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 room 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?”
Duffy stood and stared at me. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said. “Rachel, you are making accusations that go against my entire method of operating, not just in my work but in life.” He didn’t seem offended so much as amazed I would say such things. How could I get such a wacky idea?
“What did the North Bergen cops say?” I repeated.
A squint, but no movement. “That they’ll get to work immediately on getting the paperwork ready to exhume the body from the anonymous grave the John Doe was placed in five years ago,” he said. “Sgt. Johnstone remembered the case and seemed quite excited that they might finally be able to put a name to the body.”
That seemed really unlikely. “Just based on your word and a few coincidental details, they’re going to authorize an exhumation? What are you leaving out that you haven’t told me yet, Duffy?”
“I haven’t gotten the chance to tell you everything,” he countered. “You decided to attack my method.”
“Okay, I’ve stopped. Now tell me what you’ve been holding back.”
Duffy sighed, and his shoulders rose and fell with the effort, a theatrical flourish he added just to reiterate how wrong I had been about him. “A study of the photographs taken from the scene on the night the body was found indicate Damien Mosley’s car was parked less than forty yards from the scene,” he said.