Entombed (11 page)

The lamp on the table
next to the bed had been knocked to the floor and the telephone line
had been pulled out of the wall.

"Emily Upshaw.
Forty-three years old," Mike said, referring to his notepad. "Single,
lived alone. Been in this apartment almost fifteen years."

I scanned the room for
photographs.

"Brunette, about five
foot seven, slightly overweight."

Mercer frowned. "She's
too old for my boy. And a little too fleshy."

Mike wasn't bothered
by the physical discrepancies. "She had a ski jacket on-it's in the
living room. Hood up, from behind, hard to tell her age-or the size of
her waist. Your rapist is older now, too. Maybe he's less picky."

Mercer shook his head
and looked around the room.

There were several
pictures on the dresser, all of two or three individuals. Perhaps she
was in one of those. Groups of people in a beach scene, on a hiking
trail, riding bicycles, and in a wedding party.

"What does-did she
do?" I asked. The walls were hung with museum reproduction posters in
cheap metal frames, about one step up from college dorm room decor.

"Writer. Freelance
magazine pieces, book and movie reviews. Whatever paid the rent, her
buddy tells me."

Mike motioned to us as
he walked into the last room, which was set up like an office.

"And she drank, too.
Have I mentioned that?"

The overturned
wastebasket was crammed with crumpled paper and empty bottles, spilling
out of it as it lay on its side. Vodka, mostly, and cheap red wine.

"Screw tops," he said,
lifting a half-filled Burgundy off the desk. "Girl after my own heart.
Slainte, Emily."

Next to the desk was a
stack of newspapers. I flipped through them, all from the preceding
week. Yesterday's headlines were on top of the pile.

"The computer?" I
asked. "You checked it?"

"Haven't touched it.
It was turned off like this when we got here. I'm going to take the
hard drive to be downloaded."

The computer tech cops
were experts at the forensic examination of the machines. Emily's files
and e-mails might give some hint of her activities and correspondence,
and the "cookies" on her Web browser would tell us exactly what sites
she had been searching in the days before her death. The only
likelihood of relevance would be if the killer had not picked her at
random and there had been some connection between them before this
evening.

I shuffled the files
on the desk while Mike talked to us. "Teddy-that's her friend, Theodore
Kroon-Teddy's known Emily for almost fifteen years."

"Romance?"

"Not the way Teddy
swings. I didn't ask him how they met. They were supposed to hook up
tonight, around midnight, at a bar on York Avenue."

"Midnight? Why so
late?" I asked.

"Emily had to do a
piece on a performance artist who was appearing at the Beacon Theater.
Some musical geek who plays Burt Bacharach songs in the style of
Beethoven, reciting the lyrics in German. Wasn't due to break until
almost eleven. She planned to come home to drop off her notes and
change clothes since she had to pass right by the apartment on her way
to York Avenue. Then she was joining Teddy for cocktails."

Mercer picked up the
thread. "So you figure she got popped on the stoop?"

"Probably. Can't find
any witnesses yet, but that's how the others got it, isn't it? Her
handbag's in that front room with the keys inside it."

"How'd you find her?"

They started back to
the bedroom. The articles she'd been working on could not have produced
much income. A search for the best homemade ice creams in Brooklyn, the
controversy over whether owls should be sold as domesticated pets, and
the effect of winter weather on the projected population of deer ticks
in the Hamptons for the coming summer. I replaced the folders and
joined up with the guys.

"Facedown on the bed.
Naked."

"Completely?" Mercer
asked.

"Yeah. Her clothes
were in a pile next to the bed."

"Did she undress or
were they cut off?"

"See for yourself,"
Mike said. He pointed to a row of brown paper bags, each tagged and
labeled. "I looked everything over- didn't notice any holes. The lab
can work 'em up for blood and semen."

Mercer crouched next
to the bags and started to open each one, removing the single piece of
clothing inside and holding it up for a look.

"Her arms were tied
together behind her back. Ankles were bound, too. Stabbed five times in
the back. Carving knife, about fourteen inches long, with the blade.
Still in her when Teddy stumbled in."

"Her own knife?"
Mercer asked. We didn't think our perp carried anything that big when
he prowled the streets.

"Matches a set in the
kitchen. Maybe he took a look at her and figured a pocketknife wouldn't
get the job done," Mike said, glancing back at Mercer. "Those last
bags? That's the panty hose. They're bloody, man. Maybe he cut himself
in the process and we've got his fluid on them as well as hers."

I watched as Mercer
opened the last two paper bags and removed the items one by one. Dried
blood had formed clumps on the pale taupe surface of the hosiery,
caught in the fine mesh webbing. The empty outline of a foot dangled
from his hand, part of the knot that had restrained Emily for the kill.

"Something else
bothering you, Mercer?" Mike asked. He knew his old partner well enough
to recognize the puzzled expression on his face.

Mercer passed me one
of the bags. "Little things."

"Like what?"

"Our man never hit
before midnight. Never stabbed anybody in the back before-"

"Shit, he never
stabbed anybody at all till that Swedish kid fought him last week.
Maybe he liked doing it. Maybe thinking he'd killed a girl satisfied
him even more."

"Always had his own
knife-the small folding kind," Mercer said, ticking off a punch list of
distinctions from the four-year-old case details he knew so well. "Her
keys shouldn't be inside her pocketbook, like she had time to replace
them and close it up. They'd be on the floor or a tabletop. The jacket
would be in here, with the pile of clothes."

"Three, four years is
a long time in a pervert's life. Maybe his style changed, maybe his
whole approach."

"It's not just the
little things," I said, twisting the piece of bloodstained evidence and
holding it up by the toe. "This isn't panty hose."

"Then what the hell
have I been fumbling with all these years, trying to get inside the
damn stuff? Could have fooled me," Mike said.

"Maybe you should try
it with the lights on and your eyes open once in a while," I said. "You
might enjoy it."

"What have you got?"

"Something bigger to
add to Mercer's instincts. Stockings. Old-fashioned, expensive, hard to
come by, and totally useless without garter belts. Not the cheap Lycra
waist-high pull-ups from a local drugstore that all our other girls
were tied with."

"So, what's your
point?"

"That this killer's a
copycat who's read the news accounts of the case pattern, took the
headlines literally, and is trying to imitate our rapist to cover up a
murder," I said, passing the bloody hosiery to Mike. "These really are
silk stockings."

12

"I'll take your twenty
dollars and bet it on this. They're not going to find semen when they
autopsy her," I said to Mike as we climbed the staircase to the squad
room in the Nineteenth Precinct station house at 5
A.M.
"This wasn't a rape."

We walked in, greeted
by the frightened or sullen faces of more than a dozen men-black
men-seated on every available chair. The metal gate of the holding pen
was thrown open so that others could sit on the benches usually
reserved for prisoners.

"What the hell's
happening here? Somebody holding auditions for
The Jeffersons
?"
Mike asked Mercer,
who was coming up behind us. "One look around and I know it ain't
hockey tryouts."

"Same damn thing as
last time. This is where the RoboCop business gets ugly."

After the serial
rapist task force had been formed several years back, the moment there
was a report of an attack that fit the pattern, police swept the
neighborhood for every dark-skinned man who was on the street. A single
glance around and it was obvious that no one in this crowd even
remotely resembled the roundcheeked suspect depicted in the victims'
composite sketch.

A lone detective sat
in a corner in front of a computer monitor, entering pedigree
information into the system. "What are you doing, DeGraw?" Mercer asked.

"I'm trying to get
these guys out of here as fast as I can. Two doctors-they're the quiet
ones behind bars over there. One partner at some fancy-dancy law
firm-he's the one screaming about the racial-profiling suit he's gonna
file on behalf of everyone who's keeping me company this dark and
lonely night. A banker, two cooks, a fireman, a hot dog vendor, a
paroled burglar with six misdemeanor convictions, a couple of lounge
lizards hanging out at the local bars looking for a lonely piece of
ass."

"Why are they here at
all?" I asked. "This is appalling." The usual procedure was to do a
stop-and-frisk on the street, fill out the necessary paperwork that
accompanied the search, and let the men go.

"The guys stopped so
many people they ran out of forms. We had to bring the rest of them in
to process."

Mercer was making the
rounds, shaking everyone's hand and apologizing for this outrageous
fallout from the murder investigation.

"You swabbing 'em?"
Mike asked.

"I've been asking for
volunteers. So far, the legal eagle told them they don't gotta do it.
One of the docs went along with the program," DeGraw said, showing me a
single Q-tips in a glassine envelope. "Nobody else is in the mood."

"You want to take a
shot at it, Mercer?" I asked. "Just for elimination purposes?"

"That is one mean
assignment, Ms. Cooper. Me, leaning on the brothers to help elevate the
African-American statistics in the population genetics pool of the data
bank," Mercer said, doubling back to ask again whether any of the men
were willing to give us a saliva sample.

"Where's m' man Teddy?"

DeGraw pointed Mike in
the direction of the lieutenant's office at the far end of the room.
"He's in there, unless he flung himself out the window already. Go easy
on him-he's a wreck."

Theodore Kroon lifted
his head from his folded arms on the desktop when he heard the door
open. His lean, pale face was streaked with tears and his reddish-brown
hair was tousled and unkempt. There were bloodstains on the front of
his shirt and pants.

He began to wail as
soon as he saw Mike Chapman. "I touched everything, Detective. I
couldn't help it. I didn't know what I was supposed to do."

"It's okay, buddy. I
wouldn't expect anything else."

"But I mean my
fingerprints must be everywhere in Emily's apartment. I tried to see if
she was alive, I untied her hands, I… I even held the handle of the
knife. I wrote it all out for you, just like you asked." Teddy thrust
several pieces of paper at Mike.

"First thing you're
gonna do is go into the men's room and wash up. You're no good to me if
you don't calm down. This is Alexandra Cooper. She's from the DA's
office. I'd like to go over everything with you again, so Ms. Cooper
can hear it."

Kroon closed his eyes
and breathed deeply before he stood up and left the small room.

"See what I mean? Too
light in the loafers for a job like this murder."

The political
correctness of the nineties had not even been a blip on Mike's radar
screen. "Please stop with that kind of talk. You know it drives me
crazy. And what if I'm right that Emily wasn't raped?"

"I realize you're
tired but you're never gonna change my spots, kid. It's just my bad
mouth-inside you know I'm like butter."

"Yes, but it's your
mouth that makes such an indelible impression."

"My cousin Sean-did I
tell you he's getting married in June? I'm the best man. The bride's a
guy he met playing soccer in Ireland. I got twenty-two first cousins,
and if you don't think the odds are that at least five of them are gay,
then you can sit there praying with my aunt Bridget and her rosary
beads, trying to pretend it only happens in other people's families.
Now I have to take Teddy seriously as a suspect-that's what you're
telling me?"

"Is it all right for
me to come in?" Teddy said, pushing open the door.

Mike put a hand on
Teddy's shoulder and steadied him as he walked back to the lieutenant's
chair. We seated ourselves across the desk from him.

I opened the coffee I
needed to keep myself going and the bag of bagels that I had stopped to
pick up for the detectives and witnesses. Mike asked Teddy Kroon to
tell us about himself.

"I was born
forty-eight years ago in Bangor, Maine. My parents-"

"How about we
fast-forward and start from this end. What do you do?"

"Retail, Mr. Chapman.
I own a shop in TriBeCa that sells highend cooking utensils-pots and
pans, table toppings-"

"Carving knives?"

"Yes, sir. The
one-um-the one that's in Emily's back? I gave her that set for her
birthday last year." He shook his head and tried to open a packet of
sugar with his shaking hands.

"You work in the shop,
too?"

"Six days a week. I
get down there at eight before we open and stay late most nights to do
all the paperwork. We're closed on Sundays."

"And Emily Upshaw,
what's your relationship been with her?"

"She's my best friend,
Detective." Teddy's eyes welled up with tears again. "She's been my
very dearest friend for almost a decade."