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  “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 scree
n.

  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:

  Seen enough?

  “That’s not good,” Ben said.

  Chapter 15

  There just wasn’t any point in continuing that evening. Ben drove me back to where I’d left my car—you meet in a public place on a first date, even with a law enforcement official with dark hair and blue eyes—and I went home, with plenty of thoughts in my head and none of them pleasant.

  I breathed a sigh of relief when my front door was actually locked, and I managed to make it all the way into my office without scaring the living crap out of myself. One must be grateful for small favors.

  There was a sticky note on my computer screen from Paula, who had still been there when I’d left for my wildly romantic evening of suspects and threatening e-mails. It read, “More info on ‘Duffy.’ See you AM.” Paula goes to sleep early and generally does not have madmen chasing her unless she wants them to, which she rarely does.

  So I revised exactly two pages of my manuscript and was immediately ready for bed. I took off my makeup, washed up, and went to bed. I believed that it had been a full day.

  My first order of business the next morning was indeed to call Paula for the latest on my character wannabe. Duffy said he’d be coming at ten; I got up at eight thirty because . . . well, because Paula was at my door at eight thirty. She’d probably been up since five; going to bed early means getting up early, like Ben Franklin said.

  “I assume you’re here to tell me more,” I began.

  “Are you okay?” Paula asked. “You look gravelly.”

  She wasn’t used to dealing with me before a more sociable hour. And I remembered that I hadn’t told her about the nut who was cyberstalking me now. So I told her, and once she recovered, I said, “So this is what I sound like when I spent much of the night thinking about a crazy person who likes to send me e-mails,” I said. “Especially when I have another crazy person trying to protect me from him. What can you tell me to alleviate my fears?”

  “Not much.”

  “That’s not helpful.”

  “Well, maybe this is: I can’t tell you anything that’s going to make you more fearful, either.”

  “It’s a start,” I said. “What’d you find out?” If I kept asking, there was a distinct possibility she might actually tell me.

  “Nobody ever seems to have heard of Duffy Madison before four years ago,” Paula reported. “People from his high school—teachers who must have had him in class at some point—don’t have any memories of him. I can’t find a record of who his parents were or even whether they’re still alive. This is a man who truly sprang from your imagination onto the streets of Hackensack.”

  “You didn’t come here this early just so you could say that,” I suggested. “You’re holding back for effect, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe a little,” she said guiltily. “There are two interesting leads. One is his college yearbook; he went to Oberlin in Ohio. And in his yearbook, he’s listed as having been a director for a section of Model UN.”

  Try as I might, I couldn’t really make a significant connection there. “Model UN?”

  “Model United Nations.” Like that helped.

  “I didn’t think it was Model Unwanted Nitwits. How does that help us find out something about this guy?” When I was talking to Paula, I stopped thinking of him as “Duffy” and went back to “unnamed maniac.”

  “Think about it,” she urged. “He was helping high school kids get through a mock session of the United Nations. He was in charge of some of them. It’s not something that can be done alone in a room from far away. Somebody had to see him.”

  “You appear to be taking this really personally,” I pointed out.

  “I have the scent of blood,” she said.

  “You said there were two things. What’s the other one?”

  Paula was grinning when she said, “There’s some indication that he might have gone to the senior prom.”

  This was getting a little scary. “Remind me never to get on your bad side,” I told Paula.

  “It’s not pretty.”

  I thanked Paula, and seeing that I was a work in need of much progress, she left. I was showered and dressed by the time Duffy showed up in the driveway. I had decided to be outside waiting for him. He’d been in the house before, but I wasn’t comfortable with him coming back just now. Not until Paula found out who his prom date had been.

  “Do you really think this trip is necessary?” I asked him as I buckled in.

  “We still have no strong leads to the location where Ms. Bledsoe might have been taken,” he said. “We have to follow every possible idea until something suggests itself.”

  I studied him as he drove. He was intense without being tense. He was all concentration without seeming like he was obsessed. He was all business without being emotionless. He was a perfect model for the character I write regularly. Observing him would be a terrific tool for future books. It’s not always easy to come up with new things for Duffy. And yet, here was Duffy in front of me, flesh and blood. I could ask him anything.

  What I finally decided on was, “How can you remember nothing before four years ago?”

  “Do you remember before you were born?” he asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s like that.”

  “How can you explain your existence? It’s not like every character every author ever wrote is now walking around living a slightly different life that author imagined for him.”

  “How do you know? Maybe we’re all characters that were imagined by an immense author and everything we do is fiction.” Duffy never moved his gaze from the road, never referred to notes, had no GPS on.

  “Very metaphysical . . .”

  “Duffy. Duffy Madison. Nice to meet you.” So he did have a sense of humor. My Duffy always had.

  “Surely you can understand how weird this is for me,” I said.

  “Imagine how I feel. Last Friday, I had no idea you existed. I thought, like you do, that I must have undergone some hideous trauma that my mind insisted on blocking out. I spent a year with a therapist trying to uncover that lost memory. But it wasn’t there. Now I know why.”

  This was going to be a long ride, and the distance wasn’t even very far. “How can you make that leap?” I asked. “There are a million other explanations ahead of the idea that you just came into being because I typed some words on an iMac.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like maybe that wasn’t a great therapist. Like maybe it wasn’t some emotional experience you were trying to block out. Maybe you got hit really hard on the head.”

  “Where’s the scar?”

  “Under your hair; what do I know?”

  There was silence for a while. “If you were writing this scene, what would happen now?” Duffy asked.

  “You and me in the car? I don’t write science fiction.”

  He was agitated enough to steal a half-second glance at me before he stared once again into the distance. “You write stories in which a character with my name—” He stopped himself. “—in which I investigate cases of abduction. Ms. Bledsoe has been missing more than four days. We have no substantial leads. What should I do now?”

  I closed my eyes. It was typical of Duffy, in either incarnation, to foist the responsibility onto me. “You’re asking me how to find Sunny?”

  He nodded without turning. “What we know is that she was home five nights ago. We know that because her sister saw her there that night. We know she was in her Ocean Grove bungalow within the last three days, because her phone was found there and it was still holding a charge. We know she had received a series of threatening e-mails and had failed to report them to any authorities.”

  “And we know that she was seeing a guy named Brad that she was really excited about,” I added.

  Duffy shook his head. �
�We don’t know that. We know that another author, someone who knows Ms. Bledsoe, said that was the case. Until we can substantiate the suggestion, we don’t actually know that to be the fact.”

  “Fine. Any progress on finding this Brad guy?” I had opened my eyes a while back; had I forgotten to mention that? Duffy was calm, but small, dark circles under his eyes and dryness in his lips indicated it had been a while since he’d slept well. He always did get emotionally involved in his investigations.

  “We don’t have much to go on,” he answered. “Ms. Bledsoe’s sister has never heard of the man, and neither has her ex-husband.”

  “Sunny is divorced?”

  “Yes. I’ve told you that before.”

  “But before I knew Julia Bledsoe was Sunny Maugham.”

  Duffy did not address that directly. “She was married to a man named Zachary Wharton for seven years. They’ve been divorced for four. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.” Duffy’s tone was not accusatory; it was more in the area of perplexed. “I thought the two of you were friends.”

  “Well, we were professional friends. Not even. Acquaintances, really. You know how it is: There are friends, and there are friends.”

  There was no irony in Duffy’s voice. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. I resolved to write some friends for him as soon as possible. I might be able to shoehorn in at least one when I got back to my revisions.

  “I’m guessing Zachary is not a suspect in the abduction,” I said.

  “It would be odd if he’d kidnapped and murdered three other women just to warm up for this one,” Duffy agreed. “But we haven’t eliminated any suspects yet, since we have so little to go on. Still, I have met Mr. Wharton, and he is considerably taller than the man in the convenience store video.”

  “You met him? What’s he like?” Duffy reads things by observing people; he can tell you more about yourself than your spouse. There are times that can be incredibly valuable.

  “He’s a forty-seven-year-old venture capitalist who spent six months in prison for insider trading fifteen years ago. He is meticulous in his manner of dress, scrupulous about his conversation, and emotionally distant, probably as the result of a difficult upbringing. He says he has not seen Ms. Bledsoe in almost a year, has no reason to be upset with her, no longer pays her alimony because her income is higher than his, and has no idea who might have a grudge against her.”