alarms in his mind. Would he even think to tell Mike about it when they next spoke?
'I believe Mr. Wallace understood my concern about your walking out of the emergency room at nine o'clock or so to find a taxicab by yourself. He said that neighborhood is plagued with drug dealers and youth gangs. I hope they double their efforts there to look for you. Seems they found an elderly woman in an alley just a few hours ago, beaten to a pulp by some young hoodlums, just to rob her of seven dollars and a crucifix on a gold chain. Brought her to the same emergency room where you and I waited for Sylvia.'
Shreve paused. 'And then another detective reminded Mr. Wallace that some woman had been harassing you as well. Some lady with a gun.' He shook his head in mock dismay, and I thought how easily the detectives could be off on a red herring now, combing the East Seventies for my unhappy stalker.
I sank deeper into my frosted terror. What if Mike wasn't worried about me at all? What if he and Valerie were home together, enjoying each other's company like a normal couple? Maybe he'd gotten fed up with my repeated rituals of independence, believing that I'd walked out of Sylvia Foote's hospital scene just as I'd run away from Jake's conversation with an informant and run again from Mike's scene of domestic intimacy. Maybe I deserved to be marooned in an abandoned ruin with a killer.
'The miniature model that my grandfather had built, Ms. Cooper. You seem to be as interested in it as I am. Shall we talk?'
Shreve had let me live so far because he thought I either knew something about the model's whereabouts or the key to its treasures. Now he was determined to get the answers.
'You've tried to convince me that you're not a killer, Professor That Charlotte Voight was responsible for her own death.' Hi looked at me but didn't speak. 'But Lola Dakota is dead, too. And if you're going to tell me that was also an accident, then we've go nothing to discuss.'
'It wasn't a murder, Ms. Cooper. Nothing was premeditated, didn't go there to kill her.'
Most lawyers didn't know the distinction between premeditation and intention, so why should Winston Shreve? He didn't have to plot the murder of his friend Lola before he went to se her that day, he simply had to form the intent to kill her in the moments before he executed the plan. Maybe it was a genetic thing, inherited from his grandfather.
All I knew is that I didn't want to be another notation in his agenda of women who had met their demise accidentally. 'In fact, it was Claude Lavery who caused her death.'
'I don't believe that.' As soon as I snapped those words at Shreve, I didn't know why I had said them. I was overwhelmed with confusion-from the sedatives, the situation, and the snow
'I spoke to Lola often while she was out in New Jersey at her sister's house.' He was standing again, swinging his arms as though to keep warm. 'Both of us had been certain that the old laboratory-'
'Strecker?'
'Yes, that the Strecker building was the deadhouse. It's an old Scottish word meaning a morgue, or a place where dead bodies are kept.'
How fitting that it has kept in character after all these years, I thought, not daring to imagine the condition of Charlotte Voight's remains.
'While Lola was hiding out at her sister's house she was also researching the island, using a lot of primary source material that student volunteers had come up with while assigned to the Black-wells project. Things they had found in the municipal archives, records from the Department of Health and Hospitals. Papers no one had touched for the better part of a century. Documents that explained exactly what the deadhouse was.'
'And it wasn't the laboratory?' Could there have been a more ghastly place than Strecker?
'Its purpose was plain. It was just a theater for autopsies and a lab to examine the specimens. But there wasn't enough room to keep the bodies from all the plague-ridden institutions on Black-wells Island.
'Deadhouses were the wooden shacks they built all along the waterfront. Places to store and stack the corpses until they could be taken back home for burial.'
The first sight from the Manhattan side of the water that patients bound for the island would see. The reason that some of them jumped into the deadly current to chance escape rather than a sure sentence of death by contagion. Deadhouses.
'Weren't they destroyed?'
'Moved, actually. Torn down and hauled to the other coast of Blackwells, to face the factories and mills on the Queens side of the river. No patients were shipped in from that direction, so the buildings were simply reerected out of sight of the arriving population. To give the patients hope, Ms. Cooper, to give them something to believe in.'
Exactly what I needed at the moment. Something to make me believe that I could get off the island alive, too.
'But what did the deadhouses have to do with your grandfather?'
'It took Lola to figure that out. There was Freeland Jennings, a realist if one ever existed, stuck in a penitentiary with those lower-class criminals, most of them immigrants, f their primitive superstitions. All of the papers make reference to the fact that none of the laborers would go anywhere near wooden deadhouses.'
'Those hospitals had all been closed years before your j father was sentenced to prison.'
'Yes, but the buildings still stood there, much as you set today. The Smallpox Hospital, Strecker, the Octagon Tower even the row of grim little shacks that had housed the dead land wrote about the circumstances in the letters he sent sister-the same one who was taking care of my father. First, months of observations of the other inmates and their manners and odd habits. Then his fascination with the way these seemingly fearless street thugs would avoid, like a ritual, haunted remnants of all the places that had sheltered the terminally ill.
'It didn't take him long to figure out a safe place to hide the diamonds, the jewels he considered his lifeline.'
'Under the deadhouses.' I thought of the map Bart I had mailed to me shortly before he died, and how it diagram every inch of the island, signed by Freeland Jennings.
'Luigi Bennino was the prisoner who created my grandfather’s model of the island. And it was Luigi he hired to dig the places for his gems. No one would think to go where a disease and pestilence might still lurk. Even today, lots students and faculty won't go near this building, fearful they'll unearth some encapsulated germs that still bear their lethal poison.'
'Bennino was an uneducated peasant, too. Why wasn't he just as superstitious about contamination?'
'Don't forget his crime, Ms. Cooper. He was a grave robber. Young Luigi had clearly overcome his concern about contact with the dearly departed long before he reached Blackwells Island. He was the perfect henchman for my grandfather's needs.
'It's just that Freeland had learned never to put all his trust in another human being. And although it's kind of veiled in his correspondence, it would appear that he paid a second prisoner to double-cross Bennino and move the diamonds. Still in the dead-houses, but in entirely different locations in the ground.'
'Another grave robber?' How fortunate for him to find two such thieves.
'No. A murderer. A man who had killed a prostitute down at the Five Points,' Shreve said, referring to a once notorious area of the city where our courthouse now stood. 'Freeland talks about him in the letters, a much too solicitous concern for the man who was dying of syphilis. One last charitable thing that Granddad could do for him, so that his family would have enough money for a proper burial. And so that he would take Freeland's secret with him, well rewarded for his trouble.'
'So three men knew about the diamonds and where they were buried.'
'And all three died on the rock, as it were. My grandfather's death in the raid could not possibly have been anticipated. He never had time to retrieve his fortune. That's why I'd like the map, Ms. Cooper. The map and the model of the island.' Shreve sat in the frame of the window, hands on his knees, and stared me in the eye.
'And Lola had them?'
'And Lola's dead.'
'But if you hadn't killed her-'
His gloved hands slapped against his thighs as his temper flared. 'Why would I have killed her without getting what I needed from her? It's Claude Lavery's fault that she's dead.'
How could I evaluate what he was telling me? Maybe Chapman and I had given him an opportunity to blame Lavery telling the group of professors that Lavery had been seen going into Lola's building with her the day she died. Maybe Shreve hadn't known that until we gave the fact away. And now he was just using it to make me think
