Entombed (12 page)

"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."

13

"I'm telling you this
murder and the skeleton behind the brick wall are connected," I said,
after Teddy Kroon left the station house. "A skeleton is found in the
house where Poe once lived. Buried alive, in all probability. You blab
it to the press and it winds up in the headlines on a slow news day.
Twenty-four hours later, Emily's dead. And her scene is manipulated to
look like the elusive Silk Stocking Rapist just escalated out of
control. Emily Upshaw's death has nothing to do with our East Side
serial rapist."

"What's the link,
Coop?" Mike's feet were on the lieutenant's desk and I was slumped back
in a chair opposite him when Mercer returned to the room. It was after 6
A.M.
"She liked Poe?
There's not a
literate adult in America who grew up without reading him."

"An obsession with
premature burial? C'mon," I said.

"You weren't creeped
out the first time you read that story? It's impossible to forget those
images. The lever in the family vault that throws the iron portals
back, the padded coffin with a lid and springs, the rope attached to
the big bell, fastened to the hands of the corpse. Living inhumation,
isn't that what he called it? Nothing so agonizing on earth. I must
have been twelve or thirteen but I didn't sleep for weeks."

"Mike, we're talking
about an intelligent adult. Not likely she was spooked for the rest of
her life by a short story she read in grade school. Something happened
to her, you heard what Teddy said. It's related to some bad experience
with a guy she met in rehab who was a madman. About twenty years ago.
It's only a madman who would have entombed a young woman alive, too.
Straight out of Poe, in the basement of the very house he lived in."

"You're going
'woo-woo' on us, Coop."

"The guy reads in the
newspaper that we found the skeleton. The same day's paper has the
story of the return of the Silk Stocking Rapist. Emily was some kind of
danger to him," I said, my mind racing to think of reasons why, "so he
killed her. I think it makes sense."

"So, now what do you
want us to do? I know, let's dig up every building foundation in New
York City. You think we got buried bones all over town? Or this lunatic
only comes out of the blue once every quarter of a century to murder
somebody? A bit unusual for a serial killer, isn't it?"

"Find that guy, you
solve both cases."

"This bagel is hard as
a rock. That's the best you could do for me?" Mike asked, slathering
the remaining half with cream cheese.

"I'm with Alex on this
one," Mercer said.

"What a stretch. You
think DCPI is gonna go with that kind of long shot? Don't ever tell
them it's a brainstorm from the mind of Alexandra Cooper," Mike said.
"They're likely to flop you back to street patrol in Harlem for taking
your cues from blondie."

The NYPD's deputy
commissioner of public information would have to advise his boss on
this decision. News of a murder on the Upper East Side was a story with
legs. Give out an essential clue that might only be known to the
killer-the use of actual silk stockings instead of cheap panty hose-and
it might blow the chance to score solid points when it came time to
interrogate suspects. But if Mike was right and the original serial
rapist had escalated to murder, not warning people about this more
frenzied attack could prove to be a fatal error.

"The commish is
screwed either way. Letting everyone think this new kill is part of the
task force operation gives us more wiggle room to work the case
quietly," Mercer said. "The murderer will think he's got us duped."

"Mind if I finish
this?" Mike asked, reaching over and taking the food Teddy Kroon had
left behind. Murder rarely affected Mike's desire for something to chew
on. "You know I hate it when Mercer sides with you. But this time, just
on some nitwit literary hunch? It almost takes my appetite away."

"It's not her hunch."

"What then?" We both
looked at Mercer. His chair was tipped back against the wall, but his
long legs were planted firmly on the floor.

"The teeth. It's the
skeleton's teeth," he said.

"How so?"

"Well, Andy Dorfman
gives us an age on those bones that wouldn't be so different from Emily
Upshaw's age today-forty-three years old-if the other woman had lived.
And her teeth suggest that in the last few years of her life she spun
out of control-like a drug addict or alcoholic who didn't get any
medical or dental attention."

"You two are beginning
to scare me," Mike said.