Entombed (37 page)

We walked to the
elevator as we both scanned the alphabetical list, looking for names of
African countries. I took out a pen to check the ones I recognized.

"Angola. That was
Portuguese, I think. Not British," I said, thinking of Annika's comment
about the perp's accented word. "Benin. What's that?"

"Used to be Dahomey
back when you took geography. French West Africa."

"Botswana. Now that
used to be under British influence," I said, marking the page. "Burkina
Faso. Where the hell is that?"

"Upper Volta. Part of
the French Union at one time."

"Burundi. I think that
was German or Belgian." I said, buttoning my coat as the guard let us
out of the building.

"Cameroon," Mercer
said. "Check it off. That had both British and French divisions."

"This is going to take
more manpower than I guessed. We're not even out of the
C
's
yet."

We got back into the
car and Mercer called Lieutenant Peterson. "Alex will shoot a subpoena
up to the chief of protocol in the morning. I can't say we were greeted
with open arms here. You might put in a request for some backup from
the Nineteenth Precinct. With any luck, we'll be knocking on a lot of
doors tomorrow afternoon."

Mercer seemed
attentive to Peterson's reply. Then he listened to something else the
lieutenant had to say, grabbing the pen from my hand to write down an
address.

"Here's our chance for
that second chat with Emily's friend Teddy Kroon. Emily's child, the
one she gave to her sister Sally to raise? She showed up on Kroon's
doorstep an hour ago, trying to find out from him who her father is."

37

Mike Chapman would
have been pushing me out of the way if he were with us, telling Teddy
Kroon to stop whining. Mercer and I took the more compassionate
approach, hoping to gain his trust and elicit more candid responses
than we had in our first meeting.

"Amelia. Amelia
Brandon," Kroon said, repeating the girl's name over and over again as
he rocked back and forth on his living room sofa. "I opened the door
and I swear it was like seeing Emily's ghost. Amelia. It was Emily's
little girl."

"You just let her walk
away?" Mercer asked.

I was sitting next to
Kroon and patting him on the back to help calm him.

"What else could I do?
She came in and talked for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I, I think she
had figured out that I might be her father," Kroon said, forcing a
smile. "I guess I convinced her that wasn't possible."

"But why didn't you
give her some coffee-find some way to stall and keep her here-and go
inside to call the precinct?"

Kroon looked at Mercer
quizzically. "Detective Wallace, this whole thing came at me as such a
surprise, I'm sure I didn't do a lot of things you would have thought
of."

Mercer had the
opportunity he wanted. Kroon was caught in a lie. The draft of the
letter from Emily Upshaw to her sister was one of the files that had
been opened on the computer the night of Emily's murder. Amelia and her
appearance could not have been much of a surprise at all.

Mercer pushed the
coffee table out of the way and lowered himself onto an ottoman that he
pulled up directly in front of Kroon.

"Now one of the things
we'd like to do this morning, Teddy, is to establish some ground
rules," he said, his huge frame boxing the smaller man into place
beside me. "You haven't been entirely honest with us about-"

"Yes, I have. Yes, I
have from the very beginning. It's my finger-prints; didn't I tell you
they'd be everywhere in Emily's apartment? I, I knew that was going to
be a problem from the first time the police started questioning me. Is
that what you mean?" Kroon looked over at me to be the good cop in this
conversation, but I stared back at him without offering any comfort.

I remembered that Mike
had been even more suspicious of Kroon when he got the confirmation
from the autopsy that no sexual assault had been completed on Emily.
The killer's sexual orientation was of little moment if the whole scene
had been staged for the purpose of misleading the investigators.

"You gotta do better
than that, Teddy. You gotta convince us you weren't the one waiting in
the apartment for Emily when she came home from the theater the night
she was killed."

Kroon was practically
doubled over. "But I told you the name of the bar I was in. People saw
me there. Lots of people."

"In a crowded bar
where you were a regular. No one can swear to the time you arrived or
when you ordered your second drink or whether you went out and came
back during the course of the evening."

"I'd never have hurt
Emily. She was the dearest friend I've ever had," he said, resting his
head in his hands.

Mercer tapped a long,
thick finger against the top of Kroon's knee. "Look at me when I'm
talking to you," he said, his deep voice the only sound in the room.

Kroon slowly lifted
his head to meet Mercer's eyes.

"Don't mess with me,
Teddy. There's a little chip inside the hard drive that recorded the
exact minute someone went into a bunch of files from Emily Upshaw's
computer," Mercer said, rubbing his fingers together in front of
Kroon's face. "And there were enough skin cells on the computer mouse
to tell us that person was you. So it suggests that you were either
there with your friend at the time she was attacked with-correct me if
I have this wrong-
your
carving knife, or that you interrupted
your mourning after
her death long enough to log on to her machine. Neither one of those is
a pretty picture."

Kroon's head snapped
back and he leaned it against the rear edge of the sofa, gazing up at
the ceiling.

Mercer was getting to
him. "Start with the crap you gave us about leaving messages on her
answering machine. There were none."

"Maybe I dialed the
wrong number. I'm telling you that I called Emily several times."

"Try harder. You knew
she was very upset. You lied about that, too. She told you she was
frantic when she called you at the store in the afternoon."

"Like I said, she only
left a message with one of my sales-"

"Teddy, her phone
records show she was talking with someone at your shop for almost five
minutes."

It wasn't warm enough
in Kroon's apartment for any of us to be sweating, but small, watery
beads were forming on his forehead.

He pulled himself
upright and snarled at Mercer, "Emily Upshaw was scared to death when
she called me that afternoon. She had a premonition that she was going
to be murdered."

Mercer and I hadn't
expected that answer.

"All right, Detective?
Would you have believed her if she told you that? Would you have taken
her any more seriously than I did?"

"It depends what she
was talking about."

"Someone was trying to
find Emily. Someone she didn't want to hear from ever again."

I thought I knew where
he was going. "Amelia Brandon. Her daughter?"

Kroon was silent.

"Look, Teddy, we know
the letter that Emily wrote to her sister about Amelia is one of the
documents you opened the night of the murder. That's why I don't
believe you were all that surprised when Amelia showed up at your door
this morning. There's got to be a different reason you turned the child
away."

"Fear, Miss Cooper.
Plain and simple fear. Can you understand that?" He pushed himself up
from the sofa and walked away from the two of us.

"Of course I can
accept that." Better than you'll ever imagine. "But it would help if
you told us who you're afraid of."

He balanced himself
against the windowsill as he shouted at me, "How the hell am I supposed
to know if you people can't figure it out?"

"So what did you do?"
Mercer asked. "Send the kid back out on the street as a test balloon?
See what kind of trouble she attracts? I want to find that girl, Teddy,
before we have another tragedy on our hands."

Kroon exhaled. "Emily
had been sick since she got that phone call from Amelia, maybe a week
or ten days before she was killed. She'd promised her sister never to
have any contact with the child."

"We know that. Sally
Brandon talked to us when she was here. But Amelia's got to be out of
college by now-she was bound to find out sooner or later."

"Some sort of legal
papers had been arranged for the Brandons when Emily gave up the baby,
but apparently no one ever destroyed the original birth certificate on
file at the hospital. Amelia hadn't gone looking for trouble. She
simply wanted to come here to meet Emily, to find out why her mother
had abandoned her. She wanted to know who her father is."

"Wasn't his name on
the birth certificate, too?" I asked.

"No. That just said
'unknown' in the space for the father's name."

"Do you know who he
is?"

Kroon nodded his head
up and down. "Emily told me that same week. The NYU professor whom she
slept with the time she came to the city for her college interview.
Noah Tormey is his name."

"Did Emily actually
speak to Amelia?"

"Only once. You see,
the child didn't have a phone number for Emily. Her home phone
is-was-unlisted. So Amelia rummaged through her mother's papers but the
only things she came up with were some occasional clippings of articles
with Emily's byline that Sally must have saved. The girl began to call
the editorial departments of the magazines, and once she did that,
Emily got calls from her former colleagues, telling her that someone
named Amelia Brandon was trying to reach her."

"So Emily phoned her?"
Mercer asked.

"Absolutely not. She'd
made a promise to her sister that she wasn't going to break. But she
was tormented by the fact that Amelia was determined to track her down.
There was no way to put the cat back in the bag. I guess one of the
other writers on the magazine staff finally gave the child Emily's
phone number."

"Take us to Saturday
afternoon before the murder," Mercer said, "when Emily called you with
her-what did you say- premonition?"

Kroon wiped his brow.
"I was at work, like I told you. The store was busy and I'm afraid I
didn't take her as seriously as-well-as it turned out I should have."

"You couldn't have
known what would happen to her," I said.

"Emily had been at
home all morning, sleeping late, I'm sure. She went out for the papers
and some groceries, and when she got back there had been a series of
calls. Three, I think she said. All of them hang-ups."

I looked at Mercer,
who had studied the outgoing and incoming activity on Emily Upshaw's
phone records. He nodded his head and mouthed the words "pay phone."

"Emily couldn't
imagine who had called, but she was concerned that it had something to
do with Amelia's attempts to find her. Every time we had met during the
week, she'd been soliciting my help with what to do about telling her
sister."

"And your advice?"

He shrugged. "Be
honest with her. There was nothing to hide anymore."

"The hang-up caller,
did he or she phone back?"

"Yes. That's what
prompted Emily's panicked call to me. It was that doctor-you know, the
one with the Asian name who was found dead last week."

"Dr. Ichiko?" I asked.

"Exactly."

"Did Emily know him?"

"No," he said. "She
told me that she'd never met him."

Mercer walked over to
Kroon. "But you just told us her phone is unlisted."

He sniffled and
answered, "Emily's name was in the file the doctor had kept on Monty,
when Ichiko had treated him back in his college days. Apparently, Monty
had talked about her in session, as the woman he lived with, the person
he confided in when he had the flashbacks that he had killed someone.
The doctor had an NYU alumni directory. Emily's number is printed in
that."

"What did he want?"

"First he spooked her
by just expressing relief that she was alive-that she hadn't been
murdered long ago. Ichiko asked whether she had seen the newspapers,
the headlines about the skeleton in the building basement. Emily had
just come home with the papers-the
Times
and the tabloids. He
told her to look at the
Post
follow-up story, that he was
convinced he knew whose bones had been discovered. And certain that the
killer was Emily's old boyfriend, the one she called Monty."

"What did Emily do?" I
asked.

"Ichiko wanted her to
tell him where Monty was, what had become of him. She swore she didn't
know, that she hadn't seen him in over twenty years. He pressed Emily
hard-he really scared the daylights out of her."

"How?"

"He told her that once
the skeleton was identified, Emily wouldn't be safe in New York. That
she had to help him figure out what had become of Monty or they'd both
wind up dead. Dr. Ichiko wasn't wrong, was he?"

"And you, what did
Emily want from you?" Mercer asked.

"Money. Money to get
out of town. And advice about where to go."

"What did you tell
her?"

"That she couldn't run
because she didn't know where in the world this man Monty had gone."

"Hadn't she thought of
that before?" I asked.

"Often," Kroon said.
"She often wondered what had become of him. How do you support yourself
if you're a poet, Detective Wallace? Nobody can make a living that way
today."

"The pages you opened
from Emily's computer, Teddy, what was that about?" Mercer asked.

He bowed his head.
"That was such a stupid thing to do."

Heartless, I wanted to
add.

"What was so important
to you that you opened computer files before you even called
nine-one-one?"

Kroon walked to his
desk drawer and returned to the sofa, sitting next to me and handing me
a thin manila folder. "You can look. I mean, when I found her body, I
assumed she'd been killed by the Silk Stocking Rapist. That it was just
a rotten piece of bad timing and bad luck. I-I guess I just wanted to
be a hero."