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  It was just after five when I walked into my kitchen and got out some leftover chicken. Duffy loses track of time when he’s on the trail and rarely eats; I went along for his ride today, and I was famished. I put the chicken in the oven and turned it on because I believe in delayed gratification and because the microwave makes chicken gummy. I got out a packet of microwave rice because I was hungry right now, and the microwave doesn’t hurt rice at all.

  I sat at the table, not microwaving the rice (just by itself would be bland) and not getting up to chop up vegetables to put into the rice, maybe with some chicken broth that would make it less boring. I didn’t do that because I was writing. If you were in the room, you’d swear I was doing no such thing.

  The thing about writing fiction is that unless you’re at your keyboard clicking away, nobody can see you do it. They see you sitting at a table staring off into space and think you’re stoned or lazy when in fact you’re trying desperately to come up with a plot point nobody’s ever seen before or help your character out of an incredibly difficult situation that you pushed him into the last time you couldn’t think of something for him to do.

  But today’s events kept getting in the way of the perfectly awful fictional ones I’d been concocting. A female witness I was writing had turned into Louise Refsnyder. Angela Mosconi was starting to seem more and more like someone who should be named Emily Needleman. The dead man at the bottom of the cliff? Maybe he’d be a missing bartender identifiable only by his bowling shirt, and he’d have a secret wife.

  Now it was getting complicated: Had I really invented Duffy out of the sky and given him life, or was I now a figment of his imagination?

  I put the rice away and turned off the oven, then I called the local Thai place and put in a delivery order. The last thing I wanted to do was get into another car, even if it was my own.

  The woman on the phone said it would take about forty-five minutes for the food to show up, which was odd since the restaurant was maybe six minutes from my house, but I let it go given the time of day. Rush hour. Lots of takeout orders.

  I dragged myself into my office and procrastinated for a while by checking my e-mails, none of which—thankfully—had anything to do with Damien Mosley, Louise, Walt, Rod, Michelle, or anyone else who might be involved with Damien’s leaving and not coming back.

  My mother e-mailed from her home in Colorado. She had taken up hot yoga and thought it would do me a world of good. Mom did not explain the reasoning behind her claim. Maybe she just thought hot yoga would do everybody a world of good.

  I had not received an e-mail from my father today, which wasn’t terribly notable, but he had posted the cover of my latest Duffy novel to his Facebook page in anticipation of its release a mere four months from now. Dad likes to brag to his buddies on the Wiffle ball team (my father plays Wiffle ball competitively), and yes, he has a Facebook page. Probably a sign it’s time to move on to the next social media phenomenon.

  The rest of the incoming lot was unremarkable. Neither my agent nor my editor had gotten in touch, which didn’t mean a thing at all during this stage in the creative process. They just let me write and wait until there’s something to talk about. Writers are supposed to love autonomy. I wouldn’t mind a little guidance, but then I wouldn’t want anyone telling me what to write, either.

  Writers are crazy, or hadn’t you noticed?

  The guy came with the Thai food, and I tipped him generously. I tip based on quality of service and in proportion to how hungry I am, so it’s something of a wonder that I didn’t insist he take my sofa home with him, too. I practically ran the bag into the kitchen, got a beer out of the fridge, and tucked in.

  That, naturally, is when my phone rang.

  Brian Coltrane is one of my closest friends and has been there for me on many an occasion when I have needed him. But now I was really hungry and trying to decide whether the pad thai was more important than whatever Brian had on his mind. On the other hand, he was one of my closest friends and had heard me chew before. I put the call on speaker so I could eat with both hands.

  “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Are you eating?” Apparently, the loud slurping and the strained quality of my voice through noodles had tipped Brian off. He’s an astute fellow.

  “No. Why do you ask?” I leaned over a little so he could hear me chew more clearly.

  “No idea. So how did the trip to Poughkeepsie with the lunatic go today?” I’d told Brian about the field trip with Duffy because I generally tell Brian everything and so the police would have somewhere to start looking if Duffy actually had turned out to be a homicidal maniac, which I didn’t really believe would happen but have decided I should consider a possibility. The man thinks I created him and that he was in his late twenties when he was born. You can’t be too careful.

  If Brian was just calling to catch up on my adventures, I could call him back after inhaling the rest of my dinner, but then I looked down and saw there was very little left. Did I mention I was a bit peckish?

  “We talked to some people, but I don’t know if we have any real leads on where this guy might have gone or if he magically became Duffy Madison five years ago,” I reported. “Did find out he was married, though, and he had a place in West New York.”

  “The whole thing is a wild-goose chase.” Brian is, let’s say, a bit skeptical about Duffy, but then he wasn’t there when Duffy actually did save my life. The fact that Duffy had a hand in endangering my life in the first place wasn’t something we discussed. “You should stay away from that guy, Rach.”

  “And here I was lamenting how I hadn’t heard from my father today,” I said, sucking up the last of my dinner, which I now understood had been underordered. I got up and rummaged in the freezer for some ice cream. It was that kind of evening. “Now my day is complete.”

  “Hey. I’ve met the man, and he seems perfectly reasonable, except that he’s crazy,” Brian said. “I worry about you.”

  “You get this way when you’re between girlfriends,” I reminded him. “You’re actually not my big brother.”

  There was a smile in Brian’s voice. How can you hear when someone’s smiling? But you can. “I might not be between girlfriends anymore,” he said.

  The conversation drifted away from my problems, Duffy’s psychosis, and Damien Mosley’s disappearance in order to concentrate on the really important issue, this girl Brian had met at the supermarket the day before. He’s not the kind of guy who trolls the produce aisle looking for women, but he is good-looking, and women do buy kale, so do the math.

  “Her name’s Julie, and she works for a software marketing firm in the city,” he reported. Apparently, Julie was funny and smart and adorable, and by the time Brian was finished describing her, I practically wanted to adopt her. He has a tendency to start relationships wearing rose-colored glasses. It is not something I’ve never done, so I indulge his early delusions. Three months from now, Julie would no doubt be the daughter of Beelzebub, and I would be sweeping pieces of my friend off the kitchen floor. We all have our rituals.

  I congratulated him on his good fortune and good taste, being careful not to overpraise the woman I’d never met for fear my words would be recalled verbatim when things went inevitably south. And just when I was getting back to my own travails—I think we were up to the issue of crumbling infrastructure—I heard the tone that indicates someone is trying to call you while you’re on the line. I asked Brian to hang on and pushed the flash button.

  I already knew the call was from Duffy and girded myself for having to explain again why I would not be assisting in his investigation. But he decided to forego pleasantries (not unusual for Duffy) and jumped right in.

  “I believe Damien Mosley is dead,” he said.

  Chapter 10

  The last person I had wanted to walk through my door arrived at about six thirty. Duffy came in and walked to my office, which is where he thinks we do our serious thinking. It is the most cramped and unkempt ro
om in my house, and I normally don’t let strangers in before verifying they’ve been properly vaccinated against communicable diseases.

  “Okay, you had your dramatic moment,” I said, sinking into my Captain Kirk–style office chair. If I could have pushed a button and asked Scotty for warp speed, I’d have done so, but alas, it was just a swivel chair with arms. “What makes you think Damien Mosley is dead, and more to the point, why is it any of my business now that I’ve told you I’m not involved in your investigation anymore?”

  I know what you’re thinking: I was going to be part of Duffy’s search for Damien Mosley, and I knew it. Part of the hunt was my idea, more or less, to prove that Duffy wasn’t Duffy before I started writing Duffy, that he had in fact read at least one of my books at some point and had, for whatever reasons of physical or psychological trauma, taken on the identity of my character. And it was in my best interest to prove just that by showing that before Damien vanished, Duffy might very well have been him.

  Yes, I knew that. And my allowing Duffy to come to my house (after trying unsuccessfully to get Brian, who had a date with Julie, to come over to referee) was a sign that I was aware I’d be involved. But I was worn out from a day of grilling people about a guy who’d fallen off the edge of the earth five years before, and I was looking forward to writing a thousand words without actually knowing what they were going to be yet. I don’t write well when I’m tired, and I was already not writing well before I was tired.

  So I was being, perhaps, difficult.

  And Duffy did look a little wounded after I’d suggested I wasn’t going to be his partner-in-not-crime anymore. It made me feel a trifle guilty, but the whole tired thing was winning out at this point.

  “I thought you would find this particular development intriguing enough to spark your interest in the case again,” he said, trying to find an unoccupied spot on my ancient leather sofa and moving some papers out of the way. I probably should have thrown them out in 2011. “I made a few phone calls when I got home, and I am convinced that Damien Mosley died five years ago.”

  “Why? I know you, and you need facts to make a statement like that. You want me to ask, so I’m asking. What’s the proof?”

  “I was unable to find Damien’s wife Michelle,” he began, which didn’t sound like proof at all. I decided—against my cranky nature—to let that go because I knew Duffy would keep talking anyway, and he did not disappoint. “I have still been unable to find any records of a marriage or even her maiden name. So she has not been of any help to this point.

  “But”—and I’d known there would be a but—“I have tracked down some of the records on Damien’s apartment in West New York, which are very interesting. The property was rented by a Dorothy Mosley in the late 1990s, and when the building went co-op, she bought the property and rented it as a profit source for ten years. Then apparently Mrs. Mosley moved into the apartment in 2002 and stayed there until exactly five years ago, when she supposedly willed it to her son.”

  “Supposedly?” I asked. “You have some reason to think she didn’t?”

  “There is no record of her dying, so she couldn’t have willed it to him,” Duffy answered. He shifted on the sofa a bit, trying to find a comfortable spot. But if one was not a stack of papers or an advance reader copy of one of my books, there was no refuge on that couch. “If they had an agreement about the ownership of the property, it was never filed formally, because there is no public record. The apartment is still legally in Dorothy’s name, but as far as I can see, no one has lived there in at least two years. Not even as a vacation rental.”

  This didn’t seem to be leading to proof that Damien was dead, but I know Duffy’s methods, and he was building toward that, making his case airtight and convincing. I did not have to ask a question about that. I did wonder about the specifics, though, and besides, I was aware he was waiting for his cue.

  “Who’s making the payments?” I asked. “Even if the apartment was paid off years ago, there’s still property tax and co-op fees, maintenance, that sort of thing. Someone has to be paying those bills, and you said you didn’t have any trace of Dorothy Mosley alive or dead. So I’m guessing it’s not her.”

  “You’re right,” Duffy said, pointing at me like a smart pupil. “What’s interesting is that Dorothy apparently set up a trust five years ago, just a few weeks before Damien vanished, that pays all the fees and necessities for the West New York apartment. I don’t know where her money came from, but there has been no problem keeping up with the bills there.”

  I sat back and let the chair tilt so I could look at the ceiling fan, which was not on at the moment. It’s a way I think. “The timing is the really interesting part, isn’t it? It seems like she knew she wouldn’t be at the apartment and maybe that Damien or someone else would be, so she had to keep paying for it.”

  “Precisely.” Duffy gave up the whole couch thing, probably acting on a request from his butt, and ran his hands through his hair. I gave him that mannerism because I wanted him to have a signature move and remind my readers, many of whom are female, that Duffy has very thick hair. You should see some of the letters I get. “That indicates intent. This isn’t just a big coincidence, but there’s more.”

  For the record, I had known there was going to be more. I’d just like that noted.

  “Our friend Sgt. Dougherty was not actually working on the Poughkeepsie city police force five years ago,” Duffy said. “He was then working for the town of Poughkeepsie, which is adjacent to the city but a separate municipality.”

  “I know,” I said. “Who wouldn’t want to name two things right next to each other Poughkeepsie?”

  He ignored me, which was just as well because I was only trying to amuse myself at this point. I knew he’d start lecturing again, and he wasted no time at all.

  “So the sergeant, through no fault of his own, has no personal recollection of the investigation, if there was one, into Damien Mosley’s disappearance.” Duffy let his head hang down, stretching the neck muscles and giving him the appearance of someone who found the floor absolutely astonishing. “I looked into the public records of what actually did occur, with a little help from Ben Preston’s access into law enforcement sites.” Ben, the investigator with whom Duffy worked in Bergen County, would no doubt have allowed the use of his passwords for an inquiry like this one, but it was just as likely that Duffy had not asked and merely knew Ben’s passwords from previous use. It didn’t matter.

  “So was there some major mess-up in the way they looked for Damien?” I asked. I didn’t actually say mess-up. I used another term. But I don’t know you well enough to use that kind of language with you.

  Duffy didn’t seem to care. “No, but only because they didn’t really look for him at all. They filled out the proper paperwork and authorized his landlord to sell his belongings in order to get back some of the money he was owed in rent after the police made a rather halfhearted attempt to locate Damien, calling his phone a few times. The necessary forms were delivered to his address, evicting him from the premises, and since he never showed up to contest the proceedings, everything went very smoothly.”

  I was getting even wearier. It had been a ridiculously long day, and I’d never gotten to eat my ice cream. It was time to give Duffy his moment and cut to the chase.

  “So if the Poughkeepsie police didn’t actually look for Damien, and there’s no record that he lived in West New York, with or without a wife, what makes you think he’s dead and not just working for an insurance company in Madison, Wisconsin?”

  Duffy, clearly having been waiting to savor this moment, stopped and turned right toward me to make maximum eye contact. “Because he didn’t vanish from Poughkeepsie. I think he vanished from West New York, and he did so because he died.”

  I was about to note that he hadn’t actually answered my question, but Duffy didn’t give me the chance. “At virtually the exact time Damien Mosley vanished, police in North Bergen, adjacent to West New York
, were called about something seen at the bottom of a drop in James Braddock Park. The caller, who remained anonymous, couldn’t reach whatever it was but thought it looked wrong. Police investigated and found the body of a man, roughly in his late twenties and of the right build and height to be Damien Mosley.”

  A man dead at the bottom of a hill. A park in New Jersey. Duffy Madison investigating the scene. It was too much. My stomach churned a little, and my voice was oddly dry when I looked at Duffy and tried to speak.

  “Did . . .” I cleared my throat. “Did the man fall onto a fence post and get impaled?” I asked.

  Duffy didn’t turn his head, but his eyes looked around the room as if searching for the sane person he’d known was here a moment ago. “No,” he said slowly. “He tripped on wet grass and hit his head on a rock after tumbling down a hill. Why?”

  Okay, so I hadn’t written about Damien Mosley’s—or somebody’s—death five years after it happened without having heard about it first. That is what in my world constitutes a “relief.”

  “Nothing,” I answered, waving a hand to tell him to go on. “So I’m guessing you think the man in the park was Damien Mosley. What makes you think that?”

  “As I said, the physical description fits,” Duffy said, having shaken off my bizarre behavior. “And the timing fits. There are no fingerprints on record for Damien because he never had a job that required them and was never in the military. Dental records are inconclusive and haven’t been checked anyway because the North Bergen police never heard of Damien Mosley before tonight. But there is one thing.”

  Wait. The North Bergen police had never heard of Damien before tonight? “You called the cops in North Bergen already?” I asked.

  Duffy looked startled. “Of course. I believe I might have been able to help solve a case they’ve had open for five years. Why would I not call them?”

  I swiveled back and forth in my chair, a nervous habit I developed at the age of four when I visited my father in his office. “Don’t you see, Duffy?” I said. “You’re making huge leaps of logic here because you want this dead guy to be Damien Mosley. You want to prove to me that he was never you, or you were never him, or something. So based on a few coincidences and your own prejudices, you called the North Bergen police tonight and told them your theory. What did they say?”