"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."
"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 2P.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.
"I picked this up when I was waiting for the list of names this afternoon. Look at the delegate speaking at the December meeting on trade sanctions."
The man in the photograph looked remarkably like the composite drawing, except that he appeared to be in his mid-sixties. The hairline and round-shaped face, even the size of the nose and outline of the lips were identical to the rapist's physiognomy. The skin color was the deep ebony that witnesses had described.
"Who's your friend?"
"Sofi Maswana. Representative to the United Nations from Dahlakia."
"Enlighten me, Mercer."
"Like Eritrea, it was once part of Ethio
pia. Broke off in the nineties and became an independent republic. Northern Africa, on the Red Sea, prized for its pearl fisheries."
"And Mr. Maswana?" I asked.
"He's downstairs with his number-one son, waiting to talk to us."
"I'm impressed. That's why all the guys look so wired out there?"
"They know something's up," Peterson said. "They haven't seen the pair yet."
"What do you know?"
"Maswana's a perfect gentleman," Mercer said, flipping open his notepad. "He's got business degrees from the University of London-don't go smirking there, Alex-and the Sorbonne. Sixty-eight years old. Been in the diplomatic corps for almost thirty years and has been posted here for six."
"What's the address?"
"Town house on East Seventy-fourth Street, between First and Second Avenues."
"I hope our profiler likes that for a 'jeopardy center.' Couldn't be better. What does he know at this point?" I asked.
"By four-thirty, INS confirmed visa information for other family members. There's a wife who splits her time between here and home, and five kids, all in their twenties. Three sons, two daughters. They've all come and gone from the States over the years. I got an agent to meet me at Maswana's office in the Secretariat building so I didn't have to use any ID that linked me to Special Victims. I thought immigration questions would be less threatening than telling him we were looking for a serial rapist."
I liked the sound of this. My adrenaline was pumping, just like the detectives who paced in the adjacent room. "Good start. What did he tell you?"
"The agent explained to Maswana the latest updates in airport security procedures for United Nations personnel. The government's working on a form of identification to create an express VIP service for all diplomats who've submitted to extensive anti-terrorist screening procedures. Then, it seemed natural we had to take him through the family members step by step."
"Was he cooperative?"
"One hundred percent. Help the good old USA, and grease the wheels to get through the airport more speedily. Mrs. Maswana, he told us, is here until April. Both girls are at college, one at Princeton and one at Georgetown."
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