Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  “What else can we do?” Dad asked when all the data had been printed out in triplicate and distributed to each of us (Paula is nothing if not efficient). “If we can’t call people today, what’s left?”

  “We need to Google all the writers who were targeted and see if there were people leaving nasty comments about them,” I suggested. Okay, so I’ve Googled myself once or twice; it’s not a crime. Some late nights you feel like seeing how your books are being received. Some late nights it’s better not to look. The Internet is vicious; it’s like high school, only everybody in the world is in your graduating class.

  “I can handle that,” Paula said, as I knew she would. “If there’s a recurring pattern in the way they’re heckled, I’ll find it. That might lead us somewhere. I’ll check reviews, too.”

  I sat at my desk, which makes me feel like Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise. You can swivel around and pretend you’re in charge of things. Paula was my Lieutenant Uhura, communicating via computer with the rest of the universe. Dad was my Bones, always questioning the morality of what was going on and never not on my side. And my Spock . . .

  There was no choice; I had to call Duffy.

  He answered on the first ring. “Is everything all right?” That was, coming from Duffy, touching. Other people would have tried “hello,” but given his personality, I would have expected a dissertation on the use of the cellular phone to convey information in various digital forms and . . . I fell asleep in the middle of my own sentence.

  “I’m fine,” I told him. “Nothing’s happened. But my father, Paula, and I are trying to strategize, and I thought it would be helpful if you could drop by and contribute. Are you in the middle of something?”

  “I am attempting to triangulate the killer’s location through travel patterns, Internet connections, and behavioral analysis,” he said. A lot of people, I’m told, watch baseball games on Sunday afternoons in the summer.

  “So not much, then,” I suggested.

  His voice had a low chuckle buried in it. “I suppose not. Would you like me to drop by?”

  “I thought I said that. Do you like sub sandwiches?”

  He hesitated. In the books, Duffy is a vegetarian, but without reading them, this Duffy couldn’t know that. “Certainly,” he said. Gotcha!

  “Good. Can you stop at No SUBstitutes on Mayhall Avenue on your way?” Duffy couldn’t find a way to say no, so I got Paula’s and Dad’s orders, gave him mine, and thanked him for the help. Duffy sounded a little sheepish but agreed to get to my house as soon as possible.

  “He’s getting subs?” Paula asked with a knowing tone.

  “Yup. He doesn’t know Duffy is a vegetarian.” I grinned at her.

  “Is he a vegan?” Dad asked.

  “No.”

  “They make cheese subs,” Dad contributed. That hardly seemed called for.

  While we were waiting for Duffy, Dad agreed to go out for some soda and macaroni salad, because you can’t have subs without macaroni salad. Duffy in the books wouldn’t drink beer or wine, and I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure this one didn’t know that, so the diet soda, which he does drink obsessively in my novels, was for him.

  Paula began to attack her laptop keyboard in her office, and that left me alone with my thoughts for the first time today. Which, although it was what I had wanted earlier, turned out to be not that good a thing.

  It was fun to play detective with Duffy and my entourage. I loved rallying Paula, and having Dad around was always a kick—for a while. I knew that within three days, I’d want him back in his barn doing whatever it was he does in his barn. And Duffy, while certifiably insane, was at least interesting to observe in order to get ideas for my next book.

  But sitting here by myself, the possibility—if not probability—that there wouldn’t be a next book, mostly because I’d be dead, was sinking in. This guy had killed four other crime fiction writers for no clear reason. And he had made it clear that I was the very author he’d choose to dispose of next. So far, nobody had come close to finding him, not even the always stalwart and resourceful Duffy Madison, who only one female FBI agent seemed to think was even a little fallible. I’d have to ask him about that the next time I saw him.

  Or would I? Did I want to know of Duffy’s failures, if he was committing himself to keeping me breathing? Was it better to be blissful (if this was bliss, I’d hate to see despair) in my ignorance? The only reason I could think of to assume Duffy himself wasn’t the mad killer was that he’d had plenty of opportunity to abduct or murder me in the times we’d spent alone and so far had not availed himself.

  That wasn’t very much. Who the hell had I just asked to buy me a sub sandwich?

  I got up and walked to Paula’s doorway, if for no better reason than to not be left alone with my thoughts. She looked up at me and took off the glasses she uses for the computer screen. “What’s up?” she asked. The reporter’s notebook she uses to take down my more profound thoughts was close to her right hand, I noted. Paula is the most efficient woman on the planet.

  “You said you might have a breakthrough on Duffy,” I reminded her. “I need to know what it is.”

  She grinned a cat-post-canary grin and shook her head. “I told you,” she said. “Not until I’m sure.”

  But I wasn’t playing that game now; I needed reassurance that I wasn’t actually inviting a homicidal maniac into my house just because his route went past No SUBstitutes. “I can’t wait that long; I need something to hang onto. Please. Who is this guy, best guess?”

  Paula studied my face, and her smile faded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is really getting to you, isn’t it?”

  I decided, consciously, to look away. “Having my life threatened puts a general crimp in my week,” I said. It came out way more woe-is-me and way less snarky than I had intended. The sniffle right afterward probably didn’t help. “What can you tell me about Duffy?”

  Paula nodded, mostly to herself, I think. “There’s a guy from Poughkeepsie, New York, named Damien Mosley,” she said. “Average kid, nobody ever really noticed him. Went to the high school, got mostly Bs and didn’t really make much of a splash. Father was an IBM executive, a minor one, in the data storage department. Mother was a homemaker, joined the PTA, that was about it. They kept to themselves and they never did anything to get people talking about them.”

  So far, I didn’t see a reason to get excited. “So the guy has the same initials as Duffy Madison. So what?” I didn’t exactly doubt Paula, but I honestly couldn’t follow her reasoning.

  “So Damien went to Oberlin College. Just like Duffy. And after that, beyond a driver’s license and some credit scores, which are just about perfect, there isn’t much in the public record about him. Until . . .”

  I waited what seemed like an eternity but was probably just three seconds. “You’re being coy. I’m having a nervous breakdown and you’re being coy, Paula! Tell me what’s going on!” I leaned hard on the edge of her desk. “I need to know if this guy is a serial killer or a real-life incarnation of my imaginary friend!”

  Paula punched a few keys on her keyboard and frowned. “Well, I can’t tell you that definitively,” she said. “Like I told you, I need more time. But there’s something very strange about Damien Mosley.”

  She was going to make me say it. “What?”

  “He vanished just about four years ago. Right around the time—”

  I closed my eyes. “Right around the time I started writing books and Duffy Madison made his first appearance at the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office.”

  Chapter 22

  Dad got back before Duffy could fill our sandwich order and make his appearance, so Paula and I brought him up to speed on her research about the guy who had presented himself as my character. Dad listened with full attention and did not ask questions as the story was being told to him. He is a careful thinker, which was why his business career was successful, and he prides himself in taking a sober, rea
soned approach to every problem that comes his way. He steepled his fingers and held them up to his lips as he listened, blinking very rarely, looking more serene with each passing second.

  “The guy’s a nut,” he finally pronounced.

  I waited, but there was no more from my father. “That’s it?” I asked. “He’s a nut? That’s the best you can do?”

  Dad had the nerve to look surprised. “What did you want me to say, Rachel? A guy shows up on your door and claims to be the character you’ve been writing for four years, come to life magically through your word processor? He takes a job doing what your character does and presents himself as the character in the flesh? His life closely parallels one of another guy, with his initials, who went missing at exactly the same time that you started writing your books, and you want me to say yes, he’s your hero, the guy who’s going to get you through this? The man’s a nut. I don’t know what he did or what made him decide he was someone else, but it couldn’t be good.”

  That was the sum total of everything I didn’t want to hear, and I didn’t have an immediate response. I turned toward Paula. “Damien just vanishes and Duffy appears?” I asked. “Did his family file a missing person report? Why wasn’t anyone looking for him?”

  “His father died two years before, and Damien had been living in his own apartment in New Rochelle, New York, at the time he vanished. He wasn’t married, didn’t seem to have any friends, wasn’t seeing anyone. Damien worked as a bartender, sometimes in two places at a time so he could get enough hours to pay his rent. His mother didn’t report him missing because she had gotten used to not hearing from him.” Paula was scrolling down the file of notes she’d taken.

  “But somebody must have noticed. The bars he was working in knew when he didn’t show up for a shift. The landlord figured out he wasn’t paying his rent. Maybe his power company noticed he was leaving the lights off a lot.” I was trying to poke holes in Paula’s logic, but I was poking with a butter knife and what I needed was something on the order of an awl.

  Paula shrugged. “The landlord filed an eviction notice after the rent checks stopped coming. That’s when they contacted Damien’s mom, who didn’t know anything. After another two months, when it was clear he wasn’t coming back, the landlord got to go into the place, send some possessions back to Mrs. Mosley, and sell the rest. By then, there was no trail to follow.”

  “So maybe he is the guy we know as Duffy, and maybe he’s not,” I said.

  “This is why I didn’t tell you sooner,” Paula said. “I’m waiting to get a telephone number for the mother and to check with the state police on whether they’ve ever had a record of anyone using the driver’s license, a credit card, or anything. I don’t know what we’re talking about yet.”

  Dad shook his head in disbelief and looked at me. “You didn’t hear a word I said, did you?” he asked. “I’m telling you this guy you’ve been trusting is deranged and might be dangerous. You’re just ignoring what I said.”

  “Yes, I am,” I admitted. “I don’t want to believe that, and I don’t have a real hard piece of evidence to prove otherwise. This is how I work, Dad. You have to let me get through the process.”

  “Is this how you write books? By diving in and seeing what happens?”

  “Actually, yeah.”

  Cue the doorbell: Duffy was here. I got up to answer the door and my father, usually a very calm and understanding man, grabbed my forearm. “Don’t let him in,” he said with great force in his voice.

  “I have to. He has my lunch.” Dad let go, and I let Duffy in, wondering if being sassy to my father was worth the admission of a possible lunatic to my home. It had felt like a good impulse at the time.

  Duffy, unaware that his sanity was even more in question than usual, greeted me with a charming, “I believe Ms. Bledsoe was murdered in a basement or an attic.”

  “Did you get napkins?” I asked.

  “Of course. Fibers in the closet in which the body was found indicate a good deal of dust at the scene of the murder, and the metal-tipped pen that had punctured her carotid artery bore traces of dichlorobenzene.” We were already walking toward the dining room, where there was a table large enough for four people. I heard Dad and Paula heading in that direction as well.

  “Oh, dichlorobenzene,” I parroted back. “That seals it.”

  Duffy gave me a slightly irritated look. “It is the common ingredient in most modern mothballs,” he sniffed.

  “How could I have forgotten that?” I wondered aloud.

  Introductions were made, with Dad eyeing Duffy the way one would glare at . . . a possible murder suspect. We set out the food on the dining room table. Paula had gotten glasses and utensils from the kitchen, and everyone except my father grabbed a sandwich with gusto. Well, Duffy’s version of gusto, which was to actually reach across me to get his sub rather than wait to have it handed to him. He unwrapped it slowly, which normally wouldn’t bother me, but it was the very height of suspense now. I saw Paula watching like a hawk as he revealed his chosen lunch.

  A cheese sub.

  We exchanged a look that couldn’t decide if it was relieved or annoyed. But I know we were both wondering the same thing: Did he pick up that detail in one of the books, or is that an actual incarnation of Duffy Madison sitting across the table? Should I call him “Damien” and see what happens? Wasn’t Damien the evil devil kid in some seventies horror movie? (I’m pretty sure I was the only one thinking about that last question.)

  Dad, picking absently at his sandwich as if he was afraid it might bite back, did not look at our fictional guest but idly asked, “So Duffy, how do you intend to find the man who you think is now focusing on my daughter?”

  Duffy, of course, didn’t skip a beat. “The key is to provide security for Rachel while continuing to research the criminal’s methods and possible psychology. I don’t believe in profilers, but I do think that a person’s communication can be very telling, and the e-mails he sent to your daughter are extremely valuable.”

  He then went into a detailed description and analysis of syntax, grammar patterns, and font choices, and I blanked out somewhere around the complete lack of alliteration in the threatening notes. Duffy was trying to show off how thorough he was, but he wasn’t getting anywhere with Dad.

  Once he took his first extended breath, my father leapt upon his opportunity. “How do we know you’re not the killer?” he asked.

  I almost dropped my sandwich. “Dad!”

  “It’s a reasonable question,” Duffy responded. Not a bead of sweat, not a blink. Nothing. “You have the evidence that, in the three days I have known your daughter, I have done absolutely nothing the least bit threatening and have been endeavoring to keep her safe. We have been alone at least three times, once in her home, and no harm has come to her. And you have my sincerest declaration that anything at all harmful would have to get through me first before Rachel could be hurt.” He took another bite, and some mustard squirted onto the corner of his mouth. Duffy dabbed at it with an inadequate paper napkin from the sub restaurant.

  “So you’re asking me to take your word for it,” Dad responded. He took a forkful of macaroni salad and chewed it suspiciously, if such a thing is possible.

  “I’m suggesting you exercise logic and then take my word for it,” Duffy answered, his lip now mustard free.

  Before my father could snarl at him some more, Duffy’s cell phone buzzed, and he registered a slight look of surprise when he checked the incoming caller. He stood and tapped the phone. “Special Agent Rafferty,” he said with a hint of superiority in his voice. So she’d come crawling back for his help, had she? Well, he’d be happy to pitch in now that she was acknowledging his skills and dedication, but only because he wanted to help save lives.

  It was a lot to infer from a 5 percent change in his tone, but I’m an author, and we observe, then exaggerate. Saves millions in lawsuits.

  Duffy listened for a few seconds. “Indeed. How soon?” He looke
d at me perplexed. “Tomorrow? Well, certainly, if you feel it could make that large a difference.” He walked out of the room, and his conversation with the FBI agent—sorry; special agent—became unintelligible.

  “Sounds like something’s happening in the case,” Paula attempted as a way of breaking the silence.

  “Good,” Dad grumped. “This needs to end soon.”

  “What is it with you?” I asked. “You’re usually so nonjudgmental, and now you’re practically jumping down Duffy’s throat every time he makes a sound.”

  He gave me a very stern fatherly look and said, “I take offense when someone threatens my daughter’s life. No matter how much he resembles a guy you made up.”

  “Well one thing Duffy’s right about, we have no evidence at all that he’s anything other than what he appears to be, at least professionally. He is trying to help, and you’re jumping to the conclusion that he is the serial killer.”

  Duffy walked back in, pocketing his cell phone. “I’m afraid I’m off,” he said.

  “No kidding,” Dad mumbled, but Duffy didn’t appear to hear it. Hey, some jokes are inherited father to daughter.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Special Agent Rafferty believes there’s a strong possibility the next abduction has taken place. There’s a crime writer in Connecticut named Rosemary Cleland who apparently is not in touch with friends or relatives.”

  I knew Rosemary from some meetings I’d attended of a nascent writer’s union in Manhattan. Her writing name was Lisbeth Pastel, and she wrote what I’d consider to be something more akin to romance novels that occasionally had crimes in them. And the union hadn’t gone anywhere, either. I told all that to Duffy.

  He shrugged. “She’s a writer, and she’s missing. The special agent wants me in Stamford as soon as possible. Apparently, I’m not quite the charlatan she’d assumed.”

  I suddenly felt a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. “What if she’s wrong?” I asked. “What if Rosemary isn’t the next victim? I’ll be here without anyone to help.” I realized what that sounded like and added, “No one official.” I looked at Paula, who waved a hand to tell me not to worry, and Dad, whose expression was not as severe as before. He caught Duffy’s eye.