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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,

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.

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.

“What came through on the cell phone?” Ben asked. He was good at keeping us on topic, I’d noticed.

“There were no calls made a few hours before we found the phone,” Duffy reported. “So while the battery life would indicate that it hadn’t been left there long, it had not been in use for some time.”

“How does that help?” Ben asked.

“It doesn’t. But a review of the calls that were made and received revealed something more interesting.” Duffy punched a few keys, and ahead of the latest e-mail from my creepy pen pal came a printed list of the calls Sunny Maugham had made and received just before Duffy and I invaded her bungalow in Ocean Grove. “Look here.”

He pointed at a list of incoming calls, all in a row, that came from the same number. “These calls were made within the two days before Ms. Bledsoe vanished,” Duffy said. “You’ll see there are eleven of them, and they are concentrated almost entirely into an eighteen-hour time span.”

“Are they from a guy named Brad?” I asked, remembering what Susan Oswego had told me about the man Duffy had suggested was Sunny’s “suitor.” “Do you know where he is?”

Ben Preston didn’t know about Brad, so it took a minute for Duffy and me to explain. But all the while, Duffy was shaking his head.

“We don’t know if the man who called her is named Brad or even if it was a man,” he said. “The phone was a prepaid mobile phone purchased at a convenience store the day it was used.”

“So how does that help?” I asked.

“If we know where the convenience store is that sold the phone, we can narrow the focus of our investigation,” Ben explained. “It takes the search down from all of Earth to a much more manageable area. Where was the phone sold, Duffy?”

“In Passaic, on Main Avenue,” Duffy answered. “And the local police were kind enough to question the owner of the place, who said that he didn’t remember the man who bought it but had security video that could provide some help.”

This seemed like it was exciting Ben and Duffy, but it wasn’t doing much for me. “Okay, great,” I said. “So instead of having to look for this guy in Istanbul or Minsk, now we can limit the search to northern New Jersey. Swell. And we might have some grainy security video that could show someone who called Sunny but might or might not be the person who took her. So explain to me why I should be encouraged at all.”

Duffy looked surprised, as if surely I had missed the simplicity in what he had told me before. “The security video will be anything but grainy,” he said slowly, like he was explaining it to a five-year-old who had recently suffered an unfortunate blow to the head. “It’s digital. We can isolate the buyer and get a clear picture. We will at least have a view of the person
we can distribute to police departments and hope for a sighting very soon.”

“Has that been done yet?” Ben asked, perhaps trying to reassert his authority. He was, after all, the real investigator on this case.

“Yes. I got in touch with the Passaic County office and used your name. I hope you don’t mind,” Duffy told Ben. Ben waved a hand to dismiss the notion; of course he didn’t mind. “We should be getting a look from them any minute now.”

“They’re working late?” Ben’s eyebrows arched.

Duffy smiled just a trifle naughtily. “You authorized the video technician’s overtime,” he said.

“I’ll take it out of your fee.”

“If we find Ms. Bledsoe unharmed, it will be well worth the expense,” Duffy noted, not specifying whether he meant the department’s expense or his own.

“Guys, I need a ride home,” I told them. “Being scared out of your wits makes a girl tired. Can you call me a taxi or something?”

Ben stood up. “I’ll drive you,” he said. “This is our first date, after all.” Oddly, he was looking at Duffy when he said that. Duffy, very deliberately, did not move a facial muscle. “You’ll call me when you get that video image?”

“First thing,” Duffy said. He turned toward me. “I will see you in the morning, Ms. Goldman.”

“You will?” I wondered if this was some kind of test to see whether I was going to get lucky with Ben Preston tonight.

“Of course. You assured me you’d come along to Ms. Bledsoe’s house for a look around.”

Oh, yeah. “Can you give me Sunny’s home address for my GPS?” I asked.

“I will pick you up at your home. About ten, given the lateness of the hour right now. Is that convenient for you?”

Sure it was convenient, if I never intended to get any work done again for the rest of my life. “Shouldn’t be a problem,” I told Duffy.

“Good.” He started to turn away when a “whoosh” sound came from his computer. “Hang on. I think we’re getting that image from Passaic County.”

I froze, and I don’t know why. I’m not sure what I was afraid to see on his screen. Ben turned to look, and Duffy sat riveted in his chair, fascinated but also in a strange way giddy. He clicked on the file coming in.

“Is the guy at the bodega sure that this is the man who bought the phone?” Ben asked as the image started to download.

“He’s only sold one such phone in the past week,” Duffy answered. “This has to be it.”

“We’d better get a break soon,” Ben said, “or Special Agent Rafferty will come and show us stupid cops how it’s done.”

“Special Agent Rafferty?” I asked.

“There’s an FBI agent who’s been paying attention to these abductions because they’re taking place in a number of states,” Duffy explained. “She’s been e-mailing Ben and me, threatening to take over the investigation if we don’t solve it soon.”

“She’s a pain in the ass,” Ben noted for color.

Soon enough—or too soon, depending on one’s perspective—the picture came up, clear and sharp, on Duffy’s screen. It
showed a figure, in a blue sweatshirt (in this heat?) and baseball cap—Red Sox—pulled down tight over his forehead. He was hunched over the counter at the small store, which was crowded with shelves groaning with products for sale. His elbows were on the counter, where the clerk, who must have been in his early twenties, was placing the phone down for inspection.

“Well, the search is over,” I said to Duffy. “We can close in on every guy on the eastern seaboard.”

“It’s not a great image,” Ben agreed. “Do we have the whole video? Maybe there’s a section where he’s not bent over like that.”

Duffy looked deflated. “This is not the picture we were hoping for,” he admitted. “But the tech at Passaic said this was the best image he could take out of the video.”

“Any chance the tech is our guy?” I asked.

They stared at me as if I’d suggested that we should be looking in Carpathian graveyards because I suspected Dracula was involved. “The other three crimes took place in other states,” Duffy said quietly, using his best placate-the-mental-patient tone. “It is almost impossible for the Passaic employee to have been in all three places.”

“It was a thought,” I mumbled.

Duffy turned his attention back to the screen. “Maybe I can refine the image more efficiently,” he said. “We might be able to get more facial detail that way, but it’s never going to be a clear portrait.”

“It’s obvious he knew there were security cameras,” Ben said, running his fingers through his hair. “What does that tell us?”

“That he’s not an idiot,” I said. “You can see the cameras in those stores; that’s the idea. They want you to see that you’re being filmed so you won’t shoplift to begin with.”

“But he planned for it. Had he been there before?” Ben looked at Duffy, who shrugged.

“Casing a bodega because he planned to buy a mobile phone there?” Duffy answered. “A little extreme, I’d say. My guess is he simply assumed there would be cameras and prepared for them.”

“Yeah,” Ben began, and then looking at Duffy’s screen, froze.

“What?” I asked. I turned toward the screen.

The picture from the security camera was being dismantled, bit by bit (byte by byte?), slowly, until it became yet another message in early hostage-taker:

“That’s not good,” Ben said.