Linda Fairstein - Entombed

"Don't mess with me, Teddy. There's a little chip inside the hard drive that recorded the exact minute someone went into a bunch of files from Emily Upshaw's computer," Mercer said, rubbing his fingers together in front of Kroon's face. "And there were enough skin cells on the computer mouse to tell us that person was you. So it suggests that you were either there with your friend at the time she was attacked with-correct me if I have this wrong- your carving knife, or that you interrupted your mourning after her death long enough to log on to her machine. Neither one of those is a pretty picture."

Kroon's head snapped back and he leaned it against the rear edge of the sofa, gazing up at the ceiling.

Mercer was getting to him. "Start with the crap you gave us about leaving messages on her answering machine. There were none."

"Maybe I dialed the wrong number. I'm telling you that I called Emily several times."

"Try harder. You knew she was very upset. You lied about that, too. She told you she was frantic when she called you at the store in the afternoon."

"Like I said, she only left a message with one of my sales-"

"Teddy, her phone records show she was talking with someone at your shop for almost five minutes."

It wasn't warm enough in Kroon's apartment for any of us to be sweating, but small, watery beads were forming on his forehead.

He pulled himself upright and snarled at Mercer, "Emily Upshaw was scared to death when she called me that afternoon. She had a premonition that she was going to be murdered."

Mercer and I hadn't expected that answer.

"All right, Detective? Would you have believed her if she told you that? Would you have taken her any more seriously than I did?"

"It depends what she was talking about."

"Someone was trying to find Emily. Someone she didn't want to hear from ever again."

I thought I knew where he was going. "Amelia Brandon. Her daughter?"

Kroon was silent.

"Look, Teddy, we know the letter that Emily wrote to her sister about Amelia is one of the documents you opened the night of the murder. That's why I don't believe you were all that surprised when Amelia showed up at your door this morning. There's got to be a different reason you turned the child away."

"Fear, Miss Cooper. Plain and simple fear. Can you understand that?" He pushed himself up from the sofa and walked away from the two of us.

"Of course I can accept that." Better than you'll ever imagine. "But it would help if you told us who you're afraid of."

He balanced himself against the windowsill as he shouted at me, "How the hell am I supposed to know if you people can't figure it out?"

"So what did you do?" Mercer asked. "Send the kid back out on the street as a test balloon? See what kind of trouble she attracts? I want to find that girl, Teddy, before we have another tragedy on our hands."

Kroon exhaled. "Emily had been sick since she got that phone call from Amelia, maybe a week or ten days before she was killed. She'd promised her sister never to have any contact with the child."

"We know that. Sally Brandon talked to us when she was here. But Amelia's got to be out of college by now-she was bound to find out sooner or later."

"Some sort of legal papers had been arranged for the Brandons when Emily gave up the baby, but apparently no one ever destroyed the original birth certificate on file at the hospital. Amelia hadn't gone looking for trouble. She simply wanted to come here to meet Emily, to find out why her mother had abandoned her. She wanted to know who her father is."

"Wasn't his name on the birth certificate, too?" I asked.

"No. That just said 'unknown' in the space for the father's name."

"Do you know who he is?"

Kroon nodded his head up and down. "Emily told me that same week. The NYU professor whom she slept with the time she came to the city for her college interview. Noah Tormey is his name."

"Did Emily actually speak to Amelia?"

"Only once. You see, the child didn't have a phone number for Emily. Her home phone is-was-unlisted. So Amelia rummaged through her mother's papers but the only things she came up with were some occasional clippings of articles with Emily's byline that Sally must have saved. The girl began to call the editorial departments of the magazines, and once she did that, Emily got calls from her former colleagues, telling her that someone named Amelia Brandon was trying to reach her."

"So Emily phoned her?" Mercer asked.

"Absolutely not. She'd made a promise to her sister that she wasn't going to break. But she was tormented by the fact that Amelia was determined to track her down. There was no way to put the cat back in the bag. I guess one of the other writers on the magazine staff finally gave the child Emily's phone number."

"Take us to Saturday afternoon before the murder," Mercer said, "when Emily called you with her-what did you say- premonition?"

Kroon wiped his brow. "I was at work, like I told you. The store was busy and I'm afraid I didn't take her as seriously as-well-as it turned out I should have."

"You couldn't have known what would happen to her," I said.

"Emily had been at home all morning, sleeping late, I'm sure. She went out for the papers and some groceries, and when she got back there had been a series of calls. Three, I think she said. All of them hang-ups."

I looked at Mercer, who had studied the outgoing and incoming activity on Emily Upshaw's phone records. He nodded his head and mouthed the words "pay phone."

"Emily couldn't imagine who had called, but she was concerned that it had something to do with Amelia's attempts to find her. Every time we had met during the week, she'd been soliciting my help with what to do about telling her sister."

"And your advice?"

He shrugged. "Be honest with her. There was nothing to hide anymore."

"The hang-up caller, did he or she phone back?"

"Yes. That's what prompted Emily's panicked call to me. It was that doctor-you know, the one with the Asian name who was found dead last week."

"Dr. Ichiko?" I asked.

"Exactly."

"Did Emily know him?"

"No," he said. "She told me that she'd never met him."

Mercer walked over to Kroon. "But you just told us her phone is unlisted."

He sniffled and answered, "Emily's name was in the file the doctor had kept on Monty, when Ichiko had treated him back in his college days. Apparently, Monty had talked about her in session, as the woman he lived with, the person he confided in when he had the flashbacks that he had killed someone. The doctor had an NYU alumni directory. Emily's number is printed in that."

"What did he want?"

"First he spooked her by just expressing relief that she was alive-that she hadn't been murdered long ago. Ichiko asked whether she had seen the newspapers, the headlines about the skeleton in the building basement. Emily had just come home with the papers-the Times and the tabloids. He told her to look at the Post follow-up story, that he was convinced he knew whose bones had been discovered. And certain that the killer was Emily's old boyfriend, the one she called Monty."

"What did Emily do?" I asked.

"Ichiko wanted her to tell him where Monty was, what had become of him. She swore she didn't know, that she hadn't seen him in over twenty years. He pressed Emily hard-he really scared the daylights out of her."

"How?"

"He told her that once the skeleton was identified, Emily wouldn't be safe in New York. That she had to help him figure out what had become of Monty or they'd both wind up dead. Dr. Ichiko wasn't wrong, was he?"

"And you, what did Emily want from you?" Mercer asked.

"Money. Money to get out of town. And advice about where to go."

"What did you tell her?"