"Then when the doctor made the decision to admit her, I went back out to tell Ms. Cooper that I wasn't going to leave the hospital until I knew that Ms. Foote would be all right."
Wallace had questions. I rooted for him to break this goddamn alibi.
"Yes, Detective, Alex insisted on coming inside and waiting with me. I called the Lockhart house and told Skip's mother that we'd encountered a problem and wouldn't be able to keep the meeting after all. Alex came into the waiting room and-"
Shreve must have turned around and faced the other direction. It was more difficult to hear him but it sounded as though he was explaining how I'd passed the time while Sylvia was being treated by the medical team.
Whatever Shreve had drugged us with, I had no memory of the hours after the session in Sylvia's office broke up. It must have had amnesiac qualities. Is it possible that I actually had been inside the emergency room waiting area at New York Presbyterian? And if not, what a clever ruse. That place was a perpetual zoo. An endless procession of gunshot wounds, stabbings, car accidents, drug overdoses, women in labor, and miscellaneous misery of every sort. Most admissions were accompanied by strings of relatives and friends-whining, wheedling, bawling, and generally filling every inch of the enormous holding tank in which they waited for news of a loved one's condition.
The wind carried Shreve's words back to me. He must have shifted position again.
"For hours, Detective. She was there for hours. Watching television a bit, like everyone else. Making some phone calls."
Wallace was trying to figure out when I had left the hospital.
"Must have been close to nine o'clock. Yes, yes, of course. It was after they told us that Sylvia was awake and responding, but that they were going to keep her overnight for observation. I didn't want to leave without seeing her myself, but Ms. Cooper seemed impatient at that point. Told me she'd just grab a cab out on Broadway and get herself downtown."
Shreve hesitated before he threw in the next suggestion. "Seemed to be in a bad mood, Mr. Wallace. Something about a row with her boyfriend. Her beeper had been going off repeatedly and she paid it no attention. Rather willful, I'd say."
No one would argue with him on that point.
Shreve hadn't missed a detail. How stupid of me to have announced aloud to Mike that I had an unhappy boyfriend when my beeper had gone off at the beginning of the meeting in Sylvia's office.
"You mean come into the station house? Right now? But I've just told you everything that I know about-"
Break his balls, Mercer. Shreve'll never make it through a fact to-face encounter with you.
"Certainly, Mr. Wallace. No, no, thanks, I don't need a ride.'
Shreve's footsteps crunched again on the packed snow as r walked closer to my little sanctuary and bent his head to come in under the plywood covering. He ungagged me and stood in front of me to explain that he was going to leave for a short while.
"What did you give me to knock me out? What did you do to Sylvia?"
"You needn't worry. Nothing with long-term effects. Just sedative to make sure I could get you here and get her out of the way."
"A lot of a sedative. I can't remember anything."
Shreve smiled. "Gamma-hydroxybutyrate."
"GHB?" I knew it better than most. A colorless, odorless, tasteless designer drug, and I had quickly ingested it in my hot choc late in a matter of minutes. Most ironic of all is that it was making the rounds as a date-rape drug, being slipped into drinks of unsuspecting women to render them unconscious for several hours.
"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
"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."