Written Off (4 page)

“He said he’d gotten a call about an author whose name was unknown to him. That he’d asked around his office and found out that there was a manuscript in house by that author. That’s you, you know.”

“No kidding. Who was calling about me?”

And somehow I knew the answer before Adam had the opportunity to say it. I can’t say it made my stomach feel any better.

“He said he’d gotten the call from someone in a county prosecutor’s office and the guy’s name was Duffy Madison.”

After spending twenty minutes (unsuccessfully) trying to convince my agent that I was, in fact,
not
paying some guy to pretend to be a law enforcement official and call publishers on my behalf (why would a producer read a book because a county investigator told him to?), I forgot about my revisions, got into my car, and drove, with the help of my very reliable GPS device, to the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office.

Hackensack, New Jersey, is not all it’s cracked up to be. On the other hand, when you start out with a name like “Hackensack,” you’re not exactly shooting for the stars to begin with. It’s the seat of a county that includes some of the richest real estate in the country within its borders, and yet the city itself is a little tired, a little rundown, and frankly, mostly forgotten by Bergen County’s wealthier residents except when they have to find a way to get out of jury duty.

My purpose was considerably less hypocritical (I thought). I asked very nicely for Chief Investigator William Petrosky’s office and was told I couldn’t see him.

That was something of a problem. You’d think that a woman of my accomplishments (which were up to about five now) would have thought to call ahead, but I’m more of a take-the-bull-by-the-horns kind of girl, and besides, it had never occurred to me that Petrosky wouldn’t drop everything on his to-do list just to converse with a woman from a county he didn’t represent and of whom he had almost certainly never heard.

But I decided to persevere. “It’ll only take a minute of his time,” I said. “I promise. Did I mention I’m a mystery author doing research?”

“He doesn’t have any time today.” The receptionist, whose expression indicated she had expected to marry out of her job by now, wasn’t exactly looking at me. She was glaring into an iPhone, which was situated in such a way that I couldn’t tell exactly which
Candy Crush
game was giving her trouble. “You want to make an appointment for next month?”

“I’m afraid it can’t wait.”

“Sorry. There’s nothing I can do.” She slammed the phone down on her desk. “Dammit!”

“I appreciate your frustration,” I told her. “Couldn’t you just ask him?”

The woman looked up, apparently startled that I was still there. “I told you, he’s booked.”

Defeated, I started for the office door. Then completely on an impulse, I turned back and blurted out, “Duffy Madison.”

She looked dumbfounded. “What did you say?”

“I want to talk to him about Duffy Madison.” I had no idea what this conversation was about, but it was working.

“Hang on,” she said, and walked to the door six feet to my left. If I’d had any indication that was where Petrosky was located, I’d probably have tried to barge in, but the door wasn’t marked with anything but the numeral
4
. The receptionist knocked, walked in, and shut the door behind her. I waited perhaps ten seconds before she walked back out, smoothed her hair (which did not need smoothing), and said, “He says to go right in.”

Petrosky turned out to be a man of about fifty, was an inch or two shorter than me, and wore a white shirt and navy-blue tie. The jacket from his navy-blue suit hung over the back of his chair, which was behind his desk.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t get your name.” He reached out to take my hand in a businesslike manner. I gave it to him, but just for a loan. I was going to need it again later.

“I’m Rachel Goldman,” I said, mostly because I am. I could have added that I write a series of novels about a guy who claimed to be working for him, but I wanted to gauge Petrosky’s sudden interest. It was clear Duffy’s name had gotten me in. Maybe not talking was a better way to find out something about what was going on.

“You’re the woman Duffy’s been talking about,” Petrosky said, sitting back down and gesturing for me to sit on a county-issued chair in front of his county-issued desk. Okay, that indicated that there in fact
was
a Duffy Madison, or at least someone using that name, and that Petrosky had heard of him—and me. This keeping quiet thing was working out, so I did it some more.

Sure enough, more information came my way. “Duffy says you write novels and that you use his name for a character you write,” Petrosky went on. “How did you find out about Duffy?”

Clearly, I couldn’t stay silent after that, since I’d probably set a personal best just in those twenty seconds. “Wait,” I said, “this guy really
is
Duffy Madison? And he says I stole his name from
him
?”

Petrosky smiled in an avuncular manner and spread his hands in a gesture of calm and reconciliation. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “Nobody’s going to sue you.”

Sue me? For using my imagination and creating a fictional character? What world was this? Still, I had to maintain my composure. I was talking to a man who came to work in a navy-blue suit. Some sense of professionalism was called for, clearly.

I couldn’t get my jaw to open the whole way, so through the tiny space my teeth would allow, I said, “Well, I’d hardly think I was going to get sued, but I don’t understand.” The jaw loosened up a little. Soon Petrosky would be able to recognize vowel sounds I made. I barreled on through before he could ask me for the name of my translator. “You see, I created Duffy Madison, my character, from scratch four years ago. I had no idea there was someone going around using that name. I made him a consultant with the Morris County prosecutor. I took two whole days to settle on the name Duffy Madison after using baby name books, death registries, and a random search of the Morristown phone book.”

Petrosky’s smile had dimmed, and he leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his desk. “So you’re saying that you’d never heard of Duffy Madison before you wrote his name down?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. How long have you known
your
Duffy Madison?” I asked.

“Just over four years,” the chief investigator said, staring at a point about two feet above my head.

“And how did you meet him?”

Petrosky didn’t focus so much as he simply answered the question from memory. “We were working a missing person case in Lodi,” he said. “Woman left her bed in the middle of the night and vanished. We had no trail at all. This guy walks up to one of my investigators at the woman’s home while it was still a crime scene, says he specializes in this stuff. We looked at him hard as the possible kidnapper, but nothing pointed to him ever having met her before.”

“And that was the guy who calls himself Duffy Madison,” I said.

Suddenly, Petrosky’s face was completely attentive and focused directly on me. “Look, lady, we didn’t just take him in off the street and ask him to start looking into crimes. I checked into his background personally. Saw his ID—Social Security number, Selective Service registration, driver’s license. Had him fingerprinted, no matches. We took samples of his DNA to use when we thought he might be a suspect. Nothing. He’s clean as a whistle.”

“How is that possible?” I asked. “The guy’s claiming to be a fictional character.”

“And
you’re
claiming you’d never heard of him when you started writing your books,” the chief investigator snapped back.

That got me—he was looking at me like
I
was a suspect in . . . something. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

“It’s supposed to mean, who should I trust—a guy who’s helped us solve eight missing persons cases or a woman who makes stuff up for a living?” Petrosky waved a hand to dismiss that. “No. I’m not saying I think you’re lying. I’m saying that what you’re telling me doesn’t add up.”

“Imagine how I feel.”

He caught my eye a moment and studied my gaze. “Yeah. I’ll bet. Look. I know Duffy. I’ve worked with him. He’s never told me anything that was the least bit questionable. Tell me what he said to you.”

I could have; maybe I should have. But something in the back of my mind was insisting that I refrain from outing “Duffy Madison” as a raving lunatic, and I didn’t know why. I simply couldn’t tell Petrosky that he’d said I had created him from whole cloth and that the grown man in his thirties who came to my book signing had claimed he hadn’t existed before I’d started writing a character with his name.

“Besides his name? He said that he worked with you on missing persons cases. He said that he had a case he thought I would be able to help with and that it was a matter of life and death.”

Petrosky, as good investigators will, had been watching my face as I spoke. He’d been paying excellent attention. “There’s
something you’re not saying,” he suggested. “What did he tell you that you don’t want to say?” Far too excellent attention.

I looked away as if I were embarrassed. “He said he’d never read any of my books,” I said. Then I sniffed a little, not as if I were stifling tears, but as if I were terribly offended and wished the subject to go away.

Petrosky smiled. “Well, I’ll tell you what. After this conversation, I’m going to make a point of going to a bookstore on my way home and buying copies of all your books. I want to see if your Duffy bears any resemblance to mine.”

Good; he’d bought the act. “Yeah, I’d kind of like to find that out myself. I’m even more confused now than I was when I got here. That’s not what I was hoping would happen,” I said. I stood to leave.

Petrosky held up a hand like he was directing traffic and wanted me to clear the crosswalk for an old lady. “Maybe you can get your chance,” he said.

“To do what?” I didn’t know what he was getting at, but the odds were that I wouldn’t like it.

“To find out if our two Duffys match and to get less confused,” he answered. “I’d really appreciate it if you would talk to Duffy about the case he’s working.”

I
knew
I wouldn’t like it. “Why?” I asked.

“Two reasons: First, because I don’t understand what’s going on with him and your books. I need to know if one of my best consultants is a nut job.”

“And second?”

“Second, because what Duffy told you is true. The case he’s working really
is
a matter of life and death.”

“Her name is Julia,” said the man who called himself Duffy Madison. “Julia Bledsoe. She is forty-seven years old, divorced, no children. She lives in Upper Saddle River, and her sister called three days ago saying she was concerned because she couldn’t contact Julia. Her phone was going directly to voice mail, and the box was full. Her house was locked; the sister has no key. When police arrived to check out the scene, there was no sign of Ms. Bledsoe.”

We were sitting in a conference room that Petrosky called “Duffy’s office.” It was bare except for the standard oblong table in the center of the room. No windows. A plain, light-brown textured wallpaper. Refreshingly, incandescent rather than fluorescent light. Duffy (I’ll just call him that in an effort to simplify matters) sat in the center of the table on the right side.

I was opposite him on the left.

Petrosky had insisted that I meet with the imposter, simply because the case of Julia Bledsoe was still active and the
police felt time was short to bring it to a favorable conclusion. I had agreed because I am easily bullied and, to be honest, because I was intrigued by this strange creature on the other side of the table.

Duffy Madison was not exactly how I’d always pictured him; I don’t think of my characters in specific physical terms because I prefer to let the reader decide what they look like. This is especially enjoyable when readers insist they know a character is blond, or tall, or has green eyes. It’s a real ego boost to know they can picture my people so vividly.

In this case, though, the man was in front of me and clearly visible. He was tall without being imposing and a little thin for his height with unruly brown hair that had some wave to it but couldn’t be classified as curly. He had brown eyes that were large and seemed to be able to bore into a person (me, for example). He was the kind of man who, although he was not doing so at the moment, looked like he should be wearing tweed.

“She lives by herself and now she’s not answering her phone,” I summed up. “That’s a matter of life and death?”

“It’s the pattern that’s the problem,” Duffy answered. “This is something I’ve seen happen to three other women in the Northeast in the past two years.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “How did the other three women get found?” I asked.

Duffy looked away. “They were not found alive,” he said quietly.

In the books, Duffy would be driven by guilt. “Were they your cases?”

“No. None of them was in New Jersey. But they are all dead.”

It took a moment to sink in. I felt something like a trap close around me; now I had to be committed to do whatever this weirdo wanted me to do because there really was a life at stake. “I’m guessing they didn’t all die of natural causes by coincidence,” I said.

“Sadly, no.”

“So there’s a serial killer targeting upscale divorced women in the Northeast?” I asked.

“No,” Duffy said. He stood, looking restless, like he really wanted to leap out of the window, if there had been a window, and go rescue Lois Lane. Instead, he was stuck in this room explaining the details of an odd missing person case to a mystery novelist. That didn’t make any sense, and I started to raise an objection, but he went on. “That’s not the pattern. One of the other three women was married, another was single, not long out of high school, and without much of an income. The third was divorced, it’s true, but she did not have the same economic advantage as Julia Bledsoe.”

I write dialogue for a lot of characters—more so for Duffy Madison than others. I know his speech patterns because I have made them up; they are not even second nature to me; they’re first-and-a-half nature. I don’t have to conjure up Duffy’s conversation when I need it. I know exactly how he talks; that’s the easiest part of writing the character.

So the way he was talking now was especially worrisome, because I could tell there was a gap in it, but I didn’t know where. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” I said to
him, and he avoided eye contact, so I knew I was right. “You’re either withholding something that’s confidential about the case, or you’re trying to lead me into an area of conversation I don’t want to bring up. Which is it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “I’m simply telling you the facts of the case so you can help me find Julia Bledsoe.”

“No, that’s not it.” I stood, too. I write best when I glue my butt to the chair and force myself (writers spend years, sometimes decades, trying to become full-time authors, and once they do, they’ll do anything to avoid writing), but I
think
best on my feet, pacing. “There are questions I should be asking, and I haven’t stumbled onto them yet. You just want to tell me in your own way, and I’m not giving you the opportunity.”

He stared at me.

I ignored that; there was no way
I
was going to be the crazy person in this conversation, and I had to remember that. Duffy hadn’t anticipated my ability to think his thoughts—he was a talented imposter, but I was the character’s creator—and he could probably feel the tables turning on him.

“Let’s break this down,” I said, talking mostly to myself and pacing back and forth on my side of the table. It was a decent-sized room, so there was plenty of pacing space. “Three women have been murdered in the past two years. There’s a pattern to the victims, you said so yourself, but it’s not marital or economic status. And the wild card is that for some reason you think I can help you find the latest woman to disappear, this Julia Bledsoe, even though I’ve never actually heard of her before. So given that I have no knowledge of the victim
but you’re intent on talking to me, there has to be some common ground. How am I doing so far?”

Duffy tried to regain his dignity by drawing himself to full height and lacing his fingers behind his back, as if he had been given the order to be at ease. “Your reasoning isn’t bad,” he said. “But you must be careful. Jumping to conclusions in a case like this is extremely dangerous. We have to stay—”

“—one step ahead of the kidnapper. Yes, I’ve heard that before. In fact, I wrote it.” I stopped pacing and faced him directly. “Cards on the table, Duffy. You truly believe that you’re a manifestation of the fictional character I created four years and now five manuscripts ago?”

He nodded. “I confess, I can’t come up with another scenario that fits the facts. What’s that got to do with the case?”

“You have to know that I think you’re a nut. But you’re a smart nut. You act exactly like the character I write, and he’s brilliant. You can’t do anything stupid. You can’t step out of character, not even once, especially when I’m around. And that gives me an advantage—I know your moves better than you do. I know them before you do them.”

“This is not a competition, Ms. Goldman.” But the tightness in his mouth betrayed his real feelings.

“You aren’t capable of dodging the question. I know that. So I’ll ask it: why are you so intent on talking to me about this case?” I put my palms on the conference table and leaned toward him. “Why do you need me?”

“I think you know something about the victim,” he answered. I thought there’d be more, but there wasn’t.

“No, I don’t. I’ve never heard of Julia Bledsoe.”

In my books, Duffy Madison has a flair for the dramatic; he uses it to his advantage to get kidnappers to confess or witnesses to talk. So I fully expected to see him use it here, and he didn’t disappoint. “Yes, you have,” he said. “But you know her as Sunny Maugham.”

I felt my eyes widen and drew a sharp intake of breath. Damn, he was good. “Julia Bledsoe is Sunny Maugham?”

Duffy nodded. “Her pen name.”

I knew Sunny Maugham. I didn’t know her well; we’d met at mystery conferences once or twice, and I was fairly sure we’d both been on a panel at the New York Public Library a couple of years before. She was a lot higher up on the literary food chain than I was. “You brought me in because the victim is a mystery author.”

“That’s the pattern,” he almost whispered.

I stared into his eyes. “The pattern? The other victims? They were all mystery authors?”

“I’m afraid so,” Duffy said.

It was too much to take in all at once. Sunny Maugham, an author of light, paper-thin mysteries, was missing. But that wasn’t all—Duffy believed that she was the fourth in a series of such abductions, and the other three women who had been taken had been found murdered. All three of them mystery authors.

Like me.

“I don’t mean to alarm you,” Duffy said, although he had done exactly that. “I thought you might have known Ms. Bledsoe.”

“I know Sunny. Not well, though. We’ve met a few times and really only talked once.” At a convention in Bethesda, Maryland, Sunny and I had closed the bar one night when my first book was just on the shelves and her twelfth novel had just reached the
New York Times
Best Sellers list. We toasted each other until we were thoroughly toasted, and she gave me some advice about using social media to help people find your work. Mostly, it was about not being a pain and sounding like a commercial. She hadn’t had to do that. She had gone out of her way for me, strictly as a way of “paying it forward,” and I appreciated it.

“What did you talk about?” Duffy asked, suddenly intent on the question.

I left my reverie and looked at him. “Who are you, really?” I asked.

“Duffy Madison. What did you talk to Sunny Maugham about?”

“Nothing. Books. Publishing. Twitter. It wasn’t significant.”

Duffy gave me a look, and I knew before he said it that he was going to tell me, “Until we hear all the facts, we don’t know what will be significant.” I was pretty sure I’d written that one for him. “Is there anything you can think of that might point us in a direction? A place she liked to go? A lover or a relative she’d visit? Something like that?” He said “lover” like it was something he’d heard about but didn’t really understand.

“She didn’t tell me anything like that. I told you, we weren’t close.” Then, of course, just to prove that he was right and I was wrong, I remembered something. “Wait. She said
she had a place down the shore. In Spring Lake, I think. She liked to go there when she got blocked writing or when she just needed to clear her head. She called it her bungalow.”

Duffy’s eyes lit up. “Why wouldn’t her sister know about it?” he asked. “Was it a secret?”

“I honestly have no idea,” I told him.

He pulled a laptop computer from a bag he had on the floor and opened it on the conference table. “There must be some way to get the address,” he said to himself, because clearly there was no reason I needed to hear it. “Yes! Looking under Sunny Maugham, there’s a deed to a small house in Ocean Grove, not Spring Lake.” He couldn’t resist letting me know where I’d been mistaken. “She might have gone there or been taken there. It’s worth checking.” He grabbed a jacket off the chair he’d been standing near and threw it on in a dramatic gesture. “Let’s go.”

Go?
“What do you mean, ‘let’s go’?” I asked. “Isn’t this police work? What do you need me for?”

Halfway to the door, he stopped to give me an incredulous look. “Don’t you want to know if your information helped solve the case?”

“Not especially. I hope Sunny’s all right, and I’d appreciate it if you’d call me later and let me know. But I’m going home. I’ve got revisions to do.” I picked up my purse. Now, I surely wasn’t going to do any revisions when I got home, but it sounded important enough. “After all, if I don’t fix my book, how will you know who to be tomorrow?” Maybe that was mean.

“I’m not fictional, Ms. Goldman, I assure you. And I must insist that you accompany me to Ocean Grove.”

It wasn’t until I noticed the room getting alternately dark and light that I realized I must have been blinking a mile a minute. “Ocean Grove? Now?” It was an hour and a half drive, and that was without traffic. Even if he hadn’t been pretending to be a figment of my imagination, now I would be sure this guy was nuts.

“Yes, please. You see, you lend a perspective that I can’t hope to understand, never having written fiction. You can empathize with the victim, put yourself in her shoes. You can be invaluable.”

“Why not just call the Ocean Grove cops and ask them to check in on her house?” I asked.

“I will do that, but I think it’s imperative that you and I be on the scene as well,” the fake almost-a-cop answered. “If Ms. Bledsoe is not there, you might be able to spot clues to her next destination. If she is there, you might be able to draw her out and determine the reason for her behavior.”

Something didn’t add up. “That doesn’t fit your assessment of the situation,” I told Duffy. “You practically told me before that you think Sunny might be the latest in a series of murders. You think she’s dead.”

“I don’t think anything yet. I need facts. And you are keeping me from getting them as we speak.”

I folded my arms. “I’m not keeping you from anything. You want to schlep down to Ocean Grove, enjoy yourself. The beach is lovely—and crowded—this time of year. But
there’s no logical reason for me to go, and I am definitely not going.”

He regarded me without a readable expression on his face for a long moment. “If the situation were reversed and I asked Julia Bledsoe to help me find you, would she do it?” he asked.

Well, there went my day.