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telling Teddy Kroon to stop whining. Mercer and I took the more compassionate
approach, hoping to gain his trust and elicit more candid responses than we
had in our first meeting.
"Amelia. Amelia Brandon," Kroon said, repeating the girl's name over and over
again as he rocked back and forth on his living room sofa. "I opened the door
and I swear it was like seeing Emily's ghost. Amelia. It was Emily's little
girl."
"You just let her walk away?" Mercer asked.
I was sitting next to Kroon and patting him on the back to help calm him.
"What else could I do? She came in and talked for ten, maybe fifteen minutes.
I, I think she had figured out that I might be her father," Kroon said,
forcing a smile. "I guess I convinced her that wasn't possible."
"But why didn't you give her some coffee-find some way to stall and keep her
here-and go inside to call the precinct?"
Kroon looked at Mercer quizzically. "Detective Wallace, this whole thing came
at me as such a surprise, I'm sure I didn't do a lot of things you would have
thought of."
Mercer had the opportunity he wanted. Kroon was caught in a lie. The draft of
the letter from Emily Upshaw to her sister was one of the files that had been
opened on the computer the night of Emily's murder. Amelia and her appearance
could not have been much of a surprise at all.
Mercer pushed the coffee table out of the way and lowered himself onto an
ottoman that he pulled up directly in front of Kroon.
"Now one of the things we'd like to do this morning, Teddy, is to establish
some ground rules," he said, his huge frame boxing the smaller man into place
beside me. "You haven't been entirely honest with us about-"
"Yes, I have. Yes, I have from the very beginning. It's my finger-prints;
didn't I tell you they'd be everywhere in Emily's apartment? I, I knew that
was going to be a problem from the first time the police started questioning
me. Is that what you mean?" Kroon looked over at me to be the good cop in this
conversation, but I stared back at him without offering any comfort.
I remembered that Mike had been even more suspicious of Kroon when he got the
confirmation from the autopsy that no sexual assault had been completed on
Emily. The killer's sexual orientation was of little moment if the whole scene
had been staged for the purpose of misleading the investigators.
"You gotta do better than that, Teddy. You gotta convince us you weren't the
one waiting in the apartment for Emily when she came home from the theater the
night she was killed."
Kroon was practically doubled over. "But I told you the name of the bar I was
in. People saw me there. Lots of people."
"In a crowded bar where you were a regular. No one can swear to the time you
arrived or when you ordered your second drink or whether you went out and came
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back during the course of the evening."
"I'd never have hurt Emily. She was the dearest friend I've ever had," he
said, resting his head in his hands.
Mercer tapped a long, thick finger against the top of Kroon's knee. "Look at
me when I'm talking to you," he said, his deep voice the only sound in the
room.
Kroon slowly lifted his head to meet Mercer's eyes.
"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-yourcarving 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?
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