Written Off (14 page)

I reached for my phone again. Distraction. That’s what I needed. I’d call Brian.

“Ms. Goldman?” Shit. Someone was going to make me deal with reality. I turned to see a woman in a conservative gray suit carrying a voice recorder. “Are you Rachel Goldman?”

I admitted to being myself because I wasn’t really thinking sharply enough to come up with an alternate identity. She reached for my hand, and I gave it to her. “I’m Special Agent Rafferty, FBI.”

Ben and Duffy had mentioned the FBI agent monitoring their case, and they’d rolled their eyes at the thought of her. But the imposing figure in front of me didn’t really seem like the “meddling little lady” cops might disdain. “Wow,” I said. “You must be really impressive.” I wasn’t really firing on all cylinders.

Special Agent Rafferty shook my hand and looked closely at me, as if trying to see the roots of my mental illness in my eyes. “How so?” she asked.

“I don’t know any female officers or FBI agents, and I’ve done a decent amount of research on criminal justice,” I explained. “I’m glad to meet you.” Maybe I could patch up the faux pas with a little sisterhood.

She took a moment. “Research,” she said. Then she stared at me. “You’re
that
Rachel Goldman? The author?”

Now, you have to understand, that
never
happens. For one thing, mine is hardly the most distinctive or unusual name an author could have (and I never even used a pseudonym). And among people who have met me outside BooksBooksBooks and other such venues, I am not exactly a household name. Someone who recognized my work was a rare treat.

“Yes, I am,” I said. “You’ve heard of my books?”

“Heard of them? I
love
them!” Special Agent Rafferty looked like she’d just met the president of the United States, or Justin Bieber, depending on your personal preference. “I never miss anything you write!”

I almost asked for her voice recorder to immortalize this moment and have it to play back in my dotage. “I’m so glad you enjoy the novels,” I said modestly.

Rafferty blinked. “Novels?” she said. “I didn’t know you wrote novels.”

What did she think I wrote—papal decrees? “Sure. I write the Duffy Madison mystery series.” Remember? How you loved them ten seconds ago?

Now she looked
really
confused. “But I just spoke to Duffy inside. He’s real. Did you name a character after him?” She scratched at something imaginary on the right side of her head.

“No. I’ve been writing mystery novels for four years. What did you think I had written?” It’s one thing to be dissed; it’s another thing to be dissed when the person doesn’t even know they’re doing the dissing.

“You’re Rachel Goldman. You write books on the philosophy of the criminal justice system. I’ve read every one.”

“I don’t. I write mystery novels. I swear.” Then it hit me. “You mean
Roberta
Goldman.” I’d heard that name before, of course.

“Oh, that’s right!” No apology, nothing. She didn’t even have the decency to look mortified. Between this and finding the dead body of a professional acquaintance, it had hardly been worth getting up this morning.

“How can I help you, Agent?” If she wasn’t going to shower me with praise, we might as well get on with this.

“Special agent,” she corrected, probably out of habit. “Well, you can tell me about what you found inside.” Voice recorder out, red light lit.

“You saw it,” I noted.

“Yes, I did. But I want you to tell me about it.” For a gushing fan of . . . somebody . . . Special Agent Rafferty was not terribly pleasant, I thought.

“Duffy and I went inside so I could have a look around the house,” I said.

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yes. Why were you brought in to look over the scene? You’re not a criminal justice employee or a forensics expert. Why you?” This woman was about as not Lieutenant Isabel Antonio as she could be without changing species.

“Duffy felt it would be helpful to get another writer into the house to see if there was anything unusual that someone outside the field might not notice,” I told her.

Rafferty scowled. Really. A full-on scowl. I’ve used the word to describe disgruntled expressions before, but I’d been doing the term a disservice. This was a real scowl. Rafferty looked like she wanted to spit. Possibly at me.

“So that’s what
Duffy
thought, huh?” Her inflection was all I needed to infer a few things, mostly that Rafferty didn’t like Duffy Madison.

“I was just trying to help,” I said. I sounded even more like a five-year-old than you’re already thinking.

“And what did you see?” Rafferty continued. “Was there any useful observation in there from you? Did your writer’s sensibility help the investigation?”

“I found the body,” I said, a little more starch in my voice. “That didn’t help Sunny Maugham much, but it was more
than anyone else had managed to do.”
You go, girl! Get a little of your own back!

“Yes, let’s talk about that,” Rafferty said. I didn’t like the almost happy tone. “What made you get up and open the closet door?”

“I was looking for paper.” That seemed simple enough.

“Why? You were just
observing
. What did you need paper for?” There was something ominous in this interview, but it was sneaking up on me. I knew it was there, but I wasn’t sure I could get out of its way.

“I wanted to print something out, to get a sense of what it felt like to work in Sunny’s office.” That was, in fact, why I was looking for the paper. It’s important to tell the truth to someone who could arrest you. My mother taught me that after her first pot bust. (She got off with a fine.)

“Why? What would printing out a file do to help?”

“It was to get a feel for the office,” I said again. “It was supposed to give me a better idea of what Sunny’s system was, so that I could tell if anything was amiss.”

“And something was.” No expression on her face. We could have been discussing fabric softener sheets.

“I didn’t find that out until I opened the closet door.” Okay, so maybe there was a little attitude in my voice at that point. We were discussing the death of a woman I’d known, who might even have thought of me as . . . no, we weren’t really friends. But it was upsetting.

“How did you know it was a closet?” Rafferty asked.

What did that mean? “I don’t understand.” That’s what I say when I don’t know what something means. Snappy, huh?

“I mean, how did you know that was a closet?”

I still wasn’t getting it. “Well, the fact that there were all these supplies in it sort of gave the purpose away.” Mom never said anything about being snarky to the officer, but I was still betting it wasn’t the best strategy. She’d baited me, giving me the same straight line twice.

“The door. The closet door.” I must have been staring blankly. “You’d never been in the room before, correct?”

Yes, madam district attorney. “That’s right.”

“So if you’d never been in the room before, how did you know that door led to a utility closet?”

It was a good question. How
had
I known? “It seemed logical. She wasn’t storing paper or anything she’d need nearby in the desk. There was a door just to the left of the desk; I figured it was a closet.” Because that was exactly where I’d put the supplies if I could afford to have an office like that, and everything else in the room was exactly the way I would want it, so it followed. I felt it was probably best not to mention my office envy to the detective.

“There are six filing cabinets in the room. You didn’t go to any of those. You walked directly to the closet.” A mouse walked up to me and asked if I knew what it felt like to be lured into a trap, but I ignored it.

“I figured the filing cabinets had files in them. The door looked like a closet.” Whoa. My eyes narrowed involuntarily. “Why are you asking?”

“I’m just trying to understand.”

Wait. There was something else. “Besides, Duffy told me it was a closet.” Okay, so I was already on the way to the
door when Duffy mentioned it was the supply area, and I had assumed that, but it should have bought me at least a little credibility.

Instead, there was the sneer again. “Duffy,” she said.

“What is it with you and Duffy?” I asked.

She, naturally, ignored the question. “How well did you know Ms. Bledsoe?”

This was not progressing along the path I’d anticipated when it seemed Rafferty was a big fan of my books. “Not all that well. We spoke for a while at a mystery book conference once.”

“What did you talk about?” She had put the voice recorder in a breast pocket, where it could still record, and pulled a reporter’s notebook out of her back pocket. She started writing in the notebook.

I folded my arms. “Do I need to call an attorney,
Special Agent
?” I asked. Because it sure was starting to sound like I might.

Not a blink. “Why would you need an attorney?” Blandest tone you ever heard. The last time someone asked you to pass the salt, they had more passion in their voice.

“I’m wondering that myself, but you’re making it sound very much like I’m on the verge of being arrested. If I am, I’d like to stop answering questions and call my attorney.” I stopped short of the cliché, “I know my rights.”

“I wasn’t planning on arresting you,” Rafferty said. “Unless you’d like to make a confession.”

“Depends,” I said. “If you’re arresting people for watching trashy reality shows, I’m ready to be handcuffed.”

Rafferty’s face was as impassive as a Halloween mask of a police detective, only less expressive. “Far as I know, that’s still legal,” she said.

“Then I think I might exercise my right to remain silent. Other than to say that your interpersonal skills might use some polish.”

Her eyelids stood at half-staff. “I’ll take it under advisement.” I turned to walk away, but she added, “I thought you wanted to help find the person who killed your friend.”

I’ll admit it, I stopped walking. “You know, impersonating my Aunt Harriet really isn’t going to help you much.”

Rafferty just stood and stared. She looked like she was thinking about the last time she was really bored.

“What is it you want to know?” I whined.

“What did you and Ms. Bledsoe talk about when you met at the book convention?” she said. Lord knows,
I
wouldn’t have remembered what had gotten this little chat fest going, but she did.

“We talked about book promotion,” I said. “Sunny was very helpful in giving me some pointers on how to get my book noticed.”

“Then how come I thought you were Roberta Goldman?” Rafferty asked. Perhaps on her planet, that would have constituted a joke.

“You don’t venture out of the how-to-further-my-career section at the bookstore,” I said. “If you wandered into the fiction aisles, maybe you’d come across my work. Is there anything else?”

“Yeah. Did you kill Julia Bledsoe?”

“No. Damn, that was easy. I assume I can go now.” Once again, I started to walk away.

“Just one thing.” Arrgh. I turned again and considered her. She didn’t wait for me to ask what the one thing might be. Her eyes didn’t soften, and her voice didn’t show any signs of compassion. “Do you think you need protection?”

That came out of nowhere. “Why?”

“Because I hear you’ve been getting e-mails from the guy who did this,” Rafferty said. “Personally, I doubt it, but if you’re scared, we can assign you some extra protection.”

I hadn’t been thinking about that at that moment, so thank goodness Rafferty had brought it back to my frontal lobes for consideration. But I was still smarting from the grilling she’d just given me and wasn’t going to admit to the amazon that I was afraid. “If you know I’m getting threatening e-mails, and you know it’s from whoever did this to Sunny, what made you think I was the killer?” I asked.

“I didn’t. But you have to eliminate as many possibilities as you can. Now the question is whether you want us to assign some extra police drive-bys to your house and maybe put a monitor inside to watch out for you. Do you want that?”

“No,” I said without a long thought. “I have Duffy and Ben Preston watching out for me. I think I’ll be all right.”

Rafferty gave me a long look, like she was deciding if she wanted to say something. I almost turned away a third time, then figured I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. Sure enough, she spoke again.

“You’ll be safe with Ben Preston,” she said. “Be careful about Duffy Madison.”

You know when something goes screwy in movies and they play that sound where the phonograph needle skips across the record? I heard that in my head. “Why?” I asked. “What is it about Duffy?”

“He’s . . . run into problems with two other missing persons cases,” she answered. “I’m just saying you should be careful.”

Now
she
started to turn away. “Hold it,” I said, and she stopped. “What do you mean, ‘run into problems’? What’s happened with other cases Duffy’s worked?”

“I don’t work for the prosecutor’s office,” Rafferty answered. “I wasn’t there, but I heard about it.”

“Heard about what?” I got out through my gnashed teeth.

“Twice he’s had people he was looking for turn up dead. The guy’s bad luck. Just stay away, is all I’m saying.”

“Duffy’s had some bad luck once in a while, but for the most part he’s been a real boon to the department,” Ben Preston told me. We were getting out of Ben’s car at my house, where he’d taken me after the inevitable hordes of people had vacated Sunny’s place and he had enough time to drive me home. “Nobody bats a thousand.”

“I’m not saying who, but I was warned to stay away from him,” I said. “That’s why I asked. I’m told that if I am in fact next on the list for this guy, Duffy Madison is exactly the man I want to avoid.” Okay, so Rafferty hadn’t said those words exactly, but the message had been clear.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Ben said as I unlocked the door and we walked inside. “Eunice Rafferty was doing her voodoo scare thing again. She has some bug up her ass about Duffy, and I have no idea why.”

We went into the kitchen, where I started a pot of coffee. I’d just turned the air conditioning back on, so it was going to be iced coffee, but there was no sense getting the ice out until
there was something to pour over it. “There were two cases—and we don’t get tons of missing persons cases just in Bergen County—that Duffy worked on, and they didn’t turn out the way we wanted them to. It wasn’t Duffy’s fault, and he wasn’t the black cat walking in anyone’s path.”

“The first three abductions took place in three states that weren’t New Jersey,” I pointed out. “Don’t you have to look for someone who could have been in all those places at the time of the crime? Doesn’t that sort of narrow things down?”

I have a counter between the kitchen and the dining room. I never actually dine in the dining room, so there were a number of boxes in there from when I had moved in that had never been completely unpacked. Kind of makes me wonder if I needed that stuff in the first place. Ben sat down on a barstool I had set up next to the counter.

He rubbed his chin as he thought. “Of course that would help identify a suspect,” he said. “But we don’t even have a pool of people to choose from yet. This guy has been really discreet, except when he’s killing people.”

“Well, what about motive?” I filled the coffeemaker with enough water and started it going, then I walked out to his side of the pass-through and stood looking at him while the coffee brewed. “No two of these women seem to have anything in common other than writing crime fiction. Why does someone want to kill women crime fiction authors?”

I realized then how tired Ben looked. There were creases under his eyes, which were not entirely white in their whites, and his smile was crooked, favoring the left side. “Has it ever occurred to you that this guy might just be crazy?” he asked.

I shook my head, probably too dismissively. “That’s the easiest dodge in the mystery writing business,” I told him. “You don’t give your killer a motivation; you just say he’s crazy. Even crazy people have motivations, whether they make sense or not. In the criminal’s mind, what he’s doing is perfectly logical and necessary. Just saying ‘he’s crazy’ means that you don’t know why he’s doing this.”

Ben looked at me blankly for a few moments. “I don’t know why he’s doing this,” he said.

“Doesn’t it make you feel better to tell the truth?” I asked.

“Not really, no.”

I should have been more shaken up than I was; I should have been sad and terrified and angry and did I mention terrified? Sunny Maugham, everybody’s favorite in the mystery world, was dead, and I had discovered her body. It was possible that, by pissing off the abductor, I had played a role in her death. And then there was the small matter of the very broad hints being dropped that I was next on the agenda. Yes, I definitely should have been a quivering mass of frightened gelatin lying in the fetal position on my bedroom floor.

But I wasn’t. Maybe it just hadn’t sunk in yet. Maybe I was in major denial. But maybe, just maybe, the training in concocting plots, figuring motives, designing clues, and most of all creating Duffy Madison was kicking into gear now, and I was taking a defensive stance, attempting as best I could to take control of the situation and protect myself from the oncoming threat.

Yeah, it was probably that it hadn’t sunk in yet.

What I actually was, almost as much as tired, was pissed off. I started feeling like the heroine of one of Sunny’s cozies, an amateur who would immediately start investigating the crime and way outpace the professionals because she was spunky or knew how to embroider or something. I wanted to find the guy who killed Sunny and beat him up. Except that I was petrified that I was next and wanted to be as far away from him as possible. I was not discounting Jupiter as a place to hide.

The coffee began to drip into the empty pot, which Paula had been kind enough to actually wash out, so I walked back around into the kitchen and got two glasses and a tray of ice out. As I prepared the glasses with ice and got soy milk out of the fridge, Ben stood and walked around, offering to help.

“You want to help? Figure out who this maniac is and catch him,” I said. “That’s your job. Mine is making up fake ones and then getting somebody to catch those.”

“And so you made up Duffy Madison,” Ben reminded me. He looked concerned, as if the whole Duffy-as-fictional-character thing had lost its amusement.

“I did. And once we figure out who your pal using the name I made up really is, we can determine exactly how crazy
he
is.” I poured the coffee over the ice, much of which promptly melted, and got more ice to add to the drinks. “You want sugar or anything?”

“You got chocolate syrup?” Ben Preston asked. I nodded. “That’s great in iced coffee.” He opened the fridge, found it on the door, and extracted it.

I looked at him. “You cops really are just little kids with guns, aren’t you?”

“I’m not a cop; I’m an investigator for the prosecutor of the county of Bergen.” He squeezed some syrup into his iced coffee and stirred it with a spoon I handed him.

“That’s pretty much a cop. And you used to be a cop.”

“We were talking about Duffy,” he reminded me.

“I don’t have anything new to say about Duffy.” The fact that my assistant was trying to track down Duffy’s prom date seemed, well, perhaps an unflattering detail that was best left out of this conversation.

Ben took a long swig of his iced . . . mocha. It must have hit the spot, because he gave a contented sigh. “Well, I do. I think you’re wrong about him. I don’t think he’s crazy.”

“You don’t? How do you explain—”

“I can’t. I can’t tell you why he has the same name as the character you made up. Maybe you’d heard his name and forgotten it; it’s possible. Maybe you saw it on the Internet in doing some research and thought it sounded like a fictional character; that’s possible, too. But I can tell you that Duffy Madison is the best missing persons investigator I’ve ever met, and you can’t do that job as well as he does if you are mentally incapacitated.” To punctuate his point, he drained the rest of his drink. “Is there any more coffee?”

But I was annoyed enough, and frayed enough, not to succumb to the charms of a fairly good-looking man drinking a sweet caffeinated beverage in my kitchen. “I believe that Duffy is a good investigator,” I said defensively. “I made him that way. I created every piece of that personality; I know how
he thinks, what he wants, everywhere he’s ever been. It’s the only way you can do what I do at all well.” And just to show him I meant business too, I took a long sip of my iced coffee. He was right; chocolate syrup definitely would have taken some of the bitterness out. But I wasn’t going to give Ben the satisfaction.

“You’re changing your tune,” Ben said. He seemed mystified by that.

“You’re right.”

“What does that mean?”

“Exactly what you think it does,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, you really think that guy is some fictional character you made up, don’t you?” Ben leaned back on the counter and seemed to be trying to take me in all at once, which at this distance couldn’t be done without a special lens.

“It’s the only explanation that makes any sense,” I said.

*   *   *

Ben left a little while later, still shaking his head. I finally did call Brian, told him about my day, and, after all those hours, cried for a while. Scotch helped a little, but not that much. For one thing, I can’t drink more than one glass. For another, even after I felt myself relax, Sunny was still dead.

I vegged out for a while, just sitting there in my living room with
The Return of the Pink Panther
playing on my TV. Even the unrelenting silliness on the screen wasn’t helping. I wasn’t mourning Sunny, exactly; I didn’t know her well enough to feel comfortable doing that. I was feeling her loss
from the world of mystery writing, which was depressing enough, but I was also just feeling drained and uninspired. It actually occurred to me to do some revisions then, but that seemed somehow disrespectful, and besides, they were revisions and I didn’t want to do them.

So, as I often do when I’m out of sorts and have no logical reason to do so, I called my father.

I told him about Sunny. I told him about how I’d been asked to consult on her abduction, how I’d accidentally discovered her body, how that was making me feel somehow responsible, and how I didn’t want to be responsible. I said that I wished today had never happened, but now I couldn’t make it unhappen, and I’d be stuck with it for the rest of my life—and what was that going to do to me?

The one thing I didn’t tell him about was Duffy. He’d have me declared incompetent and take over my affairs in court, right after having me committed to the most compassionate lunatic asylum in New York State.

My father, who has a logical and caring mind, listened without comment for a long time. When I was done ranting and just started sniffling again—which was exactly what I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do—he spoke up.

“You know perfectly well that what happened isn’t your fault, Rache.”

“It feels like it is. I mean, if I’d just tried harder . . .”

“Your friend would be just as dead.”

I stood up and started walking around the house, just because. Well, maybe because I could be sure then that I was indeed alone in the place. I hadn’t checked my e-mail pretty
much all day. Duffy would see if there was something from the guy who killed Sunny. I didn’t want to know.

“Maybe that’s the thing,” I told Dad. “Sunny wasn’t really my friend. I mean, she was a lovely person and I liked her, but we didn’t really know each other that well. If it comes out on a LISTSERV or some of the other mystery underground, it’ll look like I was just trying to climb onto her coattails, like I’m the worst kind of morbid namedropper. How do I make it not look like that?”

“Nobody’s going to think you were doing that,” Dad said patiently. “If anyone did, it would be someone who has no idea what kind of person you are.”

There wasn’t anyone in the dining room. I turned on the lights to be sure. There wasn’t anyone in the kitchen, either. But I put some more lights on just to prove it to myself.

Then I made the biggest mistake I’d made in a day full of hideous events and certain errors. I told my father about the threats from the killer.

He did not take a breath or wait one second. “I’m on my way,” he said.

Before he could merely hang up and hop into his car (which was undoubtedly his plan), I leapt in with, “No, Dad. Please. There’s no need. I have some very good security people on me. The police are taking it seriously and helping me, I swear.”

“So how will it hurt to add your father to the mix? I’m on my way.”

“No,” I said more forcefully. “The last thing I need right now is to be worrying about you at the same time I’m worrying about me.”

“So here’s the solution: don’t worry about me. Nobody’s threatening
my
life over the Internet. I’m on my way, Rachel.”

“No, you’re not.” Improvise. Writers improvise all the time; it’s what we do whenever we don’t know what’s coming next. “I promise I’ll call you if things get worse, but I really can’t be distracted with you here, Dad. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

There wasn’t anyone in the office, or in Paula’s office, either. You can bet lights went on in both. I shuddered a little when I passed the door to the basement stairs. I sure as hell wasn’t going down there. That’s what a TSTL character would do. Or was
not
going downstairs what made me Too Stupid to Live? Either way, there was no chance I was checking my basement.

“Of course you should say something,” Dad answered. “I’ll make a deal with you. Call me twice every day to let me know you’re all right. First time I’m ready to go to lunch or to bed and I haven’t heard from you, I’m getting in the car. No questions asked. Fair?”

It occurred to me that he could call
me
twice a day, but that would surely be worse than the way he proposed; my father has the worst sense of timing on the planet. It was one of the reasons I hadn’t had sex in more than a year. He had a knack of calling whenever things were getting interesting, and yet I knew his interruption had to be completely unintentional. Dad never worked for the NSA.

“Fair enough,” I answered, since it was the best deal I was going to get. Calling Dad twice a day wouldn’t be that
bad when it was for one purpose. I could just get him on the phone, say, “I’m fine,” and he’d let me go almost immediately.

“I think it’s best we don’t tell your mother,” he said, and then thought over what he’d said. “That’s not a divorce thing, Rache.”

I had saved my bedroom for last. This was a twofold decision: I thought it would make sense to end there so I could just go to sleep and try to forget the day, and also, if there were someone in my bedroom, I especially didn’t want to know.

There wasn’t. That was not especially unusual, but tonight I was glad of it.

“I get that it’s not a divorce thing,” I told my father, “and telling Mom is the last thing I’d want to do. She’d probably blame it on either the government or the lack of fiber in my diet, and I don’t need to hear theories about either of those.”

“A wise choice,” Dad said.

I kept him on the phone, talking about pretty much nothing at all, for as long as I could, just to have a comforting voice there whenever I stopped talking. But after a while, I was tired, Dad was out of things to say, and Sunny was still dead. We said good night.