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  Judge Menendez sat back. “All right. I think there is enough evidence present to deny your motion for dismissal, Mr. Sanders. So let’s proceed. The defendant will rise.”

  I thought Sanders was going to raise another objection, but he saw the look in the judge’s eyes and instead turned his gaze to Duffy, who was looking positively entranced. Sanders gestured for him to stand, and Duffy nodded, remembering that he was indeed the defendant here.

  “How do you plead?” the judge asked.

  Sanders nodded toward Duffy, who seemed to be thinking about it. “Oh. Um, not guilty, Your Honor,” he said. He grinned when he said it as if pleased with himself for getting his lines right.

  Judge Menendez looked at him for a moment after that and then drew a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll set this case for trial. Are there any arguments regarding bail?”

  “The state opposes bail for the reasons we stated before,” Reilly said. “We believe the defendant to be a flight risk.”

  “There is no chance Mr. Madison is going anywhere but home to New Jersey, where he is easily located,” Sanders argued. “He will be available for any proceedings the court deems necessary. We feel bail should be set and should be set low, Judge.”

  The woman on the bench regarded Duffy carefully. “Mr. Madison,” she said, “do you plan on trying to avoid your trial?”

  “I would not miss it for the world,” Duffy said sincerely. “I am looking forward to it.”

  “Uh-huh.” Judge Menendez looked at him a while longer. “Is there someone here who can vouch for Mr. Madison, Counselor?”

  Sanders stood up again. “Yes, Your Honor. Mr. Preston of the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, who supervises Mr. Madison, is present in the courtroom.” He looked toward Ben, who stood up.

  “Mr. Preston, how long have you known Mr. Madison?” the judge asked.

  “About five years,” Ben told her.

  Judge Menendez sighed softly. “That number again.” She looked at Ben. “Do you consider him to be reliable?”

  “Almost to a fault,” Ben said. “He gets to work before I do. He sometimes stays after I leave. If I ask him to show up somewhere in a half hour, he’s there in fifteen minutes. And he keeps his word, Judge. If Duffy says he’ll do something, he will do it, and you don’t even have to think about it again.”

  The judge seemed to take that into account. “All right,” she said. “Mr. Reilly, I’m going to grant bail and set it at one hundred thousand dollars.”

  I gasped. Ben, sitting back down next to me, said, “He can pay a ten percent cash bond.”

  Ten thousand dollars? Cash?

  Reilly looked irritated but said nothing and sat in his chair at the prosecutor’s table fiddling with a pen. He seemed anxious for the proceedings to conclude, perhaps so he could get in a round of golf before it got dark.

  “This case is remanded for hearing at a date to be set,” Judge Menendez said and actually hit her gavel on the pad in front of her. The bailiff shouted, “All rise!” and everybody stood as the judge left the courtroom. I thought she was shaking her head in disbelief as she went, but that could be my writer’s mind embellishing. It does that on occasion.

  As soon as we could, Ben and I made it to the defense table, where Duffy was still looking around like a four-year-old seeing the Magic Kingdom for the first time, and Sanders was filing documents away in his briefcase. The law did not appear to have heard of electronic data.

  Another officer of the court, one with a gun strapped to his hip, approached just as we made it to the table. He reached out a hand to Duffy.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Duffy as he stood to go with the trooper. “Is there anything I can bring you?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Duffy said. “I’ll be with you shortly.”

  Huh? He was being led off to jail. “You will?”

  “Certainly. As soon as I can get to my wallet, I will pay the bail, and I’ll meet you outside.” Duffy pointed toward the front of the courthouse as if I didn’t know where outside was.

  “Ten thousand dollars?” I said in disbelief.

  Duffy stopped for a moment, making the trooper turn and look at him. “The judge said one hundred thousand,” he said, correcting me.

  The trooper took his arm. “It’s ten percent bond for cash,” he told Duffy.

  “Oh, very well then,” Duffy told us. “As soon as I can get to my ATM card, I will be right with you.”

  Ben and I looked at each other. What was he saying?

  “It’s ten thousand dollars,” I told Duffy. Maybe he was so overwhelmed that he wasn’t going the math in his head.

  “Yes,” he said as they made it to the door. “That should not be a problem.” And he left right behind the trooper. He might have been on the absolute best middle school field trip ever.

  I looked at Ben. “It should not be a problem?” I echoed.

  He looked straight ahead and watched Duffy disappear through the door. “I’m going to start asking him for investment advice.”

  We met Duffy outside the municipal building twenty minutes later.

  He was, as before, almost completely unperturbed, treating his arraignment like an amazingly interesting piece of theater that had been arranged strictly for his edification. I mean, the man was whistling when he walked out through the front door.

  “It’s getting late,” he said by way of greeting. Not thanks for coming and showing support or oh my god, do you think I’ll go to jail for life? No. “Perhaps we should make dinner plans, and I should book a room at the hotel near you.”

  “You’re buying that one,” Ben said. “Maybe both. Where’d you get all this money?”

  “It’s not that much,” Duffy said, as if that answered the question. “Besides, I will get it back when I am exonerated. Shall we?”

  So we did. We went back to the hotel and booked Duffy a room after some anxiety—the desk clerk was claiming they were booked up and offered to put a rollaway bed in the room with Ben and me until he saw the look on my face. He had no luggage, of course, so a visit to a clothing store was going to be in order, but Duffy suggested dinner first and said that since Ben and I had come to Poughkeepsie on his behalf, he would indeed pay the tab at the restaurant.

  Unfortunately, I did not have the wherewithal to ask the hotel concierge what the most expensive place in town might be.

  We ended up at a soul food place with a very extensive bar and live jazz music. Duffy, a vegetarian, had a little trouble finding an entrée but managed with a large salad and vegetarian gumbo. Ben went with the baby back ribs, and I asked for some fried chicken and waffles because that’s what you do. If I exploded from all the food, I wouldn’t have to write a thousand words when I got back to the hotel room, which seemed like incentive enough that evening.

  Ben dove right in as soon as the orders were placed. “You seem awfully calm for a guy who’s facing a lifetime in prison,” he told Duffy.

  “Certainly, because I expect not to spend any time in jail at all,” Duffy said. “There is no evidence against me that will stand up in court for more than ten seconds. The clumsy attempt to make me seem like the culprit is really not worthy of our attention, to be blunt.”

  “How can you be that sure?” I asked. “The judge wasn’t convinced.”

  “The judge would have to be overwhelmed to dismiss the charges without any hearing at all,” Duffy said. “She was skeptical enough, and besides, she would not be hearing the case if it was brought to trial anyway. Her job was to see to the arraignment, and that is what she did. I thought she was quite fair.”

  Ben shook his head, perhaps to clear it a little. “Duffy, how could your fingerprints have gotten on that gun? Were you here in Poughkeepsie five years ago at the time Damien and Michelle were shot?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” I told him. “You honestly don’t know where you were five years ago; you have no memories that go back before that.”

&n
bsp; “Because I did not yet exist,” Duffy said as if it made perfect sense. “You had not written me into existence yet.”

  “Do you understand how that’s going to sound on the witness stand?” I asked him.

  “I doubt it will come up.”

  Luckily, our drinks had been ordered and delivered, because I think Ben needed the scotch he was taking in. “You’re always driven by science and fact,” he told Duffy. “How can you think that you just rose out of the dust by yourself? Certainly you have to have a theory at least on the physics of what you think happened.”

  “I have nothing on which to base my research,” Duffy admitted. “There are no verifiable cases I know of in which characters from fiction suddenly appeared in physical form. So I can’t make any claims based on science now. But I can speculate on how those fingerprints might have shown up on the gun that shot Michelle Testaverde.”

  Aha. “How?” I asked.

  “They didn’t. There is no reliable way to transfer fingerprints from one object to another that clearly intact.” Duffy took a sip of the diet cola he’d ordered, because in addition to being a vegetarian, he is a killjoy. “The only reasonable explanation is that the records of the fingerprints were falsified.”

  “So the reports of the detectives and the forensics lab were changed to make it look like your fingerprints were on the gun?” Ben said. Now he was a cop working a case.

  “That is my theory,” Duffy said. “Although I must admit I have no basis for speculation on the motive someone in the police department might have had to make those alterations in the reports.”

  Our meals arrived just then, and we dug in. Even Duffy, whose day had included being let out of police custody and then being put back into police custody only to be let out on bail, a twelve-hour cycle that would exhaust an actual human being, seemed enthusiastic about the plant-based repast in front of him. So there wasn’t much shop talk for a few minutes.

  Finally, Ben took a break from his pig-based dinner and stopped to wipe his chin, which was fortunate. “Louise Refsnyder told us that if you want something fixed in the Poughkeepsie PD, you have to see Phillip Dougherty,” he told Duffy. “Why would the sergeant have a grudge against you?”

  “He might not.” I intercepted the question because I’d already been giving it some thought. “But someone who does have a grudge, or at least wants to be scratched off the suspect list, might have gotten to Dougherty and encouraged him to make some changes in the evidence records.”

  “You think Dougherty took a bribe to falsify records?” Ben seemed stunned, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I was pouring maple syrup on fried chicken. “He could go to jail for that in any number of ways.”

  “It seems the most logical explanation,” Duffy agreed, chewing. “And it opens a number of possibilities.”

  “What kind of possibilities?” Ben asked.

  “One can always trace the money back to the source, and that is the way to determine which of our suspects might be the one interested in diverting attention now that the crime has resurfaced,” Duffy told him. “If we can determine whose bank account might have suffered a significant deduction lately, we might have some idea of a direction.”

  The sun was just starting to go down, but I knew Paula and I knew how she operated, or more to the point, how dedicated she was to working. Her actual methods were probably better left unexamined, at least closely.

  I texted her quickly: Check bank records on following names. Look for big deductions. She responded within seconds after I sent a second text with the names in question.

  “What are you doing?” Ben asked.

  “You don’t want to know, necessarily.”

  But Duffy was in full Sherlock mode, to the point that I half expected him to don a deerstalker and start smoking a pipe. He did neither.

  “If we can trace the money . . . but we’ll have to know how much was involved. What do we know about this Sgt. Dougherty?”

  “Nothing specific,” Ben said. “Louise said a cop she dated, who she would not name, had said if you wanted something fixed in town, you went to Phil Dougherty.”

  “But what was interesting,” I said, thinking out loud, “was that both Rod Wilkerson and Walt Kendig mentioned having a friend on the police force we could call if we needed help. They both seemed eager to use their influence, like we would be impressed with them for being so well connected.”

  “So Wilkerson, Kendig, and Refsnyder all had a contact on the police force?” Duffy seemed fascinated. He stopped spearing bits of salad.

  “It’s not that small a town,” Ben said, although he kept eating. Being a vegetarian is very noble, but fun? I didn’t have enough data to make a determination, Duffy would say. “It’s not Mayberry. Everybody doesn’t know the sheriff.”

  Duffy chewed over the information, not the lettuce. “It is something of a coincidence that all three mentioned a police connection, even if they have all lived here for quite some time. Do you think there was some diversion involved? Were they trying to draw your attention away—”

  He stopped talking, and a look of complete understanding came over his face.

  “What?” Ben had no doubt seen this happen before. “What do you know?”

  “The money wasn’t paid to get me arrested and convicted,” Duffy said. “Whoever is behind this—and it could be one or all of the suspects we’ve discussed—knows the evidence against me won’t hold up. Nobody believes I killed Michelle Testaverde, and no one thinks I’m going to jail for doing so.”

  “So why go through all the trouble and expense of framing you?” I asked.

  Duffy regarded me with a look. “If you were writing this story, what would the motivation be?”

  A lesson? Now? There was no point in fighting it. I gave the question some thought. “The idea wasn’t to get you arrested,” I said. “It was to get you out of the way.”

  “Precisely,” Duffy said. “And doing so had the added benefit of getting Ben and you distracted enough to be where the killer would want you to be. At the police station and not where something else was going on.”

  “What?” I asked. There’d be no lesson on this one.

  “We can’t say yet,” Duffy answered. “The point was to get us all away from someone’s activities today.”

  “We were at Louise’s house while you were in the cell,” Ben pointed out. “So Louise is still in play.”

  It was an unfortunate turn of phrase, but I let it go. “So where does that leave us?” I asked.

  “Something else might be happening,” Duffy answered. “I would advise that neither of you ask for a dessert menu. We have work to do.”

  Chapter 28

  Paula texted me back when I was standing in the bushes on the corner of a property across the street from Rod Wilkerson’s house. I had the phone on vibrate so there was no loud sound, but I still started a little violently at the shock of the sudden movement and the slight buzzing. Not that I thought anyone could hear it from across the street.

  Duffy, Ben, and I had split up the three Poughkeepsie contacts we had for a kind of stakeout. It had been—of course—Duffy’s idea.

  “After all the activity of the day and the obvious pains someone is taking to cover up the death of Michelle Testaverde, it is not an enormous leap to suspect one or more of these people could be involved in the crime,” he’d begun in the parking lot of the barbecue place we’d left hastily. “There are three people in town whom we know had some contact with the victims in these murders, and each of them has behaved suspiciously in some way when we questioned them. It might also have been worthwhile to watch Barry Spader and Sgt. Dougherty, but Barry is in Virginia, and the sergeant is working the night shift at the police station. That makes the surveillance simpler since there are three of us and three of them.”

  Simpler. The man thought that was simpler.

  It led to us splitting up nonetheless. Duffy and Ben were trailing Walt and Louise, respectively. That was largely d
ue to the fact that those two Poughkeepsie residents lived within two blocks of each other while Rod lived on the other side of town, and that meant the person with the car (that’s me) would be better utilized at his house. I wasn’t crazy about Ben watching Louise in her house at night, but I do admit to some sense of payback that Walt was under surveillance when he didn’t know it. Karma is a crime fiction writer.

  I don’t know about the two guys, but I was standing in the bushes as the temperature started to drop just a little and wondering what I was doing there. For one thing, I really had no sense of what it was I should be looking for. The shades were drawn in all of Rod’s windows, and there were lights in both front rooms. Contrary to the 1950s song, there were no silhouettes on the shades.

  I was watching a house. They don’t tend to do much.

  So when Paula texted, alarming though it was for a moment, I felt a little bit of relief from the tedium. Watching a house is not all that dissimilar to watching grass grow, except that the grass is actually doing something, so if you are crazy enough to watch for days, you’ll see a difference. Houses will deteriorate on their own, but it’ll take years.

  I got my phone out of my pocket as it buzzed and looked at the message, which read, No huge withdrawals but am on to something and will get back to you. Paula is an information tease. If she said she was looking into something and implying it might get interesting, you (or at least I) could count on significant data coming soon. It gave me a ray of light to hope for while the sun went down over Rod Wilkerson’s house.

  Rod had a driveway with a four-year-old Honda Accord in it. It seemed odd because he made at least part of his living selling real estate, and realtors tend to have larger cars, SUVs, and the like to accommodate people shopping for houses more comfortably. Maybe Rod was a bad real estate agent. Somebody had to be.

  Ben, Duffy, and I had established a text group before we’d split up so we could all communicate easily. Duffy had objected to the idea of our breaking radio silence, but Ben said we needed to be alerted immediately when something happened at any of the locations under watch, and Duffy, even in this unofficial investigation, deferred to Ben.