Entombed

38

From Kroon's apartment, I placed a call to Sally Brandon. Amelia had come to New York to look at graduate schools, but had never told the Brandons what she had learned about her birth mother nor about her efforts to reconnect to Emily's world. Sally's distress and pain rang through the telephone wires as clearly as her voice.

We waited while Sally tried to reach Amelia on her cell, without success. Mercer called Peterson to start in motion efforts to find the girl before she knocked on the wrong door.

Mercer and I stopped at Swifty's for a late lunch. Neither of us had received any messages from Mike, and we were both distracted by our thoughts of his grief.

"What do you make of Dr. Ichiko contacting Emily Upshaw the day she was murdered?" Mercer asked.

"I've been thinking about his last phone call-the one to the Raven Society. What if something Emily said in that conversation pointed him in that direction, caused him to make the call?"

"To Zeldin?"

"Or to anyone else who's a member. The number he called wasn't Zeldin's personal phone. It was just his recording on the answering machine. It can't be a coincidence that the doctor phoned the Raven Society. Maybe Emily unwittingly provided a clue that Ichiko followed up on. A fatal one."

I walked back from the restaurant at four in the afternoon, splitting with Mercer so that he could spend a long evening with Vickee and Logan. Grace's Marketplace featured jumbo stone crab claws flown in from Florida, and I took home half a dozen, already cooked and cracked, as an effortless attempt at feeding myself a good dinner.

I changed into casual clothes and stared at the display on my own answering machine. No messages. When I didn't take time to remind most of my friends that I thrived on human contact, they ceased calling, believing that I was too consumed by my cases to socialize.

I cocooned myself in the den with a couple of old movie DVDs and let the week's weariness overtake me. The dull headache I'd been lugging around with me since our visit to Poe Cottage had faded to an occasional thud. I picked at the meaty crabs when I got hungry and put myself to bed early after a few chapters of the latest biography of Marie Antoinette.

I was still claustrophobic and opened the window wider, despite the midwinter chill. I left the light on in the hallway, newly uncomfortable in the dark. My last thoughts were about Mike and how lost he must have been feeling.

The cop on the security desk was the only person in the lobby of the DA's office when I pushed through the revolving door at seven-fifteen. There was a lot of catching up to do. Getting in ahead of the troops would allow me two hours of work with no phone interruptions, and the added advantage of not having to see everyone's expression of surprise as they passed me in the hallway, back on the job at Hogan Place.

The routine business of the sex crimes unit had gone on under the meticulous watch of my deputy, Sarah Brenner. The in-house cold case experts, Catherine and Marisa, had left memos detailing the eight DNA hits that came back from CODIS in a single week, solving crimes committed as far back as eight years ago. The line assistants-forty of them who specialized in this sensitive work- had responded to crime scenes and hospital beds dozens of times, interviewed scores of witnesses at their desks, and answered "ready for trial"-the three magic words that jump-started the process of jury selection-on six felony sexual assault indictments.

I read all the new screening sheets, which summarized the facts of the cases for me, so that I could get a sense of every assault and each assistant's caseload. We had been working around the clock to stop the Silk Stocking Rapist, to identify Emily Upshaw's killer, and to put some flesh on the entombed skeleton in order to learn her backstory.

In the movies, cops and prosecutors working the big case never seemed to have to worry about other old or new business. In fact, burglars still climbed up fire escapes and raped sleeping victims, women who separated from abusive partners were stalked and assaulted as they left their jobs, college students were preyed on by peers who plied them with alcohol to make them more vulnerable, and children were molested by pedophiles in places they should have been most safe-their homes, houses of worship, and school grounds.

When Laura arrived at nine, I spent half an hour with her, dictating correspondence, listing phone messages for her to return, and organizing memos to be filed. The first paper to go out was a subpoena faxed to the protocol chief at the UN, to be followed by a hand-delivered original. In lieu of an appearance by 2P.M. at this afternoon's grand jury, he could make the home addresses of the requested representatives available to Mercer Wallace.

The morning filled up as Sarah and I reviewed the new cases and she advised me of the direction each was going, and the assistants who wanted to discuss their investigations rolled in and out in response to Laura's summons.

Mercer called me from the protocol office at 1:45. He was holding the list of residential addresses. "We're talking more than thirty countries," he said. "It looks like eleven of them fit nicely inside our geographic range."

"Is the lieutenant on board?"

"Yeah. He went to the top on this. The chief of d's is pulling in guys from the street crime unit to sit on each house starting with today's four-to-twelve shift." Those cops patrolled in plainclothes and unmarked cars, usually saturating high crime areas, without the obvious labels of the distinctive blue and white RMPs to give them away.

"Any other ideas?"

"Next call is to INS, to see if we can get pedigree information on all the family members who have visited or lived here." That would have been impossible to do a few short years ago, before the Immigration and Naturalization Services had computerized their systems.

"Great. Battaglia wants to conference everything we did last week at four. Tell Laura to pull me out if anything develops," I said. "And, Mercer, you hear anything from Mike?"

"I've left some voice mails on his cell, just rambling and telling him what we've been doing. No callbacks yet."

Pat McKinney walked into my office at 3:55. He told the assistant with whom I was working to come by later on and said Battaglia had asked him to pick me up. The meeting was long, as I had expected. Battaglia was a detail man, always wanting to have the most current theories of major investigations so that he could repay media favors by planting discreet leaks when he thought they were reliable enough to release.

"I don't care what time of night, Alex. You get anything connected to the UN, I'm the first to know."

"Of course."

"And the rest of the week?"

"We've got to go back to some of the people we talked to briefly-Gino Guidi, Noah Tormey, the men at the Botanical-"

I must have missed a signal from McKinney to the district attorney.

"That reminds me," Battaglia said. "Ellen Gunsher goes with you on some of that, okay? You're down Chapman, and he's the source of some friction there. I want Ellen to get some exposure on this. You got guns involved in the professor's shooting, you got the ex-cop who killed a kid with a gun. Ellen rides with you."

I smiled and told him that was fine before he dismissed the two of us.

"You must have delivered big to get that included in your package, Pat. Battaglia telling me to partner up with your girlfriend. What's your secret? You doing more than just lighting his cigars these days? Moved on to wiping his fingerprints off a murder weapon that you've hidden somewhere?"

He ignored me and pushed open the door to the men's room. It was his favorite way of ending our conversations.

Laura was gone, but she had taped a message on the tall head-rest of my desk chair:

Mercer's on his way to the 19th squad. He wants you to meet him there.

It was already close to six o'clock. I closed up my office and went out in front of the courthouse to hail a cab for the rush hour ride to Sixty-seventh Street.

I flashed my ID at the officer on the desk and before he could scan it, the sergeant called over his shoulder, "They're waiting for you on the second floor, Miss Cooper. Go right on up."

I'd spent many fruitful hours in the squad room over the last decade. I'd interviewed crime victims, interrogated suspects, puzzled over facts with detectives, and napped on the hard wooden bench behind the bars in the holding pens when short evenings had turned into long overnights.

Lieutenant Peterson looked up as I opened the door. He put his finger against his lips before I could greet him or the half dozen detectives standing around, and motioned me to follow him into the captain's office.

Mercer was behind the desk, ending a telephone conversation. He handed me a copy of the sketch of the Silk Stocking Rapist-I knew the image as well as I knew Mercer's features-and then gave me a copy of the official United Nations newsletter with photographs of recent receptions and conferences.

"I picked this up when I was waiting for the list of names this afternoon. Look at the delegate speaking at the December meeting on trade sanctions."

The man in the photograph looked remarkably like the composite drawing, except that he appeared to be in his mid-sixties. The hairline and round-shaped face, even the size of the nose and outline of the lips were identical to the rapist's physiognomy. The skin color was the deep ebony that witnesses had described.

"Who's your friend?"

"Sofi Maswana. Representative to the United Nations from Dahlakia."

"Enlighten me, Mercer."

"Like Eritrea, it was once part of Ethiopia. Broke off in the nineties and became an independent republic. Northern Africa, on the Red Sea, prized for its pearl fisheries."

"And Mr. Maswana?" I asked.

"He's downstairs with his number-one son, waiting to talk to us."

"I'm impressed. That's why all the guys look so wired out there?"

"They know something's up," Peterson said. "They haven't seen the pair yet."

"What do you know?"

"Maswana's a perfect gentleman," Mercer said, flipping open his notepad. "He's got business degrees from the University of London-don't go smirking there, Alex-and the Sorbonne. Sixty-eight years old. Been in the diplomatic corps for almost thirty years and has been posted here for six."

"What's the address?"

"Town house on East Seventy-fourth Street, between First and Second Avenues."

"I hope our profiler likes that for a 'jeopardy center.' Couldn't be better. What does he know at this point?" I asked.

"By four-thirty, INS confirmed visa information for other family members. There's a wife who splits her time between here and home, and five kids, all in their twenties. Three sons, two daughters. They've all come and gone from the States over the years. I got an agent to meet me at Maswana's office in the Secretariat building so I didn't have to use any ID that linked me to Special Victims. I thought immigration questions would be less threatening than telling him we were looking for a serial rapist."

I liked the sound of this. My adrenaline was pumping, just like the detectives who paced in the adjacent room. "Good start. What did he tell you?"

"The agent explained to Maswana the latest updates in airport security procedures for United Nations personnel. The government's working on a form of identification to create an express VIP service for all diplomats who've submitted to extensive anti-terrorist screening procedures. Then, it seemed natural we had to take him through the family members step by step."

"Was he cooperative?"

"One hundred percent. Help the good old USA, and grease the wheels to get through the airport more speedily. Mrs. Maswana, he told us, is here until April. Both girls are at college, one at Princeton and one at Georgetown."

"And his sons?" I asked.

"The youngest one is named after him. Sofi, Junior. He's twenty-three. Goes to graduate school at Harvard but he's been home since Christmas, doing an independent study project. Went back up to Cambridge just this past weekend, but Mr. Maswana will make him available for anything we need."

"Timing is everything," I said. "It puts him in the 'hood for the recent series, but he's a bit young for the 'scrip, especially going back to the earliest cases. How about the two older ones?"

"The middle son, David, is the one who's here with the father tonight. Twenty-seven years. He works in a family export business run by an uncle-Dahlakian pearls-on Fifth Avenue, near the diamond district. He's been in and out of town lots of times in the past five years."

"That fits with the subway stop on Fifty-first Street," I said, thinking of the MetroCard and the Forty-seventh Street hub for wholesale jewels that had stretched to the surrounding blocks.

"He's twenty-seven, lives at home with Mom and Pop. He's the spitting image of his old man. I'm not jumping to any conclusions but he looks awfully, awfully good, Ms. Cooper."

"How about his big brother?"

"Comes and goes as well. He'll be thirty on his next birthday. Has a wife back home, with twin daughters. Mr. Maswana says that Hugo's involved in private banking, but he hasn't been in the States since a brief visit last summer."

"Did you check that out with INS?" the lieutenant asked.

"It fits what they've got. All the Maswanas are present and accounted for, except Hugo."

"And he wasn't here when the pattern started up again, even according to the computer records, am I right?" I asked.

Mercer nodded.

"How'd you take the next step? How'd you tell Mr. Maswana you wanted to talk to his son about a criminal case?"

"When we'd come to the end of the general questioning, the INS agent and I stepped out for a minute. I checked with the lieutenant, who already had a team sitting on the town house, in case our subject was inside. So I went back in to the ambassador and told him the truth. I'm sure he wanted to put out my lights, but he was the model of diplomacy. Quiet, dignified, restrained. If the kid's inherited anything of his character, then I'm wrong to suspect him. Maswana said he'd produce his son at the precinct as soon as he could locate the young man, and he kept his word."

"So what's the plan?" I asked.

"Bring David up here. If we get really lucky, he spills his guts," Peterson said. "Otherwise, you try to develop some probable cause. Worst-case scenario, he sucks on a coffee cup, we keep him under surveillance tonight, and this time tomorrow we've got our DNA results."

Mercer Wallace went downstairs to bring David Maswana up to the squad, but the father was not so easily separated from his son. The three of them entered the cramped office in a row.

The lieutenant stepped outside to make room and Mercer introduced me to the two men, who sat opposite me across the captain's messy desk. I explained that I wanted to question David out of Sofi's presence. The father was polite but firm.

"Is my son under arrest for anything?"

"No, sir, he is not."

"Do I need to get him a lawyer?"

"No, he's not in custody. You have my word on that. Of course, if you'd like to have a lawyer present, we can certainly wait here until you've reached one."

Maswana checked his watch for the time. "I'd prefer to get started. We have nothing to hide."

"Then I'm going to ask you to step out of the room. Lieutenant Peterson will give you a comfortable place to-"

"I intend to sit right here, Madam Cooper, beside my son."

It was too early to start butting heads. "That's not going to work, Mr. Ambassador. You're welcome to have a seat down the hall, but I will not conduct the questioning in your presence. I'll be right outside when you two have had a chance to decide what you'd like to do this evening."

No serious interrogation of an adult suspect could be carried on with a parent sitting next to him. If David were psychologically ready to unburden himself about his criminal conduct, the company of his prominent father and the rectitude of his upbringing would put the chill on any chance of a confession. The entire dynamic changed when the target was alone.

I went out to the squad room and gave Peterson some cash to order in a sandwich for David and some coffee for all of us. Like the superstitious ballplayers who left their pitchers alone on the bench between innings, none of the detectives approached me to banter or offer suggestions. Mercer and I huddled in a corner to discuss strategy.

Ten minutes later, Mr. Maswana emerged from behind the opaque glass door.

"I shall accept your rules, Madam Cooper. But I would ask you to suspend what you're doing anytime David requests that you do."

"Of course."

Mercer and I returned to the room, and while we were explaining the purpose of our questioning, a uniformed cop brought in the package from the local deli.

I placed the sandwich in front of Maswana along with a cup of coffee. Once he drank from the container and left it on the desk, it would be abandoned property that I could submit for DNA analysis before the end of the evening, without the need for a search warrant or confession.

I opened the lid of my coffee and sipped at it. "How do you take yours, David?"

He pushed the food and drink away. "Nothing for me, thanks. I'm not hungry."

Mercer began by asking some basic pedigree questions. The young man was nervous-he avoided making eye contact, his voice had a slight quiver from time to time, and he kept his hands clasped in his lap-but I would expect anyone to be frightened in this situation.

When he talked about his education, David made no mention of any schooling in England. "When were you at Harvard?"

I wanted him to answer with the year of his class, so that I could see if that slight accent that Annika heard would surface in the same three letters as the word "ass." He not only said that word, but the word "pass" as well, and there was no hint of a British pronunciation.

Mercer worked David on dates and times of year. He was vague about much of it, but then we were talking about events that were quite remote in time. Statutes of limitation had been written into our laws because people couldn't be expected to account for their whereabouts five or six years after the fact.

While Mercer did the heavy lifting, I tried to measure the guy's responses. At times he seemed earnest and as candid as he could be, and at moments when his facial expressions seemed identical to the police artist's sketch, I was ready to lock the door on the cell and throw away the key. The brilliance of DNA meant that science would resolve any of our uncertainty within twenty-four hours.

Forty-five minutes into questions and denials, Peterson knocked on the door and smiled at me, offering a pack of cigarettes, his lighter, and an ashtray. "I forgot the captain got rid of his illegal paraphernalia a year ago, at the mayor's request. We'll bend the rules for you a bit."

He had remembered the cigarette butt recovered from the stoop in front of one of the crime scenes. The perp was a smoker, and the remains he left on the desk would be another easy source of DNA analysis, from saliva.

Mercer and I each took a cigarette from the pack to make the activity inviting to our target. David Maswana wrinkled his nose at the smell of the match lighting. "Thanks. I don't smoke."

Maybe he didn't. Maybe he was smart enough not to make the process of evidence collection any easier for us.

At the end of an hour, Mercer was ready to play hardball. The vague answers about recent dates and times-those that would key into the January assaults-were unacceptable. Mercer pressed for firm answers, for information undoubtedly recorded in this generation's ubiquitous PalmPilots and desktop calendars.

He asked David to voluntarily give a DNA sample, to allow us to swab the inside of his mouth with a Q-tips. The young man welled up with tears before refusing the request, saying that he would ask his father about that before leaving the precinct later on.

Then Mercer removed a slip of paper from the folder. He turned it face-up and placed the composite of the Silk Stocking Rapist's face under the nose of our prime suspect.

David recoiled automatically and started breathing heavily. "It's-it's like me a lot, but then, who made this? White women? A lot of the characteristics would, well-look like any, um-"

Mercer's dark brown skin was almost the same shade as David's. He leaned in and pointed at the kid. "Don't let me hear any we-all-look-alike-to-them bullshit, okay? This sketch looks more like you than the photo on your driver's license."

Another knock on the door and Peterson cracked it enough to motion me out. I thought Mercer had David on the ropes for the first time, making progress and softening him up. My annoyance at the interruption was visible.

"Sorry, Alex. I assumed you'd want the call. Darren Waxon, the chief of protocol says he has to talk to you."

I took the receiver and spoke brusquely into the phone. "Yes, Mr. Waxon?"

"Miss Cooper, I'm wondering how much later you're going to keep the ambassador and his son in the police station. It's after eight-thirty and if you're planning to take any kind of action, I'll need to know about it as soon as possible."

I hesitated, afraid there had been a leak from someone in the department who saw the two men waiting downstairs earlier in the evening. "Who told you Mr. Maswana was here?"

"He called me himself, to thank me and let me know what was going on."

"Thank you? For what?"

"For telling him why the district attorney subpoenaed the personal-residence information in the first place and what the investigation concerned."

My annoyance was fast turning to anger. "Exactly when did you tell him that?"

"Miss Cooper, I gave each of the missions the courtesy of informing them that we had no choice but to respond to the proper legal process. Protocol requires-"

"But what time? At what hour did you tell that to Mr. Maswana?"

"This afternoon, shortly before I gave Detective Wallace the list of addresses."

The whole time that Mercer thought that he had pulled a fast one on Maswana with the ruse of getting information from him via the INS agent, the ambassador knew we were looking at one of his sons as a possible serial rapist.

"You had absolutely no business revealing that-"

"Miss Cooper," Waxon said, meeting my ire with his own, "I wasn't about to cause an international incident over a-a handful of hysterical women."

Mike Chapman would have called him a frigging idiot, would have threatened to lock him up for obstructing governmental administration.

"Hysterical women? What kind of misogynist are you? Well, if you've disturbed the domestic tranquillity by giving one of the other Maswana sons the time to get out of the country this evening before we could get our hands on him, I'll bring a few of those victims by your office so you can explain the concept of diplomatic immunity to them face-to-face."

I told Peterson to carry on the interrogation and to ask the wily Mr. Maswana for his permission to swab David, in order to exclude him as a suspect. "Keep someone with him all the time. He's likely to be talking to his son Hugo by cell phone. And let him think we got called out to the scene of a new rape. Stall them here as long as you can."

I opened the door and asked Mercer to step out. "You and I are headed back to the airport tonight. Tell the ambassador anything you want-anything but that. Tell him we've been called out on another case. We've got a flight to catch."