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  “Are they going to question him more tonight?” Ben was being professional even if he was just a touch impaired. I’m sure Sanders didn’t notice it, and if I hadn’t known Ben for a little while, I probably wouldn’t have, either.

  “No,” said the attorney. “They know better than to ask him anything without me there, and I’m not there.”

  “Where are you?” Ben asked. It wasn’t the first question I would have asked, but he was an investigator, and I write for a living. The thousand words for today were looming in my office as soon as I cleaned up the mac and cheese I’d made myself. They don’t call it comfort food for nothing.

  “I’m at home having dinner with my wife.” Sanders sounded a trifle put off by the question, as if it was odd that Ben would ask and was criticizing him for not being with his client. I’d had roughly the same thought, since it was plausible that Duffy wouldn’t have to spend the night in jail if the questioning ended sooner. “It’s a courtesy that I’m calling you tonight. I could have waited until tomorrow morning and given you a more complete report.”

  “What’s going to happen in the morning?” I said. There was no point in getting these two guys to butt heads over the phone tonight. Women were not put on this planet to be buffers between men. It’s a side service we sometimes offer while we plot our takeover of the world. Go ahead. Assume I’m kidding.

  “According to the cop I spoke to, they have some additional concerns that will take overnight to confirm. Right now, I’ve gotta tell you, they don’t have much of anything on Duffy.” He was already calling the guy Duffy. It had taken me three days to come up with that name, and now people were using it within five minutes of meeting him. I wasn’t clear on whether to be flattered or annoyed.

  “What do they have?” Ben sort of demanded. “Why did they bring him in to begin with? They think he killed this woman Michelle Terranova?”

  “Testaverde,” Sanders corrected him. Maybe he was beginning to notice that Ben had visited the bar in his home tonight. “And I don’t know whether they actually think Duffy shot her. What they have is circumstantial. They were supposedly in the high school here at the same time, although nobody can find Duffy’s records. He was here asking questions about her husband who disappeared right about the same time Michelle got shot. It was a five-year-old cold case, and he was poking around in it.”

  “That makes him suspicious?” I said. “On what planet does asking about a disappearance make you a suspect in a murder?”

  “It’s the fact that it was such an old case.” It was Ben, not Sanders, who answered me. “Some guys want to be the genius, you know, solve the case the cops couldn’t solve so they’re seen as a hero. They commit the crime and then wait for it to be solved. Sometimes it doesn’t get solved, and they get tired of waiting.”

  “That’s the theory this Dougherty guy was using,” Sanders said. “But I think they’re grasping at straws. They want to look like they finally solved something, and that’s the way—”

  “Wait,” I said. “Sgt. Dougherty is the cop who brought in Duffy? Sgt. Phillip Dougherty?”

  “Yeah,” Sanders answered. “How’d you know that?”

  “He was the cop Duffy and I were talking to when we first got to Poughkeepsie,” I told him. “It’s a wonder they didn’t come and arrest me, too.”

  “Well, they have one more thing on Duffy,” Sanders said. “Apparently, he knew where the gun was hidden.”

  I heard Ben draw breath sharply. “The murder weapon?” he asked.

  “Yeah. The pistol that killed Michelle Testaverde. He said he knew where it was, and after five years of looking, his guess was right on the money.”

  “Where was it?” Ben asked.

  But I already knew. “It was in a small compartment in the ceiling of the apartment where Damien Mosley used to live,” I said. “All you would have to do is open a little box in the ceiling, and you’d find the gun.”

  There was silence on both their phones. “You’d better not tell that to the cops up here,” Sanders advised. “Then they actually might come down there and arrest you, too.”

  “How did you know that?” Ben asked me.

  “I’ll tell you later.” Then I said to Sanders, “It’s not because I shot Michelle. Because I didn’t.”

  “Imagine my relief.” He went on to say something about his wife holding dinner, promised to call us in the morning, and hung up, leaving Ben and me on the phone by ourselves.

  We both let out a sigh at the same time. “Your friend Duffy has us both in knots,” Ben said. His s wasn’t slurred, but he wasn’t fooling anybody.

  “My friend? The guy showed up at my door and practically said I was his mommy.” There was a silence. Neither of us wanted to hang up and be alone with our thoughts, I guessed.

  “So what about that gun?” Ben asked. “How did you know it was up in some ceiling?”

  “Duffy wanted to look in that little notch when we were looking at Damien Mosley’s old apartment,” I told him. “I said the woman who was living there now had been gracious enough in letting us into the place and we should leave her alone. She agreed with me, and eventually I got Duffy to leave.”

  Another long pause. “I’m going to go ahead and say it,” Ben said.

  But I knew what “it” was. “Honestly, I have no idea,” I said.

  “No idea of what?”

  “Whether or not Duffy actually killed Michelle Testaverde,” I told him. “Was that the trauma, the event that made him become Duffy Madison? Is the guy at the bottom of the ditch somebody else, and the man we know as Duffy used to be Damien Mosley? Did he kill Duffy Madison, the one that was in the Poughkeepsie High School yearbook? I really don’t know.”

  There was another long, pregnant pause. “Do you want to go up there right now?” Ben asked.

  “I’ll pack a bag and come pick you up,” I told him. There was no way I was letting him drive.

  Chapter 21

  It wasn’t a huge surprise that the hotel where Ben had booked us a room had a similar one available a night early. Poughkeepsie is a nice town, but it was the middle of the week and not exactly a tourist hotspot at the moment.

  We checked in and unpacked. I like to unpack in a hotel room even if I’m just going to be there for one night. I don’t want to have to rummage through my suitcase every time I need something, and I get to hang some stuff up.

  Because I’d driven all the way up (Ben was fairly sober, but I wasn’t taking any chances), I had not been able to take out my laptop and log the thousand words for the day, so that was my first order of business after putting everything I’d brought into one of the hotel’s drawers. Ben was basically living out of his case, which was smaller than mine and probably contained nothing more than socks and briefs. Or boxers. I didn’t find out.

  We were on a mission. The problem was, we didn’t know what the mission required us to do.

  Did we want to save Duffy? Normally, that would be the priority when two people came to deal with the possible imprisonment of a mutual friend. But the trip from Adamstown had clarified one thing for both of us: We didn’t know enough about Duffy Madison to definitively say he was not the killer of Michelle Testaverde (Mosley?) and possibly the guy at the bottom of the ditch in North Bergen.

  “I’ve worked more than ten cases with Duffy,” Ben had said earlier from the passenger seat. I could have dictated the thousand words to him to type into my laptop, but I hate dictating. I don’t like hearing my words read aloud even when I’m making them up. Three of the Duffy books are available on audio (MP3 or disc, audiobook fans!), and I barely got through the first chapter of the first one. The actor performing the work was wonderful, capturing each character and giving each one a specific voice. It was my words that I couldn’t stand hearing. I put on a Circe Link/Christian Nesmith CD and never turned back. “I don’t know anything more about him than what happened in those cases,” Ben continued. “The guy never opens up about anything. Before you said he believe
s you made him up, I had no idea just how crazy Duffy is.”

  “Maybe he’s not crazy,” I said. Before Ben could be skeptical out loud, I added, “Maybe he’s just so traumatized by something that his logical nature—and we’ve both seen that he has a logical nature—decided he needed to be someone else to deal with the horror of it. Maybe he stumbled across one of my books, and that’s how he got to be Duffy Madison.”

  “Explain the Duffy Madison in the Poughkeepsie yearbook,” Ben said. He sat back and closed his eyes. I understood the impulse.

  “If I could explain any of this stuff, we’d have only half the problems we have right now,” I told him. I wasn’t sure I knew what I was talking about, but it sounded good. Sometimes that’s all dialogue does, I’ve discovered, and sometimes that’s enough. “I don’t know why that name is in the yearbook. Nobody, and I mean nobody, from that class remembers anything about a Duffy Madison being there.” I told him about Louise Refsnyder, who had aggressively not dated Duffy in high school.

  “We’ll figure it out when we get there,” Ben said, and thirty seconds later, he was snoring lightly. I turned the volume down on Circe and Christian. A little.

  Now in the hotel room, which luckily had a desk, I set up my laptop while Ben, having changed into sweats in the bathroom, stretched out on one of the beds. “Do you mind if I put on the TV?” he asked, pointing with the remote, which seemed to limit my options for answering.

  “Nah, it’s okay.” I got a pair of earbuds out of my coat and plugged them into the laptop. It’s instrumental music when I’m writing so no words can catch in my head. So I opened the iTunes playlist I have marked “Classical” and set the controls to shuffle. Ben turned on the TV to a basketball game, and I turned my attention to my computer screen. This time I chose only to read the last paragraph I had written the day before simply because I didn’t think I could bear to go back any further.

  About 237 words in—give or take—I was still struggling for plot, but the characters who weren’t Duffy seemed to be coming along all right. He was offscreen in this particular scene, and that made it easier for me to write. With flesh-and-blood Duffy sitting in a cell for the night, I preferred not to think about him and concentrated instead on Lt. Antonio and her boss, Captain Reynolds, discussing a clue that Duffy had unearthed at the scene of the crime.

  It wasn’t easy—it never is—but I was engrossed enough that I almost didn’t notice when my cell phone, sitting next to the laptop on my desk, buzzed with a text message. Ben actually had to point over and say fairly loudly, “Your phone.” I picked it up and looked at it.

  The message was from Walt Kendig, and it read, Damien’s wife Michelle murdered 5 yrs ago. I hear suspect in custody. Some people write text messages like complex rubrics of symbols that need to be deciphered. Others write them like telegrams. Walt fell into the latter category.

  I felt a quick pang of guilt for not letting Walt know Ben and I were in town, but I just didn’t have the energy for him and 763 more words all in one night. I texted back, I know. Will call you tomorrow. I figured it would satisfy Walt that the famous author was still interested in talking to him (sort of) and indicate it was late and I was tired and he should, you know, leave me alone until the next day.

  I had written only another thirty-six words (only 727 to go) when it became clear Walt was not going to take a hint. Don’t know who suspect is yet, he sent.

  I chose not to tell him that I did know and decided to ignore the text. Let Walt assume I had gone to bed. Ben looked a little irritated, but maybe his team was losing. It was hard to tell. I know Ben well enough to share a hotel room with two beds in it but not well enough to know which teams he might root for. Which I suppose is an odd sort of relationship, but one that could go in a number of directions, very few of which had anything to do with basketball.

  But Walt was apparently not endowed with the taking-a-hint gene, and he kept going. Michelle shot when Damien left. He shot too? Was Walt asking whether Damien had shot Michelle or if Damien had been shot at the same time as Michelle?

  There comes a time when an exchange of text messages is just a really slow phone conversation. And if I was in fact going get my thousand words added to the manuscript tonight—and I was—I had to get Walt off my back gently but quickly.

  I picked up the phone and called him. “I didn’t want to disturb you,” Walt said. “So I didn’t call, but I’m glad you did. Will this be in your next book?” People never get tired of asking a writer what’s going into her next book. If we knew, writing the novel would be so much easier.

  “I don’t think so, Walt.” I had told Ben about Walt, so he didn’t look incredibly surprised, but he was looking at me and not the TV screen. “How did you find out about the arrest for Michelle’s murder?”

  Ben sat up.

  Walt decided to be coy, which is virtually never a good idea. “Oh, I have my sources,” he said.

  “That’s not good enough, Walt. This is serious. Do you have a friend on the police force?”

  Ben shook his head, indicating you should never give the person you’re asking for information an answer they can simply accept and parrot back to you. In short, don’t give them an easy out.

  “Yes, but I didn’t hear it there,” Walt said, which was a little refreshing. I hadn’t given the store away. “But the city attorney comes to us to do his taxes. I’m not saying he told me anything, but . . .” That was exactly what he was saying.

  “Okay, here’s the thing, Walt,” I said, looking at my screen, which oddly had not accumulated any additional words while I hadn’t been looking. I needed to get back to work before I literally fell asleep on my keyboard. “I knew about the arrest, and I’m working on it. But since you are going to find out anyway, the suspect in custody—just for questioning, not an arrest—is Duffy Madison.”

  Ben’s face showed thought, then approval. Fine. Tell him that much and see what happens.

  “Duffy Madison?” It wasn’t a question, not like Walt couldn’t remember who that person might be. It was a challenge, as if to say that it wasn’t possible Duffy could be a suspect, which I probably would have agreed with. Yesterday. “Aren’t you with Duffy Madison?”

  Did Walt think Duffy and I were an item because I wrote a character he assumed simply had the same name? “No,” I said. “I’m not with Duffy. He’s spending the night in police custody, but I have every reason to think he’ll be released tomorrow morning.”

  But the moment I’d said I wasn’t with Duffy, Ben sprang up from the bed and hustled to the window. He pulled back the drape on one side very carefully and looked out.

  “I’m just . . . surprised, is all,” Walt said. “It never occurred to me that—I mean, I never even met the guy before a couple of days ago. Why would he have wanted to kill Michelle five years ago?”

  It was good covering, but it was covering. I could practically hear Walt sweating through the phone. I didn’t walk over to the window because I thought two people looking out would be much more conspicuous than one, and besides, Ben would tell me what he was seeing. My job, as Ben gestured to me with a rolling hand motion, seemed to be to keep Walt talking on the phone.

  “I really couldn’t say,” I told him. “We haven’t met with the police yet. How well did you know Michelle?”

  “Oh, not very well.” I was trying to hear any noise that might have been in the background on Walt’s end of the call, but he was keeping his phone close to his face apparently. There wasn’t much to go on. “She was on the bowling team, and that’s mostly how I knew her. I didn’t hang out with that crowd in high school. I was two years ahead of them.” He had said that much before, but it had been more convincing then.

  Ben watched out through the window and seemed to be focusing directly ahead. It wasn’t like he was looking around to see if there was something there. He was looking to a certain spot because there was something there, and it was probably Walt.

  But if there was no noise around him,
Walt wasn’t standing out in the hotel parking lot. How had he even found us? How long had he been watching?

  Had he asked if I was with Duffy meaning that he thought I really was with Duffy at that moment? Indicating that he’d watched Ben and me walk into the hotel? If that was the case, he’d been on the trail for a while.

  That wasn’t a very comforting thought.

  Ben didn’t repeat his hand gesture, so I guessed he had seen everything he could, but then he got his cell phone from his pants pocket and pushed a few buttons. Then he pointed the phone toward the window, and I wondered if he was taking a photograph.

  “Can you think of a reason anyone would want her dead?” I asked.

  “Nothing comes to mind,” he answered. “But then I didn’t really know her very well.”

  One of the curses of being a crime fiction writer is that it’s very difficult to stop thinking like a crime fiction writer. So when Walt said he didn’t know Michelle Testaverde well, my first thought was, That’s what the killer would say.

  “Who did know her well?” I asked. “Besides Damien.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Walt said. He sounded nervous, like he was talking faster than he intended to. “Everybody I told you about before. Lou, Rod. Barry, the guy from Rapscallion’s.”

  He’d said Barry had left for California a year ago, at least the third destination someone had mentioned for him. Late enough that he easily could have been around to shoot Michelle. “Do you remember Barry’s last name?” I asked. “Was he in your high school class?”

  “I don’t know. There were a lot of people in our class.” Walt coughed once, and I thought I heard a car go by not far from his phone. “His last name? I really don’t know. You could check with Lou.”

  Yeah, because talking to Louise Refsnyder was definitely on my list of things not to avoid when traveling to Poughkeepsie.

  Ben made a hang-up gesture with his hand, indicating I should end the call. “Thanks for the help, Walt,” I said.

  “Wait!” he called back. “If you’re not with Duffy Madison, who are you with?”