Written Off (8 page)

“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 all, 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.

“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,

“That should be impersonal enough,” I said to Preston. Duffy, reading over my shoulder and seeing his name, flinched a little.

“Yes, it should,” Preston said. “Your character is named Duffy, too?” He looked a little perplexed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Go figure.” I hit the send button, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t actually breathing when I did it.

Now in the diner, Brian had the same look that Preston had sported. “I can’t believe you did that,” he said through mozzarella.

“At the time, it seemed like the right thing to do,” I said. I took another sip of the swamp water. “Can I have some of your water?”

Brian handed it over. “You do this every time. Just order a different drink.”

I pulled on the straw, hard. “I don’t want to hurt their feelings and tell them their cola sucks,” I said when I came up for air.

“They run a diner. They don’t care what drink you order as long as you pay for it.”

“Cynic.”

He made a point of catching my eye and holding it. “Rachel, seriously, what are you going to do about this guy?”

“The kidnapper?” I knew what he meant. I was playing for time to think up an answer to the
real
question.

“The guy who thinks he’s Duffy Madison.”

“What do you care? You don’t even read the Duffy books.” It was true; Brian buys four copies of every book I write and doesn’t read any of them; his taste runs to nonfiction. I personally can’t understand why anyone would read anything that was actually true.

“Stop evading the question.” Brian, alas, has known me a long time.

“What do you want me to do, Brian? You want me to refuse to help find Sunny Maugham because the guy who’s doing his best to find her claims to be a character I made up?” Just for that, I took a French fry off his plate and ate it.

“How about trying to find out who he really is?” Brian challenged. “You’re not doing a thing but buying his story. You research those books. You know how to dig in, how to act like a cop on an investigation. This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you—”

“What about Walter Messinger in tenth grade?” I said.

“Okay, the second-weirdest thing. But at least Walter wasn’t dangerous.”

“That’s your perspective.”

Brian glared at me. “Stop it. I’m worried about you.”

I broke into a crooked smile, and I wasn’t even trying to do that. “I know,” I said, patting his hand. “The fact is, I’m a little worried about me, too.”

“This guy is
crazy
,” he said.

“Maybe so. And the one who’s kidnapping these women is even crazier.” I took a bite of salad. It wasn’t as good as the French fry.

Brian looked very serious. “How do you know they’re not the same person?” he asked.

I didn’t eat much after that.

*   *   *

I got back to the house determined to find out something—anything—about the man who called himself Duffy Madison. I wasn’t sure how to do it, but as Brian said, I have been doing research on crime novels for a few years now, and that meant thinking like a detective. You had to assume that anyone you met or saw could be capable of a crime and make no assumptions until you had facts. It meant being constantly vigilant and aware. It meant taking nothing for granted.

Which is why I was more than a little concerned to find my front door unlocked.

I knew I’d locked it—manually, with the key, from the outside—when I’d left this morning (after doing some actual revisions, about twenty pages) for lunch with Brian. And I knew that I never, ever leave the door unlocked. So I didn’t check when I got home; I just put the key in the lock and turned it.

But there’s a different action in the lock when there’s a dead bolt moving inside. You can feel it. And this time, I didn’t feel it.

Now, a TSTL character would walk into the house armed with a candlestick or a penknife, try to be quiet, fail, walk into a bedroom without looking behind the door, and get herself into some hideous situation because the author is too lazy to write someone with a brain.

Not me. My first impulse was to call the police. But there’s a problem with calling the cops to tell them your door was unlocked: they’re going to tell you that you
think
you locked it when you left but you really didn’t. They’d come if you insisted on it, but you’d be in the odd position of feeling embarrassed if someone
wasn’t
in your house intent on killing you.

So maybe the thing to do was call the pseudopolice: Duffy and/or Preston. They knew there was a possibility I was in danger, so they wouldn’t consider me a hysterical woman for being worried.

I got the phone out of my pocket and was looking for Preston’s business card in my purse when the front door of my house swung wide open in a quick, jerky motion. I gasped, dropped my purse, and had what I considered to be several small heart attacks that were probably just the Greek salad reminding me of something.

“I thought I heard your car in the driveway,” said Paula. “Why are you standing out here?”

Of course. Friday. Paula was working this afternoon, and she had a key.

“Um, I was just texting,” I said. “Anything going on I need to know about?”

“Adam called to say he’d sent out
Little Boy Lost
to three more production companies. It seems like the movie world heard someone was on it, and now he’s optimistic he might be able to get it to auction.”

What? A book of mine being bid on by more than one producer?
“Adam’s been into the mushrooms again,” I said, more or less to myself.

“Sol called about the manuscript, and I said you were doing revisions,” Paula continued. “Want to come inside?” She seemed confused by my inability to move, and frankly, it was a little bit worrisome to me as well. I followed her in.

“You also got a call from a Mr. Preston. He just said to call him back. Do I know him?” Paula asked as we walked from the front door toward my office.

“No,” I told her. “We just met yesterday. He works for the Bergen County prosecutor.”

She gave me an interested look. “Ooh,” she said.

“Yeah, keep dreaming. Listen. I have stuff for you to do.”

Paula, no matter how overworked she was, always looked eager when I gave her more responsibility. I often considered giving her a raise, but then I’d have to cut back on her hours so I could afford her. It was a conundrum. “Stuff?”

“Yeah.” I sat down in my desk chair without swiveling toward the computer screen, which is my natural tendency. Paula did not take out a pad to jot down notes; she knew she’d remember what I said, and so did I. “You remember the guy the other day who called and said he was Duffy Madison?”

She grinned. “Of course. What a nut.”

“Uh-huh. I want you to do some digging. He works as a consultant for the Bergen prosecutor.”

Paula’s expression went from amused to serious. “Mr. Preston? He’s Duffy Madison?”

I shook my head. “As far as I know, Ben Preston is Ben Preston. But ‘Duffy’ has convinced them, after a series of vetting processes, that he’s for real. He has an SSN, a birth certificate, a driver’s license, Selective Service, everything. What we need to do is find out who he really is.”

“We?”

“Okay, you. Get the numbers on his ID if you can find them. Call Max Cogdill at the IRS. See if they have any records for him. Then see how far back those records go and if he can be traced to a time before he was using this name.”

“How do I find that out if all I have is ‘Duffy Madison’?” Paula asked. It was a fair question. I wished I had the answer.

So I improvised; that’s what writers like me do. I’m a pantser. “The birth certificate will note a place of birth. That’s something to start with. Call the town in question, the clerk or somebody, and see if you can find any records of the guy. If his name really was Duffy Madison, there will be school records, old classmates, people like that. If it wasn’t, the birth certificate is fake and we have him in a lie. That along with the prosecutor gig might be enough to get him to fess up. It’s something to start with, anyway.”

Paula nodded, looking determined. “Cool. Anything else?”