Entombed

24

I knew the triage process would begin the moment we hit the entrance to the ambulance bay at Presbyterian. A medical team would be waiting for us, Tormey would be evaluated for surgery, and if they put him under with anesthesia, we'd be lucky if we could get back at him within the next forty-eight hours.

"There's no time for bullshit now, Professor. I need more honest answers or I can't protect you from whatever's going on."

"But I thought Emily's attack was a random one-a man who followed her in off the street."

"Maybe it is that. I happen not to think so. Too many things are going on that seem to be related. The child you fathered with Emily, have you ever tried to have any contact with her?"

Tormey looked directly at me. "The baby died, Miss Cooper. She was stillborn."

"That's what Emily told you?"

"Yes. And that's what her mother told me, in the one or two conversations we had together. I felt responsible for the fact that her family disowned Emily. Then how ironic it was that she lost the baby after all."

The truth about the child and the fact that she had been raised by Emily's sister could wait a day or two.

"But your relationship with Emily, that continued?"

"Sexually? No, not after she came back to New York and started at the college. She had visions of setting up house together, of me replacing the family she thought she had lost. Getting her pregnant had been a pretty sobering experience for both of us- well, that's a particularly bad expression for me to use. I was a few years older than she, and by the time that year had passed, I was involved with someone else. Someone more appropriate. The woman I married, actually."

The medic signaled me to get out of his way as we turned onto 168th Street.

"We're almost there, Professor. Those names Detective Chapman was asking you about? You know he didn't finish."

Tormey sighed.

"Did you ever meet Monty?"

"Who?" he asked. He seemed weary from the pain and apprehension.

"A guy Emily lived with before she was arrested. Someone who may have done something that frightened her."

"It doesn't sound familiar."

"This ceremony about Edgar Allan Poe today, what's your interest in him?"

Tormey smiled and closed his eyes. "I told you earlier, I think the man was a genius."

"And Emily, did she agree?"

"I don't know what she thought, Miss Cooper. She worked on projects for me. She did what I asked her to do."

The ambulance lurched as the driver stopped short and backed it into a bay. The men who were standing by to receive Noah Tormey lifted the gurney out of the rear and placed it on a set of metal wheels, rushing it into the doors that opened automatically as they approached.

"Hey, loo, you got nothing better to do than make house calls?" Mike asked. Raymond Peterson, the lieutenant of the homicide squad, was standing with a nurse at the ER entrance. He held out a hand and helped me step down.

"I was on my way in when I got the call. Thought I'd stop by and check the damage. You all right, Alex?"

"No worse than falling off a bicycle. May I wash up inside?" I asked the nurse.

"I'll have someone look you both over right away. You just need to go sign in at the desk. They'll give each of you an examination cubicle and-"

"I really don't need to waste anyone's time. I've just skinned my hands a bit."

"C'mon, Coop. We can share a cubicle, put on those cute little gowns."

"It's policy, ma'am. You came in in an ambulance and we can't let you go without an examination."

"Go ahead, Alex. I've got to make sure Mike doesn't claim any injuries that would get him out on three-quarters," the lieutenant said, referring to the department's generous retirement pension for injured cops.

It didn't take long to determine that neither one of us had anything more serious than cuts and scrapes. Noah Tormey was taken into surgery to remove the bullet in his shoulder, and we described the morning's events to Peterson.

"You hear anything yet about Dr. Ichiko from the autopsy?" Mike asked.

We both knew that no reliable tests existed to permit forensic pathologists to make an unequivocal diagnosis of drowning. Instead, that conclusion is usually reached by the circumstances of the person's death.

"Water in the lungs?" I asked.

"Yeah, but Dr. Kirschner says it's not significant. When there's as much turbulence as there is at those falls, water gets forced into the organs even after death. There's a fracture to the skull-"

"And that doesn't give us a homicide?" Mike asked. "Somebody splitting his head open before he jumped in for a whirlpool spin?"

"Kirschner's not ready to declare," Peterson said. "He wouldn't expect someone to go over those falls and hit the rocks below- voluntarily or not-without cracking his head fatally."

"But the wound," I asked, "wouldn't the antemortem injury look different than the postmortem?"

"The doc says no. The water causes more profuse bleeding, Alex, and it prevents clotting. So the blood leaches out and makes it impossible to differentiate."

"Anything on time of death?" Mike asked.

"Ichiko had washerwoman skin," Peterson said, referring to the profound wrinkling that occurs after long immersion. "But the doc tells me that can set in earlier than I thought-maybe within half an hour-when the water temperature is as frigid as the river is right now. This one's dicey. On the good-news front, we may be able to lay Aurora Tait to rest."

"What happened?"

"Missing Persons found an FBI report that's about twenty-five years old with that name on it. They're sending the dental records out today."

"Is there any family?" I asked. "Where's she from?"

"Parents are dead. There's a brother back home. Outside of Minneapolis."

That hometown location wouldn't surprise any old-timers in law enforcement. Before the 1990s' cleanup and Disneyfication of midtown Manhattan at Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, the area was known as the Minnesota Strip. Unhappy teens from all over the Midwest would make their way to the big city, most often by buses that disgorged them at the Port Authority building, where seasoned pimps-acting as Good Samaritans-would embrace them, offering to feed and shelter them until they found jobs and lodging. Within weeks, those too weak to escape the grasp of these men would be addicted to some form of drug and selling their bodies to pay the price. Aurora Tait may well have been one of those girls.

"Look, Coop and I have some things to take care-"

"First stop is a change of clothes, and then you're taking her down there to see the district attorney. He hates to be last to know about capers like these."

"You've spoken with him?" I asked.

"Let's just say he prefers it when he thinks you're sitting safely behind your desk. I told him this shooter wasn't aiming for you," Peterson said. "Nobody-not even Tormey-knew you were going to be at the college today, did they?"

"That's right."

"Okay, Chapman. Take her downtown before you do anything else."

"We need a lift back to the Bronx so I can pick up my car."

Peterson sent us off in an RMP-radio motor patrol car-and by two-thirty we were standing at Rose Malone's desk, waiting for Battaglia to call us in.

"Hey, Mr. B," Mike said, "how come you always miss the fireworks? You think all the action's in the white-collar crap, while Coop and me are busy cleaning up the mean streets. Well, howdy, Miss Gunsher. How'd you find your way in here without holding on to McKinney's hand? I didn't know your sense of direction was that sharp."

Of course Ellen would be here for this. McKinney had to dump her somewhere once her lack of courtroom ability had been memorialized in some lousy trial results a few years back. He had created GRIP-the Gun Recovery Information Project-a useless little unit that tried to imitate the feds' successful efforts to track the illegal handguns that flooded the city and were used to commit violent felonies.

"Good afternoon, Mike. Alex," Ellen said, with undisguised gloating. She had undoubtedly told Battaglia that we had ejected her from last evening's proceedings. He continued to tolerate her as a staff member rather than acknowledge that she had been one of his rare hiring errors-a "celebrity scion," as we called them, whose mother had been a prominent reporter useful to Battaglia in Ellen's early days, but of doubtful worth now since she'd been fired from the network.

"I guess it would have been stupid of me to think you might have been in court this morning, Alex," Battaglia said. "Who's this professor you went to see?"

"His name is Noah Tormey." Ellen was taking notes as I spoke. "I think Mike and I have begun to make some serious progress on the investigation, Paul. My next trial isn't scheduled until the first week of March. I'd like to stay on this, if you don't mind."

"What kind of gun was it, do you know?" Ellen asked Mike.

"It wasn't a handgun."

"Well, we're not limited to tracing just those. My people can still be helpful."

"Can't you cooperate with GRIP on this?" Battaglia asked. "I'm trying to get them on the map so we can grab some federal funding for the program. Put the damn personalities aside, stop sniping at each other and work together for once. Alex, you're in charge."

"Sure. Let's go over to my office."

Mike grabbed a Cohiba from Battaglia's humidor. "Wish you'd been with us this morning, Ellen. You'd probably have known whose rifle it was just by the sound of the whoosh as it went by your ear. Thanks, Mr. B."

I knew McKinney was determined to stay inside our operation and had engineered Ellen's involvement as a backdoor move. He must have appealed to the district attorney's tireless desire to get government money for prosecutorial projects.

Mercer was waiting for us inside my office. He lifted an eyebrow when Ellen trailed in behind me. "So rumor has it the morning held some surprises. You guys okay?"

"Still standing, m' man," Mike said.

"What's all the paper?" I asked.

"Property records for Third Street, and some university housing listings. It's going to be tedious, but-"

"Ellen can start going through those," I said, turning to her. "Pat and Scotty Taren know what we're looking for. That's the part of the investigation Pat is so keenly interested in, so he can fill you in. And your other assignment is to work on Gino Guidi's lawyer. Pat made that stupid deal with him last night and we need to undo it."

She started to protest.

"People are dying, Ellen. D'you get it? You and Pat need to make it clear to Roy Kirby that we can only protect his client if he helps us. Do it the easy way or I hand him a subpoena and let him go to court to quash it."

"I'll talk to Pat," she said, picking up the stacks of files that Mercer had brought and walking out of my office.

"What else?" Mike asked Mercer.

"According to the computer squad, if that was Teddy Kroon at the keyboard deleting information from Emily Upshaw's machine before he called nine-one-one, he managed to get a few files cleaned out. Whether he printed them out for himself or just tried to erase any record of them is what we'll have to ask," Mercer said.

He handed me a sheaf of papers. Several seemed to be articles that Emily had been working on at the time of her death. Mike and I could read those later.

The last page was a draft of a letter to Sally Brandon-still incomplete-dated just days before Upshaw's murder. Emily's daughter, given up at birth and raised by Sally, had recently sent for her original birth certificate in order to apply for a passport. From that, the girl learned the truth-that Emily was her mother. She had called to ask if she could come to New York, on her own, so they could meet.

In the letter, Emily Upshaw revealed this startling new development to her sister, and also said that she had called Noah Tormey a week earlier, to tell him that she needed to see him.