Entombed (38 page)

"It never occurred to
you that the killer was Monty?"

"Call it denial,
Detective. I had read about the rapist back in the neighborhood,
stabbing a woman. I-I guess I didn't think things were moving so fast,
since the doctor had only called Emily that very day. I didn't think
Monty was anywhere around yet, so I thought I could find information
about Monty that I could turn over to Dr. Ichiko, that would help the
police solve the old case."

I opened the file that
Kroon had printed out the night of Emily's murder and shuffled through
the papers to see whether anything struck me as relevant or useful to
our investigation. I hadn't had the chance yet to study the police
forensics report on the computer.

Teddy may have claimed
a close friendship with Emily, but for some unfathomable reason he had
purloined some very personal writings. There were pages of meditations
on the emotional upheaval she had undergone because of Amelia's
contact, and intimate recollections that the dead woman had written
about her parents and sisters.

Then came a lengthy
manuscript, titled "Poetic Injustice," which listed both Emily Upshaw
and Noah Tormey as its authors. It appeared to be the academic treatise
on Poe's flirtation with plagiarism that she had researched and written
for the young professor- the one that had scotched his ambitions at the
Raven Society.

Next came a paragraph
of single-spaced prose. I lifted the page from my lap to read it.

Kroon saw what it was.
"See? I thought I could give this to Dr. Ichiko, to show that
Monty-whoever he was-had confessed to Emily."

I read the lines:

I determined to wall
it up in the cellar, as the monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to
have walled up their victims. For a purpose such as this the cellar was
well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed, and… I made no doubt
that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the
corpse, and wall the whole thing up as before so that no eye could
detect anything suspicious… by means of a crowbar I easily dislodged
the bricks and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner
wall, I propped it up in that position, while with a little trouble I
re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood.

"Stick to gourmet
cooking, Teddy. That's vintage Poe. 'The Black Cat.' Another burial
behind brick walls," I said.

He looked crestfallen,
as though he had actually found a clue of significance.

The last pages
included the draft letter that Emily was working on to send her sister
Sally, telling her about Amelia's discovery.

"Is this your
handwriting?" I asked, pointing to the edits and corrections that had
been made in pen along the margins.

Kroon said yes without
looking up.

"Why did you write
Noah Tormey's name at the top of the page?"

"I wanted to be sure
I'd remember it. I'd heard his name from Emily for the first time, just
a few days earlier."

"But why?" I asked.
"What were you going to do with this letter, with this information?"

"Well, nothing. I-uh-I
just felt I knew the truth and ought to keep a record of it, for
Amelia's sake."

"And then you brushed
her off at the door when she arrived this morning?" Mercer asked.

I read the page again
while Mercer questioned Kroon. The changes he had made to the draft
made no sense to me. It was no longer intended to be a letter to Sally
Brandon.

"Where did you send
the girl?"

"Nowhere in
particular. I couldn't deal with her is all."

"Did you give her
Tormey's name?" Mercer asked. "Was that your plan?"

"No, not yet. I didn't
think she was ready for that. I didn't know what to do with her. She
wanted information about Emily's life, about who would be able to help
her. I-I told her about the detective who had befriended her mother-"

Mercer was steaming.
"Kittredge? Did you give her Kittredge's name?"

"Yes."

"What else? Did you
talk about Monty?"

"Only that I don't
know who he could be. I wasn't suggesting she try to find out."

"But she's desperate
for information about her birth parents. For all we know you've sent
her out in harm's way. Now how the hell do you help us find her again?"
Mercer asked. "At least if you'd given her Tormey's name, maybe he'd
have taken her in and we'd know she's safe."

Now the written words
made more sense, came clearer on the page when Kroon answered Mercer's
questions.

"Of course you didn't
want her to get to Noah Tormey quite yet," I said, looking up at Kroon.
"You were hoping to extort a little money from him in order to let his
secret go to the grave with Emily."

38

From Kroon's
apartment, I placed a call to Sally Brandon. Amelia had come to New
York to look at graduate schools, but had never told the Brandons what
she had learned about her birth mother nor about her efforts to
reconnect to Emily's world. Sally's distress and pain rang through the
telephone wires as clearly as her voice.

We waited while Sally
tried to reach Amelia on her cell, without success. Mercer called
Peterson to start in motion efforts to find the girl before she knocked
on the wrong door.

Mercer and I stopped
at Swifty's for a late lunch. Neither of us had received any messages
from Mike, and we were both distracted by our thoughts of his grief.

"What do you make of
Dr. Ichiko contacting Emily Upshaw the day she was murdered?" Mercer
asked.

"I've been thinking
about his last phone call-the one to the Raven Society. What if
something Emily said in that conversation pointed him in that
direction, caused him to make the call?"

"To Zeldin?"

"Or to anyone else
who's a member. The number he called wasn't Zeldin's personal phone. It
was just his recording on the answering machine. It can't be a
coincidence that the doctor phoned the Raven Society. Maybe Emily
unwittingly provided a clue that Ichiko followed up on. A fatal one."

I walked back from the
restaurant at four in the afternoon, splitting with Mercer so that he
could spend a long evening with Vickee and Logan. Grace's Marketplace
featured jumbo stone crab claws flown in from Florida, and I took home
half a dozen, already cooked and cracked, as an effortless attempt at
feeding myself a good dinner.

I changed into casual
clothes and stared at the display on my own answering machine. No
messages. When I didn't take time to remind most of my friends that I
thrived on human contact, they ceased calling, believing that I was too
consumed by my cases to socialize.

I cocooned myself in
the den with a couple of old movie DVDs and let the week's weariness
overtake me. The dull headache I'd been lugging around with me since
our visit to Poe Cottage had faded to an occasional thud. I picked at
the meaty crabs when I got hungry and put myself to bed early after a
few chapters of the latest biography of Marie Antoinette.

I was still
claustrophobic and opened the window wider, despite the midwinter
chill. I left the light on in the hallway, newly uncomfortable in the
dark. My last thoughts were about Mike and how lost he must have been
feeling.

The cop on the
security desk was the only person in the lobby of the DA's office when
I pushed through the revolving door at seven-fifteen. There was a lot
of catching up to do. Getting in ahead of the troops would allow me two
hours of work with no phone interruptions, and the added advantage of
not having to see everyone's expression of surprise as they passed me
in the hallway, back on the job at Hogan Place.

The routine business
of the sex crimes unit had gone on under the meticulous watch of my
deputy, Sarah Brenner. The in-house cold case experts, Catherine and
Marisa, had left memos detailing the eight DNA hits that came back from
CODIS in a single week, solving crimes committed as far back as eight
years ago. The line assistants-forty of them who specialized in this
sensitive work- had responded to crime scenes and hospital beds dozens
of times, interviewed scores of witnesses at their desks, and answered
"ready for trial"-the three magic words that jump-started the process
of jury selection-on six felony sexual assault indictments.

I read all the new
screening sheets, which summarized the facts of the cases for me, so
that I could get a sense of every assault and each assistant's
caseload. We had been working around the clock to stop the Silk
Stocking Rapist, to identify Emily Upshaw's killer, and to put some
flesh on the entombed skeleton in order to learn her backstory.

In the movies, cops
and prosecutors working the big case never seemed to have to worry
about other old or new business. In fact, burglars still climbed up
fire escapes and raped sleeping victims, women who separated from
abusive partners were stalked and assaulted as they left their jobs,
college students were preyed on by peers who plied them with alcohol to
make them more vulnerable, and children were molested by pedophiles in
places they should have been most safe-their homes, houses of worship,
and school grounds.

When Laura arrived at
nine, I spent half an hour with her, dictating correspondence, listing
phone messages for her to return, and organizing memos to be filed. The
first paper to go out was a subpoena faxed to the protocol chief at the
UN, to be followed by a hand-delivered original. In lieu of an
appearance by 2
P.M.
at this afternoon's
grand jury, he could make the home addresses of the requested
representatives available to Mercer Wallace.

The morning filled up
as Sarah and I reviewed the new cases and she advised me of the
direction each was going, and the assistants who wanted to discuss
their investigations rolled in and out in response to Laura's summons.

Mercer called me from
the protocol office at 1:45. He was holding the list of residential
addresses. "We're talking more than thirty countries," he said. "It
looks like eleven of them fit nicely inside our geographic range."

"Is the lieutenant on
board?"

"Yeah. He went to the
top on this. The chief of d's is pulling in guys from the street crime
unit to sit on each house starting with today's four-to-twelve shift."
Those cops patrolled in plainclothes and unmarked cars, usually
saturating high crime areas, without the obvious labels of the
distinctive blue and white RMPs to give them away.

"Any other ideas?"

"Next call is to INS,
to see if we can get pedigree information on all the family members who
have visited or lived here." That would have been impossible to do a
few short years ago, before the Immigration and Naturalization Services
had computerized their systems.

"Great. Battaglia
wants to conference everything we did last week at four. Tell Laura to
pull me out if anything develops," I said. "And, Mercer, you hear
anything from Mike?"

"I've left some voice
mails on his cell, just rambling and telling him what we've been doing.
No callbacks yet."

Pat McKinney walked
into my office at 3:55. He told the assistant with whom I was working
to come by later on and said Battaglia had asked him to pick me up. The
meeting was long, as I had expected. Battaglia was a detail man, always
wanting to have the most current theories of major investigations so
that he could repay media favors by planting discreet leaks when he
thought they were reliable enough to release.

"I don't care what
time of night, Alex. You get anything connected to the UN, I'm the
first to know."

"Of course."

"And the rest of the
week?"

"We've got to go back
to some of the people we talked to briefly-Gino Guidi, Noah Tormey, the
men at the Botanical-"

I must have missed a
signal from McKinney to the district attorney.

"That reminds me,"
Battaglia said. "Ellen Gunsher goes with you on some of that, okay?
You're down Chapman, and he's the source of some friction there. I want
Ellen to get some exposure on this. You got guns involved in the
professor's shooting, you got the ex-cop who killed a kid with a gun.
Ellen rides with you."

I smiled and told him
that was fine before he dismissed the two of us.

"You must have
delivered big to get that included in your package, Pat. Battaglia
telling me to partner up with your girlfriend. What's your secret? You
doing more than just lighting his cigars these days? Moved on to wiping
his fingerprints off a murder weapon that you've hidden somewhere?"

He ignored me and
pushed open the door to the men's room. It was his favorite way of
ending our conversations.

Laura was gone, but
she had taped a message on the tall head-rest of my desk chair:

Mercer's on his way
to the 19th squad. He wants you to meet him there.

It was already close
to six o'clock. I closed up my office and went out in front of the
courthouse to hail a cab for the rush hour ride to Sixty-seventh Street.

I flashed my ID at the
officer on the desk and before he could scan it, the sergeant called
over his shoulder, "They're waiting for you on the second floor, Miss
Cooper. Go right on up."

I'd spent many
fruitful hours in the squad room over the last decade. I'd interviewed
crime victims, interrogated suspects, puzzled over facts with
detectives, and napped on the hard wooden bench behind the bars in the
holding pens when short evenings had turned into long overnights.

Lieutenant Peterson
looked up as I opened the door. He put his finger against his lips
before I could greet him or the half dozen detectives standing around,
and motioned me to follow him into the captain's office.

Mercer was behind the
desk, ending a telephone conversation. He handed me a copy of the
sketch of the Silk Stocking Rapist-I knew the image as well as I knew
Mercer's features-and then gave me a copy of the official United
Nations newsletter with photographs of recent receptions and
conferences.