Entombed

12

"I'll take your twenty dollars and bet it on this. They're not going to find semen when they autopsy her," I said to Mike as we climbed the staircase to the squad room in the Nineteenth Precinct station house at 5A.M. "This wasn't a rape."

We walked in, greeted by the frightened or sullen faces of more than a dozen men-black men-seated on every available chair. The metal gate of the holding pen was thrown open so that others could sit on the benches usually reserved for prisoners.

"What the hell's happening here? Somebody holding auditions for The Jeffersons?" Mike asked Mercer, who was coming up behind us. "One look around and I know it ain't hockey tryouts."

"Same damn thing as last time. This is where the RoboCop business gets ugly."

After the serial rapist task force had been formed several years back, the moment there was a report of an attack that fit the pattern, police swept the neighborhood for every dark-skinned man who was on the street. A single glance around and it was obvious that no one in this crowd even remotely resembled the roundcheeked suspect depicted in the victims' composite sketch.

A lone detective sat in a corner in front of a computer monitor, entering pedigree information into the system. "What are you doing, DeGraw?" Mercer asked.

"I'm trying to get these guys out of here as fast as I can. Two doctors-they're the quiet ones behind bars over there. One partner at some fancy-dancy law firm-he's the one screaming about the racial-profiling suit he's gonna file on behalf of everyone who's keeping me company this dark and lonely night. A banker, two cooks, a fireman, a hot dog vendor, a paroled burglar with six misdemeanor convictions, a couple of lounge lizards hanging out at the local bars looking for a lonely piece of ass."

"Why are they here at all?" I asked. "This is appalling." The usual procedure was to do a stop-and-frisk on the street, fill out the necessary paperwork that accompanied the search, and let the men go.

"The guys stopped so many people they ran out of forms. We had to bring the rest of them in to process."

Mercer was making the rounds, shaking everyone's hand and apologizing for this outrageous fallout from the murder investigation.

"You swabbing 'em?" Mike asked.

"I've been asking for volunteers. So far, the legal eagle told them they don't gotta do it. One of the docs went along with the program," DeGraw said, showing me a single Q-tips in a glassine envelope. "Nobody else is in the mood."

"You want to take a shot at it, Mercer?" I asked. "Just for elimination purposes?"

"That is one mean assignment, Ms. Cooper. Me, leaning on the brothers to help elevate the African-American statistics in the population genetics pool of the data bank," Mercer said, doubling back to ask again whether any of the men were willing to give us a saliva sample.

"Where's m' man Teddy?"

DeGraw pointed Mike in the direction of the lieutenant's office at the far end of the room. "He's in there, unless he flung himself out the window already. Go easy on him-he's a wreck."

Theodore Kroon lifted his head from his folded arms on the desktop when he heard the door open. His lean, pale face was streaked with tears and his reddish-brown hair was tousled and unkempt. There were bloodstains on the front of his shirt and pants.

He began to wail as soon as he saw Mike Chapman. "I touched everything, Detective. I couldn't help it. I didn't know what I was supposed to do."

"It's okay, buddy. I wouldn't expect anything else."

"But I mean my fingerprints must be everywhere in Emily's apartment. I tried to see if she was alive, I untied her hands, I… I even held the handle of the knife. I wrote it all out for you, just like you asked." Teddy thrust several pieces of paper at Mike.

"First thing you're gonna do is go into the men's room and wash up. You're no good to me if you don't calm down. This is Alexandra Cooper. She's from the DA's office. I'd like to go over everything with you again, so Ms. Cooper can hear it."

Kroon closed his eyes and breathed deeply before he stood up and left the small room.

"See what I mean? Too light in the loafers for a job like this murder."

The political correctness of the nineties had not even been a blip on Mike's radar screen. "Please stop with that kind of talk. You know it drives me crazy. And what if I'm right that Emily wasn't raped?"

"I realize you're tired but you're never gonna change my spots, kid. It's just my bad mouth-inside you know I'm like butter."

"Yes, but it's your mouth that makes such an indelible impression."

"My cousin Sean-did I tell you he's getting married in June? I'm the best man. The bride's a guy he met playing soccer in Ireland. I got twenty-two first cousins, and if you don't think the odds are that at least five of them are gay, then you can sit there praying with my aunt Bridget and her rosary beads, trying to pretend it only happens in other people's families. Now I have to take Teddy seriously as a suspect-that's what you're telling me?"

"Is it all right for me to come in?" Teddy said, pushing open the door.

Mike put a hand on Teddy's shoulder and steadied him as he walked back to the lieutenant's chair. We seated ourselves across the desk from him.

I opened the coffee I needed to keep myself going and the bag of bagels that I had stopped to pick up for the detectives and witnesses. Mike asked Teddy Kroon to tell us about himself.

"I was born forty-eight years ago in Bangor, Maine. My parents-"

"How about we fast-forward and start from this end. What do you do?"

"Retail, Mr. Chapman. I own a shop in TriBeCa that sells highend cooking utensils-pots and pans, table toppings-"

"Carving knives?"

"Yes, sir. The one-um-the one that's in Emily's back? I gave her that set for her birthday last year." He shook his head and tried to open a packet of sugar with his shaking hands.

"You work in the shop, too?"

"Six days a week. I get down there at eight before we open and stay late most nights to do all the paperwork. We're closed on Sundays."

"And Emily Upshaw, what's your relationship been with her?"

"She's my best friend, Detective." Teddy's eyes welled up with tears again. "She's been my very dearest friend for almost a decade."

"How'd you meet?"

He paused. "Fifteen years ago. At an AA meeting."

"Alcoholics Anonymous? Since when did they start holding sessions in a bar on York Avenue?"

Teddy flashed a glare at Mike. "I didn't make it, Mr. Chapman. Neither did Emily. That's why we got along so well."

"Take me through it."

"I was new to the whole twelve-step-program idea. We were a small group, meeting in a church basement on Lexington Avenue late in the evening so those of us who worked long hours could keep up. Emily was doing really well then. She had a steady job at a woman's magazine doing some editing, in addition to her writing."

"Did you see her outside the meetings?"

"Not at first. We'd sometimes walk home together. She was very smart and I liked to listen to her talk about her work. She was always interviewing someone interesting."

"You bonded right away?"

"It was just a few months and then her schedule changed completely. She had a good offer from a travel magazine. The only problem was that it required her to be on the road a great deal of time. She started to miss meetings. Lots of them."

"There's hardly a place you can go that doesn't have a branch of AA," I said.

"True. But the reality was that Emily couldn't manage it. She assured herself that she could skip a session every now and then, but traveling offered too many temptations. There were time changes that left her jet-lagged and more resistant to squeezing in a meeting. There were minibars in the hotel room and expense accounts to charge them to. There was that beverage cart on the airplanes that pulled right up next to her seat. So we fell out of touch for a while."

"No contact at all?"

"Not for almost four years. By that time she had been fired from the magazine and was ready to try AA again. I had just lost my partner to AIDS and was pretty desperate. Emily and I kind of reinforced each other through some of our darkest hours. From that point on we've been really close."

"So when did you fall off the wagon?" Mike asked.

"September twelfth, 2001. One of my sisters worked for the Port Authority. My shop was just six blocks away from the World Trade Center and I tried to get there-"

"You don't have to explain that one, Teddy." Mike was still fighting his own demons from that tragic day. "And Emily?"

"She hung in till about a year ago. She'd lost another job and run through most of the small inheritance her parents had left her. I loaned her some money, of course, but she really struggled to make a living. Three strikes, she kept telling me. She was out."

"What did she mean by three strikes?" I asked.

"This was the third time she'd busted out of the program. The usual alcoholic's denial. Emily just convinced herself it wasn't meant to be."

"So we know about the second and third times she tried. Do you know anything about the first?"

Teddy thought for a minute. "It was right after college. She'd been drinking and doing drugs since she was a teenager. Cocaine mostly. One of her professors introduced her to a self-help group like AA. I know she was clean and sober for a couple of years. She did some really good writing then and published a few serious pieces."

"But lapsed?"

"Yes. She got into a relationship with one of the young men in the program. Something that happened when they were together just scared her to death. I don't know why-that's just the expression she always used. Emily used to say she liked it better being drunk and alone than living with a coke-snorting madman."

"That's what she called him-a madman?"

"Exactly."

"You know his name?" Mike asked.

"It was Monty, I think. I don't know whether that was his first or last name. But I'm pretty sure it was Monty."

"Ever meet him?"

"No, no, Detective. Emily never saw him again. He was someone she ran into in the program, the first time she was in rehab. She was a kid, right out of school. She moved in with him and they lived together for a while, but once they broke up she wanted no part of him."

"Because?"

"I never got into that kind of bedroom talk with her. I don't know whether it was the sex or the drugs, or some other problem he had."

"Were there any men in her life since then?"

"No one significant that I'm aware of. Friends, but nothing more serious."

"How often did you see Emily?"

"Well, we talked almost every day. We tried to have dinner together once or twice a week. Like last night, just something casual in the neighborhood."

"Did you speak with her yesterday? Was she alarmed about anything, or did she have any plans to meet someone before joining you?" I asked.

He shook his head. "No. I was too busy to talk when she called the store. She just left a message early in the day telling me what time she'd meet me for burgers at Hudson Bay. Around midnight, she said."

"But she didn't show. So what'd you do?"

"Naturally I was concerned. I called several times," Teddy said, looking at Mike for confirmation. "You must have heard the messages I left on her machine, didn't you?"

"Concerned about her safety?"

"No, not that," he said quietly. "I was afraid she might have started drinking at home. Maybe blacked out. Sometimes when she binges I worry-sorry, I mean I worried that she was going to wind up in the hospital, without any coverage to pay for the treatment." It usually took weeks for people to talk about the dead in the past tense.

"You had a spare key?"

"Yes. We had each other's keys, in case of emergency. Not this kind, of course."

"Has she got family?"

"Not in New York. Two sisters back home in Michigan." He leaned back and covered his eyes with his hand. "Lord, I guess I have to be calling them today, too. I'm not sure I can deal with it all."

Teddy continued to tell me about his friendship with Emily as Mike walked out of the room. He returned with a cotton-tipped swab and broke into the conversation long enough to ask the nervous witness if he minded rubbing the inside of his cheek for a sample of his DNA.

"Why do you need this?"

"Just routine. Have to run it against all the samples we find at the crime scene."

Teddy looked back and forth between us but seemed too cowed to question our authority. He poked around and handed Mike the slim wooden stick.

"Ever been arrested, Teddy?"

"Twice. Driving under the influence." His mood was now alternating between grief-stricken and surly. "I suppose you'll want to fingerprint me, too."

"I will, actually," Mike said. "There's bloody fingerprints all over the bedroom. We've got to eliminate yours. See if any of them don't match yours or Emily's."

Mike left the room again to voucher the swab and package it for the lab.

Teddy put his elbows on the lieutenant's desk and leaned forward as though to whisper to me. The whites of his eyes were shot through with red lines, and the tremor in his hands-probably DT's rather than anxiety-was more pronounced.

"You'll do me a favor, won't you, Miss Cooper?"

"If I can."

"You'll see Emily, won't you? I mean, at the morgue?"

"Well, I don't necessarily have to go there on this case, but Mike will certainly-"

"No, you must. You must promise me you'll go." He stopped talking and took my hands in his own. "Mr. Chapman will think this is crazy, but you have to make sure that Emily is dead. Really dead."

Spare me one more flaky witness, I thought to myself. The friend he had found eviscerated on her bed, a carving knife impaled in her back, had no more chance of breathing again than Ted Williams.

I squeezed Teddy Kroon's hands. "I'm not sure I understand. You want Emily to be dead?"

"No, no, no. What I mean is that Emily made me promise that if something ever happened to her, I'd make absolutely certain that she was dead. It terrified her more than anything."

He was agitated now, and I tried to calm him. There was no rational way to do that when I thought of how dreadful her last minutes must have been, but he didn't sound rational anymore either. "Most people are frightened of death, Mr. Kroon. This attack tonight was so quick, so cataclysmic-"

"Not death. It's burial before death that haunted her."

"Premature burial? That's what Emily was worried about?"

"Exactly, Miss Cooper."

I pulled myself away from him and stood up. I may not have seen the body bag on its way to the morgue, but I had seen the blood-drenched crime scene. "That's a promise I can make to you, Mr. Kroon. You have my word you won't have to worry about that. The medical examiner's office is the best in the country- Emily's in very capable hands, and there's no question that she's dead. This isn't fiction we're dealing with, so you need to get hold of yourself."

Teddy Kroon leaned back and rubbed his eyes with his hands. He laughed for the first time since I had come into the room. "You're right, Miss Cooper. Too much Poe. I guess Emily had an unhealthy obsession with Edgar Allan Poe."