrs. Halvorsen’s for Michael. Then her fingers hovered in hesitation over the keypad, suddenly reluctant to enter the number for the Killamook Inn.

She shook her head. Yes, she was disappointed with Kevin, even a little angry. But there was the case to consider. He had helped in the past. Turning to him now would also give him the chance to make up for what he’d done.

Biting her lip, Liza called the inn. Kevin promised to set off immediately.

The next number caused her a shorter hesitation, a bare moment before she punched in the number for the sheriff’s substation down at City Hall.

She was in luck—Ted Everard was back in Sheriff Clements’s office. “This may be a dirty word to you,” Liza said into the phone, “but I found a clue. I’m having some people over to discuss it, and I’d like you to be here, too.”

“A clue,” he repeated. “Does this have anything to do with our conversation earlier today?”

“You might say that,” Liza replied.

“Anything else?” Everard pressed.

Liza suddenly thought of the empty state of her kitchen shelves. “Well, you could bring snacks.”

While she waited for them all to arrive, Liza managed to find some tracing paper and redid the Mondrian overlay, this time in color.

They convened over sodas, pretzels, and chips that the state police investigator had brought. Liza quickly took them through her conversation with Matt Augustine.

Everard quickly interrupted. “He had a cell phone? It wasn’t found with him or in his room.” He looked at Liza. “Remember his personal effects? Either Augustine was spinning you a story, or whoever killed Dalen took the phone.”

“Augustine wasn’t telling fairy tales,” Liza said. She went through her own process of discovery, realizing that the Mondrian reproduction matched the puzzle Dalen had given her at the final sudoku class, the blue funk— telefunken connection, the ten digits she’d gotten. Then she dialed the number, putting her phone on speaker.

The four of them listened to Chris Dalen’s greeting.

When it was over, Liza hung up. Kevin shook his head. “ ‘Go ahead,’ he said. But go where?”

“Could it be to go ahead with the puzzle?” Everard suggested. “Take away that phone number and you have—”

He went to count, but Liza headed him off. “Seventy-one spaces remaining.”

“Most of them are white,” Michael said. “Is that where we should go first?”

“There are three colors left,” Kevin pointed out. “Maybe there are three more sets of information that we need.”

“Or three sentences, if this is some kind of code.” Everard stared so hard at the puzzle, Liza began to worry he was about to burn a hole through it.

“Maybe we’re getting too fancy with this,” Michael suggested. “Dalen obviously had to be tricky, but I think he also had to follow the KISS principle.”

“Kiss?” Kevin gave him an uncomprehending look.

“Keep It Simple, Stupid,” Michael replied with a beatific smile.

Everard managed to get hold of Kevin’s arm before he slugged Michael. “It’s an acronym,” he said. “K-I-S-S.”

“So how do
you
‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’?” Kevin angrily asked Michael.

Michael shrugged. “Blue was for telephone. What color is for go?”

All eyes went to him as they said almost in unison, “Green!”

Consulting the puzzle and the overlay, they ended up with fifteen digits.

Everard frowned at the little line of numbers. “So what good does this do us?” He tapped the blue squares. “Blue meant a telephone number that was supposed to be called. If green means go, then these numbers should represent somewhere—”

“Where we should go,” Michael chimed in.

“So what is it?” Everard asked. “An address? There are numbered avenues in Portland, but I don’t think you end up with fifteen digits.”

“Maybe they threw in the zip code,” Michael said. “Or the zip plus four.”

“Portland zip codes begin with a ninety-seven,” Everard told him.

Kevin tapped one of the red areas on the overlay. “You know, red is the color usually connected with hell.”

Michael’s head snapped his way. “So?”

“Well, it’s another place you could go,” Kevin replied with a shrug.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Michael demanded.

Kevin shrugged again. “Just an observation.”

“Maybe you should keep your brilliant observations to yourself,” Michael said.

“I’d be glad to—if you could do the same,” Kevin shot back.

Liza rolled her eyes. So what’s the next line going to be?
she wondered,
“Make me” or “Bite me”?

Everard took advantage of the bickering to lean closer on the couch with Liza. “Hope you didn’t invite me here hoping to recruit a Curly so you could take this Stooges act on the road.”

“Actually,” Liza told him, her voice a little sour, “I had you more pegged as a Moe.”

That would have gotten a laugh out of him, except that the volume—and the bad blood—between Kevin and Michael kept escalating.

“You better back down, Langley.” Kevin was out of his seat now, looming over Michael, his hands clenched into fists. “Keep running your mouth like that, and someone’s going to shut it for you.”

Michael bounced right out of his chair to stand nose to nose with Kevin. “Nobody in my family ever backed off from a bully, Shepard. Our family motto is ‘Fifty-four forty or fight!’ ”

Ted Everard got to his feet and with two quick motions, separated the two. Liza saw that he didn’t actually get between them, but had stationed himself to restrain either one of them from going at the other.

“Actually, Langley, our side did back down in that argument,” he pointed out in a calm voice. “Way down. President Polk and the Brits signed a treaty setting most of the border between the U.S. and Canada along the forty-eighth parallel of latitude—”

He broke off, risking a quick glance at Liza while still standing ready to keep Michael and Kevin from tangling. “Liza, read the first few numbers that we just wrote down.”

“Four, five, six, seven . . . ,” she began.

“Should that tell us something?” Michael snapped.

“Considering that the international border is several hundred miles north of us, it might mean something to a guide who’s up on all the latest bells and whistles.” Everard looked at Kevin, who suddenly put down his hands and stepped back, slipping out of fighting mode.

“You’re right. I should have seen it.” He spoke with a healthy tone of self-disgust in his voice. “I’ve even done some GPS-guided hiking.”

Michael looked from Kevin to Ted Everard to Liza, his own aggression melting away in confusion. “I still don’t—”