Written Off by E J Copperman

Author:E J Copperman [Copperman, E J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC022000 Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General
ISBN: 9781629535999
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Published: 2016-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

“Duffy’s had some bad luck once in a while, but for the most part he’s been a real boon to the department,” Ben Preston told me. We were getting out of Ben’s car at my house, where he’d taken me after the inevitable hordes of people had vacated Sunny’s place and he had enough time to drive me home. “Nobody bats a thousand.”

“I’m not saying who, but I was warned to stay away from him,” I said. “That’s why I asked. I’m told that if I am in fact next on the list for this guy, Duffy Madison is exactly the man I want to avoid.” Okay, so Rafferty hadn’t said those words exactly, but the message had been clear.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Ben said as I unlocked the door and we walked inside. “Eunice Rafferty was doing her voodoo scare thing again. She has some bug up her ass about Duffy, and I have no idea why.”

We went into the kitchen, where I started a pot of coffee. I’d just turned the air conditioning back on, so it was going to be iced coffee, but there was no sense getting the ice out until there was something to pour over it. “There were two cases—and we don’t get tons of missing persons cases just in Bergen County—that Duffy worked on, and they didn’t turn out the way we wanted them to. It wasn’t Duffy’s fault, and he wasn’t the black cat walking in anyone’s path.”

“The first three abductions took place in three states that weren’t New Jersey,” I pointed out. “Don’t you have to look for someone who could have been in all those places at the time of the crime? Doesn’t that sort of narrow things down?”

I have a counter between the kitchen and the dining room. I never actually dine in the dining room, so there were a number of boxes in there from when I had moved in that had never been completely unpacked. Kind of makes me wonder if I needed that stuff in the first place. Ben sat down on a barstool I had set up next to the counter.

He rubbed his chin as he thought. “Of course that would help identify a suspect,” he said. “But we don’t even have a pool of people to choose from yet. This guy has been really discreet, except when he’s killing people.”

“Well, what about motive?” I filled the coffeemaker with enough water and started it going, then I walked out to his side of the pass-through and stood looking at him while the coffee brewed. “No two of these women seem to have anything in common other than writing crime fiction. Why does someone want to kill women crime fiction authors?”

I realized then how tired Ben looked. There were creases under his eyes, which were not entirely white in their whites, and his smile was crooked, favoring the left side. “Has it ever occurred to you that this guy might just be crazy?” he asked.

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