Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  “You disagreed with Duffy about that?” I asked. “I’m surprised. I thought you listened to every word he said.”

  “I listen, but I don’t always agree. I’m the investigator; he’s the consultant.”

  Ben had met me at the restaurant bearing one tiny tulip, an orange one he gave me before we walked inside. The waiter had already placed the little flower in a glass of water, making it look like a toddler swimming with water wings on his arms. So Paula had been right: this was indeed a date.

  “I thought I understood how you guys operate,” I said.

  “There’s always more to learn, and besides, you didn’t call me when you were creating your first book.” Creating. Is that not adorable?

  I felt like taking notes for my next book, but the scoop-neck top and pants Paula had approved for me tonight didn’t have ample pocket room for a reporter’s notebook, and my purse was on the floor next to my chair. It would have been showy for me to reach over to get it. In any number of ways. “So why did you go along with the e-mail plan if you didn’t think it was a good idea?”

  Ben considered, then tilted his head a bit to indicate it was a compromise. “I didn’t have a better idea,” he admitted.

  “Have you given some thought to what I told you this afternoon?” I asked him. “About Duffy being a little too much like the character in my novels?”

  I tried to remember Paula’s advice about the date: “Make sure he asks about you and doesn’t just talk about himself. Make sure he doesn’t call the waitress ‘honey.’” (We had a male server. That would have been a real mood killer.) “And above all, see if he’s a generous tipper. That’s key.”

  Ben leaned forward, now being both interested and serious. “Yes, I have. And it’s weird. It’s weird that you chose a name for your character that just happens to be the same as the guy who has that specific job for us. It’s weird that you started writing the books at the exact moment he appeared at our door looking for the job. And it’s weird that he never mentioned any of that to us in the office.”

  That was lovely summing up, but it didn’t really create much of what you’d call “progress.” I looked Ben Preston over. He wasn’t a classically handsome man in the “male model” sort of mode. He was more the guy-next-door type, heavy on the “guy.” But his movements, his expressions, his words all seemed just a little rehearsed, like he was used to having women (and some men) admire his good looks as he walked by and he was trying not to disappoint them. It was the first date I’d been on in a while (damn you, Phillip!), and we were talking business, but that was mostly my doing. I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to see how well Ben tipped the waiter. That didn’t seem especially vital just at the moment. Except, I imagine, to the waiter.

  I wasn’t swooning for Ben, but I could be persuaded to under the right circumstances. For reasons I didn’t understand, though, I seemed subconsciously intent on sabotaging any hint of romance: I kept talking shop. Ben’s shop, which, after considerable revisions to fit my twisted imagination, would become my shop.

  “So what do you think it means?” I asked him. If Duffy Madison was the reason Ben and I had met, he was also the reason we had something to talk about. And the perspective on Duffy from someone who worked with him would be invaluable in dealing with the flesh-and-blood model as well as the Duffy who lived in my tortured mind.

  “Damned if I know,” Ben said.

  “Thanks. That’s a huge help.”

  “I’m serious; I have no idea what to make of it. I’ve done all the checks on Duffy the department does with all new employees, and he came up clean every time. He’s not living under an alias. The ID records he has are not forgeries, and even his fingerprints check out.”

  Wait. “Why would Duffy have been fingerprinted before he came to work for you?” I said. “What do you have to compare them to?”

  “He taught an afterschool class in forensic criminology at a middle school in Hackensack,” Ben said. “You teach in a middle school, you have to have fingerprints on file.”

  What? “When?”

  “About seven years ago. Before you were writing him by a wide margin.”

  My head swam just a bit, and it wasn’t because I had drained my wine glass in record time. “None of this makes any sense. If Duffy—”

  Ben held up a hand. “Are we going to spend the whole night talking about Duffy Madison?” he asked. “Would you rather be out with him tonight?”

  Hell no! “Of course not,” I answered. I can be genteel when necessary. And the thought of being out on a date with Duffy had certainly sobered me up in a hurry. “Tell me how you got to be an investigator. Were you a police officer before?” That’s the way most of the prosecutors’ investigators start, although Ben was younger than most of them.

  He nodded. “I was a cop in Metuchen, down in Middlesex County,” he said. “But I had to quit due to a disability and took on the job here when it was offered. The physical demands weren’t quite as stringent.”

  A disability? “Were you wounded in the line of duty?” I asked.

  He sniffed a little in amusement. “I fell down the stairs carrying a box of Christmas decorations.”

  “Must have been quite a staircase.”

  “I just hit it the right way. Compressed two vertebrae and broke my left arm. Luckily, after I healed, physical therapy and a lot of time got me to the point where I don’t really feel it that much anymore.”

  Our dinners came, and there was less talking because the pasta primavera (mine) and chicken marsala (Ben’s) were intoxicating. I did take time to notice that Ben was delicate in his movements, favoring his right arm, and drank water, not wine, with the dinner.

  When we came up for air, he asked me how I’d gotten the idea for Duffy Madison the fictional character. I guessed that let us out of the don’t-talk-about-Duffy pact because now it wasn’t his Duffy but my Duffy. So I left out the part about being in the shower for reasons I didn’t fully understand and said that I’d wanted someone who had access to law enforcement but wasn’t a fully qualified officer. “That was so I could cover over any mistakes I made in procedure by saying that Duffy wasn’t really a cop.”

  “And why’d you put him in the prosecutor’s office?” Ben asked, wiping a little marsala sauce from the corner of his mouth.

  “Before I started looking into it, I didn’t know the prosecutors’ offices had their own investigators,” I said a little sheepishly. “I thought local police departments handled every crime in their jurisdiction.”

  “Everybody thinks that. In New Jersey, we don’t work that way.”

  “Obviously. So when I created Duffy—and I’m insisting that I did in fact create Duffy and hadn’t ever heard of your version before I did—I started talking to some cops, who told me exactly that. They sent me to the prosecutor, and luckily, I found a source there who could tell me how things really worked. It didn’t hurt that he loves mystery novels but hates it when they get procedure wrong.”

  “What’s his name?” Ben asked. And there was something just a little bit off about his tone when he asked. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to put him onto Marty Dugan.

  “His name’s Martin Dugan,” I said. Okay, so he had nice eyes and I caved. “Do you know him?”

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t know that many guys in Morris. We talk more often to the Passaic and Essex people. We share a larger border with them.”

  Eager to move the conversation, I said, “Duffy. What can we conclude about Duffy?”

  Ben sighed. “Look. I just met you yesterday, and you seem like a very nice, reasonable woman. So much so that I asked you to come have dinner with me tonight in this really homey restaurant. And I’m glad we’re here. You’re charming, you’re pretty, you’re engaging, and you’re funny. But here’s the thing: I’ve known Duffy Madison for four years. He has helped me solved cases I thought were lost causes. He’s never told me anything—anything—that turned out not to be true. So if you were me, who would yo
u choose to think was the nut?”

  He had a point, although not one I was especially well inclined to admit. “Wow,” I said. “You really don’t have any chance of getting lucky tonight.”

  Ben sat back a little and smiled. “Really? None at all?”

  I hadn’t intended to sleep with him anyway, so I answered, “Nope. You’re completely on your own.”

  “I did say you were pretty.” That was true. I was about to rethink my position. “And I meant it. But I’ve never known an author before, and that’s really interesting. I want to know more.” So, naturally, that’s when his phone buzzed, and Ben looked at it, then straightened up as if something surprising had shown up on his screen. “It’s Duffy,” he said.

  Duffy. The man was everywhere. In my head, in my life, on Ben’s phone; you couldn’t swing a dead cat and not hit Duffy Madison. If my books had made him this ubiquitous, I’d have paid off my mortgage by now.

  Ben hit the button on his phone and put it to his ear. “Duffy,” he said, and then listened for a long moment. His jaw tightened, and I thought I could hear his teeth grinding, something you really shouldn’t get to hear from a man you’ve decided not to share a bed with. “Okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” A moment. “No. I’ll do that. Okay. Right.”

  He put the phone into his pocket and turned his attention to me while signaling the waiter for our check. “I have to go,” he said.

  “Something from Duffy?” That couldn’t be good. If I were plotting this adventure, at this point, Duffy would be getting really deep into trouble and things would take a dark turn. From Ben’s face I could see that real life was essentially in the same story structure segment that I would be. I didn’t like the feeling.

  Ben nodded. “Yeah.” He took the check from the waiter and handed him a credit card before he could walk away. The waiter, without a word, took the card and the check back to process. “I have to go see him right now.”

  I was the mystery writer and the witness, of sorts, in this escapade; I understood the drill. “Can you drop me off, or should I call a friend for a ride?” I asked.

  “You should come with me. Duffy’s intercepted an answer to your e-mail. Our mutual friend—the one with the interesting e-mail font decisions—just got back to you.”

  I picked up my purse and followed him to the door as soon as the check was signed. I have no idea how much Ben tipped.

  Chapter 13

  Duffy Madison did not react when Ben Preston and I arrived together, and he did not comment on my clothes, which were a little dressier than anything he’d seen me in before. I had no way of knowing whether he’d seen Ben dressed for an evening out in the past and chose not to think about it. But I could see the wheels in his brain turning when he saw us—even through his lack of a reaction. The guy was a champion at not reacting. If he thought I didn’t see that, he just wasn’t paying attention.

  It was possible I was overreacting. But news of a fresh message from Sunny Maugham’s abductor, in response to what I’d sent him, had me just a little on edge. The next time someone who has kidnapped four women and killed the first three gets back to you about an e-mail designed to infuriate him, you may judge me, and not a moment before.

  “I’m not sure what to make of it,” Duffy said, “but it certainly does leave us with some avenues of investigation.”

  The reply, from the same somehow-untraceable e-mail address as before (what do I know about technology?), read,

  I am not typical. Do not treat me like a typical “fan.” I hold your FATE IN my hands. Ask Sunny. WHEN you can.

  Well, that wasn’t encouraging. Duffy, who had seen the message long before Ben and I got to his office, chewed on the end of a pen despite not being called upon to write anything down. It was a habit I’d given him. Right now, I found it annoying.

  “We got a response,” he said. “Much as we would have expected. He’s not happy about being sent a form reply.”

  “Swell,” I answered. “Now we’ve got him pissed at me. Nice work there, Duff.” He grimaced. I knew he didn’t like to be called “Duff.” This adopt-a-fictional-character’s-personality thing could be played both ways.

  “I’ll say it again: I don’t think this contact was a good idea,” Ben told Duffy before we could get into a “guess Duffy’s habits” contest (which I had the eerie feeling I’d lose). “We’ve increased the danger to Rachel, and we haven’t found out anything useful about the sender.”

  “Oh, but we have,” Duffy replied. “We’ve found out that he doesn’t like to be thought of as typical. That’s very useful.”

  “It is?” That was me.

  “Certainly, Ms. Goldman. A person who does not believe himself to be typical has often had that message delivered to him by his parents, peers, even therapists, perhaps. There could be psychologists who have spoken to him. The chances that he has been involved in the criminal justice system just rose considerably. There is a much higher likelihood of a paper trail with someone this volatile.”

  “You’re not making my stomach feel any better,” I told him.

  Duffy had the nerve to look surprised. “My apologies,” he said.

  “Those are places to look,” Ben said, rolling a chair by the computer screen on Duffy’s desk. “But I’d hardly call them a breakthrough.”

  “I never used the word ‘breakthrough,’” Duffy pointed out. He can be annoyingly accurate when you don’t need it.

  “You said it was very helpful.” Ben, who had worked with Duffy for years, clearly knew how to push his buttons the right way to get results.

  Sure enough, more came from the mind of the fictitious loony next to me. “Look at the message, Ben. Like the last time, this person has chosen a number of different fonts and type sizes for his message. Each choice is a clue to his brain.”

  “I get that he wants it to look like an old-style ransom note, but I don’t get why,” Ben said.

  Nobody had gotten me a chair, so I rolled one in from the outside reception area, but I could hear Duffy through the open door. “Look. It’s really very simple. Notice how each time he refers to himself, the type size increases and he uses a bold face. Yet each time he refers to ‘you,’ meaning Ms. Goldman, the size decreases, and the type is italic, lighter, and less forceful.”

  “Okay, so he’s being insulting with the typeface,” I said. Might as well throw in my two cents, given that it was my life the guy was threatening. At least, it sounded threatening. “What good is that knowledge?”

  Duffy didn’t turn around to look when I was talking; he kept his gaze fixed steadily on the screen. “He did the same thing when referring to Ms. Bledsoe as ‘Sunny,’” he went on. “And he underlines the word ‘not’ both times he uses it. He wants to make sure the word is noticed and obeyed. This note is all about control. It’s about the sender taking control and denying it to you and Ms. Bledsoe.”

  “You have a degree in psychology,” I said, really to myself. I’d given him that, too.

  “Yes, and this note tells me that the man who sent it is unquestionably trying very hard to dehumanize his victims, to make them seem less than significant in his mind,” Duffy said.

  “‘Victims.’” That word hit me right between the eyes. “You think Sunny is dead. And you think that I’m next.”

  Ben swiveled in his chair and looked at me with concern. “That’s not what Duffy is saying, Rachel,” he said. “Right now, we know that Sunny is probably the victim of a kidnapping. She’s been missing for four full days we know about. This guy seems to have knowledge of her and her situation. But Duffy using the word ‘victim’ is not any indication that anything worse than that has happened to her. Right, Duffy?”

  Duffy continued to stare at the screen. “There is no evidence to support either theory right now. But the length of time Ms. Bledsoe has been missing is not a good sign.”

  Someone gasped. Pretty sure that was me.

  “Duffy—” Ben began.

  I held up a hand. “There
’s no point,” I told him. “He sees things that way. You can’t make him not see things that way.”

  Duffy was always right. That was something that needed to be understood. In the books, every theory he has is proven out by the end. Every one he shoots down turns out to be stupid or a bad guy lying. He doesn’t cloud his thinking with what he wants to be true; he deals just with what he knows to be true. So when he says something, it always—always—turns out to be correct.

  That meant Sunny Maugham was dead. And if Sunny was dead, there was a very good chance that the next “victim” was already chosen. And everybody in that room knew it.

  That would be me, too.

  Chapter 14

  Ben Preston didn’t let me wallow on my expected fate for more than a second. “Duffy,” he said, clearly in an effort to move the conversation in another direction, “is there anything here that can give us an idea of the sender’s location?”

  “No.” My Duffy was usually more help than that.

  My head reeled. I was a dead woman walking. I had no future. I’d have to find someone to water my plants. I should have a letter of recommendation for Paula in my files. Perhaps moving to Ecuador was an option. I could write in Ecuador.

  Note to self: call Brian, Sol, Rita, and Adam before leaving for Ecuador. Did I know any cities there? Was there a place to get ice cream when you finish a manuscript? Could I pack Paula in a really large suitcase with air holes?

  “But there is some encouraging data from Ms. Bledsoe’s cell phone,” Duffy went on. “I think from that, we might be able to begin to zero in on her location.”

  “You buried your lead, Duffy,” I said.

  He looked up. “A newspaper term.”

  “Yeah. It means you saved the most important piece of information too long and told us the less vital stuff first. Bad reporting.” I had started out wanting to be a newspaper reporter, after all.