Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  “Does my computer have some illness I should be concerned about?” Apparently getting a virus was more than a metaphor.

  “It wasn’t a virus that caused this,” Duffy said. I had always thought I’d given him a sense of humor, but it’s so subjective. “This came from Ms. Bledsoe’s abductor, almost certainly.”

  That was not good news. He seemed to be jumping to conclusions after a quick glance. “How do you know?” I asked, and even as I said it, I knew I’d regret doing so.

  “All the crime fiction authors in this pattern have gotten e-mails like this one,” Duffy answered. “They were found on the hard drives of the three before and then Ms. Bledsoe. It is the perpetrator’s calling card, his way of introducing himself before the game actually begins.”

  Yeah, I’d been right. I regretted asking.

  “You’re not making me feel better, Duffy,” I said.

  He didn’t turn away from the screen but had not yet touched the mouse or the keyboard. “I’m not trying to alarm you, Ms. Goldman,” he said. “I’m merely stating the facts of the case.”

  “The facts of the case are alarming me,” I admitted.

  “Facts are facts.” The man was a virtual wellspring of reassurance.

  “What does the message mean? How can this guy know I was involved in the investigation? I wasn’t before I met you.” Duffy would analyze the situation dispassionately, clearly, and intelligently. Why wasn’t that making me feel any better?

  “That is an excellent question,” he said, eyes never leaving the screen. It was like he wanted that message—which I never wanted to lay eyes upon again—burned into his retinas so that he could analyze it endlessly for as long as he wanted until it told him something useful. “It is destructive to speculate without sufficient data.”

  “We have data. There are a finite number of people who had the information that this person now has. We can assume, then, that one of them told him, no?” When I’m writing Duffy, the hard part for me is finding a puzzle that will be difficult to solve, because he’s written as such an observant and analytical character. Now, I was hoping this was the easiest case he’d ever have to solve.

  “Not necessarily,” he answered, tearing down any hope I might have been trying to build. “The perpetrator in this case might have been watching at any of the points we were visible to the public, which is virtually any time since we met that we were not alone in the conference room at work or in my car. He might have been following you before you came to see me this morning.”

  My god, was that really just this morning? This had been the longest day of my life, and I hadn’t even gotten any revisions done.

  “So where does that leave us?” I asked.

  “With only a few facts.” Duffy looked up because the doorbell rang.

  I think I might have stopped breathing. Could the kidnapper be so confident that he’d ring my bell and walk in without any trepidation? Would it help that Duffy was here?

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Duffy said. “I called the investigator after I spoke to you. Would you let him in?” He gestured toward the door as the bell rang again.

  “The investigator?” Wasn’t Duffy investigating?

  “Of course. You know I’m just a consultant. You wrote that for me. Mr. Preston is the investigator assigned to Ms. Bledsoe’s case.”

  Of course. If there was one thing you had to love about Duffy, it was the matter-of-fact way he condescended to you. Without anything else to do, I got up and went to the front door.

  I looked through the peephole, which was entirely unhelpful. A man was standing there. He might have been the Mr. Preston Duffy was speaking about. He might have been the kidnapper. He might have been a Jehovah’s Witness on the graveyard shift. I had no idea what any of those people might look like.

  I took my chances and opened the door.

  “Ben Preston, Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office,” said the man, who looked much better than the squashed version of himself I’d seen in the peephole. He held up identification in a folding case. For the first time in my life, I examined such a thing closely. It looked like it was real, and so did he. I opened the door wider.

  “I’m Rachel Goldman.” I held out my hand, and Preston (if that’s who he really was) took it.

  “Is Duffy Madison here?” he asked. “I hate to bother you at this hour, but I got a call from him and it seemed urgent.”

  “Oh, he’s here,” I assured Preston. “Follow me.” If this man was the criminal, he was doing a great job of concealing it. I locked the door behind him, then decided I would walk very quickly to the office. If Duffy knew the guy, he was Preston. If not, I would be walking in front of a deranged killer and kidnapper.

  Maybe that wasn’t the best plan. “Duffy!” I shouted. “Mr. Preston is here!”

  Duffy’s voice came back sounding slightly irritated and a little puzzled. “Yes, I know. Lead him back here, please.”

  Big help, Duffy. We’d have to go through a narrow corridor. I’d have preferred to have Duffy meet his “colleague” out here.

  Ben Preston looked at me a moment. He had nice blue eyes and dark hair. If he was planning on kidnapping me, I was probably being abducted above my pay grade. Then Preston seemed to pick up on my vibe. “Would you like me to walk ahead?” he asked.

  There is no greater sign of idiocy than the impulse to give up one’s life rather than risk seeming rude. “Oh no,” I said. “There’s no need.”

  “Yes, there is,” he answered. “Which room is it?”

  I pointed down the hallway. “Third on the left. You’ll see.”

  Preston headed in that direction without hesitating. Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I followed him. When he reached the fork in the hallway—one way toward my office, the other way toward Paula’s—I said, “Left,” and he followed the direction.

  Inside the office, I saw Duffy Madison get up and walk toward Preston. “Thank you for coming, Ben,” he said. “We’ve got another one.”

  Duffy showed Ben the e-mail message and sat back down in the swivel chair. He reached into his pocket again and produced another pair of latex gloves, which he offered to Preston. Preston waved his hands to decline.

  “If there’s been a crime committed, it wasn’t committed here,” he said to Duffy.

  “True. I like to be thorough.”

  There was a long-suffering quality in Preston’s voice when he answered, “I know.”

  I sat down on the sofa and considered very strongly the option of breathing into a paper bag. “Okay, fellas,” I said. “Exactly how petrified should I be?”

  Preston said, “Not very,” at the very same time that Duffy said, “You should be very concerned.”

  I pointed at Preston. “I like your answer better.”

  He smiled, and it was a nice smile. “There’s not much reason to be worried,” he said. “This is just an e-mail. It’s made to look scary, but it really doesn’t say anything that can be considered criminal. And you don’t fit the profile of the other women this person has targeted.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No,” Preston answered. “They were all mystery writers.”

  There was a fairly long silence in the room. Its comfort level varied depending on which inhabitant one was considering. Mine was pretty low. “That’s what I do,” I informed Preston.

  His jaw seemed to loosen a little; it swung around once or twice. “It is? I’m very sorry, Ms. Goldman. I’m not familiar with your work.”

  “Mr. Preston, this guy has killed three crime fiction writers; has kidnapped a fourth, whom I actually know and like; and now he’s sending me messages that say I could be next. So whether or not you’ve read my books is hardly what I’m choosing as my top priority.”

  “Exactly my point,” Duffy said. “It is a very serious area of concern.”

  I gave him a look that would have been withering if he were a normal human being. Maybe that was it—maybe this wasn’t a person at a
ll, just a collection of quirks and tics that had come to life when I’d hit my fourth printing on Olly Olly Oxen Free.

  Preston decided to cover his awkward faux pas by concentrating on the computer screen. “Is there any way to trace the e-mail?” he asked Duffy.

  “I’ve tried not to touch the keyboard, but if past experience is any indicator, I tend to doubt it,” Duffy answered.

  “Go ahead and try. The only fingerprints you’ll smudge will be Ms. Goldman’s, and we already know she uses that computer.”

  Duffy nodded. He set to work on the keyboard, and with his rapid typing, a number of windows opened on the screen in quick succession. I couldn’t keep up, but among them were definitely at least one search engine whose name I’d never seen before, a home page for the prosecutor’s office (which I assumed was Duffy logging into his account for access), and something that flashed by so quickly that all I could see was the words Original Source.

  A few more minutes went by with nothing but the clack of the keys audible in the room. I’m not sure I heard my own breathing. I’m not sure I was breathing.

  Finally, Duffy turned toward Preston and looked perturbed. “It’s encrypted at least seven different times,” he said. “Whoever this person is, he or she is good.”

  “I don’t think ‘good’ is the word I would use,” I muttered. Nobody seemed to hear me or the sound I appeared to make.

  “Is it necessary to confiscate the hard drive, do you think?” Preston asked. “Think we’d get anything from that?”

  Yeah, they were going to confiscate . . . huh?

  “Whoa!” I shouted. The two men, startled, jumped just a bit and turned to look at me. “I write for a living, no matter what you might have heard, Mr. Preston. I keep everything I write on that computer. If you take that computer away, you take away my livelihood. You’re not going to do that.”

  “You really should back up your data, Ms. Goldman,” Duffy scolded.

  “I do back up my data,” I shot back. “But I work on that machine. What are you going to get from my hard drive that you can’t get from the server that sent me the e-mail to begin with?”

  A full minute of computer gobbledygook followed, of which I understood the words computer and e-mail. That was it. As you might imagine, I was largely unconvinced, although the flood of fluid Geek was impressive. And after it was all over, Duffy shook his head. At Preston.

  “I don’t think taking the hard drive is necessary,” he said.

  “Couldn’t you have just said that before?” I asked.

  “I will need your e-mail password and the name of your domain, Ms. Goldman,” Duffy went on.

  I gave him Paula’s phone number and suggested he call her in the morning. “She keeps all those files,” I told Duffy. “I have no idea. What’s a domain?”

  They started to talk again. “I retract the question,” I said.

  Preston looked at the message on the screen again. “Not much more we can do,” he said.

  I was actually glad, because my eyelids were in the second stage of droopdom, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stay awake, scary e-mail or no scary e-mail. “Well, thanks for coming,” I told him. I didn’t tell Duffy anything.

  That didn’t stop him from piping up. “There is something we can do,” he said, suddenly looking excited and rubbing his hands together. “I can’t believe it took me this long to think of it. And it can be of great help in the Bledsoe case.”

  Preston’s eyelids fell to half-staff. “What can you do?” he asked Duffy.

  But the figment of my imagination shook his head. “It’s not what I can do,” he answered. “It’s what Ms. Goldman can do.”

  Now, you have to trust me when I say that I had no desire to play straight man to a guy pretending to be my fictional hero. But he was playing the role with such intensity that I really didn’t see an alternative to asking, “Me? What can I do?”

  Duffy Madison, if that’s who he was, smiled. “You can answer the e-mail,” he said.

  Chapter 11

  “So let me get this straight.” Brian Coltrane sat across the table from me looking concerned with a side of stupefied. “You followed this guy who said he was a character in your book all the way down the shore to Ocean Grove, came back to your house and found a threatening e-mail, and called him to come help you?”

  “I’m not proud of it.” Sandy, the waitress at the Plaza Diner, had just put down our lunches: a Greek salad for me and a pizza burger with fries for Brian. Sandy, working her way through Ramapo University, knew not to listen in on the conversation, and besides, she had other tables. “But he has this way of making you believe in him. You met the guy.”

  “Yeah, and I thought he was a nut. So did you, the night at BooksBooksBooks.” Brian dug into the pizza burger, but with a knife and fork. He doesn’t like to pick food up. He is what we call in New Jersey a “crazy person.”

  “I still do,” I protested, spearing some vegetation on my fork. I should have told Sandy to leave out the black olives, but I thought she’d know that by now. I ate lunch at the Plaza at least twice a week, one of those times with Brian. “But he’s the best I can do, and he checks out with the Bergen County prosecutor. At least in that area, he’s Duffy Madison, and he’s for real.”

  “And you’re playing along with this crazy game of e-mail tag with a kidnapper who might have killed three women?” Brian could actually look worried while wiping marinara sauce off his chin. It’s part of what women who aren’t me find “cute” about him. He says. “How is that supposed to help? Both these investigators—the fake one and the real one—said they couldn’t trace the source of the e-mail like they can with a phone call. What’s the point of continuing the contact?”

  I sipped my diet soda. I won’t call it a Diet Coke, because what passes for such in a diner is made through a fountain machine and usually tastes considerably like straight syrup in warm water. But hey, they put a lemon in it, because when you order a sweet drink, what you want is a sour one. I love the Plaza, but they can’t make a soda. And yet I order it every time. I’m an optimist.

  “Duffy says that engaging the perpetrator in an online conversation might get him to say something that can help the cops find Sunny Maugham,” I said. “The idea is to goad him into thinking I’m not paying him close enough attention so he’ll say something incriminating or telling.”

  I thought Brian’s eyes would pop out of his head, but then his sunglasses, which he insisted on wearing because we were near the window and “with contact lenses there’s always glare,” would have held them in. I’m guessing. “So the plan is to taunt this dangerous guy and get him mad at you?” he said. “This guy’s gonna get you killed, Rache.”

  To be fair, I had thought—and said—variations on that very theme when Duffy had suggested I respond to the e-mail the night before. But Ben Preston had said the response would not be designed to seem insulting or challenging to the sender of my e-ransom note.

  “What we want to do is open a very impersonal sort of dialogue, at least from your end,” he’d said. “What do you normally do when a fan sends you an e-mail about your book?”

  “A fan?” I echoed. “I’m not sure that’s how I’d put it.” I have a problem with the concept of having fans. It somehow seems pretentious to assume that if someone has read my book and enjoyed it, that person is now a fanatic about it. Fanatics, it has been my experience, are not people who are especially reasonable. “If readers get in touch, I always try to respond. I write an e-mail back thanking them for reading the book, saying how glad I am that they liked it, and usually mentioning books they might have missed or the next title to be published and when. It’s a fun part of the job, but it’s not one I’ve ever been incredibly comfortable with.”

  “Why not?” Duffy had asked.

  “Because I’m not convinced that I’m good enough at what I do to have people feel so strongly that they will take the time out of their day to get in touch and say so to me.”


  “You think they’re lying?” Duffy was having trouble grasping the concept.

  “I think they’re mistaken,” I said.

  Ben Preston took over the conversation, largely because somebody had to. “That’s exactly what I want you to do with this guy,” he said. “Send back an e-mail that sounds like a form letter, something that indicates you’ve received his message but haven’t read it. You might want to send it through your assistant’s e-mail account.”

  “No,” Duffy interjected. “There is no sense in getting Ms. Goldman’s assistant involved. Let’s not give this man any e-mail address he doesn’t already have.”

  Preston thought and nodded. “Good thinking.” He turned back to me. “Anyway, respond with an impersonal e-mail. Let him think his attempt to terrify you has gone unnoticed. They hate that.”

  “But if I do something he hates, isn’t he more likely to get mad at me and maybe come after me with a typewriter or a passel of rejection letters?” That one still seemed unbearably cruel to me. “Aren’t I sort of inviting him to come and force me to pay him some attention?”

  “I don’t think it’ll get that far,” Preston answered. “In fact, I don’t think it’ll ever get past the e-mail stage. We’ll be lucky if he responds at all. What we want is for the guy to see what you send back, feel like he needs to better articulate his point, and, in the course of doing so, give us a hint to his location or the place he’s holding Julia Bledsoe.”

  Bringing up Sunny and calling her by her real name were low blows—the two investigators were reminding me that she was out there somewhere, probably terrified and in great danger, and I was bringing up petty concerns like not getting kidnapped myself. Dirty pool. But effective.

  I ended up sending our mystery man a very formulaic e-mail, which read,

  Thank you for getting in touch! It always is a pleasure to hear from a loyal reader. With your permission, I’ll add your e-mail address to my newsletter mailing list, so you can keep up with Duffy and his adventures! And again, thank you so much for taking time out to contact me. Sincerely, Rachel Goldman.