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  “Bingo,” she said.

  Chapter 13

  Paula’s reasoning was logical, but her evidence would have needed an airline ticket to get within driving distance of circumstantial. We both knew that, but we also figured we knew Louise’s motivations.

  That didn’t get us anywhere until we could prove something.

  We brainstormed for about an hour. I actually walked into Paula’s office so she could sit down. I could, too, because Paula has an extra chair in her office that is not covered in papers and assorted detritus. Paula is annoyingly organized, but I try not to hold it against her because it is on my behalf.

  What we (mostly Paula) came up with was this: She would dig into Louise Refsnyder’s (née Mendenhaus) background some more, specifically to see if she could locate the ex-husband who probably didn’t know her that well, just to cover our bases. Paula would also see if anyone else named “Madison” had graduated from Poughkeepsie high school for ten years before or after Duffy did, on the off chance that he’d had a sibling or a cousin we hadn’t considered before.

  I knew he wouldn’t. I wrote Duffy as an only child. His parents were currently living in Oslo, Norway, for reasons I can’t actually remember other than it kept them out of a particular story where their proximity would have been a problem for me. I told Paula to check into that possibility. Who knew? The idea that Duffy Madison would have rung my doorbell the night before would have seemed absurd a year ago. Now I barely flinched when I saw his name on my caller ID.

  My role in our reconstituted efforts to track down the “real” Duffy Madison would be somewhat more focused and a little uncomfortable on my part.

  First, I called my buddy Walt Kendig in Poughkeepsie. This was going to be a recurring theme now that we had some new information on both Louise Refsnyder and Damien Mosley.

  Walt, of course, sounded thrilled to be hearing from me. The idea that people think authors are celebrities is a source of both ego boost and astonishment for me. I love people who write; some of my best friends really and truly are authors. But I know the job, and I know the routine. The idea that anybody would think what I do is in the least glamorous borders on hilarious.

  I told Walt I had some news about Damien because I thought that was the easier way into the conversation. Just asking whether Louise had dated Duffy in high school would have been counterproductive: Walt said he had not socialized with any of the members of his bowling team before he’d been recruited by the bartender at Rapscallion’s, a guy named Barry, who he said later bought the business before leaving town a few years after that.

  After I’d explained Duffy’s discovery, there was a long pause allowing Walt to absorb the information that his friend was probably dead.

  “So he fell down on a rock, huh?” Walt said. “Tough break.” Some people absorb things faster than others; Walt absorbed as quickly as SpongeBob SquarePants.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was apparently having a harder time with the news than Walt, and I’d never actually met Damien Mosley.

  “So I guess that closes the case, huh?” Walt sounded a little disappointed. He was losing his connection to the amazing people he’d met only the day before.

  Might as well give him a ray of hope. “If the investigator was anybody except Duffy Madison,” I said. “He’s going to work this until there’s absolutely no shred of doubt that the guy at the bottom of the hill was Damien and that he definitely died because he fell and suffered the trauma to his head.” Crime fiction writers know not to say, “hit his head on a rock.” We are way more precise than that.

  “Well, is there anything else I can do to help?” Walt asked. I had a sudden urge to scratch him behind the ears and tell him he was a good boy, but technology has not yet devised ear-scratching phone technology. There’s your ticket to millions, app developers. You’re welcome.

  “I did want to ask you about Louise Refsnyder,” I said, as if there were some connection between my inquiry and Damien’s death, which there wasn’t. “Did she ever discuss her old boyfriends with you?” I purposely didn’t say anything more than that because I figured Walt was the kind of guy who wouldn’t ask why I’d brought up the subject. I let him make connections in his own head because there weren’t any in the real world.

  He must have come up with an interesting train of thought. “You mean her ex-husband?” he asked. “I don’t think they were together very long.”

  Before he could ask the dreaded “why” question, I jumped in as I heard the doorbell ring. Paula got up from her desk to investigate. “No, I meant further back. High school. Did she mention a high school boyfriend?”

  I could practically hear Walt thinking. What I did hear was my front door open and the muffled sound of voices in my front hallway. “I don’t remember anything about a high school boyfriend,” Walt said. “Sorry.”

  Before I could ask another question, Paula ushered Duffy into my office and, standing behind him, shrugged her shoulders to indicate she hadn’t been able to dissuade him from coming in. I nodded my acceptance, and Paula retreated to her own lair.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told Walt. “If you think of anything else, please get back to me, okay?” I purposely didn’t use Walt’s name to avoid making Duffy suspicious.

  I hung up, and Duffy looked at me.

  “Damien Mosley was murdered,” he said.

  Chapter 14

  There are few things Duffy Madison enjoys as much as a dramatic pronouncement. He likes to shake things up, and he is an emotional guy, so when he comes across a fact that he believes leads to a “eureka” moment, he tends to play it up to the hilt.

  Of course, I had a few reasons for writing Duffy that way. For one, I didn’t want him to perfectly fit the calculating, almost stoic Sherlock Holmes model; Duffy was going to care desperately about the people he was trying to help. For another, a writer is pretty much always looking for a nice jolting end of a chapter, a way to bring one small piece of the story to a conclusion while enticing the reader to continue turning pages. Losing the reader’s interest is the worst thing an author can do.

  So when Duffy dropped his “murder” bomb in my lap, I had time to consider my reaction because I more or less expected him to be didactic and a touch melodramatic. He had shown up unannounced and had not waited, as he normally would have, outside my office door for permission to enter.

  Also, he hadn’t asked me about the phone call I was ending, one I would bet cash money he knew was about him.

  These were all signs Duffy was going to try for a rise out of me. The real question was whether I should give it to him. I decided against.

  “What makes you think so?” I asked.

  I’m fairly sure I heard Paula chuckle just a bit from her office across the hall, but Duffy did not react to the sound. He was still trying to get a bigger reaction out of me. I’ve found since this version of Duffy emerged from nowhere that it’s productive not to feed his ego all the time because it forces him to try to impress you even more.

  “Ah!” Duffy held a finger up in the air. He seemed positively invigorated by the possibility of a murder investigation. It’s the Holmes thing again; every crime fiction writer in the world is influenced one way or another. “The North Bergen police were kind enough to supply me with the original photographs taken at the scene of Damien Mosley’s death, and I have observed some details they did not take into account originally.”

  (“Observed” isn’t blatantly British, but it is very Sherlock. He’ll often admonish his best friend, “You see, Watson, but you do not observe.” You have to wonder why anybody wants to hang around with this guy.)

  I knew that Duffy wanted me to ask about the pictures, which I was certain he had on his person somewhere. I didn’t want to torture the poor man, but I did want to make a point that I thought needed reiterating.

  “Duffy, you remember I told you I was no longer on this case with you, right?” I said. “I’m not an investigator or a cop, and all I want to do right now
is figure out how to write my next book. I don’t understand why you came here with this lead. Why not go to Ben or someone in North Bergen?”

  Duffy’s eyes flashed just for a moment with absolute astonishment. How could anyone pass up the opportunity to investigate a juicy murder with him? Why wasn’t I as engaged in Damien Mosley’s supposed murder—although if Duffy said it was a murder, I had little doubt that’s what it was—as he was? Duffy hasn’t had much experience with women that I know about (although it would be worth looking into the idea of him having dated Louise Refsnyder), so sometimes he really does find me baffling.

  “Ben is a fine investigator, but he has no jurisdiction in North Bergen,” Duffy stammered for a moment.

  “Neither do I.”

  Duffy regained his composure. “The North Bergen police have been informed, and Detective Lowenstein is considering his options, including the possibility of exhuming Damien’s body for a more detailed examination.”

  Okay, I’d tortured him long enough. “Why don’t you think the ME did a thorough job the first time?” I asked. “What did you see in those photographs?”

  Yes, I knew what I was in for: Duffy reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope. Lucky me, I was going to have a guided tour of the scene where a man who might have been Damien Mosley died, possibly having been murdered. Then I could go back to my own story about a guy being impaled on a fence after falling off his bicycle.

  Crime fiction writers live rich, full lives. They just mostly take place in our heads.

  Duffy looked for a flat surface on which to spread out what I was sure would be somewhat gruesome prints of digital photographs. But we were in my office, which meant there was no such open space to be found.

  “Perhaps we should move to the dining room table,” he suggested.

  I followed him into my dining room, musing as I do periodically on the wisdom of allowing a crazy person into my home often enough that he could lead the way from one room to another. But I walked on behind and waited while Duffy painstakingly arranged the pictures on my dining room table, where I do occasionally eat actual food. I couldn’t wait to see photographs of a guy with his head bashed in on that surface.

  Duffy had laid out the photos as they were numbered on the back by whoever had filed them away in North Bergen. I wasn’t sure there was any rhyme or reason to the numbering, but Duffy clearly was, and I figured he worked more often in this sort of area than I did. He pointed at the first—top left, with twelve pictures arranged in four rows of three each—image.

  “This one shows the area from which Damien fell,” he said.

  I was pleased to note there was no body visible in the picture, although my peripheral vision had noticed more than one shot with a man facedown in the mud to come later in this gruesome collage. So I worked to maintain my focus on the picture Duffy was indicating.

  It looked to me like a fairly low-angle shot of a dirt road with grass to the right side and a hill, or the top of a hill, directly ahead. There were footprints on the dirt going in pretty much every direction and yellow police crime scene tape wrapped on a few trees around the site, isolating it from the rest of the park.

  “So, land. Right?” I said.

  Duffy, now accustomed to my enthusiastic approach to crime busting, did not miss a beat. He pointed at a spot, shiny and white, on the photograph. It looked to me like maybe a tooth in the grass, and I definitely did not want to see that. Not that I have anything against teeth per se, but I didn’t want to think about the implications of finding one in this particular spot under these circumstances.

  “This is the significant area,” Duffy said. As if the pointing hadn’t made that clear. But he didn’t go on.

  “Why?” I asked. I realized questions were simply enablers for a born lecturer like Duffy, but now he’d actually gotten me thinking about the scene. I hadn’t noticed anything all that significant.

  “Do you know what that white object is?” he said. Duffy has an annoying habit (I know, you’re amazed) of answering questions with questions so he can feel he’s actually teaching me how to solve crimes. I don’t want to know how to solve crimes. I want to know how to write my way through a slump.

  “It looks like a tooth,” I answered.

  “It’s not,” he said. That was probably a relief. “The photograph is not especially clear in that area. What you’re seeing is actually smoothed grass, a spot where a shoe slipped and skidded, just a little bit.”

  I was glad it wasn’t a tooth, but I didn’t see how that was going to be significant. “We already knew Damien fell down the hill here,” I reminded Duffy. “So he slipped and then he fell. How does that make it murder? You don’t even know if it’s Damien’s shoe that matted down the grass there. Anybody’s foot could have done that, even one of the crime scene investigators.”

  Duffy smiled. I’d given him the exact response he’d wanted, which meant that I was definitely wrong. He loves showing people where they made mistakes so he can correct them. Why had I made up this character? Well, largely because it never occurred to me we’d actually meet. It was becoming clear I’d been very shortsighted in that regard.

  “It’s true that other people had walked through this area before the crime scene tape was put up,” Duffy said. “There was the young jogger who made the nine-one-one call and the uniformed police officers who had responded. But that skid wasn’t made by Damien Mosley’s shoe because Damien, as you’ll see in subsequent photographs, wasn’t wearing shoes.”

  Huh? “Who goes out for a walk in the park at night barefoot?” I asked. It was really thinking out loud, but Duffy believes every question ever asked is directed specifically at him, so he answered. If I was being honest, I’d expected nothing else.

  “That is a good question,” Duffy said, “but the theory is borne out in this picture here.” He indicated the one immediately to the first photo’s right, a close-up of some mud nearer the edge where Damien—or somebody—had dropped to his death. “See this footprint? It’s very deep, as if the man standing there was trying very hard to hold his position. But it is also clearly that of a barefoot man; at least three toes are distinctly indicated.”

  That was true. Assuming Damien was the person who died here, he had definitely not been wearing shoes when standing on that precipice. “Were there any shoes found nearby?” I asked.

  “Very good, Rachel!” Duffy gushed. “Yes. A pair of New Balance running shoes was found seventy-eight yards south of the edge we’re looking at now, and the size of those shoes is a match for the footprints found here. The owner of those shoes, which had athletic socks stuffed into their toes, was the man who fell to his death here. Damien Mosley.”

  I chose not to argue the point with him at that moment, but we still did not have a positive identification of the man who died that night. Duffy wanted it to be Damien for his own reasons, which might have been clouding his judgment. When there were facts, I’d make my case if necessary. (Hey. Duffy’s character didn’t come from nowhere.)

  “Why do you think he took off his shoes?” I asked. Duffy had a theory for everything.

  “My best guess is that whoever killed him forced him to do so. We don’t have photographs from the area where the shoes were found, but there are small dots of blood here and there on the path, see, like here and here. Very small, but indicative that Damien had cuts on his feet from the rough surface. He did not decide to walk this way without shoes; someone was directing him. But that is just a guess.”

  “I’m still not getting murder from this, Duffy,” I said. “A guy takes off his shoes, walks around in a park, falls down, and hits hit head. It’s odd, I’ll grant you, but so far I’m not seeing how it’s criminal.”

  Duffy pointed to the third photograph. “This is where it gets interesting,” he said. I didn’t see how; it was a picture of the same scene from a medium distance. All I saw were trees and dirt and grass and the trunk of one police cruiser on the right side. But I knew better than
to comment on how truly fascinating the picture was, because Duffy certainly wanted me to so he could show off the crucial detail I had missed. It’s kind of a really sick parlor game.

  Not wishing to be embarrassed, I studied the photograph more closely. I remembered that the photographer was not Duffy, so the angle of the shot might not be relevant to what it was I should be noticing. The lens had been aimed mostly at the ground leading up to the fall, but not so closely that you expected to see the photographer’s shoes. He or she had shot the picture almost straight from eye level, so the dirt and grass were there but so was a hint of the sky (fairly dark) and the trees in the wooded area to the left of the drop. I wondered if a magnifying glass would have revealed something especially significant, but I didn’t have one except as an app on my phone. But I didn’t activate it because my phone was back in my office, and I didn’t want to make a show of it.

  Besides, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to see what Duffy had seen anyway.

  I was just about to throw my hands up and concede defeat when it occurred to me to examine the police car that took up only a small fraction of the frame. Could Duffy think a cop was involved in Damien’s death? But all that appeared on the picture was a standard white car trunk, license plate not visible. I couldn’t see the back window, and the bumper, not surprisingly, was free of stickers. It was a cop car, no frills.

  “I give up,” I sighed. “I don’t see anything that points to a murder. The only interesting thing in the whole picture is that one tree branch.” I pointed to a tree in the background of the photograph. “It’s bent funny.”

  Duffy did not respond with the derisive laughter I had expected in my low-esteem-afflicted writer’s mind. Instead, he beamed at me and nodded his head approvingly. “Very good indeed,” he said. “That is the significant feature.”

  “It is?” He’d caught me by surprise.

  “Of course. Your eye was drawn to the branch. Otherwise this is a pretty standard crime scene photograph without any noticeable abnormalities. Look at the way that branch has broken. What do you think could have caused that?”