The DeadHouse

by Linda Fairstein

  "Well, no. I mean, Professor Dakota had it. She let me see it a couple of times, but that was months ago."

  "Where was it when you saw it?"

  "At her office, right in this building. But she moved it out of here a while back."

  "To?"

  "I don't know. She told me she had to find another place for it. No room in her office."

  "Do you know why it was so important?"

  He looked puzzled. "I'm not sure it was. Least, not that she ever told me. I just thought it was beautiful. Made with such painstaking devotion, accurate to the most minute detail."

  Lola may have liked this kid a lot, but she didn't seem to have trusted anyone with the importance of her discovery.

  "Would it help you guys if I poked around the island some more? There's lots of places to hide things over there. Places nobody goes to or looks in."

  "I don't want you doing anything to get in trouble at school. How about you let the detectives do it with you?"

  "Yeah, that's fine. You want me to take you around there tomorrow?"

  "I don't want to screw up the visit with your family." I checked the time. "I'm going to see the detective I'm working with in another hour or so. Why don't you give him a call later on tonight and we can work out a way to do this together? Any day that it's convenient for you will work for us." I took out one of my business cards and wrote Mike's beeper number on the back. "In the meantime, just give some thought to where you think she would have stored the model for safekeeping, okay?"

  If we weren't able to jog Orlyn Lockhart's memory, then maybe Mike and I could more thoroughly interrogate Efrem later tonight. I thanked him for coming by and rejoined the disgruntled-looking characters who were marching down the staircase to the lobby. This was not a good day for a ride in the country.

  Lockhart pulled up in front of the building and honked his horn. Thomas Grenier held Nan by the arm and walked her to his SUV, closing the back door after he helped her inside, and then settling himself in the passenger seat.

  Recantati waited several minutes with Sylvia and me until Winston Shreve arrived in a gray minivan. He slid back the door and I hoisted myself into the rear. Recantati boosted Sylvia up by the elbow and Shreve held her bag while she buckled up the seat belt, telling Recantati she would call him in the morning. He whispered something to her that I was unable to hear, then shut the door and walked away as the engine started up.

  "Turn up the heat, Winston," she ordered with her usual display of charm. He angled the rearview mirror into place, and I could catch the corner of his smile as he then adjusted the temperature controls on the dashboard.

  There was a steaming container of cocoa in the cup holder of each of our armrests. Shreve opened his and sipped at the hot drink.

  "You know the way, do you?" Sylvia asked.

  "Yes, Sylvia. Skip's given me directions," he said, holding up a slip of paper. "It's right off the Saw Mill River Parkway. Won't take long to get there. I just want to drink a bit of this before I start driving. Otherwise it will spill all over us."

  "Good idea."

  We uncapped the lids and I blew on the chocolate, warming my hands as I took a swallow. "Detective Chapman and I were up there the other day. The house is easy to find. I grew up not too far away."

  "In White Plains?"

  "No, in Harrison." I sipped a few more times before Shreve pulled away from the curb, making the westbound turn to head over to Riverside Drive and the entrance to the West Side Highway. "Spent a lot of time there. I was a competitive swimmer in high school and they were our archrivals. Next town over."

  "Just get us up there and back before this snow starts piling in," Sylvia said.

  The liquid sloshed around the rim of the cardboard cup as Shreve accelerated past the yield sign, and I took another big gulp of hot chocolate, wiping the drops off my parka.

  We were passing under the cloverleaf roadway that led up to the George Washington Bridge, following the signs to Westchester County, when I heard Sylvia make a gurgling sound. Her neck snapped forward and her chin dangled against her chest.

  I reached for the headrest behind her seat to pull myself forward and yelled for Shreve to stop the car. "Are you all right, Sylvia?" is what I tried to say, but my tongue twisted around the words and they slurred as they came out.

  My arms felt like leaden weights as I unbuckled my seat belt, pushed the strap out of the way, and attempted to reach toward Winston Shreve. Snowflakes swirled outside at a dizzying speed, blurring into one as I slid off the seat and onto the floor of the van.

  32

  My first sensation was of the cold, biting and urgent, piercing every pore of my body. The stinging pain that grated on my wrist and ankles was caused by bindings of some kind, although I could not see them as I lay facedown in the darkened space. A soft piece of cloth covered my mouth, tied behind my scalp.

  Wind shrieked above my head and still the blur of white flake: fell around me. I was inside some structure, flattened against the remains of a wooden floorboard that had been partially destroyed by years of exposure to the elements. Whatever it had been, the draft and snow told me there was now no roof covering the walls

  I heard no sounds of a human presence. No inhalation o exhalation of breath. No footsteps. No words.

  I shifted my weight and turned my body onto its side. Still, no response from anyone to the rustling sound made by my own movement.

  Even this slight change of position charged the flashes of light that raced inside my brain, and the pounding waves of dizziness and nausea returned. I had been in my office, I remembered that. I was talking with Mike Chapman, and I was pretty certain that had happened. But now the crests and swells of wobbly images flooded my head again and I was sure of nothing.

  Thoughts would not come clearly and my eyes closed, ceding to whatever it was that had overpowered all my senses.

  I don't know for how long I lost consciousness this second time, but when I was able to see again, the inky surroundings were identical. I was dressed in my ski parka, and the lapel of a gray suit stuck out above the zipper. I pushed to order my thoughts, trying to recall when I had dressed this way to leave my home. There was a moth-eaten old plaid blanket stretched out down the length of my body, heavy now from the wet snow that it had absorbed.

  My hands were gloved and boots were still on my feet. I could feel them. Only my face was exposed to the pelting drops of ice. I rolled it back onto the flooring. Think, I told myself over and over again. Think where you were today and who you were with. Think where you were going that brought you to this godforsaken place. But the neurons were short-circuiting and something had poisoned my brain's ability to connect the dots. All I knew for certain was that I was cold.

  I drifted off again and wakened later still. Now I could see a brick wall a few feet away from my head, the side of whatever building I was in. I arched my back and saw, two or three feet above the floorboards, the empty frame of a window. Get to that, I directed myself. Get to that and find out where you are.

  Turning back onto my side, I started to wriggle my feet, making sure I could control their movement. I bent my knees and drew them up toward my waist. Slowly, like some primitive, reptilian apoda, I extended my legs as far as possible and edged my body forward toward the wall. Repeating the motion eight or nine times, I worked myself across the splintered floor until my head touched the crumbling rows of brick.

  I rested there for several minutes before trying to slide my body into an upright position. Sitting up would bring back the dizziness, since the oxygen would flow away from my brain. Expect that, I reminded myself. Mental and physical processes were all operating in slow motion. Don't fight it, I said, forming the words with my mouth.

  Inch by inch, I righted my body and twisted to lean my back against the wall. It felt sturdier than its uneven surface appeared, and I knew it could support my weight. My head pounded as I forced it to remain erect. I settled there for several more minutes, adjusting my
eyes to the darkness around me.

  Something moved within the walls of my enclosure. I blinked and tried to clear my vision, tensing for the arrival of my captor. But these were scratching sounds, sharp and rapid, playing off the icy surface of the floor.

  Rats. Two or three of them, chasing each other through an open portal and out the gaping hole where glass once fitted in a window.

  For the first time, I had a reassuring thought. Large rodents terrified me, but I was relieved to think the odds were good that I was still somewhere in New York City.

  Now I saw the outline of the building walls. The window beside me was on the ground level, but it looked as though there were two tiers of empty frames on flights above-three stories in all, though the flooring was missing from all but the foundation The four sides, without a roof, seemed to be the entirety of the structure. Too small to be an institution, but too grim to have been a private home.

  I dragged myself closer to the smooth orange brick that marked the window jamb closest to me. My left ear ached anew as the wind howled past. Straining my neck to look out the rough stone archway, I saw sharp icicles jutting down from every overhanging surface.

  Cutting through the storm's gray haze was the glare of huge red neon letters. Read the words, I charged myself. Over my shoulder, the rats danced again, in and out of the asymmetrical cavities at the far end of the building.

  I concentrated on the giant script sign, which was like trying to make out the object inside the dome when a snow globe has been turned upside down.

  Pepsi-Cola. I read it four or five times to convince myself those were the words.

  Why did I know that graphic? A huge red advertisement that I had seen more times than I could ever count, I thought. Focus on it, I urged myself. Make the pieces come together. The district attorney's office, my home, the skyline, the city. Make each image relate to another. Every night when I left the office and headed uptown on the FDR Drive, I saw the Pepsi-Cola sign, several stories high, shining across the East River from its enormous perch along the Queens side of the water.

  I twisted farther to the left, an icy stalagmite gnawing at my chin as I tried to widen my view. Yes, there were the four great smokestacks of Big Allis, belching dense clouds into the night sky, blowing back at nature's offering.

  So this must be the island in the middle of the river. Not Roosevelt, not the one I had visited several days ago. But Blackwells. Some gutted shell of a nineteenth-century building that had been abandoned and was waiting to be explored by scholars and students, historians and treasure seekers.

  Now I began to reconstruct the puzzle. I remembered being at my office with Chapman. I had a clear recollection of our ride uptown to the King's College meeting with Sylvia Foote. But then everything turned hazy, and I couldn't figure whether I had sustained an injury to my head or ingested something that affected my memory.

  It was difficult to move because of my restraints, but it was impossible for me to remain still. With my hands bracing my behind my back, I pushed away from the window and prop myself in the opposite direction, toward what looked like gabled opening of the building entrance.

  Wrenching myself back onto my knees, I tried to read an inscription that had mostly faded from a plaque on the wall bottom corner credited the Bible, and from what was left of the letters it looked like Hosea. Something about ransoming son from the power of the grave and redeeming him from death. I didn't know the biblical context but I cherished the thought

  In the dim light, I could make out larger letters carved in the plaque into the terra-cotta panel that bordered the archway:

  STRECKER MEMORIAL LABORATORY.

  I sank back to the floor as though I had been punched in the gut. This was the morgue.

  What had Nan told us about it? One of the first path-laboratories built in America, she had said. This must have the place to which all the bodies on Blackwells Island had taken. Why was I here? Who had bound me and left me in this frigid shell?

  I could hear the screech of rats again, sprinting closer 1 entryway. I half crawled, half pulled myself to the far side of the door, fearing that the filthy animals would find me in their path.

  Another window sucked in frigid air from the night sky slithered past it, trying to get to one of the building's corners a bit more shelter. My feet were tied so tightly together that unable to raise myself and stand on them. My back bumped against the contour of a wooden cabinet and I came to a stop. The top and edges had rotted completely and come loose fro support, jutting out into the room and making my passage difficult.

  I rested for a minute then pushed forward around this antique chamber, but my jacket snagged on a rusted metal strip that I had not seen, ripping a tear down the length of the sleeve.

  I backpedaled to free the fabric and saw for the first time what had snared me. The mouths of the cabinets were agape as I turned to disengage my arm from the metal spike. Side by side were three drawers of morgue trays, each mounted in double rows, the wood decayed but the metal still intact.

  The steel grooves were fixed in place, some rolled back into the drawers and others hanging partway into the room. This is where every plague-ridden patient on Blackwells had been stored, studied, and dissected.

  As my bound hands ripped away, I jerked forward and bumped my head against the middle set of drawers. On the bottom tray I could see the profile of a small body, wrapped in a blanket of the same plaid design that had covered me. I was swept by another wave of nausea.

  Beside the feet, closest to me, was a slim leather-bound book. I leaned my arms toward it and pulled it out onto the floor.

  As quickly as I could, I pushed myself away from the gruesome cabinet, kicking the book before me with my knee. It spun around and I tipped back the cover, revealing the title page of the volume of Garcia Lorca's poems, and the small print of the owner's name in the top corner.

  I was here alone in the morgue with Charlotte Voight.

  33

  By the time Winston Shreve stepped through the old doorway, I had dragged myself back into the farthest corner of the deteriorated laboratory-away from the remains of Charlotte Voight, away from the rats, and away from the man who had kidnapped me.

  He was dressed for the occasion-with a ski jacket, jeans, and heavy boots-and now I remembered I had seen him at the college, in Sylvia Foote's office during the afternoon, when he had worn a blazer and slacks. I still had no memory of how I had left the administration building and what had happened.

  I shuddered when he spotted me in the dark recess into which I had crawled, but I had been shivering with cold for hours.

  Shreve's tread crunched on the packed snow as he walked toward me, stopping to pick up the blanket that had fallen off my body as I'd moved myself around the room. He kneeled in front of me and replaced it around my shoulders.

  "I'm not a killer. That's the first thing you've got to understand."

  My eyes must have expressed my terror. He spoke to me again.

  "I'm not going to hurt you, Alex. I've brought you here because I need your help tonight. I'm not a killer."

  It was difficult to believe him with Charlotte's body between me and the front door.

  "You've got something I need, I think, and we're going to have to trust each other for a while." He reached behind me and removed the binding from around my wrists. I could see that it was a man's necktie.

  "I'm going to remove the gag from your mouth, too. Maybe that will help convince you that I'm not going to do anything extreme." He undid the knot in the handkerchief and then used it to wipe some of the moisture off my forehead and cheeks. I noted that his tools had been those of an amateur-spare pieces of clothing-rather than ropes and duct tape, and tried to draw hope from that fact.

  I moved my jaw around, opening and closing my mouth. It was sore and stiff from the restraint. I was unconvinced by his removing the gag. Now that I knew my whereabouts, I assumed that there was not a living soul within a mile of us. Water surrounded us on thr
ee sides, and there was a wasteland of debris to the north that was gated off from the population of Roosevelt Island by metal fencing and razor wire. Even without the bluster of the fierce wind, there was no one to hear me scream.

  I found my voice. "Is that Charlotte Voight?

  "The anthropologist was standing in front of me, and he turned to look at the cabinet of steel morgue trays before he answered. "Yes. But I didn't kill her." He repeated his denial, slowly but firmly, as though it made a difference if I believed him.

  "I was infatuated with Charlotte. There was nothing I would ever have done to hurt her."

  I thought back to the students we had interviewed and their rumors about affairs between faculty members and undergraduates. It should have been obvious to me that Winston Shreve would be a likely offender. Hadn't he told us when we questioned him that his ex-wife, Giselle, had been one of his students when he taught in Paris? How typical to have repeated the pattern. H was probably a classic case of arrested development, fixated on twenty-year-old students and consummating that original love affair over and over again.

  "This is one way you can help me, Alex," he said, squatting again and lifting the blanket off my shoulders to cover my head as well. "As a prosecutor, I mean. I can explain this to you and then you can tell them that I am innocent."

  If he was waiting for a response, he got none. "Charlotte and I had been having a relationship for month Oh, there were boys now and then whom she got involved with but she was as enamored of me, I think, as I was of her. She was nothing at all like most of the kids. She thought like a woman, not a child."

  How many times had he used that bullshit line on some unsuspecting adolescent?

  "I brought her over to the island to get her involved in the project. She didn't have much interest in the work here, but she loved the place itself. Not the new part," he said, waving his arm in the direction of the residential half of the island. "She liked mysteries about the past, about the history. And she loved walking through the ruins."