Entombed

17

Mercer arrived in my office with Annika Jelt at one, to prepare for the afternoon grand jury. An attendant from the hospital accompanied the young student, who was brought to me in a wheelchair because of her still-fragile physical condition.

He sat beside her and held her hand as she went over all the details of her attack. Her English was excellent as she spoke softly but with determination. Annika described how her assailant had appeared quite suddenly, out of nowhere. Like the others before her, she had no idea whether she had been followed for any distance to the stoop of her building.

It took me the better part of an hour to get from Annika every nuance of the aborted assault, and then another fifteen minutes-once the afternoon grand jurors reconvened-to present her testimony to them. It was clear now that it was only the resistance she mounted at the top of the staircase-unwilling to give her assailant the opportunity to get her alone behind her closed apartment door-that led to the frenzied stabbing.

Mercer wheeled her back to my office to get her coat and turn her over to the attendant from the hospital.

"It's so wonderful to see how much stronger you are, how much you've improved, in just this short time. I know you've got a long way to go, Annika, but you've made a great start. Do you know when you're leaving for Sweden?" I asked.

"As soon as the doctors tell me it's safe for me to fly. The pressurized cabins are not good for my lungs yet, and the flight is so long. But you'll call me there if you catch the man, no?"

"The City of New York will buy you the ticket back here to testify and I'll be your personal escort," Mercer said.

"The posters-may I ask you a question about them?" Annika said. "One of the nurses showed me a poster."

Neighborhood groups had reproduced the composite sketch and circulated it to stores and businesses on the Upper East Side, urging them to hang it in their windows and behind their counters, in case the rapist made an appearance.

"What about it?"

"The poster has one of the drawings on it from the group Detective Wallace showed to me, the one I identified last week. It looks just like him-exactly like the man who did this to me. But what it says on the writing below the picture, well…"

"You don't have to be hesitant," I said. "If you noticed something different, you can tell us." Some people were more accurate at estimating height or weight. Some could remember the feel of facial hair rubbing against them that others hadn't even observed, or notice the smallest of scars or blemishes on the skin of a perpetrator.

"The drawing the detective showed me didn't have any writing on it. But the poster does."

Mercer and I both nodded.

"You know where it says the guy is African-American?" Annika asked.

Mercer seated himself on a chair opposite his witness and let her talk directly to him. "Yeah, you told me he was a black man."

"Of course, yes. But, maybe this is because I'm foreign, because English is a second language for me and I hear it differently."

I didn't know where she was going with this.

"The other women," she asked, "were any of them foreign-born?"

Mercer thought for a moment. "No."

"Well, I don't think the man is American. That's the word that troubles me. Black, yes. African-American, no."

"What then? Caribbean?"

"I can't say that. I haven't had much experience with people from the islands. It wasn't all-how you say?-singsong, like a few of the Jamaicans in my class at school. Not like that at all."

"Can you give me an example?" Mercer said. "He didn't speak very many words to you."

"No, no. It's-well, maybe it's not important then," Annika said, rolling the wheels of her chair backward and averting Mercer's glance, as though she feared wasting his time.

"It's all in the details," he repeated to her, gripping the arm of the chair. "What is it you remember? Every bit of it is important."

"Perhaps it's silly. It's just a single word that I noticed."

"Which word?"

She looked at Mercer. "Ass. When he tried to get me to open the door, he told me to get my ass inside."

"Go on."

Annika was doing what we had watched hundreds of other victims do. She was putting herself back in the moment, watching a slow-motion replay of the attack in her mind's eye, and fighting the emotions that bubbled to the surface as she did.

"I can hear him say that, just before I braced myself against the wall with my leg," she said, reminding me of the footprint on her door. "It's what I believed at the time. I thought he was from England, or that he went to school there."

"Why?" Mercer asked.

"A lot of my friends in Sweden, they learned their English in boarding school or college. My accent is from speaking it in class, as a second language. But the British pronunciation is different from you Americans'."

Annika smiled for the first time since I had seen her greet Mercer from her hospital bed. "My boyfriend? He spent a summer at Oxford. He says the word 'ass' exactly the same way. It's silly, no? I didn't think at the time, but whenever that night comes back to me, I realized that's what was so jarring, when I heard the man speak that word."

Mercer and I both laughed. "Nothing's silly, Annika," he said.

One more possible feature for the task force to factor into the investigation. All of the other women had been asked about the perp's speech and none had described it as accented. Unlike many attackers who talk to their victims all through the assault, the Silk Stocking Rapist had not been a man of many words.

We said our good-byes and Mercer took Annika and her attendant down to help them into the ambulette that had transported them from the hospital. He returned minutes later.

"Back to the drawing board." He tossed the case folder onto my desk and had an uncharacteristically discouraged frown on his face.

"I'm not exactly convinced that we're looking for an Oxfordeducated rapist on the basis of one syllable," I said.

"Yeah, but we've still got to reanalyze the language in every case and reinterview each victim about every single word the guy said. Annika's too smart to ignore. The list of things to do seems to get longer every day rather than shorter."

"That's because you two just aren't as efficient as I am," Mike said, walking into the room and waving his right hand with a flourish. "Emily Upshaw. Grand larceny in the third degree."

"Nice work," I said, clapping my hands in appreciation.

"Bloomingdale's. Men's department. Designer clothes and accessories," Mike said, as he began to quote from the old complaint report. "'Undersigned did observe above-named defendant conceal three long-sleeved men's shirts, an alligator belt'-there's your felony price tag-'and six pairs of socks in a shopping bag and attempt to leave the store without paying for said items.'"

"Who's the guy? Was he locked up, too?"

"Don't jump ahead, Coop. Seems the cowardly weasel waited outside the store and sent Emily in to do the lifting."

"Well, did the cop see-?"

"Not a cop. Square badge made the collar," Mike said, referring to a store security guard. "There's nothing to suggest a codefendant was picked up."

"Was there any bail set at the arraignment?" I asked.

"Five hundred bucks," he said, flipping a few sheets of paper. "What did Emily's sister say about a professor helping her out? The guy who posted bail was named Noah Tormey. Says he taught English at NYU."

"He put the money up either because he truly wanted to help her or-"

"Or because he was the unapprehended beneficiary of the shirts and belt."

"Isn't there a detective's name anywhere in the file?" I asked, thinking of Emily's sister's other comments, as I opened the telephone book to see if there was a listing in Manhattan for Tormey.

"Yeah. You'll like this. Emily Upshaw had a change of address on the date the case was dismissed. She had moved out of her apartment on Washington Square and was living on West End Avenue. With a detective named Aaron Kittredge."

"What? She moved in with a detective?"

"Don't make it sound like drinking poison, Coop. Could be good for you."

Noah Tormey wasn't in the book. I replaced it on the shelf and logged on to the Internet. "Kittredge still on the job?"

"Nope. Retired five years ago. Pension bureau still sends his checks to the Upper West Side address. We got places to go and people to see, kid. Saddle up."

Laura walked in and handed Mike a fax. "Andy Dorfman called from the medical examiner's office. Wanted you to look at this when you came in."

"It's the initial report of his exam of some of the things taken out of the basement in the room with the skeleton. No surprises. First of all, the pathologists agree there's nothing to work with but bones, which don't reveal any gross trauma that could have caused death. Buried alive-entombed in that basement-still seems the most likely way they're going to rule on this one," Mike said. "The bricks are a couple of hundred years old. But the sealant is a cement compound that didn't exist until the last fifty years."

"Those chips Andy pointed out to you, were they really fingernails?"

"Yes, ma'am. And this confirms the nails picked up some of the cement scrapings," he read to me in a quiet voice. "That broad wanted out. "

He skimmed the rest of the paragraphs. "What's 'vermeil'?"

"Silver, with a gilt finish on top."

"That's all Andy can tell us about the ring. But he's also picked up something that was scratched into one of the panes of glass on the basement door."

"What door?" I asked. I had been so absorbed once I saw the skeleton in her coffin I hadn't even noticed much else.

"In the corner of the basement there was a small door with two little windows that looked out onto the yard. Somebody etched this into one of them." Mike smiled as he read from Dorfman's report.

"O Thou timid one, do not let thy

Form slumber within these unhallowed walls,

For herein lies-"

I interrupted him to finish the stanza. "…The ghost of an awful crime."