"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 he wasn't the killer. Or perhaps both of them were involved, and they were both responsible her death. How could I know?

I was more tentative now, talking softly to Shreve, aware he might keep me alive as long as he thought I could give him he wanted.

What had I done with the map before Mike and I had dashed out of the office on the way to King's College? Is it possible I had been less than twenty-four hours since all that had happened? I bit my lip and took myself back one day. I had given my paralegal the map to copy, telling her to lock the original in one of the file cabinets until Mike could voucher it. And I had given one of the copies to him, then folded the other to slip in the pocket gray slacks, to examine later that night when I got home. Shreve overheard Mike ask me, in Sylvia Foote's office, whether I had secured Jennings's blueprint of the island?

I looked down at my pants leg to make certain that I was still wearing that same suit. My pocketbook and case folder were either in Shreve's van or his apartment. Perhaps he had gone through them in search of the map or any references to it, but if he hadn't thought to search my clothing, he would not have found the map.

The adrenaline pumped again and I swallowed hard.] knew that what Shreve wanted was here under his nose, and if he found the small slip of paper, there would be no reason to maintain our dialogue. I would be as good as dead.

"But Lola was telling you all these things while she at Lily's house, doing the research. What did you two have to fight about the day she was killed?"

"I didn't go to see her to argue about anything. I was excited, thrilled that she might have solved the puzzle about my grandfather's fortune. I wanted to see the map for myself."

"Did she have it?"

"She was mad that I had come to her apartment. She stalled and tried to put me off. Told me she didn't have it with her. Told me the prosecutor from New Jersey was going to be arriving shortly and that she'd call me the next day. Of course, I didn't know at the time that she wasn't kidding about the prosecutor. He actually was coming over." Shreve sneered. "Not for Lola, but for his money."

"What money?"

"Apparently the guy had all kinds of financial problems. Lola was doling out cash to him to keep him afloat. Probably to keep him coming back to bed with her, which wasn't necessarily a pleasant place to be."

"How do you know that? I mean, about the cash?"

"After she died, Claude Lavery told me. That's what drove the two of them apart. Lola knew that Claude took an unorthodox view of his grant money. She pleaded with him to let her borrow some of it, claiming she needed it for the Blackwells project. Claude called me last week and asked me to return the money. I had to tell him she hadn't used a nickel of it for the dig. Then I remembered what she'd told me about the prosecutor and his financial problems. The money must have all been going to the deadbeat boyfriend."