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  “That should be impersonal enough,” I said to Preston. Duffy, reading over my shoulder and seeing his name, flinched a little.

  “Yes, it should,” Preston said. “Your character is named Duffy, too?” He looked a little perplexed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Go figure.” I hit the send button, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t actually breathing when I did it.

  Now in the diner, Brian had the same look that Preston had sported. “I can’t believe you did that,” he said through mozzarella.

  “At the time, it seemed like the right thing to do,” I said. I took another sip of the swamp water. “Can I have some of your water?”

  Brian handed it over. “You do this every time. Just order a different drink.”

  I pulled on the straw, hard. “I don’t want to hurt their feelings and tell them their cola sucks,” I said when I came up for air.

  “They run a diner. They don’t care what drink you order as long as you pay for it.”

  “Cynic.”

  He made a point of catching my eye and holding it. “Rachel, seriously, what are you going to do about this guy?”

  “The kidnapper?” I knew what he meant. I was playing for time to think up an answer to the real question.

  “The guy who thinks he’s Duffy Madison.”

  “What do you care? You don’t even read the Duffy books.” It was true; Brian buys four copies of every book I write and doesn’t read any of them; his taste runs to nonfiction. I personally can’t understand why anyone would read anything that was actually true.

  “Stop evading the question.” Brian, alas, has known me a long time.

  “What do you want me to do, Brian? You want me to refuse to help find Sunny Maugham because the guy who’s doing his best to find her claims to be a character I made up?” Just for that, I took a French fry off his plate and ate it.

  “How about trying to find out who he really is?” Brian challenged. “You’re not doing a thing but buying his story. You research those books. You know how to dig in, how to act like a cop on an investigation. This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you—”

  “What about Walter Messinger in tenth grade?” I said.

  “Okay, the second-weirdest thing. But at least Walter wasn’t dangerous.”

  “That’s your perspective.”

  Brian glared at me. “Stop it. I’m worried about you.”

  I broke into a crooked smile, and I wasn’t even trying to do that. “I know,” I said, patting his hand. “The fact is, I’m a little worried about me, too.”

  “This guy is crazy,” he said.

  “Maybe so. And the one who’s kidnapping these women is even crazier.” I took a bite of salad. It wasn’t as good as the French fry.

  Brian looked very serious. “How do you know they’re not the same person?” he asked.

  I didn’t eat much after that.

  * * *

  I got back to the house determined to find out something—anything—about the man who called himself Duffy Madison. I wasn’t sure how to do it, but as Brian said, I have been doing research on crime novels for a few years now, and that meant thinking like a detective. You had to assume that anyone you met or saw could be capable of a crime and make no assumptions until you had facts. It meant being constantly vigilant and aware. It meant taking nothing for granted.

  Which is why I was more than a little concerned to find my front door unlocked.

  I knew I’d locked it—manually, with the key, from the outside—when I’d left this morning (after doing some actual revisions, about twenty pages) for lunch with Brian. And I knew that I never, ever leave the door unlocked. So I didn’t check when I got home; I just put the key in the lock and turned it.

  But there’s a different action in the lock when there’s a dead bolt moving inside. You can feel it. And this time, I didn’t feel it.

  Now, a TSTL character would walk into the house armed with a candlestick or a penknife, try to be quiet, fail, walk into a bedroom without looking behind the door, and get herself into some hideous situation because the author is too lazy to write someone with a brain.

  Not me. My first impulse was to call the police. But there’s a problem with calling the cops to tell them your door was unlocked: they’re going to tell you that you think you locked it when you left but you really didn’t. They’d come if you insisted on it, but you’d be in the odd position of feeling embarrassed if someone wasn’t in your house intent on killing you.

  So maybe the thing to do was call the pseudopolice: Duffy and/or Preston. They knew there was a possibility I was in danger, so they wouldn’t consider me a hysterical woman for being worried.

  I got the phone out of my pocket and was looking for Preston’s business card in my purse when the front door of my house swung wide open in a quick, jerky motion. I gasped, dropped my purse, and had what I considered to be several small heart attacks that were probably just the Greek salad reminding me of something.

  “I thought I heard your car in the driveway,” said Paula. “Why are you standing out here?”

  Of course. Friday. Paula was working this afternoon, and she had a key.

  “Um, I was just texting,” I said. “Anything going on I need to know about?”

  “Adam called to say he’d sent out Little Boy Lost to three more production companies. It seems like the movie world heard someone was on it, and now he’s optimistic he might be able to get it to auction.”

  What? A book of mine being bid on by more than one producer? “Adam’s been into the mushrooms again,” I said, more or less to myself.

  “Sol called about the manuscript, and I said you were doing revisions,” Paula continued. “Want to come inside?” She seemed confused by my inability to move, and frankly, it was a little bit worrisome to me as well. I followed her in.

  “You also got a call from a Mr. Preston. He just said to call him back. Do I know him?” Paula asked as we walked from the front door toward my office.

  “No,” I told her. “We just met yesterday. He works for the Bergen County prosecutor.”

  She gave me an interested look. “Ooh,” she said.

  “Yeah, keep dreaming. Listen. I have stuff for you to do.”

  Paula, no matter how overworked she was, always looked eager when I gave her more responsibility. I often considered giving her a raise, but then I’d have to cut back on her hours so I could afford her. It was a conundrum. “Stuff?”

  “Yeah.” I sat down in my desk chair without swiveling toward the computer screen, which is my natural tendency. Paula did not take out a pad to jot down notes; she knew she’d remember what I said, and so did I. “You remember the guy the other day who called and said he was Duffy Madison?”

  She grinned. “Of course. What a nut.”

  “Uh-huh. I want you to do some digging. He works as a consultant for the Bergen prosecutor.”

  Paula’s expression went from amused to serious. “Mr. Preston? He’s Duffy Madison?”

  I shook my head. “As far as I know, Ben Preston is Ben Preston. But ‘Duffy’ has convinced them, after a series of vetting processes, that he’s for real. He has an SSN, a birth certificate, a driver’s license, Selective Service, everything. What we need to do is find out who he really is.”

  “We?”

  “Okay, you. Get the numbers on his ID if you can find them. Call Max Cogdill at the IRS. See if they have any records for him. Then see how far back those records go and if he can be traced to a time before he was using this name.”

  “How do I find that out if all I have is ‘Duffy Madison’?” Paula asked. It was a fair question. I wished I had the answer.

  So I improvised; that’s what writers like me do. I’m a pantser. “The birth certificate will note a place of birth. That’s something to start with. Call the town in question, the clerk or somebody, and see if you can find any records of the guy. If his name really was Duffy Madison, there will be school records, old classmates, people like th
at. If it wasn’t, the birth certificate is fake and we have him in a lie. That along with the prosecutor gig might be enough to get him to fess up. It’s something to start with, anyway.”

  Paula nodded, looking determined. “Cool. Anything else?”

  I glanced quickly at the computer screen as I hit the mouse button to start it up. “Uh . . . no. Have you been checking my e-mails?” I doubted Paula would have neglected to mention if a raving maniac had gotten back to me, but the possibility always existed until confirmed or denied. Duffy taught me that. Or I taught him. The line was blurring.

  “No. Should I?” Paula showed not suspicion but perhaps curiosity.

  “No, absolutely not. I’ll handle that end. If there’s anything important that you need, I’ll forward it to you.” I turned my back on her, politely, telling her I was getting to work now. I heard Paula get up and walk back toward her office.

  The first order of business was to call Preston. Maybe they’d made an arrest and he was calling to thank me for my exemplary bravery and effort in helping to incarcerate a dangerous killer.

  Hey, you dream what you dream, and I’ll dream what I dream.

  “I’ve been monitoring your e-mail,” he said once I’d identified myself. It was a lovely greeting, I thought. Invasion of privacy as an icebreaker. “The guy hasn’t responded to you yet.”

  “Great. It gives me something to look forward to. Why did you call me, then?”

  “I wanted to know about your relationship with Duffy.”

  Well, that was a new one. “My what with who?” I asked. I thought it was a legitimate question.

  “You and Duffy. How you know each other. The two of you were acting strange last night, uncomfortable in an odd sort of way, and I need to know if what’s going on between the two of you is going to compromise my investigation.” I didn’t know Preston well, but I couldn’t hear a smile in his voice, which meant that—contrary to all logic—he wasn’t kidding.

  “I don’t have a relationship with Duffy,” I said. “I met the man two days ago and only talked to him at length yesterday on the way back and forth to Ocean Grove. What are you getting at, Mr. Preston?”

  “It’s Ben, please.” Like that was going to help him after what he’d just dumped in my lap. “And I’m not getting at anything. It’s just that I’m a pretty decent judge of human behavior, and there was something going on between you and Duffy last night.”

  “There isn’t anything that’s going to interfere with your work, Ben,” I said. Okay, so there was a little more emphasis on the name than I’d planned on. “You can rest assured of that.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. And then he didn’t say anything else.

  “I’m just wondering if anyone’s bothered to call Sunny’s editor and her agent,” I said. “If she was planning on traveling, they might know—well, her agent would, anyway—and even if she wasn’t, the attacks seem to be based on being an author. They’d have some insight, wouldn’t they?”

  “That’s very nice advice,” Ben said. “But we’ve already had people talk to them. Her agent is Mandy Westen and her editor is Carole Pembroke. We’ve gotten what we can from them to begin with.” Was he being a wiseass? I could out-wiseass him any day of the week. I’m a writer.

  “So you called to check in on me and Duffy?” I asked. “Isn’t that a little odd all by itself?”

  “I had to be clear on that point,” Preston said. “Now I’m clear.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, because frankly, what else was there to do? “So let me ask you something. How well do you know Duffy Madison?”

  There was a pause. Preston’s eyes were probably crinkling; I’d seen him do that the night before. I was, of course, impervious to such things. Except that I was imagining him doing it now. “Impervious” is a relative term. When you use it like I do, anyway.

  “We’re not dating, if that’s what you’re asking,” Preston said.

  “It wasn’t, but thanks for clearing that up. I mean, do you trust him? Has he told you much about himself? What can you tell me about Duffy?”

  I could hear Preston’s county-issued chair squeak. He must have leaned forward. “I don’t know that much about him personally. He’s all business when we call him in on a case.” Then he paused, but not long enough for me to jump in. “Why?”

  “Are you aware that I write books with a character named Duffy Madison?” I asked. “A character who’s a consultant on missing persons cases for the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office?”

  Preston had clearly never read one of my books, but it was possible he’d heard about them. The “coincidence” of my character and his consultant having the same name (and job) should certainly have been a topic of conversation among the investigators.

  “You mean you just changed counties when you used him for a character?” Preston said. “I thought you just met Duffy a couple of days ago.”

  “I did. And no, I didn’t change counties. I’d never heard of your Duffy Madison when I started writing the books four years ago.”

  I could pretty much hear the light bulb go off over Preston’s head through the phone. “Right around the time Duffy started working with us,” he said. I’m not sure he was even conscious of being on the phone anymore.

  “That’s right. Kind of a big coincidence, don’t you think?”

  I thought that confronting Preston with this information—leaving out the part about Duffy believing I had psychically given birth to him—might lead to some revelation that would prove conclusively the man who was working for him and the man I’d been imagining for five books now were different. In that mine was imaginary, and his was crazy.

  “How is that possible?” Preston asked.

  “That’s an excellent question. How do you think it could be? Because I’ve been going at it around and around in my head since Tuesday, and I haven’t come up with anything.” I checked my e-mail again; still no new communiqués from the creep with a thing for mystery authors. That was good, right?

  “I thought you said you met him two nights ago, on Wednesday,” Preston said. Investigators. They never let anything go.

  Well, this was a problem. I didn’t want to out Duffy as the complete nut job I thought he was, just in case he wasn’t. In that case, I’d be ruining his career. On the other hand, if he were a bloodthirsty madman, it was probably better his employers know that.

  So I hedged my bet. “He called Tuesday night asking me about Julia Bledsoe, but I didn’t know her by that name, so we barely talked,” I said. It was within driving distance of the truth and could be seen as at least some cause for further discussion without suggesting openly that Duffy be fitted for a jacket with very, very long sleeves.

  “Uh-huh,” Preston said. So he wasn’t a scintillating conversationalist. There are other things that can be important. Like those crinkling eyes. “That doesn’t really answer the question, does it?”

  “I said since Tuesday, and that was three nights ago,” I explained. Again.

  “The question about why he seems to be a version of your character, despite you never having heard of Duffy when you started writing.” Oh yeah.

  “I can’t explain that,” I said, and that was precisely the truth. I mean, I could explain it, but the only reasonable way to do so would be to suggest that Duffy was nuts, and not being a licensed psychoanalyst, it wasn’t in my province to say that. “Can you?”

  “No, and I don’t like it.” Next Preston would be telling me that mysteries give him a bellyache. Men can be driven by role models they get from bad movies.

  “As an investigator, how would you research it?” I asked. I’d given Paula a list of tasks to perform, but maybe Preston could simplify the problem or use the resources at his disposal, which were undoubtedly better than the ones Paula or I had.

  “I could ask Duffy,” he said. Brilliant, Holmes! How does the man do it?

  “I’ve already asked him,” I said. That was probably a mistake. Duffy’s explanation would not
help anyone’s case here, and Preston’s inevitable question would be . . .

  “And what did he say?” Can I predict them, or what?

  “Well, he couldn’t explain it, either,” I said. Certainly, Duffy couldn’t explain it adequately, and that was one way of interpreting the question.

  “Odd. Normally he’d mention something like that to me.” Normally? Something like that? How often did these situations come up?

  “Well, maybe he’s embarrassed. Maybe he thinks the other guys in the office will read the books and make fun of him.” Now I was acting like Duffy’s mom. Be nice to my boy and I’ll bake you cookies.

  “Duffy doesn’t embarrass easily,” Preston said. That was true, at least of the Duffy I wrote. One time I had him emerge from a sewer pipe wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a snorkel, and he hadn’t even flinched.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t bring this up just yet,” I suggested. “Observe him for a while and see if you can pick up on anything.”

  I couldn’t hear Preston nod, but I was sure he did just that. “That seems reasonable. In the meantime, I think we should talk about how you conceived of this character. Are you free for dinner tonight?”

  Well, that came out of left field! It was so unexpected that I said, “Yes, I am,” without thinking once about it. That’s not like me.

  “Great,” Preston answered. “I’ll pick you up at your house around eight. Okay?”

  I was off the phone before I realized what had happened. Did I have a date with Ben Preston? Or were we conferring about one of his colleagues?

  It was best not to think about it, although deciding what to wear was definitely going to be a problem. I got up and walked into Paula’s office.

  The room was larger than mine and did not look out on my somewhat muddy backyard. It was decorated as Paula would have it—I’d insisted on that—which meant that everything was done in subdued colors, tastefully accented, and completely neat. I feared for Paula’s mind.

  She was staring at her laptop, which she kept open on her desk, when I walked in. She looked up with the same “Do you have something else for me to do?” face I’d seen before, when I actually had something else for her to do.