Free Written Off by E. J. Copperman Page A

called the policeconcerned—because this is a serious break in Ms. Bledsoe’s routine—leads me to believe that she was taken.”
    “How does the cell phone lead to abduction?” I asked, finally. Somebody had to get him to the reveal or we’d be here all night, and I wanted to get home. To revise. No, really.
    “A writer without a cellular phone is unthinkable,” Duffy said. “To be out of touch with an editor, an agent, a publicist? Never. Am I correct about that?” he asked me.
    Considering that I’d talked to my agent today and had to e-mail my editor as soon as I got home, I nodded.
    “So she forgot her phone,” the sergeant said. “It happens to everybody.”
    “Yes, but then everybody comes back to get it,” Duffy said. “Ms. Bledsoe’s sister confirms there is no second cell number. That is the only phone she has. And since it’s still holding a charge enough that we could hear the ringing from outside the house, we can assume it has not been lying on the floor here for much more than a day, two on the outside.”
    “That means she’s not here,” the sergeant argued. “It doesn’t mean she’s been kidnapped.”
    “The phone was on the floor next to the table. It had been dropped there. And it was left there.”
    “So she dropped her phone on her way out the door,” the sergeant said.
    “Look at this house,” Duffy countered. “It’s not clean, but it’s neat. There isn’t one thing out of place. Everything, down to the last cereal spoon, has been put back in its designated spot. Everything except that cell phone, the one itemMs. Bledsoe would probably have been most cognizant of the whole time. No, the phone on the floor is very telling, sergeant. There’s no sign of a struggle, but that phone makes it kidnapping for me, and if that’s the case, I’m afraid we have very little time left to find Ms. Bledsoe.”

Chapter 9
    “You were extremely helpful,” Duffy Madison told me. “I would not have been able to adequately evaluate the crime scene if you hadn’t been there. Thank you.”
    All this buttering up was taking place in the parking lot of the Bergen County office building, after another interminable trip, this time from Ocean Grove to Hackensack to pick up my car. Duffy had nattered on about the case in a monologue, almost nonstop, since we’d said our good-byes to the Ocean Grove police department and headed northwest to our—or my, at least—home county.
    I’d been taking notes, as he’d . . . is there a word that could make it sound like he didn’t actually order me to? Instructed , perhaps. Gentler, without actually being polite.
    The three murders of crime writers were perplexing at the very least, he’d said. They weren’t the same kind of writers. One, Missy Hardaway, lived in New Hampshire and wrote “cozies,” the kind of mystery that features no “bad” language, no graphic violence, and, above all, no explicit sex. (You cankill anyone you want—except the cat—but you can’t have your heroine shtup anybody or you’re toast.) She had published two books in trade paperback with a small publisher headquartered in Baltimore.
    The second dead writer, J. B. Randolph (I didn’t think any of these were their real names), wrote tough thrillers. The initials instead of a first name probably indicated that her publisher wanted readers to think the books were written by a man, or at least not to think about the author’s gender at all. Randolph had written seven books, all stand-alones. They’d managed some success, but she was hardly a household name.
    The third was Marion Benedict, a lab assistant and an unpublished writer who had created two e-book short stories on her own and was at work on her first full-length novel (the first two had not been purchased by a publisher, and she’d been talking about self-publishing), a police procedural about a beautiful but shy forensic lab technician, when she was found murdered.
    I did not get to ask Duffy