Entombed

by Linda Fairstein

  The United Nations opened for business in 1950 with the completion of the now familiar tall and sleek Secretariat Building-our destination this morning-followed later by the General Assembly and conference buildings.

  As Mercer shut off the engine and stuck his laminated parking plaque in the car's windshield, we were both conscious of the fact that the UN, technically, was not within the jurisdiction of the United States. It had its own police force and post office, and operated with a unique set of rules and regulations.

  Forty minutes later, passing through layer upon layer of internal security, we presented ourselves to the second assistant to the chief of protocol for the United States mission, the duty officer in charge on a quiet Sunday morning.

  Ralph Barcher wanted to know more about our inquiry. Mercer told him only that we were at the preliminary stage of an investigation that was confidential, but might involve an employee or relative of someone assigned to the world peace organization. Barcher balked at the idea of releasing any information to us without permission from the protocol chief himself.

  "Why don't you phone him?" I asked. "I'll be happy to explain what we need."

  He looked at his watch and thought better of placing the call. "You know you can go to our website and get a listing and mission location for every member state," Barcher said, somewhat nervously.

  "You can be sure we'll do that. But it's the home addresses and contacts that I want as well."

  "Don't you understand the security issues we have when it comes to the release of that sort of personal data, Miss Cooper?"

  "We'll be sensitive to those, of course. We represent the two most important law enforcement agencies in the city. We're not terrorists. Who's the chief?"

  "Waxon. Darren Waxon."

  "That must be a recent promotion. I did some work for him when he was the deputy, just six months ago," I said. "I can't imagine he won't be willing to help us."

  My unit was frequently called for help in training the staff of foreign missions that came to this country with a myriad of clashing cultural values. We had stepped in to prosecute a tribal leader who had brought the horrific practice of female genital mutilation from his sub-Saharan hut to West 112th Street, counseled rape survivors attacked by opposition rebel troops in Eastern European civil wars, intercepted teens brought from Southeast Asia in juvenile sex slave practices, and handled domestic violence incidents for women from countries in which they were still treated as the property of their spouses, even though they were married to businessmen and not camel herders.

  "I'm afraid that since you won't brief me on what you're going to do with these names, there'll be nothing Mr. Waxon can help you with either."

  "Look, I can't tell you exactly what case we're working on, but you can see from our business cards we're both assigned to highly sensitive matters. We don't intend to embarrass anyone."

  Barcher reexamined the cards we had handed to him.

  "I suppose, Miss Cooper," he said flatly, "that you've given some thought to the concept of diplomatic immunity."

  "You're really jumping the gun. To tell you the truth, that hadn't crossed my mind yet. I'm not even close to saying that you're going to hand us a crime suspect on a silver platter. We'd just like to make sure we don't ignore any possibilities."

  Mercer tried to be helpful. "Maybe Ms. Cooper didn't make herself clear. We're not looking at any of your ambassadors here as a target. What we're doing might eliminate the chance of drawing your people into the investigation."

  "What do you know about immunity, Detective Wallace?"

  "Not much."

  "It's an ancient principle of international law, sir. It dates from the early Greeks, who allowed messengers and envoys to travel freely through neighboring countries, so they weren't subject to punishment, even when they carried bad news."

  "That was then," Mercer said.

  It seemed so unnatural not to have Mike at my side. I smiled just thinking of his typical comeback. He probably would have told Mr. Barcher that the Greeks had left us a legacy of some other interesting habits, too.

  "Same theory as today. Representatives of foreign government officials are exempted from the jurisdiction of local courts and authorities. They're allowed to operate under the laws of their own countries."

  "That extends to their families, too?" Mercer asked.

  Barcher bristled. "Diplomatic agents as well as their immediate families are immune from all criminal prosecution."

  "Unless their home government waives that immunity, isn't that right?" I asked.

  "Certainly. It's not a license to commit crimes. If you think you've got evidence to charge someone, the first step is that the State Department advises the proper government involved and requests a waiver to take the case to the proper court."

  "How about diplomatic staff?" I asked, thinking that our perp might even be attached to a mission for some other purpose.

  "Consular employees have less protection, Miss Cooper. They only get immunity for acts performed as part of their official duties."

  "Well, I suggest you spend a bit of your spare time today getting together the list I asked for. I'll have a grand jury subpoena up here first thing tomorrow morning."

  "I don't mean to be an obstructionist. There must be-well, as we'd say here-a more diplomatic way to go about this. If you're talking about some egregious criminal matter, you know we have had charges result in deportation in the past."

  "That's a pretty unsuccessful solution, Mr. Barcher," I said. "When you deport a major felon, he's never brought to justice in our courts, there's no punishment for him here at all, and usually he works his way back over our borders in no time, if New York City is the place he wants to be."

  He tried another route. "You know, one of the things we do here at Protocol is work with the injured, the aggrieved party to try to secure some kind of restitution for them."

  "Money? For victims of violent crime?" Mercer asked. "You think that women who've been sexually assaulted are just looking for money? They want this bastard off the streets, Mr. Barcher, whoever he is. They want him behind bars. Now maybe our case will turn out to have nothing at all to do with the United Nations, but we're expecting your help."

  Barcher walked to a file cabinet and opened the drawer, retrieving two copies of a document from a large stack. "One hundred ninety-one member states. I can't provide you with home addresses, but these are where their missions are located."

  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- yourcarving 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 after
noon 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."