Murder by Numbers (20 page)

“Vasquez will probably also have the cop shop's in-house guy available, too,” Buck went on.

“Guy's a hobbyist,” Bradley said with disdain.

Clouds of geek rivalry filled the room as soon as the two technical types saw each other. Vasquez simply ignored the fumes, pointing to the computer on the table. “The LAPD found this when they searched the apartment of Leo Carruthers. Remember him?”

“Hard to forget,” Liza said. “He shoved a gun in my face.”

“Yeah?” Bradley showed the first stirrings of real interest she'd seen since Liza had met him.

“Anyway, the L.A. guys noticed there was a plaque on the computer saying, ‘To Derrick Robbins, who helped put the craft in
Spycraft
.' They figured Carruthers helped himself to it the night Robbins got killed. Anyway, they turned it over to us, and it's been in the evidence lockup ever since.”

“Luckily it's an older-style model, without the latest bells and whistles. Otherwise, it might have walked,” Bradley grunted. “What's it run, XP?”

“Bradley, you are an idealist,” Buck Foreman muttered.

The geek in black shrugged. “Computer belongs to a dead guy, it's sat around for months, so it's not likely to be returned—dead guys being notorious for not needing Internet access and all. And stuff never goes missing from lockups, right?” he said skeptically.

The geek in blue, a heavyset kid with watery gray eyes, looked ready to dispute the point until Vasquez touched him on the shoulder. “On a preliminary investigation, the computer appears to be password protected.”

“So we either need the password, or we've got to try and crack our way in,” Bradley said.

“Robbins was the codebreaker on
Spycraft
,” the police expert said. “Suppose we try a few related terms to start?”

He brought up the password request and typed “cipher,” only to be rejected. “Encryption,” “decryption,” and “cryptanalysis” also failed.

“What if he encoded his name or something?” Bradley reached over his blue-clad counterpart and typed in “18 15 2 2 9 14 19.” “That's ‘Robbins' in a straight number-for-letter switch.”

Liza glanced over, impressed that Bradley could do that in his head. However, the computer wasn't impressed at all. When Bradley tried a reverse of the code and failed again, the geek in blue snorted, “If it's a code, it could just as easily be something like this.”

He typed in “1S52J852D3Y8-;0Wi*Y6I45&620.” Of course, that didn't work, either.

“You aren't saying anything, Liza,” Buck said.

“That's because I'm still angry at myself for not asking about a computer earlier,” Liza admitted. “It would make cryptography and puzzles—including sudoku—a lot easier.”

She frowned. “Now, we're going on the idea that Derrick left some kind of message on here. The most likely recipient would be Jenny. She didn't share his passion for codes, so it would have to be something simple—”

Excusing herself, she stepped past Bradley and leaned over the shoulder of the uniformed officer, typing letters into the password window.

“Uncled?” The word came out in unison from both experts.

“No, Uncle D. That's how Jenny always referred to Derrick—and how she still does.” She hit the Enter key. A second later, the computer had opened up.

The young tech officer looked up at Liza, openmouthed in astonishment at her success. Bradley was less impressed. “Lucky,” he grunted as the computer's desktop floated into view on the screen.

“Don't mistake knowledge for luck,” Buck Foreman reproved his protégé.

“Yeah.” Vasquez unexpectedly rose to her defense. “She pays attention, and that paid off.”

“Whatever.” Bradley leaned forward to peer at the screen. “What's he got on this sucker?”

“There's a big Bible concordance program,” the police tech pointed to one icon.

Liza nodded. Tracking down biblical quotes would have been a big help in Derrick's efforts to decode the messages he'd found embedded in sudoku problems that he thought were coded. Of course, that interest, that decoding, had also led to Derrick's murder.

She ran her eye along the ranks of icons. Most were code-or puzzle-related. Derrick even had an early version of Solv-a-doku on this machine.

“Bunch of programs I don't even know about,” Bradley commented in his usual graceless way. “What the hell are we supposed to find in here?”

“I think we're supposed to be looking for a message,” Liza said.

“Well, there's a buttload of Word documents.” The young officer called up just one screen as an example. “And there's lots more.”

Scanning the titles, Liza said, “Most of these look like correspondence or business. All of those files with ‘Count' in the titles probably have to do with
Counterfeit
, the movie he was trying to produce.”

“Well, looks like he didn't do much housecleaning on this machine.” Bradley reached down to fool with the tracking device below the keyboard. “Yeah. More than three thousand documents cluttering up his hard drive.”

“Well, we don't have to look through them all,” Liza told him. “We just have to look for any that pertain to Jenny.”

While the two technical experts verbally fenced over the respective effectiveness of various search algorithms, Liza got rid of the Properties window and began scrolling through the ranks of documents. Derrick had elected to go for an alphabetical view, which made things considerably easier. Even so, Bradley and his antagonist had almost gotten to blows by the time Liza reached the
J
s.

“This looks promising.” She pointed to one icon on the screen. The title below was in all capital letters—the online equivalent of shouting. It read: JENNY!

They opened the file to find a four-line message and an attached picture file:

“Oh, come on!” groaned the uniformed tech.

“Just as well this guy is dead—he's seriously beginning to bug me,” Bradley said.

Vasquez looked at the message with an uncomprehending frown. “Reagan creamed the Democrat in '84. That was—not Carter—Mondale. Walter Mondale.”

“But it says candidates—plural,” Buck Foreman pointed out. “Does that mean the running mate, too?”

“Geraldine Ferraro.” Liza filled in the blank. She shrugged when they all looked at her. “What can I say? It was a big deal at the time. Besides, that was probably the first presidential election where I was old enough to pay attention.”

She had whipped out a pad and began jotting down the numbers from the puzzle. Frowning, she asked the officer to bring up the Bible concordance program. “Has it got a listing for the books of the Bible?”

He frowned, looking through the program menus. “Will this help?” The screen filled with information.

“Yes…and no.” Liza sighed. “I had hoped that Derrick might have been using the same code he'd cracked to get the sudoku messages. But it's just given me gibberish.”

“So what have we got?” Bradley demanded.

“We've got a clue,” Liza replied. “And I have some things to ask my client.” She turned to Vasquez. “What happens to the computer now?”

“It's back to gathering dust till Carruthers goes on trial,” he said. “If you need another look, let me know.”

He jerked his head at Bradley and said in a lower voice to Buck, “Next time, you can lose Mr. Jolly over there. Liza did well enough on her own.”

Liza carefully copied the mystery sudoku into her notebook before they shut the laptop down. She spent most of her journey back to Maiden's Bay trying to extract the solution from the clues Derrick had given.
Maybe he made it easy for Jenny to find this sucker
, Liza thought,
but she'd have a real job finishing it. We're not talking entry-level sudoku here.

In fact, her simpler solving systems didn't even make a dent in this puzzle. Liza had to move much farther up the hierarchy of a dozen tested techniques she used to solve sudoku. At last, however, she started to get the upper hand.

“I thought you were trying to burn a hole in that paper, you were looking at it so hard.” Jimmy Perrine's voice crackled in the earphones Liza wore.

“For that, I'd need a magnifying glass,” she replied, sitting up straighter and looking out of the cockpit. “How much farther?”

“Unless something exciting happens, ten, maybe fifteen minutes,” Perrine said. “You going to need a lift into town?”

“Actually, I'll need a lift into Maiden's Bay,” Liza said. “I'll pay for your gas if you'll do it.”

She arrived down at the harbor to find all the film people wildly celebrating. “We just wrapped the filming!” a jubilant Jenny informed her.

“At least the location part of it,” Lloyd Olbrich corrected. But all in all, he seemed pretty subdued.

“I guess it's amazing what you can get done if there's no one around sabotaging the set,” Liza joked.

Olbrich nodded. “I heard about that. But the main reason—” He hesitated for a moment, then went on. “I decided to stick more with Terry Hamblyn's original plan.”

“Artistic inspiration?” Liza asked.

“More of a financial imperative,” Olbrich sourly replied. “If I understand correctly, Chissel engineered an accident to get Hamblyn out and me in to prolong production up here.” He sighed. “If we prolong much longer, there might not be a studio left to produce for.”

“As bad as that?” Liza said quietly.

“Let's just say I'm not getting any straight answers.” Olbrich didn't look full of confidence. “So we'll head south tomorrow. The interior sets have been sitting in the Timmons Grove production facility for weeks now. We'll get started as soon as possible, and hopefully bring the film in before anything extreme happens.”

He glanced at his watch. “In fact, I've got to talk to a few people before the partying gets out of hand.”

As he walked off, Liza followed him with her eyes. “So, is the big, bad wolf behaving himself?” she asked.

“He's a lot more schedule-conscious,” Jenny said. “And I guess he's trying to be encouraging. It's a stretch for him. But he's getting a feel for the role. Are we really racing the clock as much as he says, or is that an attempt to make sure we know our lines?”

“I'm not sure,” Liza admitted. “But I think you'd better take Olbrich seriously.”

She'd been wondering how to broach the subject of her latest find with Jenny. Finally, Liza decided just to plunge right in. “I was down in Santa Barbara today.”

“Was it about Hake?”

“No—we were looking in your uncle's computer.”

“I knew it was gone,” Jenny frowned. “Things weren't really sharp—or I wasn't—when I got kidnapped. But I think I remember one of the guys with the carrying case slung over his shoulder.”

“You're right,” Liza said. “The police wound up with it, and they're keeping it as evidence. There was a message on it for you. Whatever Derrick might have foreseen happening after sending his message, I guess it didn't include you and the computer being grabbed.”

Jenny just looked down.

“I think the message may be connected to the missing money.”

That brought Jenny's eyes up. “How? What did Uncle D. say?”

“The main part was a sudoku puzzle.”

Jenny struggled not to roll her eyes. “I know you're really into that, and so was Uncle D. But I sorta suck at it.”

“I sorta got that idea,” Liza said. “And I'll tell you, this is a hard puzzle. But does this mean anything to you?” She read out the text that had been set over the puzzle.

“Uncle D.'s favorite sandwich? Definitely a Reuben,” Jenny told her confidently. “He loved to go to Canter's to get them—it had to be a real, old-fashioned Jewish deli. Then he'd go on a diet for two weeks.”

How about the rest of it?” Liza pressed.

“Who lost the election in 1984?” Jenny wrinkled her forehead in puzzlement. “I think Reagan won.”

When Liza mentioned the loser, she only got a blank look. In Jenny's history of the world, Walter Mondale probably came in just a few weeks after Hammurabi bowed out.

“Doesn't much look like I'm being any kind of help.” Jenny looked unhappy. “I hate the thought that Uncle D. is depending on me to find that money—and I'm letting it slip right through my fingers.”

“You've got other things on your mind right now,” Liza told her. “Derrick also wanted
Counterfeit
to be the best movie it could be. You've got to make sure that happens, so go get yourself ready for the move back to L.A.—and don't party too much.”

That at least got a smile out of Jenny. “Don't worry,” she said. “I'm not really in the mood.”

“Save the boogie nights for the final wrap,” Liza advised the girl.

She headed off the piers, just taking a moment to shake hands with Guy Morton.

“Olbrich says we'll be working almost like a TV shooting schedule when we get down to the studio,” he said. “Is the studio really that tight?”

“I don't know,” Liza admitted. “But Olbrich seems to think so. Will that be a problem for Jenny?”

“Nah,” the older actor assured her. “She's the one who's always been most prepared. And now that Olbrich is laying off her, and following Hamblyn's lead…I think we're looking at a pretty good movie here.”

“Let's hope,” Liza said.

Coming up on the streets where the film company's trucks parked, she could see that Olbrich's time-is-money mind-set was already at work. Many of the tech people had already gone from celebration back to work mode, loading the last equipment aboard the big tractor-trailers.

Liza quickly made her way through the port-related facilities, small factories, and warehouses that made up Maiden Bay's other side of the tracks. She took the pedestrian footbridge over the highway and headed up Main Street.

She wondered where Michael might be, but then shrugged. Who needed Michael and his car? After all that time crammed into an airplane cockpit, she could use the walk.

Liza had just begun to stretch her legs, going a few blocks to work the kinks out of her joints, when she passed City Hall.

On impulse, she turned in. Sheriff Clements's intelligence system might not be as wide-ranging as Michelle Markson's, but he was certainly tuned to the local grapevine. Jimmy Perrine had probably told him that Liza was back, and she was sure he'd be interested in the latest wrinkles in the Santa Barbara end of the case.

Maybe he'd surprise her by offering some insight that the big-city cops had missed.

She inquired after the sheriff at the front desk and was sent right in.

Clements sat in the combination interrogation room and office, going through a fairly thick sheaf of papers. “Enjoy your trip?” he asked.

“Once again, it just left me with more questions and not enough answers,” she replied, giving him the high points. “So, we think we found a really confusing clue to Derrick's hidden money.” She stopped for a second, saying slowly, “Or maybe to the offshore account where it's stashed. What do they call them—numbered accounts?”