"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."