Entombed

by Linda Fairstein

  "You basically provide us with where he selects his victims," Karras said. "He's got a clear comfort zone, and we know that some of the women are low risk-from his perspective-because he thinks they're alone and in some cases intoxicated. His signatures are obvious-the weapon, the kind of binds, not much profanity, minimal verbalization, the way he subdues his prey. The computer uses his movement patterns and his previous hunting habits."

  "To do what?"

  "Statistics tell us that right-handed criminals in a hurry to flee generally make their escape to the left. But they discard their weapons to the right. You haven't charted that fact yourselves, have you? See what happens if you take him left out of every one of these buildings. Where does it lead him? That's what I'm supposed to figure out."

  "Oh," I said grudgingly, toying with my scrambled eggs and lukewarm decaf.

  "Did you know that when lost or confused, men go downhill but women go up?"

  He was losing me now. "It's a perfectly flat neighborhood, Greg. This isn't San Francisco."

  "The guy who first developed this program ten years ago? He did it with a serial rapist in Vancouver. Came up with exactly the same kind of map I'm going to create. Charted seventy-nine crime scenes and the computer spit out a red dot on the exact spot in which his perp lived. Nailed him the next day."

  I wasn't focused on the good news. "Seventy-nine cases before he got a solution? Couldn't have been many places left in Vancouver to look for the guy by that time. I'll be too old to celebrate if I live through that many more attacks."

  "Wait that long and neither one of us will have a job," Mercer said.

  Mercer's cell phone vibrated and he picked it up off the Formica tabletop. "Wallace here. Hey, loo, what's up?"

  It was 4:17A.M. and I was fading. The lieutenant was undoubtedly worried about how much overtime he would have to authorize for Mercer on this untested caper.

  He stood up and walked to the front of the shop to finish the conversation, scribbling something on a napkin the waitress handed him at the counter. He flipped the phone closed, motioned to us to come as he paid the tab.

  "Can you take a cab back to your hotel, Greg? Alex and I have business."

  Mercer moved away from the register and pushed open the front door. The blast of cold air revived me as I stepped onto the sidewalk.

  "East Eighty-third Street, between First and York. Brownstone with a locked front door. Female white, panty hose, knifepoint assault."

  Karras had his PalmPilot in his hand, entering the address. "Boy, once they get good at something, these perverts don't change their style."

  "This one's different, Alex," Mercer said, ignoring the profiler. "This time the girl is dead."

  11

  Mike Chapman was whistling a Sam Cooke tune, meant to get under my skin, as he opened the door to let us into the vestibule of the small building. "'Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody…'

  "Don't you have better things to do with your time, Coop?" he asked, handing us the rubber gloves and mesh booties we needed to enter the crime scene, which was still being worked by Hal Sherman and his crew.

  "Where to?" Mercer asked.

  "C'mon up to three. It's a floor-through," Mike said, telling us that the deceased had lived in an apartment that occupied the entire third floor of the building.

  I trailed behind them, up the staircase where the clean yellow paint on the walls and banister had now been coated with black fingerprint dust.

  "Is she here?" Mercer asked.

  "We just got her out fifteen minutes ago. I didn't want to deal with the neighbors and a body bag first thing on Sunday morning."

  The third-floor landing was full of Sherman's baggage-metal trunks that held every piece of equipment necessary to process a crime scene. I stepped over them and into the entryway of the victim's apartment.

  Hal was on his knees, taking a series of photographs of smudges-probably blood-on the area rug that covered the hallway. I squeezed his shoulder and stayed behind him until he finished shooting and greeted us.

  "You got a time of death?" Mercer asked. A death investigator from the medical examiner's office responded to every homicide in the city. The body wasn't removed from the scene until that had happened.

  "He thinks she'd been dead only a couple of hours," Mike said. "A friend of the deceased let himself in downstairs at two. They were supposed to meet earlier but she didn't show up. Claims he had a duplicate key, for emergencies. That's when we got the call. The ME was here within an hour."

  "The friend-you holding on to him?"

  "Yep. He's cooling his heels at the precinct, writing out a statement. Trust me, he's not the man."

  "Is there a story?"

  Mike led us from the entry through the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and into the bedroom, a series of long narrow cubicles that gave the feel of walking through the cars of a railroad train.

  I clasped my hand to my mouth to stifle the involuntary noise that gurgled up when I saw the blood that covered the beige linen bedspread. It made the stains outside Annika Jelt's apartment look as if they could have been stemmed by a couple of Band-Aids.

  The lamp on the table next to the bed had been knocked to the floor and the telephone line had been pulled out of the wall.

  "Emily Upshaw. Forty-three years old," Mike said, referring to his notepad. "Single, lived alone. Been in this apartment almost fifteen years."

  I scanned the room for photographs.

  "Brunette, about five foot seven, slightly overweight."

  Mercer frowned. "She's too old for my boy. And a little too fleshy."

  Mike wasn't bothered by the physical discrepancies. "She had a ski jacket on-it's in the living room. Hood up, from behind, hard to tell her age-or the size of her waist. Your rapist is older now, too. Maybe he's less picky."

  Mercer shook his head and looked around the room.

  There were several pictures on the dresser, all of two or three individuals. Perhaps she was in one of those. Groups of people in a beach scene, on a hiking trail, riding bicycles, and in a wedding party.

  "What does-did she do?" I asked. The walls were hung with museum reproduction posters in cheap metal frames, about one step up from college dorm room decor.

  "Writer. Freelance magazine pieces, book and movie reviews. Whatever paid the rent, her buddy tells me."

  Mike motioned to us as he walked into the last room, which was set up like an office.

  "And she drank, too. Have I mentioned that?"

  The overturned wastebasket was crammed with crumpled paper and empty bottles, spilling out of it as it lay on its side. Vodka, mostly, and cheap red wine.

  "Screw tops," he said, lifting a half-filled Burgundy off the desk. "Girl after my own heart. Slainte, Emily."

  Next to the desk was a stack of newspapers. I flipped through them, all from the preceding week. Yesterday's headlines were on top of the pile.

  "The computer?" I asked. "You checked it?"

  "Haven't touched it. It was turned off like this when we got here. I'm going to take the hard drive to be downloaded."

  The computer tech cops were experts at the forensic examination of the machines. Emily's files and e-mails might give some hint of her activities and correspondence, and the "cookies" on her Web browser would tell us exactly what sites she had been searching in the days before her death. The only likelihood of relevance would be if the killer had not picked her at random and there had been some connection between them before this evening.

  I shuffled the files on the desk while Mike talked to us. "Teddy-that's her friend, Theodore Kroon-Teddy's known Emily for almost fifteen years."

  "Romance?"

  "Not the way Teddy swings. I didn't ask him how they met. They were supposed to hook up tonight, around midnight, at a bar on York Avenue."

  "Midnight? Why so late?" I asked.

  "Emily had to do a piece on a performance artist who was appearing at the Beacon Theater. Some musical geek who plays Burt
Bacharach songs in the style of Beethoven, reciting the lyrics in German. Wasn't due to break until almost eleven. She planned to come home to drop off her notes and change clothes since she had to pass right by the apartment on her way to York Avenue. Then she was joining Teddy for cocktails."

  Mercer picked up the thread. "So you figure she got popped on the stoop?"

  "Probably. Can't find any witnesses yet, but that's how the others got it, isn't it? Her handbag's in that front room with the keys inside it."

  "How'd you find her?"

  They started back to the bedroom. The articles she'd been working on could not have produced much income. A search for the best homemade ice creams in Brooklyn, the controversy over whether owls should be sold as domesticated pets, and the effect of winter weather on the projected population of deer ticks in the Hamptons for the coming summer. I replaced the folders and joined up with the guys.

  "Facedown on the bed. Naked."

  "Completely?" Mercer asked.

  "Yeah. Her clothes were in a pile next to the bed."

  "Did she undress or were they cut off?"

  "See for yourself," Mike said. He pointed to a row of brown paper bags, each tagged and labeled. "I looked everything over- didn't notice any holes. The lab can work 'em up for blood and semen."

  Mercer crouched next to the bags and started to open each one, removing the single piece of clothing inside and holding it up for a look.

  "Her arms were tied together behind her back. Ankles were bound, too. Stabbed five times in the back. Carving knife, about fourteen inches long, with the blade. Still in her when Teddy stumbled in."

  "Her own knife?" Mercer asked. We didn't think our perp carried anything that big when he prowled the streets.

  "Matches a set in the kitchen. Maybe he took a look at her and figured a pocketknife wouldn't get the job done," Mike said, glancing back at Mercer. "Those last bags? That's the panty hose. They're bloody, man. Maybe he cut himself in the process and we've got his fluid on them as well as hers."

  I watched as Mercer opened the last two paper bags and removed the items one by one. Dried blood had formed clumps on the pale taupe surface of the hosiery, caught in the fine mesh webbing. The empty outline of a foot dangled from his hand, part of the knot that had restrained Emily for the kill.

  "Something else bothering you, Mercer?" Mike asked. He knew his old partner well enough to recognize the puzzled expression on his face.

  Mercer passed me one of the bags. "Little things."

  "Like what?"

  "Our man never hit before midnight. Never stabbed anybody in the back before-"

  "Shit, he never stabbed anybody at all till that Swedish kid fought him last week. Maybe he liked doing it. Maybe thinking he'd killed a girl satisfied him even more."

  "Always had his own knife-the small folding kind," Mercer said, ticking off a punch list of distinctions from the four-year-old case details he knew so well. "Her keys shouldn't be inside her pocketbook, like she had time to replace them and close it up. They'd be on the floor or a tabletop. The jacket would be in here, with the pile of clothes."

  "Three, four years is a long time in a pervert's life. Maybe his style changed, maybe his whole approach."

  "It's not just the little things," I said, twisting the piece of bloodstained evidence and holding it up by the toe. "This isn't panty hose."

  "Then what the hell have I been fumbling with all these years, trying to get inside the damn stuff? Could have fooled me," Mike said.

  "Maybe you should try it with the lights on and your eyes open once in a while," I said. "You might enjoy it."

  "What have you got?"

  "Something bigger to add to Mercer's instincts. Stockings. Old-fashioned, expensive, hard to come by, and totally useless without garter belts. Not the cheap Lycra waist-high pull-ups from a local drugstore that all our other girls were tied with."

  "So, what's your point?"

  "That this killer's a copycat who's read the news accounts of the case pattern, took the headlines literally, and is trying to imitate our rapist to cover up a murder," I said, passing the bloody hosiery to Mike. "These really are silk stockings."

  12

  "I'll take your twenty dollars and bet it on this. They're not going to find semen when they autopsy her," I said to Mike as we climbed the staircase to the squad room in the Nineteenth Precinct station house at 5A.M. "This wasn't a rape."

  We walked in, greeted by the frightened or sullen faces of more than a dozen men-black men-seated on every available chair. The metal gate of the holding pen was thrown open so that others could sit on the benches usually reserved for prisoners.

  "What the hell's happening here? Somebody holding auditions for The Jeffersons?" Mike asked Mercer, who was coming up behind us. "One look around and I know it ain't hockey tryouts."

  "Same damn thing as last time. This is where the RoboCop business gets ugly."

  After the serial rapist task force had been formed several years back, the moment there was a report of an attack that fit the pattern, police swept the neighborhood for every dark-skinned man who was on the street. A single glance around and it was obvious that no one in this crowd even remotely resembled the roundcheeked suspect depicted in the victims' composite sketch.

  A lone detective sat in a corner in front of a computer monitor, entering pedigree information into the system. "What are you doing, DeGraw?" Mercer asked.

  "I'm trying to get these guys out of here as fast as I can. Two doctors-they're the quiet ones behind bars over there. One partner at some fancy-dancy law firm-he's the one screaming about the racial-profiling suit he's gonna file on behalf of everyone who's keeping me company this dark and lonely night. A banker, two cooks, a fireman, a hot dog vendor, a paroled burglar with six misdemeanor convictions, a couple of lounge lizards hanging out at the local bars looking for a lonely piece of ass."

  "Why are they here at all?" I asked. "This is appalling." The usual procedure was to do a stop-and-frisk on the street, fill out the necessary paperwork that accompanied the search, and let the men go.

  "The guys stopped so many people they ran out of forms. We had to bring the rest of them in to process."

  Mercer was making the rounds, shaking everyone's hand and apologizing for this outrageous fallout from the murder investigation.

  "You swabbing 'em?" Mike asked.

  "I've been asking for volunteers. So far, the legal eagle told them they don't gotta do it. One of the docs went along with the program," DeGraw said, showing me a single Q-tips in a glassine envelope. "Nobody else is in the mood."

  "You want to take a shot at it, Mercer?" I asked. "Just for elimination purposes?"

  "That is one mean assignment, Ms. Cooper. Me, leaning on the brothers to help elevate the African-American statistics in the population genetics pool of the data bank," Mercer said, doubling back to ask again whether any of the men were willing to give us a saliva sample.

  "Where's m' man Teddy?"

  DeGraw pointed Mike in the direction of the lieutenant's office at the far end of the room. "He's in there, unless he flung himself out the window already. Go easy on him-he's a wreck."

  Theodore Kroon lifted his head from his folded arms on the desktop when he heard the door open. His lean, pale face was streaked with tears and his reddish-brown hair was tousled and unkempt. There were bloodstains on the front of his shirt and pants.

  He began to wail as soon as he saw Mike Chapman. "I touched everything, Detective. I couldn't help it. I didn't know what I was supposed to do."

  "It's okay, buddy. I wouldn't expect anything else."

  "But I mean my fingerprints must be everywhere in Emily's apartment. I tried to see if she was alive, I untied her hands, I… I even held the handle of the knife. I wrote it all out for you, just like you asked." Teddy thrust several pieces of paper at Mike.

  "First thing you're gonna do is go into the men's room and wash up. You're no good to me if you don't calm down. This is Alexandra Coop
er. She's from the DA's office. I'd like to go over everything with you again, so Ms. Cooper can hear it."

  Kroon closed his eyes and breathed deeply before he stood up and left the small room.

  "See what I mean? Too light in the loafers for a job like this murder."

  The political correctness of the nineties had not even been a blip on Mike's radar screen. "Please stop with that kind of talk. You know it drives me crazy. And what if I'm right that Emily wasn't raped?"

  "I realize you're tired but you're never gonna change my spots, kid. It's just my bad mouth-inside you know I'm like butter."

  "Yes, but it's your mouth that makes such an indelible impression."

  "My cousin Sean-did I tell you he's getting married in June? I'm the best man. The bride's a guy he met playing soccer in Ireland. I got twenty-two first cousins, and if you don't think the odds are that at least five of them are gay, then you can sit there praying with my aunt Bridget and her rosary beads, trying to pretend it only happens in other people's families. Now I have to take Teddy seriously as a suspect-that's what you're telling me?"

  "Is it all right for me to come in?" Teddy said, pushing open the door.

  Mike put a hand on Teddy's shoulder and steadied him as he walked back to the lieutenant's chair. We seated ourselves across the desk from him.

  I opened the coffee I needed to keep myself going and the bag of bagels that I had stopped to pick up for the detectives and witnesses. Mike asked Teddy Kroon to tell us about himself.

  "I was born forty-eight years ago in Bangor, Maine. My parents-"

  "How about we fast-forward and start from this end. What do you do?"

  "Retail, Mr. Chapman. I own a shop in TriBeCa that sells highend cooking utensils-pots and pans, table toppings-"

  "Carving knives?"

  "Yes, sir. The one-um-the one that's in Emily's back? I gave her that set for her birthday last year." He shook his head and tried to open a packet of sugar with his shaking hands.