The Deadhouse (47 page)

No one would argue with him on that point.

Shreve hadn't missed a detail. How stupid of me to have announced
aloud to Mike that I had an unhappy boyfriend when my beeper had gone
off at the beginning of the meeting in Sylvia's office.

"You mean come into the station house? Right now? But I've just told
you everything that I know about—"

Break his balls, Mercer. Shreve'll never make it through a fact
to-face encounter with you.

"Certainly, Mr. Wallace. No, no, thanks, I don't need a ride.'

Shreve's footsteps crunched again on the packed snow as r walked
closer to my little sanctuary and bent his head to come in under the
plywood covering. He ungagged me and stood in front of me to explain
that he was going to leave for a short while.

"What did you give me to knock me out? What did you do to Sylvia?"

"You needn't worry. Nothing with long-term effects. Just sedative to
make sure I could get you here and get her out of the way."

"A lot of a sedative. I can't remember anything."

Shreve smiled. "Gamma-hydroxybutyrate."

"GHB?" I knew it better than most. A colorless, odorless, tasteless
designer drug, and I had quickly ingested it in my hot choc late in a
matter of minutes. Most ironic of all is that it was making the rounds
as a date-rape drug, being slipped into drinks of unsuspecting women to
render them unconscious for several hours.

"Amazing what you can buy on the Internet. I didn't know anything
about these drugs until Charlotte died, but it's all there on the Web."

He wasn't exaggerating. Earlier in the year, a joint task force city
detectives and DEA agents had run a sting in which they bought two
gallons of GHB from a Web site called
www.DreamOn.com
for
several thousand dollars. It was simple to do.

"But surely the doctors will find traces of it when they Sylvia." I
didn't believe that he had really taken her to the hospital and was
trying to challenge him to admit that.

"You should know better than that, Ms. Cooper. The ER admission is
for a seventy-year-old woman who became ill after lunch while sitting
in a car with a college professor and a prominent prosecutor. Why in
the world would
anyone
suspect something like a date-rape
drug to be the cause? They just pumped her stomach and were thankful
when she came round. Keep her in overnight and she'll be released in
the morning."

Shreve was right once again. Unlike cocaine and heroin, which leave
trace material in the bloodstream for days, GHB doesn't even show up in
blood. And it's evacuated from the urine within twenty-four hours of
ingestion. No one would even think to look for it in Sylvia's case, and
they would be likely to credit this brief physical disturbance in an
elderly woman to a bad reaction to something in her last meal.

"I'm taking the tram over to talk to the police. I should be back in
less than two hours."

That meant it could not be much later than midnight. The tram shut
down at 2 A.M., and he was planning to return before it stopped
operating.

Shreve wasn't telling me any more details about how he had gotten me
here, but I was beginning to understand it. After Sylvia and I passed
out, eagerly gulping down our potions, he must have driven across town
and come onto the island with his van. It would already have been dark
when he let himself into the deserted southern end and deposited my
body in the Strecker Lab before taking Sylvia back to New York
Presbyterian Hospital.

He would then have spent four or five hours making himself visible
to the nurses and doctors in the waiting area, inquiring solicitously
about his dear colleague. In the meantime, inches of snow would have
completely obliterated the tire tracks that had taken me to the old
morgue, and I would have been sleeping off the toxin that had felled me.

He must have redeposited his car safely in his garage so that it
would be dry and warm if the police decided to examine it, and then
returned by tram to begin his encounter with me. He obviously hadn't
counted on a mandatory midnight visit to the detective squad.

"Don't worry, Ms. Cooper. I
am
coming back for you. You
don't have to die, you know. If that were my intention, it would have
happened already. As I said before, you can help me out of all this."
Although Shreve had removed the gag, he left me tied in place. He had
not wanted me to scream in the background while he had been on the
telephone, but now there was no one to hear me.

"I just need to calm your colleagues," he went on. "Chapman's
brought in this other fellow called Wallace. They're worried that they
haven't heard from you."

"I can tell you an easy way to relax Chapman about me," I said to
him softly.

Shreve looked back at me quizzically.

"I mean if that would get you back here faster so you'll let me go."
I wasn't taking odds on the fact that he truly might release me at the
end of this ordeal, but I was hoping to send a signal to my friends.

"What would you suggest, Ms. Cooper?"

I twisted in my seat and the old wooden slats creaked in response.
"We watch
Jeopardy!
almost every night."

"You watch what?"

"It's a game show, on television. Do you know it?" Shreve had PBS
written all over him and he stared at me blankly. I explained the final
question to him and he laughed at me in disbelief.

I racked my brain for ideas, trying to make this work. I reminded
him that Mike had known about Petra and discussed it with Shreve when
we first met him. "You, uh . . . you could tell him we were watching
the show together while we were waiting at the hospital for word about
Sylvia. You could tell him that I insisted on watching the last
question."

He was beginning to think about the idea. "There'd be no other way
for you to know that about me, and about Detective Chapman, unless you
and I had been together at seven-thirty tonight. You know, we were just
chatting and I was telling you about these silly bets we make against
each other." I was trying not to sound too much as though I was
pleading with him, but everything about me was on edge. "He'll be
convinced I was all right while the two of us were together."

For God's sake let him go along with me on this one.
I
took the next step. "I'll make up something for you. Mike was obviously
much too busy to have been watching television tonight. He was probably
talking to old Orlyn Lockhart, or had left White Plains on his way back
to the city when the show was on. Just make it some category he doesn't
know very well."

I furrowed my brow and pretended to come up with a question. "Like
feminist stuff. Tell him—I know, tell him that the last answer was the
name of the first woman doctor in America. And if you add that it
stumped me, too, he'll buy right into it."

Please do exactly what I'm telling you and please let Chapman
recall that we were together last week when that very subject came up:
Who was Elizabeth Blackwell?
I needed Chapman to remember that
and then Chapman would know that Shreve was lying through his teeth.
And with any luck he would also realize that I was somewhere on
Blackwells Island.

"We'll see whether that helps things, Ms. Cooper. Then when I come
back, I want you to think about how cooperative you're going to be
about helping me find the diamonds that are buried on the island."

I was stunned. Winston Shreve believed that the diamonds were really
still here? And what did he think I knew about how to find them?

"We'll talk about Lola later. Perhaps you're not even aware of the
information you have," he said. I hadn't even thought about Lola Dakota
since regaining consciousness. Shreve must be after something I had
come across in the investigation. But what?

"I've got a legitimate right to those diamonds, Ms. Cooper. Not like
those other fortune hunters. They belonged to my grandfather."

"Your grandfather?"

"Yes, Ms. Cooper. There were men like Orlyn Lockhart who were, shall
we say, the gatekeepers of the island at the time. And then there were
the men who spent their time here on the inside. The patients in this
hospital, doomed as they were. And just a hundred yards away, the
prisoners in the penitentiary.

"Freeland Jennings, Ms. Cooper. Freeland Jennings was my
grandfather."

35

"Really, Ms. Cooper, you don't believe that all of us who grub
around in the groves of academe have purely intellectual motives? Each
of the scholars you've met has a selfish goal, whether it stems from
the Blackwells project or his or her own special interests. Grenier
stands to make a fortune from the drug companies for his research,
Lavery's success would solve all his problems with the scandal,
Lockhart gets on a fast track for tenure—" He interrupted himself when
he mentioned that name.

"Do you have any idea how sick it made me to hear Skip pontificate
about his grandfather leading the raid on the corrupt scum of the
penitentiary? My grandfather died in that raid. My family was destroyed
by those events."

"Did Professor Lockhart know that Freeland Jennings was your
grandfather?"

"He's blinded by his own greed. And I had no intention of telling
him, anyway. It just would have made him and the others more intent on
their own ends."

"I'm not sure I understand the connection either," I said. In fact,
I couldn't make sense of anything any longer. Dizziness had yielded to
simple exhaustion, and the cold was numbing.

"My grandmother was Ariana, Freeland Jennings's beautiful young
wife. The eye-talian, as Orlyn Lockhart used to say. After my
grandfather was convicted of killing Ariana, his sister took my father
in. He was only seven years old. But once Granddad was murdered during
the raid on the island, that sister and the rest of the Jennings family
put my father in an orphanage."

He paused. "They weren't quite sure whether Freeland was really his
father, after all. So why bother to split that lovely Jennings' fortune
with a possible bastard? No one protested when it was decided to send
the child out West. Out of sight, out of mind. Out of the will."

"And that's what became of your father?"

"That was the plan. But in the end, Ariana's lover took him off
their hands. You see, it was the Church orphanage that was making all
the arrangements to send the boy out West—very common in those days.
Brandon Shreve apparently had reason to believe that he might be the
father. Either that, or he loved Ariana enough to want to keep her
child." He hesitated, then said what we both were thinking. "I suppose
your DNA technology would answer all this for us today. But not in
those times.

"So Brandon Shreve just gave the Church double the money the
Jennings family had offered to lose every trace of the child, and both
sides were happy. Shreve adopted my father and, of course, changed his
name."

"But the boy remembered, didn't he?"

"Vividly. He talked to me about it all the time. Shreve was a good
father, but my father's first seven years as a Jennings had instilled
in him an interest in the Jennings birthright. Those diamonds were
meant to be his, Ms. Cooper. Now they're meant to be mine.

"So I'm going to leave you for just a little while. If the snow
breaks off, it's not a bad view. It's the same vista my grandfather had
from his room in the penitentiary—straight across the water to his home
in the River House. I'll be sure to give your regards to the gendarmes."

Shreve led himself out with the tiny flashlight and I was once again
surrounded by darkness in my frigid quarters. Outside and on the ground
just below the window frame, a spotlight beamed up at the brilliant
architectural detail of the building's trim. If I could concentrate its
aim just thirty feet lower, someone far away might be able to see the
ghostly outline of a desperate woman and come to save me.

Dreaming about rescue didn't help. I tugged at my ties and squirmed
to loosen the knots around my ankles. I told myself to slow down and
make the attempts one at a time. I was far too rattled and weak to take
on both tasks at once.

My efforts to work myself free were unsuccessful. I slumped against
the back of the chair and closed my eyes. Think, I commanded myself. Do
anything but give in to the paralyzing cold. Think. All I could think
was why we should have smelled a rat in Winston Shreve.

Just looking at his resume, Mike and I should have known the
Blackwells project didn't suit his professional interests. This man had
devoted his academic career to classic historical sites and digs on
ancient civilizations like Petra and Lutetia. This little strip of land
was too modern and too devoid of cultural importance to pique his
interest.

And wasn't it Lola Dakota who had told him about the diamonds? She
knew he was Freeland Jennings's descendant, must have known. That
night, so many years ago, when L brought him out to the island and made
love to him while t watched the fireworks, they, too, had looked back
at the fat apartment building. What had he said to Mike and me in
describing that romantic scene?—"Where my father lived before I
born"—not too far from the view that his grandfather had in jail cell.

My weariness was fueled by my growing anger at myself wondered if
Mike would remember the fit Shreve had thrown when we said that we'd be
getting a tour of the island. How had insisted that
he
wanted
to be the one to bring the two of us here. What better control could a
killer have? I could picture his demeanor and attitude. He would have
let us in the security and driven us within spitting distance of the
hospital and laboratory, cautioning us against the dangers of falling
granite and broken glass. For the sake of our safety. All the time, he
would known that Charlotte Voight's body was under our noses.