Linda Fairstein - Entombed

"That she couldn't run because she didn't know where in the world this man Monty had gone."

"Hadn't she thought of that before?" I asked.

"Often," Kroon said. "She often wondered what had become of him. How do you support yourself if you're a poet, Detective Wallace? Nobody can make a living that way today."

"The pages you opened from Emily's computer, Teddy, what was that about?" Mercer asked.

He bowed his head. "That was such a stupid thing to do."

Heartless, I wanted to add.

"What was so important to you that you opened computer files before you even called nine-one-one?"

Kroon walked to his desk drawer and returned to the sofa, sitting next to me and handing me a thin manila folder. "You can look. I mean, when I found her body, I assumed she'd been killed by the Silk Stocking Rapist. That it was just a rotten piece of bad timing and bad luck. I-I guess I just wanted to be a hero."

"It never occurred to you that the killer was Monty?"

"Call it denial, Detective. I had read about the rapist back in the neighborhood, stabbing a woman. I-I guess I didn't think things were moving so fast, since the doctor had only called Emily that very day. I didn't think Monty was anywhere around yet, so I thought I could find information about Monty that I could turn over to Dr. Ichiko, that would help the police solve the old case."

I opened the file that Kroon had printed out the night of Emily's murder and shuffled through the papers to see whether anything struck me as relevant or useful to our investigation. I hadn't had the chance yet to study the police forensics report on the computer.

Teddy may have claimed a close friendship with Emily, but for some unfathomable reason he had purloined some very personal writings. There were pages of meditations on the emotional upheaval she had undergone because of Amelia's contact, and intimate recollections that the dead woman had written about her parents and sisters.

Then came a lengthy manuscript, titled "Poetic Injustice," which listed both Emily Upshaw and Noah Tormey as its authors. It appeared to be the academic treatise on Poe's flirtation with plagiarism that she had researched and written for the young professor- the one that had scotched his ambitions at the Raven Society.

Next came a paragraph of single-spaced prose. I lifted the page from my lap to read it.

Kroon saw what it was. "See? I thought I could give this to Dr. Ichiko, to show that Monty-whoever he was-had confessed to Emily."

I read the lines:

I determined to wall it up in the cellar, as the monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to have walled up their victims. For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed, and… I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole thing up as before so that no eye could detect anything suspicious… by means of a crowbar I easily dislodged the bricks and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it up in that position, while with a little trouble I re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood.

"Stick to gourmet cooking, Teddy. That's vintage Poe. 'The Black Cat.' Another burial behind brick walls," I said.

He looked crestfallen, as though he had actually found a clue of significance.

The last pages included the draft letter that Emily was working on to send her sister Sally, telling her about Amelia's discovery.

"Is this your handwriting?" I asked, pointing to the edits and corrections that had been made in pen along the margins.

Kroon said yes without looking up.

"Why did you write Noah Tormey's name at the top of the page?"

"I wanted to be sure I'd remember it. I'd heard his name from Emily for the first time, just a few days earlier."

"But why?" I asked. "What were you going to do with this letter, with this information?"

"Well, nothing. I-uh-I just felt I knew the truth and ought to keep a record of it, for Amelia's sake."

"And then you brushed her off at the door when she arrived this morning?" Mercer asked.

I read the page again while Mercer questioned Kroon. The changes he had made to the draft made no sense to me. It was no longer intended to be a letter to Sally Brandon.

"Where did you send the girl?"

"Nowhere in particular. I couldn't deal with her is all."

"Did you give her Tormey's name?" Mercer asked. "Was that your plan?"

"No, not yet. I didn't think she was ready for that. I didn't know what to do with her. She wanted information about Emily's life, about who would be able to help her. I-I told her about the detective who had befriended her mother-"

Mercer was steaming. "Kittredge? Did you give her Kittredge's name?"

"Yes."

"What else? Did you talk about Monty?"

"Only that I don't know who he could be. I wasn't suggesting she try to find out."

"But she's desperate for information about her birth parents. For all we know you've sent her out in harm's way. Now how the hell do you help us find her again?" Mercer asked. "At least if you'd given her Tormey's name, maybe he'd have taken her in and we'd know she's safe."

Now the written words made more sense, came clearer on the page when Kroon answered Mercer's questions.

"Of course you didn't want her to get to Noah Tormey quite yet," I said, looking up at Kroon. "You were hoping to extort a little money from him in order to let his secret go to the grave with Emily."

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.