I glanced again at the sky: treetops, bat wings, and not too far overhead the steady stream of flights landing and taking off from La Guardia Airport, directly across nearby Long Island Sound. No sign of any helicopter above, nor any police flashers below.

I was wedged into place in the crevice between two boulders, the dogs twelve feet below me, snarling and salivating as they waited for orders to attack.

Phelps took his time climbing up to meet me. He used the high beam of his flashlight to feature me as the bull's-eye within his target. When he reached the dogs they seemed to whine even louder, as though asking his permission to take a piece out of one of my legs.

"Shut up!" he said, and the whimpering stopped as they put their heads on their outstretched paws.

I saw that he was carrying a shotgun. I thought of the professor-Noah Tormey-and the marksman who had nearly taken him out that day at the Hall of Fame. How logical to need weapons-and a marksman-in an urban park like this, where so many vermin were likely to have wreaked havoc on the precious plant life.

"Now, I think you're going to have to climb down from that perch, Miss Cooper. We've got work to do."

I didn't respond. I thought I could hear police sirens in the background and I wanted Phelps to think the game might be over for him.

"I do hear that noise, Miss Cooper. But it's not for you the bell tolls. My boys are out stirring up a little trouble on Fordham Road. It's a very dangerous city beyond these gates. You know that better than anyone."

So his teenage thugs would create a diversion on a Bronx sidewalk and 911 calls would flood the switchboard. Even Mike and Mercer might think it was I who was in trouble out on the nearby street, that I had somehow been spirited off the garden grounds or had been stupid enough to follow the kids who had attacked Ellen Gunsher after Mercer told me he had seen them leaving the gate.

"Call off your dogs," I said, stalling for time. Some of the bats were still circling above us while others had settled on tree branches, wizened little faces staring into mine from their upsidedown positions.

"They're so hard to discipline, Miss Cooper. Coydogs, actually. I breed them. It's one way to keep the deer population down. Gets rid of the rabbits and moles that are so destructive to plants."

A mix of wild coyotes and feral dogs. They were rumored to be a vicious hybrid.

"Let's go," Phelps said, louder this time.

I heard an engine turn on and saw the minivan start to move. One of his young troops, no doubt, getting rid of the car so the police wouldn't make our location. My eyes followed the vehicle till it disappeared around the bend, but I didn't move.

"You can sit up there. You can even keep climbing to the top. But then where do you go? Besides, I've got hiking boots on and can overtake you in a couple of minutes," he said.

I wanted to tell him to shoot me-it would be faster than whatever he had in mind-but I didn't mean it. And I knew it wasn't his first choice of disposing of me because anyone out searching would hear the gunshots echo throughout this quiet preserve.

I started to inch myself backward up the large boulder but couldn't get a toehold without looking down. By the time I had raised myself a couple of feet, Phelps had put the shotgun on the ground and was making his way up to me. He grabbed my left ankle and wrenched it around, pulling me toward him. He lowered himself off the rocks and kept tugging at me until I landed in the dirt on my tailbone, smacking my head against the stony surface behind me.

"I certainly didn't mean to knock you out," he said, kneeling beside me. "Not before you help me carry a few of these."

Phelps gestured to the loose rock piles that some glacial movement had thrown off as it passed through the river gorge and woodlands a few thousand years earlier.

"Of course," he said, standing and extending a hand to me, "you're probably thinking I could just let the coydogs have a go at you. You've never seen them take down a deer, have you? They can each grab hold of a leg and head off together on a brisk run-and when you find the carcass in the woods a few days later it looks like it snapped in half as easily as a wishbone might at a Thanksgiving dinner."

I was on my feet, rubbing the back of my head.

"The problem with that is the poor dogs would suffer for it in the end. I've got them so well trained at this point, and Zeldin or someone else in the administration here would decide they'd have to be put to sleep for hurting you. Wouldn't that be a sorry trade?" Phelps said, shaking his head. "So what does that leave me instead?"

I didn't have to say it aloud. There could be only one thing he wanted to do to me in the cave.

"Perhaps you knew this, Miss Cooper, that the very first crypts were in caves? Deep, cool, wonderful recesses in which to entomb people. We're going to custom-make a crypt for you, Alex. Poe's way."

There was no point screaming. Not yet. I didn't want to be gagged or bound until I had exhausted every other possible means of helping myself get out alive.

"Start over there." Sinclair Phelps poked me in the back with the point of the shotgun. "You're a big girl-you can carry a few of those."

I could see his plan. He would arrange this to look like a rock slide, as though I had been trapped inside-running away from goodness knows what-had panicked and was unable to get help. That would only work if he thought no one else had put together the facts, as I had, that linked him to his victims.

I bent down and picked up a large rock-it must have weighed more than twenty pounds-and slowly walked with it to the mouth of the cave.

"Go in. Go on in," he said, prodding me again with the gun. "All those stories about bats are just myths. They're very timid creatures. Last place they'd want to be is in your hair."

I walked a foot or two into the cave, pushed farther by Phelps, who told me exactly where to drop my first load. Now I could see rows of the furry beasts hanging from their roosts.

"'A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat,' Miss Cooper. You know that one?"

I shook my head.

"Poe's 'Coliseum.' A lesser-known work." He watched me as I maneuvered the rock into place.

"Did Aurora Tait have to make her own coffin, too?" I asked.

Phelps laughed. "No, no. But then it was so much easier for me to get Aurora into my lair, Miss Cooper."

"I suppose all you had to do was promise her heroin."

"High-test. Best shit on the street. She came to me like a baby for its bottle."

"Why there? Why that building? Because it was Poe's house?"

"Keep moving," he said, conscious that I was stalling but pleased to show off what passed for his intelligence, after serving for all these years in a job that belied his educational background and knowledge of literature. "That was just a richly ironic coincidence. You know the story? You know 'Amontillado'?"

I was lugging another rock now, pretending to limp because I had twisted my ankle. "The ultimate tale of revenge," I said. "Of course I know it. You mean it was just chance that your construction work was in that particular basement?"

"The landlord was always having work done there. That dump probably wasn't fit for occupancy a century ago."

"And Aurora, she saw what you were doing?"

"She wasn't quite as sober as you are, Miss Cooper. Nor as well read. She found it amusing that I was a day laborer. She liked to watch me work, as long as she was high. I gave her the dope that afternoon and she obliged me by shooting up, getting herself into a stupor, as I knew she would. By the time I lifted her over my shoulder and stood her up behind the wall, she was almost ready to come around. Can you imagine the look in her eyes when she realized what I was about to do to her?"