Written Off (21 page)

“Thad asked how I knew about Shana Kineally,” she said. “He even got out the bank statement with the cancelled check from seven months ago. Marion was definitely a client.”

“Do you think we can tie in Missy Hardaway?” I asked.

“Give Harrison a call,” she said, grinning. So it was my turn.

Or not. “He’s her publisher. If she were using a freelance editor, she might not want him to know.”

“You’re stalling,” Paula said, teasing. “You don’t want to know, do you?”

“Of course I want to know.” I’d show her. I got out my phone and called Harrison Belechik. And he sounded surprised.

“No, Missy didn’t call Shana Kineally,” he said flat out.

She didn’t? What could
that
mean?

But Harrison wasn’t finished. “
I
called Shana Kineally,” he said. “Ballmer Press is too small to have its own editors, and Missy’s books were very imaginative and well written, but . . .”

“But she couldn’t spell to save her life, so you got her a freelance editor.”

“Something like that,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

I gave him a nonsensical excuse, something about wanting to clean up my next book, and hustled him off the phone. I looked at my father and my assistant, who I knew had been a philosophy major in college. This was the crack investigative team that had busted the serial killer case wide open? We probably needed a little help.

“Who can we call?” I asked.

Dad and Paula looked at me. “Duffy.” In unison.

I tried his cell, but it went straight to voice mail, so I left a message. “Duffy, we think we might have found something. The person’s name is Shana Kineally.” I spelled it for him. “She’s a copy editor and proofreader who works freelance
and appears to have a connection to at least two of the four authors. Give me a call back.”

Disconnecting the call, I looked at Dad. “Okay, maybe I’m crazy . . .”

“Maybe?” The man’s a laugh riot.

I went on. “But I know Duffy Madison. He has his cell phone on vibrate, and he’s not taking anything but urgent calls because he’s on a case. I’m not going to hear back from him soon if he’s on his way to Connecticut, especially if he’s driving. He’d have to pull over, and he thinks that his mission is absolutely a matter of life and death, which it probably is.”

“He won’t pull over to call back?” Dad asked.

I shook my head. “If Duffy sees I’m calling, he knows I’m still alive. He can put it off or assume I’m talking to Ben Preston, because that’s what he told me to do.”

“So call Ben,” Paula said.

“I did call Ben. He thought I was a nut and dismissed our theory as silly.”

We sat silent for a moment because we were all thinking the same thing, but none of us wanted to say it. Finally, Dad broke the silence.

“The FBI’s in charge of the case,” he said. “Call the FBI.”

I heaved a sigh of—what’s the opposite of relief?—and dug Special Agent Eunice Rafferty’s business card out of my back pocket. Sure, she’d been dismissive and condescending when we’d met, but she liked my books, right? So why not give the feds a call?

She answered the phone on the second ring and was anything but dismissive and condescending when I told her about
Shana Kineally and the idea that she’d somehow linked all four of the murdered authors together, the only such link that had been discovered so far. In fact, she sounded impressed.

“That’s very good work,” Rafferty said. “It’s a real lead. I promise you, we’re going to follow up on it right now.” She assured me the local police would be driving by my house more often because Ben Preston had requested it and said she’d call when she had something to tell me.

“I don’t know,” Dad said when I hung up. “She doesn’t sound all that bad to me.”

“She’s not,” I answered. “Cops don’t like it when cops from other bureaus come in and tell them what to do. So Ben and Duffy don’t like the FBI. The FBI probably doesn’t like the CIA. The CIA is probably not that crazy about the military. And on it goes.”

“I just hope they can find Shana Kineally soon,” Paula said, standing. “I don’t usually work weekends.” She smiled to let me know she was kidding; Paula thinks I take everything she says seriously.

“Go home,” I said. “You’ve earned your time and a half today.”

“Double time.” She wasn’t smiling quite so broadly now. I walked her to her car and watched her drive off.

Back in the house, I flopped onto my living room couch and watched Dad drink a beer. I had already made sure all the doors were locked.

My father knows what kind of household I run, so he put his feet up on the coffee table without a thought. Now that I thought about it, he was one of the people I’d learned to
run a household from, so it made perfect sense. My mother would no doubt have been appalled; she’d also have been outvoted.

“Should we call Mom?” I asked.

“What’s this ‘we’ stuff, kemosabe?”

“Maybe I’ll wait until you go home, then.” I lay back deeper into the cushion. “This being the target of a mad killer is incredibly tiring.”

“Imagine how I feel,” Dad answered. He sat back on the easy chair and closed his eyes. “Want to watch a movie?”

We settled on
The Philadelphia Story
because Dad was being nice. He’s not a huge fan of the movie, in which a father cheats on his wife and everyone looks the other way, and he has his reasons. But movies made after 1960 tend to have sex in them, and watching those with your father is a little awkward. A lot awkward. Incredibly awkward.

We’d gotten to the part where Jimmy Stewart is starting to think he’s in love with Katharine Hepburn (he’s wrong) and she’s letting him think so when my phone buzzed. A text. From Duffy.

“What is it?” Dad asked.

“Duffy. He’s texting me but he thinks he’s sending a telegram. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

But before Kate and Jimmy could realize they belonged with Cary Grant and Ruth Hussey, respectively, there was a
jarring crash outside my house. I jolted up—I’d been almost asleep on the couch—and woke Dad, who was all asleep on the easy chair.

“Did you hear something?” I asked.

“Rabbit,” he said. That didn’t help. But then he woke up completely and said, “Why? Did you?”

“Yeah.” I got up and walked to the front hall to turn on the outside lights; it had gotten mostly dark while we were watching and dozing. I reached for the chain on the door, but Dad put his hand over mine.

“I’ll go,” he said.

I didn’t argue, but I was going to watch carefully from inside. Our pal Shana Kineally might not be after Dad, but I was a crime writer and knew what “collateral damage” meant. I was not interested in my father becoming that.

He took a flashlight from a shelf at the top of the basement stairs and went out the side door. “Anybody would expect me out the front,” he said. “Lock the door behind me. I’ll text you when I want to come back in. Make sure every door is locked. Every window, too.”

With that, he was gone.

I did indeed lock the side door behind Dad and checked the back door in the office and the deck door. The front door was definitely locked, and the windows . . . well, I wasn’t going to check the windows. If someone was in the house already, checking the windows would just make me feel stupid.

Just to make it harder for my predator, I started turning the lights off in each room I walked through. There weren’t
enough windows to watch Dad as he walked around the house, and I wasn’t nearly wealthy enough to have considered outside security cameras; until now, I’d always figured that anyone who was so hard up to steal my stuff probably needed it worse than I did.

I couldn’t hear Dad outside the house, and it was working on my last nerve. I ran to the window in the office, the best vantage point for the back of the house and the rear left side. He wasn’t there. The front window was problematic; if I raised the curtain there, I might as well be wearing a target on my forehead. I peeked around the edge of the curtain, then went to the other side of the front window and peeked around that edge. No Dad.

When I was just about to open the side door and go out myself, my phone buzzed. A text from Dad:
Coming in the back door
. I ran to the back door in my office and unlocked and opened it. Dad walked in, but I couldn’t read his face. Worry? Relief? Bemusement?

“There’s no one out there,” he said. “A garbage can got knocked over.”

My trash bins are plastic; they would make noise, but not enough to wake me up from even a light drowse. “A cat or a raccoon?” I asked.

“Not unless one can type,” he said. He handed me a piece of paper. “This was sitting on top of the heap.”

The wrinkled paper, smelling only slightly of trash, held a disturbingly familiar sort of note: the typeface varied as usual, and the message, while on a slightly different subject,
was no less worrisome than the ones that had come through my e-mail:

Then, underneath, almost as an afterthought:

I called Ben Preston this time—I figured that knocking over my garbage cans, however much it led to finding a threatening message, was not a federal crime. Ben took this situation seriously (which was refreshing), and Adamstown police officers were at my door in a matter of minutes. Forty minutes. Ben got there considerably faster.

He looked rumpled, like I’d gotten him out of bed, when he arrived. Somehow that made him more sympathetic than the guy who had essentially brushed me off only a few hours before because my theory about a mad copy editor had seemed unworthy of a follow-up to him. This guy seemed sincerely concerned for my welfare.

After the introduction to my father, during which the two men shook hands and exchanged significant looks of manliness as if to prove to each other that they could protect me (men!), Ben sat down with us in the living room and got out a reporter’s notebook and a pen from his windbreaker. He hadn’t needed the jacket; it was still pretty hot and humid out,
but this was one of those moments that proves men should be allowed to carry purses. Wake up, civilization.

The fact that the windbreaker was also covering Ben’s shoulder holster was another matter altogether.

“Where was this found, exactly?” Ben said, indicating the note, which we’d left on the coffee table, so as to better scare the crap out of me.

“It was on top of the overturned garbage can,” Dad told him. “In fact, it was taped to the lid, so that when I went to put everything back the way it was, I couldn’t miss it.”

Ben looked; the tape was still attached to the top of the note. “What did you touch?” he asked Dad.

Dad thought carefully. “The handles on the trash can,” he said, closing his eyes to remember more completely. “The one full trash bag that had fallen out, so I could put it back in. The ground around the trash can, when I knelt down and when I stood up, for balance. The top of the trash can, by the handles, so I could replace it. And that’s when I saw the note.”

“You touched the note, obviously, because it’s here,” Ben said.

I nodded. “And so did I, when Dad handed it to me.”

“Did either of you touch the tape?” Ben was already placing the note, tape intact, into a plastic evidence bag he’d retrieved from the windbreaker. That jacket had more equipment in it than a pro athlete’s locker. I’m told.

Dad looked at me, and I returned the look. We both shook our heads.

“Good,” Ben said. “If there are prints on the tape, we know they’re not yours.”

That was nice, but it wasn’t really getting me anywhere. “This killer isn’t stupid enough to have touched anything we were going to find,” I said. “Not unless she was wearing gloves first.”

“She?” Ben echoed.

“Yeah. Shana Kineally.”

Ben had the good taste not to roll his eyes. “The mad copy editor,” he said. “We’re back to that one?”

I told him that Special Agent Rafferty had not shared his amusement at the theory and was investigating Ms. Kineally as we spoke. “Just because it sounds goofy doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” I said. “Half the stuff I make up is toned down compared to stories real cops tell me.”

“Are you saying Rafferty is a real cop and I’m not?” Ben demanded.

I did not have the good taste not to roll my eyes; fine, so I’m not as classy as Ben Preston. “Oh, calm down,” I said. “Nobody’s casting aspersions on your manhood.” I noticed Dad and Ben took pains not to look at each other at that moment. “Can we stick to the subject? What about the message on the note?”

Ben cocked an eyebrow. “It seems a little strange,” he said. “Be interesting to see what Duffy makes of it.”

“It tells me not to trust Duffy Madison,” I reminded him.

He looked at me with the same incredulous look Dad suddenly had on his face. “And what do you think that means?” Ben asked.

“Rache, at this point, I think it’s clear that if this maniac tells you not to trust Duffy Madison, you should immediately trust Duffy Madison more,” Dad said.

“You don’t trust him,” I said. “You think he’s a nut.”

“He
is
a nut. He thinks you created him out of the air; he thinks he’s a fictional character.” I glanced at Ben, because what Dad was saying was technically a lot more than I’d told Ben about Duffy’s delusions (which would make a great band name, by the way). “But he’s been right about almost everything since this nightmare began, and the fact is, being crazy doesn’t necessarily disqualify him from being trustworthy.”

“Duffy doesn’t think this whole character name thing is a coincidence?” Ben asked. “He actually thinks he
is
the character?”

I did that thing where you sort of bounce your head from one side to the other in a
yeah, well
sort of gesture. “More or less,” I said. “I’m not sure what he thinks.” Ben didn’t say anything else about it, but he did write something in his notebook.

That’s the moment when the doorbell rang, heralding the arrival of the local cops, who spent the next two hours asking me about my garbage, taking pictures of my garbage, and trying very hard not to make fun of me because I’d called them about my garbage.

By the time the cops left, it was beyond late; I was hungry but didn’t feel like eating; Dad was yawning; and Ben, who no longer was giving off any particular kissing vibes, had told me in no uncertain terms to look into private security, lock all my doors, and “next time, call
before
your dad goes out and possibly gets himself in trouble.”

“
Next time
?”

“Forget I said anything.” He looked me up and down and exhaled. “You’ve had a long week.”

“What are you going to tell Rafferty about this?” I asked. At the moment, I wasn’t interested in being looked up and down.

He laughed. “This? I think I’ll refrain from telling the FBI your trash cans were knocked over.”

“The note,” I pointed out.

“It’s not the first one you’ve gotten, and it won’t help Rafferty find anyone. I don’t want her to see Duffy’s name dragged into it from that angle, to tell you the truth.”

“It’s hard to know what to do,” I said. “I go back and forth between being terrified and being pissed off.”

“Stick with pissed off; it helps you think.”

But Ben left right after that without offering any further advice. I don’t suppose there was that much to offer:
Try not to get killed before I see you again, okay?

I convinced Dad to go to bed soon after, even though we never really caught the end of
The Philadelphia Story
(I’d seen it before once or seventy-six times). I sat down on the sofa with an ice cream sandwich I’d “discovered” in my freezer and kept looking at the note left on my coffee table.

Why on earth would the killer want me not to trust Duffy Madison? Why go to all that trouble to leave the message there and make sure I’d find it? As Ben had said, if this nut wanted me to have doubts about Duffy, it was probably a great reason to trust him even more. But what difference would it make to someone who would stuff a woman’s throat with rejection notes? And what could she possibly have in store for me? It was best not to think about that.

On impulse, I texted Duffy with the name Shana Kineally and waited for a reply. He was either asleep—unlikely, since
Duffy only slept about three hours a night, I had decided in
Little Boy Lost
—or back in his ruminating mode, probably driving back from Stamford and brooding over the wild goose chase he’d been sent on by the FBI. Duffy takes things personally.

It was time for me to go to bed, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat down at the computer in my office and started writing some revisions. But I didn’t do it my usual way, picking up from the page I’d last rewritten and then moving on. This time, I started with the last chapter. Duffy had punched holes in my ending, and that was bugging me. I’d find a way to make it closer to the man himself. After all, he should know how he’d act.

Now he had me thinking like that.

It was two in the morning when I stood up, still without a satisfactory ending but on my way to one, and headed for my bedroom. I wasn’t even scared walking through the dark house. I’d just spent time in my head with Duffy Madison, and he always kept everyone safe.

Except Sunny Maugham (and some unnamed people I’d been told about), but I wasn’t thinking about that. To be honest (and this doesn’t paint me in a flattering light), I was much more engrossed in thoughts about the meeting the next day with Glenn Waterman. I’d Googled him (I didn’t want Paula to know about the movie deal yet, in case it went south, which almost all of them do) and found some movies his Beverly Hills Productions had made. If he really was interested in
Little Boy Lost
, I would be in classy company. I started to wonder seriously who would play Lt. Antonio.

Such thoughts distract when there is danger lurking around the corner. And distraction is not always a good thing.

*   *   *

Dad wanted to come to the meeting at the English Muffin. “You’re being stalked by an insane killer,” he reminded me, because that thought hadn’t crossed my mind for at least three seconds. “It’s not safe to go out all by yourself.”

“I’ll be in broad daylight,” I argued. “Outdoors where everyone can see me. You can check the car before I go and make sure no one is lurking in the trunk or the backseat, okay? But you’re not coming to my option meeting.”

“I
am
coming, but I’ll certainly check the car before
we
leave,” he countered, and grabbed my keys that were hanging off a hook by the office door. He was out through the mudroom before I could protest again that one does not generally take one’s daddy to a high-stakes business meeting with a Hollywood producer.

I took another look at myself in the mirror, sighed (I’ll bet even Beyoncé groans when she looks at herself in the morning, unless she pays someone to do that for her), and touched up my lipstick for the seventh time. If I actually could calm my stomach to the point that I bit into a muffin, I’d probably leave about an ounce of Pink Cognito on the top and the bottom. I could kiss Portugal and still have my mouth covered.

When I couldn’t put it off any longer, I went outside. The tropical heat was just getting its act together at this hour,
but it had some game. Maybe this outdoor meeting wasn’t such a great idea. Dad was closing the trunk of my car as I approached.

“How do you want me to dress?” he asked.

“Like a man who’s staying home,” I said. “This is a business meeting, Dad. How would you look at someone who brought a parent to discuss investing in a new IPO?”

“I’d probably say, ‘Is there a murderer coming after you?’ and if they said yes, I’d ask why it was only one parent and not the local division of the National Guard.”

“I’m not expecting that question to come up here, and I’m not volunteering the information,” I told him. “Look, I have my phone with me. You can call or text every twenty minutes. If you don’t get a message back, call Ben or Duffy; I’m sure he’s back by now. Call the cops. Hell, go ahead and call the National Guard if you want, okay? You can check in every twenty minutes, and I’ll only be gone an hour, tops.”

He chewed over the idea. “Every ten minutes,” he said.

“Fifteen.”

“Twelve.”

“Done.” I hugged him tight. “Don’t worry about me, Pops.”

He held me very close, like he thought letting go was a mistake. “If I don’t worry about you, how will I fill my day?” he asked.

“Chess?”

I got into the car, waved my cell phone at him, and drove without incident the grueling mile and a half to the English Muffin. Dad didn’t look happy in my rearview mirror.

The English Muffin is a little café so adorable, you want to buy it some chew toys and adopt it. There are exactly four tables outside, each with an umbrella made of cast metal of some kind that’s supposed to make the place look like New Orleans, which belies the whole “English” thing. But Danielle St. James, who owns the place, is a warm, lovely person and, better, a terrific baker. Glenn Waterman was certain to be dazzled by the fare, if not by me.

Except he didn’t show up. Not for half an hour. I sat outside at the table watching the temperature and humidity levels rise, checking my phone for texts—only two came, both from Dad—or missed calls. Nothing.

It wasn’t really a long enough period of time to call for clarification, and I was just about to give up without even having anything to eat (disappointment doesn’t generally kill my appetite, but despair brings it down a notch for sure) when I heard a slightly familiar voice from behind me.

“Ms. Goldman. Who else knows you’re here?”

I stood up and turned, my stomach doing calisthenics the whole time. Then I let out a sigh of relief. Behind me, reassuring in all her Amazonian largeness, was Special Agent Rafferty.

“Just my dad,” I said. “How did you know I was here?”

“I’ve been running checks on the calls you got from this movie producer you’re supposed to be meeting,” she answered. “Something sounded a little weird about it. I mean, I like your books, but have they ever even heard of you in Hollywood?”

Everybody thinks they know the book business. “They’re interested in the Duffy Madison books as a possible TV series, as a matter of fact,” I said, wondering why I was defending myself all of a sudden. “So what about Glenn Waterman? I checked him out; he’s real.”

Rafferty nodded. “Yeah, but the calls you got weren’t. They didn’t come from Los Angeles, and they weren’t from that company. Someone wanted to lure you—” She turned her head suddenly, seemingly alarmed. “Did you hear that?”

I hadn’t heard anything and told her so.

“Stay right there a moment. Don’t move,” Rafferty said. She patted her side, no doubt looking for her weapon, and walked, quickly but cautiously, around the side of the English Muffin. There was an alley there where I knew Danielle could receive deliveries and sometimes park her car when there wasn’t a space nearby. But Rafferty didn’t seem interested in that; she looked really intense. Then she disappeared around the corner.

After a second, she started to laugh. “Oh, sorry about that,” she called from around the corner. “Didn’t mean to worry you. It’s just . . . it’s too funny.”