Linda Fairstein - Entombed

"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?"

At this very moment I was able to imagine it perfectly well.

"Betrayal. She earned every exquisite second of her miserable death. She was responsible for depriving me of everything I'd been promised from the time I was four years old. The bitch had tried to extort money-a lot of money-from my step-" Phelps stopped to correct himself. "From the man who raised me. She screwed up the whole plan, and in doing that she condemned me to the gutter."

I was on my third small boulder, peering out into the black-green forest for any sign of a rescuer.

"I'd spent my entire youth trying to please a man who never really wanted me under his roof anyway. He'd taken me in when my mother died," Phelps said.

I had heard much of the story from Gino Guidi, but I figured it would anger this strange man to let on that the detectives and I knew more about his past-without knowing his identity-than he might have liked.

"It doesn't make any sense that he took you in if he didn't want you."

"I was too young to know. My mother was his housekeeper, and the woman who took care of me after my mother's death also worked for him, on the kitchen staff. She claimed he was keen to do it at the time. The rejection came much later on, when I was eight or nine. When he finally got married the new bride wanted her own children. Of course she didn't want the illegitimate kid of the parlor maid anywhere in the mix."

"Who-who was the man?"

Phelps was watching me build my coffin, eyeing me as I ferried heavy rocks from the hillside into the cave. He was leaning against the side of it, shotgun tucked under his arm, a jacket zipped up to his chin and a scarf and hat on his neck and head that seemed enviably warm.

"Phelps. Sinclair Phelps."

We'd been told that he'd been disinherited and disowned, that like Edgar Poe he'd never been formally adopted by his benefactor. "His name? He gave you his name?"

"I took his name, Miss Cooper. Not long after Aurora and I parted ways. I didn't think I'd have the luxury of twenty-five years without anyone discovering her body-well, her remains. I never thought I'd get away with it so cleanly. I did, after all, confess to any number of people that I had killed the poor girl," he said, grinning at me. "It's not my fault they didn't take me seriously."

"So your real name?"

"That hardly matters, does it? You see, if anyone put Aurora's disappearance together with the former NYU student who hallucinated about killing her, they'd be out of luck if they tried to find him. He just ceased to exist. One less junkie the world had to worry about. One less dropout never even likely to make an alumni contribution.

"But Sinclair Phelps? However you try to find him-the best private investigator, the most determined Cold Case Squad, even- what do you call it?-Google him on the Internet-and all it comes back to is a dead man, with no male heirs, who hardly ever left Keene, New Hampshire, when he was alive. There are so many periodical and philanthropic records that connect to Sinclair Phelps, owner of the largest paper-manufacturing company in the region, that a humble groundskeeper at a city garden doesn't even pop up on the screen. I simply reinvented myself."

On the distant roadway below us I could see headlights moving slowly along. The red bubble flasher on top of it illuminated the blue and white colors of a patrol car.

Phelps pivoted and pushed me back inside the cave, pinning me against the wall and holding the shotgun to my cheek.

"They'll find us, you know. They're good at that," I said. "There's all kinds of equipment they can use to search for bodies in an area like this."

"It worked long enough for bin Laden, didn't it? My bet's on the guy inside the caves."

"Why here, Mr. Phelps?" I asked softly. "Why a groundskeeper at the gardens?"

"It's the perfect solution, don't you think? At least it was for a good while. I like working outdoors-that part never bothered me. And it's as close as I'm going to get to living like a Phelps. A nineteenth-century carriage house surrounded by hundreds of acres of the most glorious park and plantings in North America. Time for my poetry, and then there's Zeldin himself, who dropped into my lap with the world's greatest collection of Poeiana. I had access twenty-four hours a day to all those privileges of the Raven Society. It's not a bad way to go, Miss Cooper, if you've got to work for a living."