Sinister Sudoku (19 page)

“The city of Portland stands at forty-five degrees north latitude,” Everard said.

The lightbulb went on over Michael’s head. “And the magic numbers we just found start with four and five.” He frowned. “But there are an awful lot of numbers after that.”

“GPS devices go out to five decimal places on a degree of latitude or longitude, getting as detailed a plot as possible.” Kevin went to the coffee table to look at their number set again. “That means the latitude would be seven digits long, and the next three digits—” He put his finger on the paper. “Yup, they’re one, two, and four. That’s our local longitude. Actually, we’re closer to 125 degrees west, but around here that’s out in the Pacific Ocean.”

“So we’ve got a location.” Excitement filled Michael’s voice as he forgot the near-brawl completely. “We’ve got a place to go.”

“We know where the painting is!” Kevin was equally psyched.

Everard poured some cold water on their enthusiasm. “Unless we get there and find a coffee can with another puzzle in it.”

“Bite your tongue,” Liza told him. She wasn’t going to whoop and holler like her two beaus, but she was pretty eager, too.

“I’ve got a GPS tracker,” Kevin announced. “It’s too dark to try it now, but we can go out tomorrow morning and find this sucker.”

“This requires something a little more serious in the celebration department than soda and chips,” Michael said. “Suppose we take this part to that place out of town—the Famished Farmer. The food is decent, and so are the drinks.”

Liza looked at him in surprise. The Famished Farmer was also the site of one of their more recent escapades. She and Ava Barnes had left Michael with a table full of drinks, the bill, and, in the eyes of the wait staff, the bag, while making an unorthodox exit to escape the possibility of being tailed.
Choosing there of all places—that’s a bit unexpected,
she thought.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t so unexpected. Maiden’s Bay wasn’t exactly the home of diversified dining. Ma’s Café took care of most of the high-cholesterol food. Fruit of the Sea was the fancy-schmantzy place in town, but a bit too buttoned-down for a celebration. There were a couple of taverns that served greasy burgers with a side order of bar brawl . . . of course, there was the dining room at the Killamook Inn, but Michael didn’t want to give Kevin the advantage of fighting on his home ground.

“Okay, the Famished Farmer it is,” she said, going to get her coat.

“You can come in my SUV,” Kevin offered.

“Or in my car,” Everard said.

Liza shook her head and held up her keys. “Michelle Markson’s first rule of parties—always make sure you can get home on your own.”

She led the way, with Michael navigating from the passenger’s seat. The restaurant had gone up on the outskirts of town and was fairly new. It was part of a chain, complete with a rural theme. The place had been done up to look like a barn, and she could spot the logo more than a mile away—a neon farmer with a knife and fork in each hand, with a big red tongue flicking back and forth.

Michael laughed. “It’s hard to imagine, but that looks even more grotesque in the dark.”

Still, they found a good number of cars in the parking lot. Inside, the farm motif continued, with lots of hand-aged unfinished wood and straw bales for patrons to sit on while waiting for tables. At this time of evening they got right in. A waitress in jeans and a plaid shirt led them to a booth that looked very much like a cow stall.

“Very elegant.” Kevin couldn’t keep the sneer from his voice as he slid in.

“Yeah, well, try the steak and not the veal—that’s what the waitress told me last time I was here.”

They ordered a round of beers, and Liza examined a menu with the size and heft of a world atlas. Apparently the cuisine at the Famished Farmer involved food and more food.

She put the tome down and looked around. Frankly, this Disneyland version of down-home seemed oppressive to her. That subversive corner of her mind threw out an odd thought.
This is the kind of ambience that drove Chris Dalen off to become a crook.

Liza looked at the details—those impressive-looking rough-hewn beams actually looked pretty old. Maybe they had been cannibalized from a real barn to add an air of authenticity to this joint.

Lot of barns being knocked down in the name of progress,
she thought.
Not to mention farmhouses like the one where Mrs. H. grew up.

Just when she thought she couldn’t feel more out of place, she spotted an even more incongruous figure. Apparently Howard Frost was feeling a chill, because he hadn’t taken off that dreadful brown polyester parka. He was sitting at a table for one, isolated off to the side. Liza wasn’t sure whether he was just bent forward over his plate or huddled there.

As she gazed at him, Frost glanced up and their eyes met. For a second, Liza thought he was going to come over—he’d pretty much pressed each opportunity before. Instead, the insurance investigator looked back down at his plate and reached for the drink at his elbow.

Liza was going to point him out to Everard, but that’s when their beers arrived. True to the Famished Farmer philosophy, the steins were ridiculously oversized.

“I’ve bought pitchers that were smaller than this,” Michael said, hefting his drink.

“Probably at some wimpy Hollywood place where they don’t really drink beer, they just go to the little boys’ room and get high.” Kevin’s words might have been heavy-handed teasing, except for the undercurrent of challenge in his tone.

“You think I can’t hold my beer?” Michael asked mildly, and then drained half of Frankenstein’s stein. “Growing up in my hometown, all we had was beer and fishing. And I didn’t like going out for the fishing.”

“Yeah, but did you like the beer?” Kevin chugged the contents of his stein and set it down with a bang. “I’m sorry, Detective, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this around you.”

“Me?” Everard raised his stein for a hearty swig. He hadn’t announced it, but Liza noticed he’d already lowered the beer level by half. “Don’t you guys watch the police shows on TV? About half the action takes place in cop bars.”

The waitress returned, and the guys went for another round of drinks, followed by food orders. Liza was still working her way through the first monster tankard when huge platters of food arrived.

“Awesome!” said Everard, going to work on a steak with a fork and what looked like a serrated Bowie knife.

Excessive,
was how the voice in Liza’s head described the celebratory feast. The portion sizes were ridiculous. Mutant baked potatoes slathered with sour cream, a mound of several kinds of squash and beans that had been overcooked, a loaf of sourdough bread bigger than her head with a lump of half-frozen butter as large as her fist. The meat was good, but it looked as if it had come off a mammoth rather than a cow.

She ended up taking a doggy bag that bulged grotesquely—and that was just the remains of the steak. If she used this as a garnish for his regular food, Rusty would be eating like a king for the next week.

Liza pushed away her still unfinished stein. No one else in the booth wanted coffee, and she wasn’t sure what round of beer the boys were on, but enough had been consumed to pretty much kill table conversation unless she wanted to beat on her chest. She also turned down the house dessert, something called Chocolate Overindulgence that involved chocolate layer cake, a brownie, brandy, hot fudge, and whipped cream. The waitress tried for a lyrical description, but it just brought a shudder to Liza’s overfull stomach.

“Look, guys, about tomorrow morning—” she began.

“We’ll give you a call.” Michael pointed at Kevin. “
You
should give her a call, since you got the dingus.”

He slurred a little, turning the last word into something more like “dingish.”

Kevin nodded heavily. “Yeah. Yeah. I’ll do that. You don’t have to worry. Yeah.”

Everard kept his mouth shut but rolled his eyes.

“I‘ll call it a night then,” Liza said. “I’ll wait for your call.”

She rose, and the guys got out of their seats.

“I’ll leave a twenty for my part of the bill—”

“Nah, nah,” Everard said. “It’s on us.” His elocution wasn’t crisp, but he didn’t sound as bad off as the other two.

“What say we take this party to the bar?” Michael suggested.

Outside, Liza took a deep breath of chilly air, clearing her head.
First time I ever had a contact high on beer,
she thought as she got into her car. It was a quick drive home.

Rusty sniffed very interestedly at the bag in her hand as Liza came through the door. “Tomorrow,” she told him sternly as she stowed it in the refrigerator. Then she went upstairs, brushed her teeth, undressed, and fell into bed.

She woke in total darkness, feeling vaguely sick and headachy. But that wasn’t what had roused her. The phone rang again, that obnoxious bleating noise ramming a spike through each ear and into the middle of her brain.

Liza fumbled the handset into place. “H’lo?” It came out way too breathy.

The voice on the other end of the line was a harsh whisper—a slap in the face from an ice-cold hand. “You may have found the painting, bitch, but I’ve got the old woman.”

Sitting up in the darkness, Liza listened to that harsh, cold, whispering voice. It was like being in a nightmare, with the added horror of being awake.

It wasn’t a conversation, or even a discussion, more like a harangue. “I’ll call again in two hours. You’d better be ready to deal. It’s probably too much to ask you to keep the police out of this. Just tell your friend the sheriff and that stumblebum state policeman this—the first cop car I see will get to see me blowing your neighbor’s brains out.”

The phone clicked off, and Liza leapt from the bed, tearing around her room to get dressed. She clattered down the stairs, waking Rusty, who gave an interrogative sort of bark.

Liza paid no attention, throwing open the door, slamming it behind her, and slopping through the snow to Mrs. Halvorsen’s house. If Mrs. H. had disappeared, wouldn’t Michael have noticed? Why hadn’t he called or come over?

She went to knock, and the door gave back from her fist.

Open?
The discovery chilled Liza worse than the cold, dark air around her.
The door is open?

She pushed her way into the house to find one dim lamp on. The little knickknack table at the entrance to the living room lay on its side, amid a couple of smashed figurines. Then she saw the two larger figures—one sprawled on the couch, the other on the floor.

“Ohmigod!” It came out almost as a hum because she had gritted her teeth to keep any screams from coming out. Liza was getting very, very tired of finding dead bodies. She felt she was definitely over her quota for this year— and perhaps for the next five.

Liza dropped to her knees beside the body on the floor. It was facedown, and she held her breath as she turned it over.

“Michael!” she sobbed, pulling his lifeless form to her.

The body gave a great snort of a snore and then expelled a blast of beer-breath in her face.

“Michael!” Liza wasn’t sobbing now—she was hopping mad. “Wake up!” She shook him.

He grunted.

“Goddammit, Michael!” Liza smacked him on one cheek, then the other. Finally, she hauled off and gave him a good shot.

“Hunh?” Michael’s eyes fluttered open, and he put a hand to his cheek. “Ow!”

Liza waved away more beer fumes. “Where’s Mrs. Halvorsen?”

That brought a couple of confused blinks from him. “Uh . . . upstairs?” She let go of him, and his head landed on the floor with a thump.

Another “Ow!” rose behind her as she flew up the stairs. The doorway to the master bedroom was open, but Mrs. H. wasn’t there.

She had been—the bed was unmade, several drawers hung open, and a couple of mismatched shoes stood in front of the open closet door. Mrs. H. would never have left the place looking like this.

Not willingly, Liza thought. Her brain was half frozen with fear and half burning with anger. She stomped back downstairs, discovering as she did that the living room was much colder than upstairs.

The open door, she thought. Then she realized it was more than that. The slit she had repaired in the protective plastic was open again—torn open, by the looks of it.

Liza glared down at Michael, who was attempting to pull himself off the floor by climbing onto the couch. So far, all he’d succeeded in doing was reviving the other sodden form, Kevin Shepard. He’d grumble unintelligibly and shift, and, since Michael was trying to use Kevin’s knees as a brace, that would send Michael back to the floor again.

“Wake up!” Liza shouted. “Wake up, the both of you!” Her voice got louder. “Mrs. H. got kidnapped while you two were sleeping it off!” That got through to them. Kevin and Michael slowly fumbled their way to their feet until they stood in front of the couch, swaying slightly. They made a pretty sad pair, blinking owlishly at Liza while struggling to keep their balance.

“What happened?” Liza demanded.

“Nuh—nothing,” Kevin rasped, then stopped to clear his throat.

“Somebody brought us here—I kinda remember that,” Michael amplified. “I helped Kevin in—”

“No, I helped
you
in,” Kevin suddenly said. “You hit the table.”

“Oh?” Michael looked ready to argue with Kevin until his eye fell on the upended table and its shattered contents. “Oh-oh.”

“That must have made some crash,” Liza said. “And Mrs. H. didn’t come down?”

Michael shook his head, trying to look virtuous. “We thought she was asleep.”

“Yeah,” Kevin echoed. “It was after midnight.”

“You weren’t thinking of her at all,” Liza accused. “The two of you just took a few more steps and flopped on your faces.” She paused for a second. If Mrs. Halvorsen had been around, the drunken banging and crashing would certainly have brought her down.