Entombed

34

None of us felt much like eating dinner.

More than the landscape and the foliage change when winter comes to Chilmark. Not only the general store closes, but so does every up-island restaurant and inn. No fried clams at The Bite, no lobster rolls at The Galley, no shore dinners at The Homeport, no conch fritters at Cornerway, and no harpooned sword from Larsen's. There was always some clam chowder in the freezer, and I defrosted it for the three of us. Mike barely played with it while we tried to distract him with memories of weekends and evenings that all of us had spent together.

Mike stood up from the table, walked to the bar, and opened the liquor cabinet. He closed it and turned to Mercer. "I'm not gonna drink. It's too easy to get through it that way. Feel like a walk?"

They let themselves out the back door and went off in the dark. I took a book into the living room, added some logs to the fire, and poured myself the drink that Mike had rejected. It was almost ten o'clock by the time they returned.

Mike warmed himself in front of the fireplace for a few minutes before telling us he was going to try to get some rest. He and Mercer clasped each other in an embrace and then Mike grabbed the banister and pulled himself up the stairs.

"I think he's worn himself out enough so that he may actually sleep a few hours," Mercer said, joining me with a glass of vodka.

"Did he talk?"

"Enough. You know he was prepared for, well-the worst-a year ago, when Val's treatments weren't going well. With the cancer in remission, this hit him like such a bolt of lightning I'm afraid it's going to set him back twice as hard."

"What time do you want to head home?" I asked.

"Grab a ferry late morning, if we can. Be in the city by six."

"Did you reach Lieutenant Peterson this afternoon?"

"Yeah. You and I have some catching up to do this weekend. We've lost Mike for the rest of this one."

"I've been making a list," I said, ticking off names with each finger of my left hand. "I'm sure Peterson has, too. We've got to sit down with Professor Tormey, now that we know what the Raven Society is. I'm going back at Gino Guidi, whether or not Ellen Gunsher has been able to rework a deal with his lawyer."

"You guys never got to talk to him about Poe, and there he is, a major benefactor of the cottage."

"Well, we didn't know it at the time. And Emily's pal Teddy Kroon still has questions to answer, as far as I'm concerned."

"It's not the right moment to bring this up with Mike," Mercer said, "but you were with him when he went to that retired cop's apartment, weren't you?"

"Aaron Kittredge? Yeah."

"Mike had asked the lieutenant to get his departmental file. The loo filled me in on that today. Kittredge is my first priority when we get back."

"Why?"

"He left the department without a pension. Had to sue to get it reinstated."

"He told us that. You got the back story?"

"Rubber gun squad," Mercer said. "Got dumped to Central Park."

Trigger-happy cops were relieved of their weapons while the shootings they were involved in were investigated. Those who weren't indicted, but who weren't completely exonerated either, wound up flopped into some uniformed assignment where little harm could come to people in their way. Central Park was one such holding zone-very few human residents, with only squirrels and pigeons to endanger.

"Who'd he shoot?" I asked.

"Think of the story that Zeldin and Phelps told us."

"Of course," I said, closing my book. "Ten years ago-the cop on his way into the Botanical Gardens to talk to Zeldin. Shot a neighborhood kid in the back. Why the hell was he going to see Zeldin in the first place? That had to be at least ten years after Kittredge met Emily Upshaw, so what's the connection? What's the renewed interest in Poe, assuming that's what he was going to Zeldin's about?"

"I've been spinning with that one all afternoon. You with me? We'll get to Kittredge first thing Sunday morning."

Mercer said good night and went upstairs to his room. I turned on the television to watch the late news before going to sleep. Mike's devastating loss had taken my mind off what had happened to me yesterday. My headache had been replaced by a dull throb.

I could smell the coffee brewing shortly before 7A.M. I asked Mercer to have the transit department's report from the rapist's MetroCard faxed to the house, so I could play with it on the long car ride home. The three of us moped around before driving to Vineyard Haven to get on the short standby line for the ferry. By one-fifteen, we were on Route 8, headed for I-95.

Stretched out on the rear seat, my ski jacket pillowed under my head, I unfolded the papers from Transit SIB-the Special Investigations Bureau-and began to scan the report.

The MetroCard had been purchased on January 3, a little over a month ago. It was sold at a newsstand on Fifty-ninth Street. Unfortunately for us the buyer paid cash. A credit card imprint might have solved the case nicely.

I leaned a pad against my right knee, to chart the man's movements. Between eight and eight-thirty every weekday morning, he boarded the downtown Lex at Seventy-seventh Street. I drew a star at that intersection, just a few blocks west of the location of all the attacks. In the evenings between six-thirty and seven o'clock, most of the return trips were from the East Fifty-first Street station, a commercial area surrounded by financial institutions as well as offices and stores of every kind.

There were several random rides, some late-evening trips home, where he boarded the train close to midnight. I would have to compare these dates against the crime occurrences, to see whether he was prowling the neighborhood close to the times of the attacks.

There was only one anomaly.

"Hey, Mercer. The snowstorm two weeks ago, do you remember what night it was?"

"It was a Monday. I don't remember the date but it was my RDO"-police jargon for regular day off-"and I was home after the weekend. Why?"

"Give me a minute."

Mercer's Metro man had followed his usual route in the morning, going back uptown from Fifty-first Street a bit earlier than usual, at five-thirty in the afternoon. An hour later, he got on the southbound train again at Seventy-seventh Street.

At ten that same evening, the rider took his first bus ride using this pass. All his other travel had been in the tube. He boarded the M2 on First Avenue, scanning the MetroCard in at the Forty-fourth Street stop.

All the details began to click into place. The secure residence on the Upper East Side; the physical description of the clean-cut, well-spoken assailant; Annika's good ear-picking out a single word that sounded like the accent of an upper-class British student; a rapist who disappeared from the city-perhaps the country-for four years before returning; a compulsive criminal whose DNA didn't seem to be in any data bank in America; and a MetroCard from the perp's pocket that suggested he entered a bus in front of the only buildings that stand on the east side of First Avenue and Forty-fourth Street.

"John frigging Doe. You want to nail the bastard, Mercer? Call the squad and get somebody over to the United Nations stat. Find out whether there was a reception, a speech, a party-whatever was going on the night of that storm. Get the list of whoever attended-spouses, children, staff. Get the address of every ambassador and delegate who lives in Manhattan."

Mercer was watching me in the rearview mirror, smiling for the first time in two days.

"Take it to the bank, gentlemen. John Doe is the son of an African diplomat."