"Do you know du Maurier, Ms. Cooper? That's how Lola introduced me to Blackwells. Ever the actress-would have made her mother proud. 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,' she said, laying a blanket below the blackened windows of the old facade."

"That's exactly what the old hospital looks like. No wonder it's always attracted me." I turned to Mike. "That's the opening line of the novel Rebecca."

"Same as the movie," he snapped back at me. I may not be as well read as you, he was telling me, but don't push me.

"The most startling thing that night was looking back at the incredible view of the Manhattan skyline. We were spread out on the ground, drinking warm white wine from paper cups, and staring directly across the water at River House. It's where my father lived before I was born, and I'd never seen it from that angle."

So Winston Shreve came from money. The fabled apartment building, east of First Avenue on Fifty-second Street, was constructed in 1931 as a palatial cooperative apartment, complete with squash and tennis courts, an interior swimming pool, and even a ballroom. It boasted a private dock, right on the spot where the FDR Drive was later built, at which Vincent Astor kept his famous white yacht called Nourmahal. Lived in then by the rich and the royal, today it was home to world-famous personalities like Henry Kissinger and the great international beauty Lady Lynn de Forrest.

"Can't you do that now? Walk down to that vista, I mean?" I asked.

"Not till we've finished our dig, Ms. Cooper. And not unless the money is raised to reconstruct Renwick's fabulous building. Now the hospital's completely in ruins, like an old Gothic castle. No floorboards to speak of, crumbling walls, falling granite blocks. That portion of the island is blocked off from public access by metal fencing across the entire plot, east to west. Topped by razor wire. It's far too dangerous to let people near it."

Chapman poked at me with his pen. "If you're nice to me, blondie, I'll get you a pass for Christmas. The 114th patrols there." Present-day Roosevelt Island had its very rare criminal statistics tallied as part of Manhattan's Nineteenth Precinct, the same Upper East Side neighborhood in which I lived. But patrol duty fell to the auto-accessible Queens cops, and I didn't know any of the guys assigned to that precinct. "I'll get you in for an up-close-and-personal."

Shreve's territorial grip took hold and he spoke, brusquely, over Mike's words. "I'll take you myself, anytime you'd like to see it."

"You got a key?"

"All of us supervising the project have access, Detective. We've got security clearance to come and go as we please for the duration of the study. The grounds are a bit more inviting in the spring, but as soon as some of this ice melts I'll take you both over."

"Did you ever hear Lola refer to 'the deadhouse,' Professor?"

"All the time, Mr. Chapman. You know the island wasn't a very inviting place, even into the twentieth century. When the city finally abandoned these properties, the officials just walked out and closed the doors behind them. Things were left exactly as they were on the last days in use. Sheets were made up on the hospital beds, stretchers stood in hallways, wheelchairs and crutches were propped in doorways and against walls. People were afraid to go there for years, frightened that some of the contagion still lurked in the empty corridors or beneath the eaves.

"Lola liked it that way. When she called the place a 'dead-house,' it conjured up ghosts of the people who perished there. Kept the amateurs away, which suited her fine."

"I hadn't seen her in months, Professor. She had chosen to work with the prosecutors in New Jersey rather than my office, as you certainly know now. My boss thought their plan to stage her murder was absurd. Can you tell us, had she been worried about Ivan lately?"

"Constantly. Fear consumed her, wherever she was. Somehow, he seemed to know just how to spook her, whether she was walking on Broadway to meet a friend for lunch or getting off the tram when she came to the island. He always kept tabs on her whereabouts. Lola was certain that she was being followed and didn't know whom to trust. I think that's why old friends were so important to her, in the end."

"Was she afraid, even when she went to the island?" I thought immediately of Julian Gariano, and of the thought that he had been hired by Ivan Kralovic to sell information about her comings and goings.

"That's what she told me. I had no reason to disbelieve her. You see," Shreve said, his elbow resting on one knee, "she really did have a phobia that Ivan would finish her off. She was awfully prescient, Detective, wasn't she?"

"So you think that whoever killed Lola was working for Ivan?"

"As opposed to doing the job for Sylvia Foote, Ms. Cooper?" Shreve chuckled. "That's an idea I hadn't thought of until this moment. A King's College cabal? Possible, I guess, but most unlikely. You'd have to give me a pretty good reason."

"Anything else?" I said to Mike.

"I'm not going to let you go without asking a few things about Petra, Professor. D'you mind?"

Shreve rose to his feet and stretched. "If you know of it, I can only tell you that it's as spectacular as everything you've ever heard." He spoke directly to me, quoting the Burgon poem. "A rose-red city half as old as time.' Have you ever been?"

Chapman answered in place of me. "I’ll get there before the princess ever will. Can you still see the citadel?"

"Not much of it left. Seven centuries older than these local ruins of ours."

"Built during the Crusades. Part of Jordan now," Mike explained to me, turning to walk Shreve out toward the exit. "You still have to go into the plains over that narrow pass, on horseback? I'm definitely gonna do that someday."

As Shreve nodded his head, Mike shook his hand, continued to chat, and then took the empty coffee cup from the professor. "Thanks for coming in. I'll throw that in the trash for you."

He walked back to his desk after ushering Shreve out. "How come everyone figures right off the bat that you're so couth and cultured, and they all make me out to be such a frigging Philippine?"

"Philistine?"

"Philistine. Whatever. I know more about the Crusaders and the sack of Zara than that egghead anthropologist will figure out in six lifetimes.

"And what he was also too stupid to know was that I generously provided them with these coffee cups so that he could leave me just a little bit of saliva on the rim, in order for Bob Thaler to tell me all the unique things in his double helix that make him such a special guy." Mike was holding Shreve's container in the air, spinning it around in his hand. "Put his initials on the bottom, Coop, and stick it in this paper bag. Attila can take them down to the lab when we're done."

Pleased with his coup, he went back into the waiting area and returned with Paolo Recantati. The timid-looking historian was still clutching his cup, so Mike refilled it from the hot plate in the squad room and gave me a thumbs-up.

"Sit down and relax, sir. Might not be as bad as you think."

"I can't imagine it can get much worse, Mr. Chapman. I left Princeton to come into this nest of vipers. Whatever for? I'm an academic, you understand. Never really been involved in administrative work. The last thing I needed to end my first semester here was a murdered colleague. It's the coldest day of the year and I'm sweating as though it were the middle of July."

It always interested me how people close to murder victims put their own woes ahead of concerns about the deceased. Somehow, I expected each of these interviews to begin with some expression of solicitude about the departed soul of the late Lola Dakota.

"Had you known Ms. Dakota very long?"