From Potter's Field Page 3

  'It's his way of giving us the finger,' said Marino.

  'Contempt, taunting,' Wesley said. 'It's his signature. I suspect there is a deeper meaning.'

  I suspected there was, too. All of Gault's victims were sitting, heads bowed, hands in their laps or limply by their sides, as if they were dolls. The one exception was a woman prison guard named Helen. Though her body, dressed in uniform, was propped up in a chair, she was missing her head.

  'Certainly the positioning . . .' I started to say, and the voice-activated microphones were never quite in sync with the tempo of conversation. It was an effort to talk.

  The bastard wants to rub our noses in it.'

  'I don't think that's his only . . .'

  'Right now, he wants us to know he's in New York. . .'

  'Marino, let me finish. Benton? The symbolism?'

  'He could display the bodies any number of ways. But so far he's always chosen the same position. He sits them up. It's part of his fantasy.'

  'What fantasy?'

  'If I knew that, Pete, maybe this trip wouldn't be happening.'

  Sometime later our pilot took the air: 'The FAA's issued a SIGMET.'

  'What the hell is that?' Marino asked.

  'A warning about turbulence. It's windy in New York City, twenty-five knots gusting at thirty-seven.'

  'So we can't land?' Marino, who hated to fly, sounded slightly panicky.

  'We're going to be low and the winds are going to be much higher.'

  'What do you mean low? You ever seen how high the buildings are in New York?'

  I reached back between my seat and the door and patted Marino's knee. We were forty nautical miles from Manhattan, and I could just barely make out a light winking on top of the Empire State Building. The moon was swollen, planes moving in and away from La Guardia like floating stars, and from smokestacks steam rose in huge white plumes. Through the chin bubble at my feet I watched twelve lanes of traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, and everywhere lights sparkled like jewels, as if Faberge had crafted the city and its bridges.

  We flew behind the Statue of Liberty's back, then passed Ellis Island, where my grandparents' first introduction to America was a crowded immigration station on a frigid winter day. They had left Verona, where there had been no future for my grandfather, born the fourth son of a railroad worker.

  I came from a hearty, hardworking people who emigrated from Austria and Switzerland in the early eighteen hundreds, thus explaining my blond hair and blue eyes. Despite my mother's assertion that when Napoleon I ceded Verona to Austria, our ancestors managed to keep the Italian bloodline pure, I believed otherwise. I suspected there was genetic cause for some of my more Teutonic traits.

  Macy's, billboards and the golden arches of McDonald's appeared, as New York slowly became concrete and parking lots and street sides banked high with snow that looked dirty even from the air. We circled the VIP Heliport on West Thirtieth Street, lighting up and ruffling the Hudson's murky waters as a bright wind sock stood on end. We swayed into a space near a gleaming Sikorsky S-76 that made all other birds seem common.

  'Watch out for the tail rotor,' our pilot said.

  Inside a small building that was only vaguely warm, we were greeted by a woman in her fifties with dark hair, a wise face and tired eyes. Bundled in a thick wool coat, slacks, lace-up boots and leather gloves, she introduced herself as Commander Frances Penn of the New York Transit Police.

  'Thank you so much for coming,' she said, offering her hand to each of us. 'If we're ready, I have cars waiting.'

  'We're ready,' Wesley said.

  She led us back out into the bitter cold, where two police cruisers waited, two officers in each, engines running and heat on high. There was an awkward moment as we held doors open and decided who would ride with whom. As so often happens, we divided by gender, and Commander Penn and I rode together. I began to ask her about jurisdiction, because in a high-profile case like this one, there would be many people who thought they should be in charge.

  'The Transit Police has an interest because we believe the victim met her assailant on the subway,' explained the commander, who was one of three command chiefs in the sixth-largest police department in America. This would have been late yesterday afternoon.'

  'How do you know this?'

  'It's really rather fascinating. One of our plain-clothes officers was patrolling the subway station at Eighty-first and Central Park West, and at around five-thirty in the afternoon - this was yesterday - he noticed a peculiar couple emerge from the Museum of Natural History exit that leads directly into the subway.'

  We bumped over ice and potholes that shook the bones in my legs.

  'The man immediately lit a cigarette while the woman held a pipe.'

  'That's interesting,' I commented.

  'Smoking is against the law in the subway, which is another reason the officer remembers them.'

  'Were they given a summons?'

  'The man was. The woman wasn't because she hadn't lit the pipe. The man showed the officer his driver's license, which we now believe was false.'

  'You said the couple was strange looking,' I said. 'How so?'

  'She was dressed in a man's topcoat and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Her head was shaved. In fact, the officer wasn't certain she was a she. At first he assumed this was a homosexual couple.'

  'Describe the man she was with,' I said.

  'Medium height, thin, with strange sharp features and very weird blue eyes. His hair was carrot red.'

  'The first time I saw Gault his hair was platinum. When I saw him last October, it was shoe-polish black.'

  'It was definitely carrot red yesterday.'

  'And is probably yet another color today. He does have weird eyes. Very intense.'

  'He's very clever.'

  'There is no description for what he is.'

  'Evil comes to mind, Dr. Scarpetta,' she said.

  'Please call me Kay.'

  'If you call me Frances.'

  'So it appears they visited the Museum of Natural History yesterday afternoon,' I said. 'What is the exhibit?'

  'Sharks.'

  I looked over at her, and her face was quite serious as the young officer driving deftly handled New York traffic.

  'The exhibit right now is sharks. I suppose every sort you can imagine from the beginning of time,' she said.

  I was silent.

  'As best we can reconstruct what happened to this woman,' Commander Penn went on, 'Gault - we may as well call him that since we believe this is who we're dealing with - took her to Central Park after leaving the subway. He led her to a section called Cherry Hill, shot her and left her nude body propped against the fountain.'

  'Why would she have gone with him into Central Park after dark? Especially in this weather?'

  'We think he may have enticed her into accompanying him into the Ramble.'

  'Which is frequented by homosexuals.'

  'Yes. It is a meeting place for them, a very overgrown, rocky area with twisting footpaths that don't seem to lead anywhere. Even NYPD's Central Park Precinct officers don't like to go in there. No matter how often you've been, you still get lost. It's high-crime. Probably twenty-five percent of all crime committed in the park occurs there. Mostly robberies.'

  'Then Gault must be familiar with Central Park if he took her to the Ramble after dark.'

  'He must be.'

  This suggested that Gault may have been hiding out in New York for a while, and the thought frustrated me terribly. He had been virtually in our faces and we had not known.

  Commander Penn said to me, 'The crime scene is being secured overnight. I assumed you would want to look before we get you safely to your hotel.'

  'Absolutely,' I said. 'What about evidence?'

  'We recovered a pistol shell from inside the fountain that bears a distinctive firing pin mark consistent with a Clock nine-millimeter. And we found hair.'

  'Where was the hair?'

  'Close to whe
re her body was displayed, in the scrollwork of an ornate wrought iron structure inside the fountain. It may be that when he was positioning the body, a strand of his hair got caught.'

  'What color?'

  'Bright red.'

  'Gault is too careful to leave a cartridge shell or hair,' I said.

  'He wouldn't have been able to see where the shell went,' said Commander Penn. 'It was dark. The shell would have been very hot when it hit the snow. So you can see what would have happened.'

  'Yes,' I said. 'I can see.'

  3

  Within minutes of each other, Marino, Wesley and I arrived at Cherry Hill, where lights had been set up to aid old post lamps at the periphery of a circular plaza. What once had been a carriage turnaround and watering hole for horses was now thick with snow and encircled with yellow crime scene tape.

  Central to this eerie spectacle was a gilt and wrought iron ice-coated fountain that did not work any time of year, we were told. It was here a young woman's nude body had been propped. She had been mutilated, and I believed Gault's purpose this time was not to remove bite marks, but to leave his signature so we would instantly identify the artist.

  As best we could tell, Gault had forced his latest victim to strip and walk barefoot to the fountain where her frozen body had been found this morning. He had shot her at close range in the right temple and excised areas of skin from her inner thighs and left shoulder. Two sets of footprints led to the fountain, and only one led away. The blood of this woman whose name we did not know brightly stained snow, and beyond the arena of her hideous death Central Park dissolved into thick, foreboding shadows.

  I stood close to Wesley, our arms touching, as if we needed each other for warmth. He did not speak as he intensely studied footprints and the fountain and the distant darkness of the Ramble. I felt his shoulder lift as he took a deep breath, then settle more heavily against me.

  'Jeez,' Marino muttered.

  'Did you find her clothes?' I asked Commander Penn, though I knew the answer.

  'Not a trace.' She was looking around. 'Her footprints are not shoeless until the edge of this plaza, right over here.' She pointed about five yards west of the fountain. 'You can clearly see where her bare footprints start. Before that she had on some sort of boot, I guess. Something with no tread and a heel, like a dingo or cowboy boot, maybe.'

  'What about him?'

  'We may have found his footprints as far west as the Ramble, but it's hard to say. There are so many footprints over there and a lot of churned-up snow.'

  'So the two of them left the Museum of Natural History through the subway station, entered the west side of the park, possibly walked to the Ramble, then headed over here.' I tried to piece it together. 'Inside the plaza, he apparently forced her to disrobe and take off her shoes. She walked barefoot to the fountain, where he shot her in the head.'

  'That's the way it appears at this time,' said a stocky NYPD detective who introduced himself as T. L. O'Donnell.

  'What is the temperature?' asked Wesley. 'Or better put, what was it late last night?'

  'It got down to eleven degrees last night,' said O'Donnell, who was young and angry, with thick black hair. 'The windchill was about ten below zero.'

  'And she took off her clothes and shoes,' Wesley seemed to say to himself. 'That's bizarre.'

  'Not if someone's got a gun stuck to your head,' O'Donnell lightly stomped his feet. His hands were burrowed deep inside the pockets of a dark blue police jacket, which was not warm enough for temperatures this low, even with body armor on.

  'If you are forced to disrobe outside in this cold,' Wesley reasonably said, 'you know you are going to die.'

  No one spoke.

  'You wouldn't be forced to take off clothes and shoes otherwise. The very act of disrobing is to go against any survival instinct, because obviously, you could not survive naked out here long.'

  Still, everyone was silent as we stared at the fountain's grisly display. It was filled with snow stained red, and I could see the indentations made by the victim's bare buttocks when her body was positioned. Her blood was as bright as when she had died because it was frozen.

  Then Marino spoke. 'Why the hell didn't she run?'

  Wesley abruptly moved away from me and squatted to look at what we assumed were Gault's footprints. 'That's the question of the day,' he said. 'Why didn't she?'

  I got down beside him to look at the footprints, too. The tread pattern of the impression clearly left in snow was curious. Gault had been wearing some type of footwear with intricate raised diamond-shaped and wavy tread, and a manufacturer's mark in the instep, and a wreathed logo in the heel. I estimated he wore a size seven and a half or eight.

  'How is this being preserved?' I asked Commander Perm.

  Detective O'Donnell answered, 'We've photographed the shoe impressions, and over there' - he pointed to a cluster of police officers some distance away on the opposite side of the fountain - 'are some better ones. We're trying to make a cast.'

  Casting footwear impressions in snow was rife with perils. If the liquid dental stone wasn't cool enough and the snow wasn't frozen hard enough, one ended up melting the evidence. Wesley and I got up. We walked in silence to where the detective had pointed, and as I glanced around I saw Gault's steps.

  He did not care that he had left very distinctive footprints. He did not care that he had left a trail in the park that we would painstakingly follow until we reached its end. We were determined to know every place he had been, and yet it did not matter to him. He did not believe we would catch him.

  The officers on the other side of the fountain were spraying two shoe impressions with Snow Print Wax, holding aerosol cans a safe distance away and at an angle so the blast of pressurized red wax would not eradicate delicate tread detail. Another officer was stirring liquid dental stone in a plastic bucket.

  By the time several layers of wax had been applied to the shoe prints, the dental stone would be cool enough to pour and make casts. The conditions were actually good for what was ordinarily a risky procedure. There was neither sun nor wind, and apparently the NYPD crime scene technicians had properly stored the wax at room temperature, because it had not lost its pressure. Nozzles were not spitting or clogged as I had so often seen with attempts in the past.

  'Maybe we'll be lucky this time,' I said to Wesley as Marino headed our way.

  'We're going to need all the luck we can get,' he said, staring off into dark woods.

  East of us was the outer limits of the thirty-seven acres known as the Ramble, the isolated area of Central Park famous for bird-watching and winding footpaths through dense, rocky terrain. Every guidebook I had ever seen warned tourists that the Ramble was not recommended for lone hikers at any season or time of day. I wondered how Gault had enticed his victim into the park. I wondered where he had met her and what it was that had set him into motion. Perhaps it was simply that she had been an opportunity and he had been in the mood.

  'How does one get from the Ramble to here?' I asked anybody who would listen.

  The officer stirring dental stone met my eyes. He was about Marino's age, cheeks fleshy and red from the cold.

  'There's a path along the lake,' he said, breath smoking.

  'What lake?'

  'You can't see it real well. It's frozen and covered with snow.'

  'Do you know if this path is the one they took?'

  'This is a big park, ma'am. The snow's real messed up in most other places, like the Ramble, for example. Over there, nothing - not ten feet of snow - is going to keep away people after drugs or an encounter. Now here in Cherry Hill, you got another story. You got no cars allowed and for sure the horses aren't coming up here in weather like this. So we're lucky. We got a crime scene left.'

  'Why are you thinking the perpetrator and the victim started in the Ramble?' asked Wesley, who was always direct and often terse when his profiler's mind was going through its convoluted subroutines and searching its scary database.
<
br />   'One of the guys thinks he may have spotted her shoe prints over there,' said the officer, who liked to talk. 'Problem is, as you can see, hers aren't very distinctive.'

  We looked around snow that was getting increasingly marred by law enforcement feet. The victim's footwear had no tread.

  'Plus,' he went on, 'since there may be a homosexual component, we're considering the Ramble might have been a primary destination.'

  'What homosexual component?' Wesley blandly asked.

  'Based on earlier descriptions of both of them, they appeared to be a homosexual couple.'