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  “You saw me at a friend’s place in New Rochelle. I could have told you I was anywhere.” He was enjoying the idea of fooling us, reveling in the idea that it was so easy to have convinced Ben, Duffy, and me he’d been in Virginia. I decided to start detesting Barry Spader right now.

  “If you didn’t shoot Michelle Testaverde, what’s all the cloak and dagger?” I demanded. Well, asked. “What’s the whole point of manufacturing evidence and framing Duffy if you didn’t do anything wrong?” And before it was out of my mouth, I knew what it was all about, at least up to a point.

  Sure, Barry hadn’t shot Michelle. He loved Michelle. Know who else loved Michelle?

  Damien Mosley.

  I didn’t say it. I wasn’t stupid enough to say, You shot Damien! But Barry probably saw the look on my face and determined exactly what I was thinking. I make up stuff for a living, but I’m not the best liar you ever met in your life, and I’m not great at hiding the thoughts and feelings running through my brain. So it was a decent bet I was showing a certain growing understanding of the situation in front of me.

  “I never said I didn’t shoot anyone,” Barry said.

  But it didn’t add up: If Barry had killed Damien Mosley, he did that in North Bergen, New Jersey. If he hadn’t shot Michelle Testaverde, there was no crime to cover up in Poughkeepsie, New York. So what was the missing piece I wasn’t thinking of right at the moment?

  I’d never seen the door open when I was outside. I was looking at the house from an angle from which the front and side doors were visible. If there was a back door and Barry had used it, I should have seen him walking around the house to come up behind me. So that meant Barry hadn’t been in the house before he’d ambushed me in the street; he’d been coming from somewhere else. I might not have been part of the plan at all.

  That left me with a bad feeling that wasn’t alleviated when Barry motioned me to a chair with the pistol.

  “I have to go outside for just a minute,” he said. “And I wouldn’t want you taking the opportunity to leave before the party’s over.” Why do people with guns always talk like that? I thought it was just a movie thing, but apparently Barry really did want to sound like an evil genius. Or he’d just seen the same movies and figured that was what he was supposed to say.

  I didn’t move, but he pulled back the hammer on the gun, and I realized he didn’t actually need me alive.

  “Sit,” he said. So I sat.

  He continued to aim the gun in my direction while reaching into a side table drawer and pulling out some duct tape with his left hand. It wasn’t the kind of table you’d expect to house home maintenance supplies, and this wasn’t Barry’s house—as far as I knew—so that led to the conclusion that he’d planned to tape someone into a chair tonight. But he hadn’t been expecting me.

  At least he didn’t put tape over my mouth. If nobody in the neighborhood had called the police when there was a gunshot, there was no reason to think my shouting was going to be interpreted as anything but a TV show being played far too loudly.

  Barry finished encasing me in the tufted chair and then put the tape down on the table and put the gun in his jacket pocket. Then, whistling (I swear!), he walked out the back door and disappeared.

  Was this somehow an opportunity? I couldn’t get out of the chair, certainly, and it did seem useless to scream, but could I crab-walk the chair through the front door? Suppose Barry had been lying about coming back. That would be a positive in that he wasn’t actually shooting me, but it would leave me in a very difficult position and would not help Ben and Duffy find me.

  None of that mattered because it was clear in seconds that Barry would be back, and soon. I heard a car door open in the driveway near the back of the house, then I heard a grunt, and the car door slammed again. There was some more grunting, someone exerting himself, and after a short time, the back door opened again.

  Barry walked back into the living room with something slung over his left shoulder. Something large and heavy, based on the noises he made walking into the room. I couldn’t see him until he was entirely back in the living room, and then I saw him unload his burden and lay it on the carpeted floor.

  It was Duffy Madison. And he wasn’t moving.

  Chapter 30

  All in all, this had been a pretty horrible day, and it wasn’t getting any better.

  Barry caught his breath after spreading Duffy out on the rug. He actually put his hands on his thighs and took a few moments to breathe in and out, recovering from the effort. Duffy isn’t a huge man, but he’s not small, and as—I hate to use the expression—dead weight, he certainly wasn’t easy to lift or carry any distance. Barry was stronger than he’d first looked, which also wasn’t exactly good news.

  “What did you do to him?” I said after I had recovered from the sight. I didn’t have to do any heavy breathing, but it was still a shock.

  “Did you people really think I didn’t know you were watching everyone?” Barry sneered. He referred to himself alone. No one helping him. Worth filing away. I was thinking like Duffy. “I knew you’d be watching Walt’s place and Lou’s house. I went by there and caught your pal here by surprise the same way I did with you, firing a gun into not much of anything and letting him think something was going down. He bought it, and he dashed into the house to be the knight in shining armor. I hit him with a fireplace poker.”

  Duffy did indeed have a nasty-looking lump on the side of his head reaching down to his left eye. He showed no signs of consciousness, but his chest was rising and falling, so he was breathing. That was something, although it was questionable how long it would continue.

  Now I was concerned about Ben too. He should have been here by now, or had I lost a sense of time? It was certain I couldn’t reach into my pocket for my phone (because it wasn’t there) to look at the time. Even if I wore a wristwatch, it would be out of my sight range now. “What time is it?” I asked Barry.

  “What do you care?”

  That wasn’t encouraging.

  Okay, let’s come down on the side of optimism and say Ben simply hasn’t had time to walk here from Louise’s house yet. It couldn’t be much longer, could it? I mean, it has to be only a five- or six-minute drive. How many minutes is that in walking? Or running? Had Ben called the police? Why would he, when he thought I’d called them?

  I honestly didn’t want to ask Barry about his dastardly plan. I know in the movies, it’s impossible for the bad guy to dispatch the good guy (they never do) without first explaining everything he plans to do, giving said good guy a chance to figure out the cleverest, least predictable way (if the screenwriter is as good as a crime fiction novelist) to avoid the planned fate. But the truth was, I didn’t want to know what Barry had planned for Duffy and me. Mostly me. But also Duffy. If he never wanted to tell me, that would be fine in my book.

  My book! How was I going to get a thousand words written today? There were only a few hours left, and I was in no position get to a keyboard.

  Writers are nuts.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt to keep Barry talking. Not that I would find out anything particularly interesting, but it would give Ben time to pick up the pace and come rescue us, which was obviously his role in our little melodrama. I get the whole strong-woman-character thing, but at the moment, I was duct-taped to a chair, and that cuts down on a girl’s physical options. Talking was what I did best anyway.

  “Where’s Rod?” I asked him. “What did you do with him to get the house?”

  Barry waved a hand. “He’s fine. I called and told him I was moving back into town and needed a line on a new condo. He’s sitting at the bar in Oakwood right now waiting for me.” He made a sputtery noise with his lips. “Dope.”

  “You’re a swell guy, Barry,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. He was looking around the room as if deciding how to redecorate and paying most of his attention to the floor. Whatever he was thinking, I wanted him to stop thinking it.

  “So you didn
’t shoot Michelle, but you shot Damien,” I said. “How does that make sense?”

  “How much do you weigh?” Barry asked me, and that was the moment I decided to see him rot in a jail cell for the rest of his natural life.

  Rest easy; there was no chance in heaven or on earth I was going to answer that question. I plunged ahead. “You loved Michelle. Did you kill Damien because he was stealing her away from you?”

  That got his attention. He stopped what he was doing, which was stretching Duffy out on the rug flat, and glared at me. “He didn’t steal her away—he killed her because she loved me!” Barry took two steps toward me, his fury reaching the boiling point.

  Perhaps this whole getting-him-to-talk idea had been ill-conceived.

  But once Barry had moved past Duffy to advance toward me, Duffy turned his head slightly and opened his eyes. Well, one of them, anyway.

  He smiled a little and winked at me.

  It was a form of encouragement and reassurance, so I took it. “Damien Mosley killed Michelle Testaverde?” I asked. Largely because it was news to me.

  “That’s right.” Barry was still snarling, but the edge of violence in his demeanor from a moment ago seemed to dissipate. “He thought she loved him, but she kept telling him to scram. He even asked her to marry him—at a bowling alley—and she said no! What more did the guy need?”

  It occurred to me that some people needed to be hit over the head, but since that had already happened to Duffy, who had closed his eyes again should Barry look in that direction, I refrained from suggesting it.

  “So he shot her?” I said.

  I noticed Duffy nod just a little on the floor. He’d known this already. Of course. Even lying with an indentation in his skull, the guy had to show off about what a great deducer he was.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t find out until much later. He said Michelle was moving into his apartment in Jersey, and a van showed up to take all her stuff there. I couldn’t find her, and she wasn’t answering her phone. I knew she didn’t want to marry him, but she wouldn’t answer me. It never occurred to me she was dead.”

  “So what happened?” Where the hell are you, Ben?

  “I went to the place in Jersey to try to talk some sense into her. I mean, if Michelle was marrying Damien just because she thought he had more money than me, I could sell the bar and really get out of here. That’s what I should have done. Then. I should have done it then.” Barry shook his head, reproaching himself. I took note of it. The killer who regretted not acting sooner. It could be poignant even while being menacing. Hey. Everything’s fodder for the work.

  “And when you got there, Michelle wasn’t there, right?” I needed to move the narrative along, which was risky but might give me something to use in my defense against whatever this maudlin nutcase might have in store for me.

  “No. Her clothes, some of them, were there. Damien let me in, but he didn’t want me to look around. I did anyway, and I yelled at him to show me where Michelle was. He said she was shopping. It was September, and all her light jackets were in the closet. She wasn’t out shopping.”

  The clothing was used to make Michelle’s corpse look like a homeless woman. Duffy, prone though he was, had been right. This was getting tiresome.

  “So you went straight from no jacket to he must have killed her?” I said.

  Barry moved back to where Duffy was lying, ensuring he would not be able to move again. I didn’t know if I was sorry or not. “No, of course not.” He walked to the edge of the rug and started to roll it up, then shook his head and let it go. “Too big,” he said.

  “Okay, how did you figure it out?” I asked. Now I was worried. Ben could have walked here backward by now. Were Rod or Louise in on the plot? Sgt. Dougherty? Did that make sense? The guy was a semicrooked cop, but killing people or helping to kill people? Seemed a stretch.

  “I didn’t,” Barry said, sizing up Duffy one more time. He seemed to be trying to figure out how to move the prone body, which led me to wonder why he’d hauled Duffy into the house to begin with. “Damien was so guilty, he practically blurted it out at me. I mean, I had to push him up against a wall first and maybe hurt him a little, but he admitted it finally.” He pulled a box cutter out of his other jacket pocket, which did not make me feel a whole lot better. Then he walked over to me.

  “Come on. I just got an idea,” he said and started cutting the duct tape away from my wrists and ankles. Maybe he’d decided to undo this whole evening.

  At that moment, I would have signed up for that plan in a heartbeat.

  Then Barry said, “Help me carry him.”

  It occurred to me to refuse, believe me. It occurred to me a number of times in a nanosecond. If Barry didn’t think he could get Duffy out of the room without my help, I saw no reason to offer it.

  Except there was that box cutter in his hand. That was a reason. A pretty good reason. The gun in his pocket. Another good reason.

  “Why’d you bring him in here if you want to take him out again?” I asked rather than agree to anything right away.

  “I just decided what I’m going to do with him,” Barry said. “You take the feet.” He pointed, in case I didn’t know Duffy’s feet from his head.

  “What are you going to do with him?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I was asking on Duffy’s behalf. This kind of thing would absolutely entrance him.

  Barry looked me in the eye. “I’m not going to do anything,” he said with a fearsome chill in his voice. “You’re going to kill him.”

  Duffy didn’t move a muscle, but my stomach moved around inside me.

  “I’m not that mad at him,” I said. “I’m getting used to the guy.”

  “Shut up.” The quick wit in the room was overwhelming. “Now get his feet.”

  Box cutter be damned. “No,” I said.

  Barry looked up from his study of Duffy with astonishment in his eyes. “What do you mean, no?”

  “Is there a letter in the word you don’t understand?” It’s a variation on a theme. There’s only so much one has to work with.

  Barry reached into his pocket again, and I thought I was about to see the box cutter. But no, it got worse. Out came the small snub-nosed pistol. He was playing his hole card. “I think maybe you don’t understand,” he said. “Get the feet.”

  I got the feet.

  We dragged Duffy, who I personally knew could get up and walk anytime he wanted, to the car, where Barry unceremoniously dumped him into the back seat. I had been betting on the trunk, but my batting average for assumptions tonight was pretty low, so it wasn’t a huge surprise that I was wrong.

  “Get in front,” Barry ordered. I thought running off into the dark was a better option, but the street, even back here, was awfully well lit, and I knew this guy had a history of shooting people in the dark. He walked over to the passenger door of his SUV and opened it, then gestured me in. Idiot that I am, I sat down and put on the safety harness. Wouldn’t want to get killed in a car crash on the way to my own execution, after all.

  He drove in silence. I didn’t know Poughkeepsie very well after only a few days, so for all I knew, we were going to Niagara Falls or Woodstock. I thought of asking if we could stop off at my father’s house on the way so I could say good-bye, but as it turned out, we were only in the car for about ten minutes.

  Barry stopped the car at what appeared to be a random spot next to a bridge. He got out of the car and ordered me out when he got to the passenger side. I didn’t see any point to staying the in car, so I followed his instructions. He looked up.

  The Walkway over the Hudson is a bridge that was completed in 1889 as a railroad bridge and was converted to the world’s longest footbridge and pedestrian walkway on October 3, 2009. It stands 212 feet above the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie on one side to Highland, New York, on the other. It has become a major tourist attraction and spans 6,768 feet in total.

  Those are all true facts. You can look them up. I just did. You didn’t thin
k I knew all that stuff off the top of my head, did you? I sure didn’t know them that night.

  One thing I can tell you from personal experience is that you have to climb up a whole bunch of stairs to get to the walkway. Another thing: 212 feet is really high.

  I looked at the stairs, then I looked at Duffy, then I looked at Barry. “There’s no chance I’m getting the feet for that climb,” I told him.

  “You won’t need to,” he said ominously. Then he walked to the back door and opened it. He pointed the gun. At me. It was inside his jacket pocket, but I got the point. “Come on, Duffy,” he said. “You’re awake, and everybody knows it. Get out of the car, or I’ll shoot your girlfriend.”

  Duffy opened his eyes and maneuvered himself out of the SUV as if he’d awakened from a refreshing nap. He said nothing. He’d tried what he could, but it hadn’t worked, so now he’d move on to the next thing. It’s how I write him. He wouldn’t even protest the use of the word girlfriend, although I knew it was bugging him. I wasn’t crazy for it myself.

  He tripped getting out of the car and fell forward toward Barry, who instinctively put up his hands to catch the falling man. Duffy seemed a little unsteady on his feet and held onto Barry for a long moment, steadying himself. Then he straightened his posture and held up his hands, palms out, to show he was all right. “You can’t get away like that,” Barry told him. “Or any other way.”

  Barry had clearly learned how to speak by watching James Bond movies and paying attention only to the villains. I was shocked he didn’t have a British accent.

  His right hand went back into his pocket, and he extended it just enough to remind us there was a lethal weapon in there. He gestured to the stairs.

  “Climb,” he said.

  It was not a short climb. Duffy went first, then me, then Barry. We’d tried to get him to go ahead of us, but Barry, however melodramatic, was not stupid. About a third of the way up, Duffy asked why Barry was operating out of Rod Wilkerson’s house.

  “Convenience,” the confessed killer (wait—had he confessed?) answered. “Rod sold my old house for me, and I needed a place to bring the two of you. I called him and asked him to meet me across town at Oakwood. He’s probably still there waiting for me to tell him about the great business opportunity I told him I had.” He laughed derisively at the thought of his old friend (?) being stood up and used badly.