Free Written Off by E. J. Copperman Page B

how the women died because he literally never stopped talking during the ride, but he volunteered the information anyway somewhere around Exit 143B (Irvington/Hillside) on the Garden State Parkway. “Ms. Hardaway was found at her home in Nashua, New Hampshire, with trauma to her head; she’d been hit from behind with a manual typewriter she kept in her writing room but did not use,” he said. I thought—but, again, didn’t get the chance to say—that no writer uses a typewriter anymore, and certainly not a manual one, so it had probably been a decoration—or an inspiration. Some people get a charge outof the good old days of writing. Give me a good word processor and the ability to cut and paste, and I’m a happy woman.
    “J. B. Randolph was electrocuted directly by current from her desktop computer,” Duffy went on as I scribbled. “She lived in Manhattan, Kansas, and had no connection to either of the other victims or Ms. Bledsoe, according to the research I’ve done and have been given by the other three police departments. If the women weren’t all crime writers, they would seem to have been chosen at random. Because they clearly weren’t random crimes, the motive must somehow be tied to the idea of writing crime fiction.”
    I knew Sunny Maugham’s reputation well enough to dismiss the idea of a jealous rival doing her in. She was generous to a fault with other writers, had been working with the same editor for decades without so much as a hint of friction, and was considered one of the truly nicest people in the business. If I hadn’t been so busy taking dictation from Duffy, I might have had a moment to be truly worried about possibly being in very severe danger.
    But on he went: “Marion Benedict was found in her home in Philadelphia. She rented an apartment over a pizzeria and wrote in her bedroom. Her death was perhaps the most gruesome of the three.”
    I considered asking him to let me off here, but we were still on the Parkway, and getting out to walk while other cars zipped by at eighty-five miles an hour could make me an even more gruesome statistic, so I took a breath and told myself simply to write the words I heard and not to think about their meaning.
    “She was found literally choked to death with printouts of rejection letters stuffed into her throat,” Duffy said. “She suffocated.”
    He was right; that was pretty bad.
    “In Ms. Bledsoe’s case,” he continued, the words just coming out as if he had already written them down and was now reading off cards, “the abduction is unusually subtle. The other victims were reported missing but immediately found murdered at home. Ms. Bledsoe is missing from both her Upper Saddle River home and her beach house in Ocean Grove, indicating she was taken and kept longer. There is a reason the criminal has changed his pattern, but it is not yet apparent.”
    He had then recited various observations from each of the crime scenes, from Sunny’s house, which had shown no sign of any serious altercation, to the newest data (as Duffy would call it, despite the fact that it was all from his own mind) from the house in Ocean Grove, with its incongruous card table and folding chairs—really not the kind of place a woman like Julia, whose books had achieved a very high level of success, would usually be expected to own. “It is odd that she chose that house for her writing retreat and that she had clearly been there recently but had not seemed to do much more than exist there. Even the backyard did not show signs of much activity, and that would have been the route to the beach, surely one of the draws for Ms. Bledsoe to make the drive down.”
    He had never speculated on the kidnapper’s motive or any possible identity for the criminal. I knew he wouldn’t; thatHolmesian brain would never admit any thought that hadn’t been created from facts. Guessing was simply not something Duffy Madison would ever do.
    And whoever this guy was, he clearly