Entombed

11

Mike Chapman was whistling a Sam Cooke tune, meant to get under my skin, as he opened the door to let us into the vestibule of the small building. "'Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody…'

"Don't you have better things to do with your time, Coop?" he asked, handing us the rubber gloves and mesh booties we needed to enter the crime scene, which was still being worked by Hal Sherman and his crew.

"Where to?" Mercer asked.

"C'mon up to three. It's a floor-through," Mike said, telling us that the deceased had lived in an apartment that occupied the entire third floor of the building.

I trailed behind them, up the staircase where the clean yellow paint on the walls and banister had now been coated with black fingerprint dust.

"Is she here?" Mercer asked.

"We just got her out fifteen minutes ago. I didn't want to deal with the neighbors and a body bag first thing on Sunday morning."

The third-floor landing was full of Sherman's baggage-metal trunks that held every piece of equipment necessary to process a crime scene. I stepped over them and into the entryway of the victim's apartment.

Hal was on his knees, taking a series of photographs of smudges-probably blood-on the area rug that covered the hallway. I squeezed his shoulder and stayed behind him until he finished shooting and greeted us.

"You got a time of death?" Mercer asked. A death investigator from the medical examiner's office responded to every homicide in the city. The body wasn't removed from the scene until that had happened.

"He thinks she'd been dead only a couple of hours," Mike said. "A friend of the deceased let himself in downstairs at two. They were supposed to meet earlier but she didn't show up. Claims he had a duplicate key, for emergencies. That's when we got the call. The ME was here within an hour."

"The friend-you holding on to him?"

"Yep. He's cooling his heels at the precinct, writing out a statement. Trust me, he's not the man."

"Is there a story?"

Mike led us from the entry through the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and into the bedroom, a series of long narrow cubicles that gave the feel of walking through the cars of a railroad train.

I clasped my hand to my mouth to stifle the involuntary noise that gurgled up when I saw the blood that covered the beige linen bedspread. It made the stains outside Annika Jelt's apartment look as if they could have been stemmed by a couple of Band-Aids.

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."