Mike Chapman would have been pushing me out of the way if he were with us, 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 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? 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.