Patricia Cornwell - From Potter's Field

Snow had begun drifting down like ashes when we arrived at the Second Avenue subway station in the squalid section of lower Manhattan known as the Bowery.

Wind howled and blue and red lights throbbed as if the night were injured, and stairs leading into that hellhole had been cordoned off. Derelicts had been herded out, commuters had been detoured, and news vans and cars were arriving in droves because an officer with the Transit Police Homeless Unit was dead.

His name was Jimmy Davila. He was twenty-seven. He had been a cop one year.

'You better put these on.' An officer with an angry, pale face handed me a reflective vest and surgical mask and gloves.

Police were pulling flashlights and more vests out of the back of a van, and several officers with darting eyes and riot guns flashed past me down the stairs. Tension was palpable. It pulsed in the air like a dark pounding heart, and the voices of legions who had come to aid their gunned-down comrade blended with scuffing feet and the strange language radios speak. Somewhere far off a siren screamed.

Commander Penn handed me a high-powered flashlight as we were escorted down by four officers who were husky in Kevlar and coats and reflective vests. A train blew by in a stream of liquid steel, and we inched our way along a catwalk that led us into dark catacombs littered with crack vials, needles, garbage and filth. Lights licked over hobo camps set up on pallets and ledges within inches of rails, and the air was fetid with the stench of human waste.

Beneath the streets of Manhattan were forty-eight acres of tunnels where in the late eighties as many as five thousand homeless people had lived. Now the numbers were substantially smaller, but their presence was still found in filthy blankets piled with shoes, clothes and odds and ends.

Grimy stuffed animals and fuzzy fake insects had been hung like fetishes from walls. The squatters, many of whom the Homeless Unit knew by name, had vanished like shadows from their subterranean world, except for Freddie, who was roused from a drugged sleep. He sat up beneath an army blanket, looking about, dazed.

'Hey, Freddie, get up.' A flashlight shone on his face.

He raised a bandaged hand to his eyes, squinting as small suns probed the darkness of his tunnel.

'Come on, get up. What'd you do to your hand?'

'Frostbite,' he mumbled, staggering to his feet.

'You got to take care of yourself. You know you can't stay here. We got to walk you out. You want to go to a shelter?'

'No, man.'

'Freddie,' the officer went on in a loud voice, 'you know what's happened down here? You heard about Officer Davila?'

'I dunno nothing,' Freddie swayed and caught himself, squinting in the lights.

'I know you know Davila. You call him Jimbo.'

'Yeah, Jimbo. He's all right.'

'No, I'm afraid he's not all right, Freddie. He got shot down here tonight. Someone shot Jimbo and he's dead.'

Freddie's yellow eyes got wide. 'Oh no, man.' He cast about as if the killer might be looking on - as if someone might want to blame him for this.

'Freddie, you seen anybody down here tonight you didn't know? You seen anybody down here who might have done something like that?'

'No, I ain't seen nothing.' Freddie almost lost his balance and steadied himself against a concrete support. 'Not nobody or nothing, I swear.'

Another train burst out of the darkness and blew past on southbound tracks. Freddie was led away and we moved on, sidestepping rails and rodents moiling beneath trash. Thank God I had worn boots. We walked for at least ten minutes more, my face perspiring beneath my mask as I got increasingly disoriented. I could not tell if round bright lights far down the tracks were police flashlights or oncoming trains.

'Okay, we've got to step over the third rail,' Commander Penn said, and she had stayed close to me.

'How much farther?' I asked.

'Just down there, where those lights are. We're going to step over now. Do it sideways, slowly, one foot at a time, and don't touch.'

'Not unless you want the shock of your life,' an officer said.

'Yeah, six hundred volts that won't let go,' said another in the same hard tone.

We followed rails deeper into the tunnel as the ceiling got lower. Some men had to duck as we passed through an arch. On the other side, crime scene technicians were scouring the area while a medical examiner in hood and gloves examined the body. Lights had been set up, and needles, vials, and blood glistened harshly in them.

Officer Davila was on his back, his winter jacket unzipped, revealing the stiff shape of a bulletproof vest beneath a navy blue commando sweater. He had been shot between the eyes with the.38 revolver on top of his chest.

'Is this exactly as he was found?' I asked, stepping close.

'Exactly as we found him,' said a detective with NYPD.

'His jacket was unzipped and the revolver was just like that?'

'Just like that.' The detective's face was flushed and sweating, and he would not meet my eyes.

The medical examiner looked up. I could not make out the face behind the plastic hood. 'We can't rule out suicide here,' she said.

I leaned closer and directed my light at the dead man's face. His eyes were open, head turned a little to the right. Blood pooled beneath him was bright red and getting thick. He was short, with the muscular neck and lean face of someone who was seriously fit. My light traveled to his hands, which were bare, and I squatted to take a closer look.

'I see no gunshot residue,' I said.

'You don't always,' said the medical examiner.

'The wound to his forehead is not contact and looks to me as if it's slightly angled.'

'I would expect it to be slightly angled if he shot himself,' the medical examiner replied.

'It's angled down. I wouldn't expect that,' I said. 'And how did his gun come to rest so neatly on his chest?'

'One of the street people in here might have moved it.'

I was beginning to get annoyed. 'Why?'

'Maybe someone picked it up and then had second thoughts about keeping it. So he put it where it is.'

'We really should bag his hands,' I said.

'One thing at a time.'

'He didn't wear gloves?' I squinted up in the circle of bright light. 'It's very cold down here.'

'We haven't finished going through his pockets, ma'am,' said the woman medical examiner, who was the young, rigid sort I associated with anal-retentive autopsies that took half a day.

'What is your name?' I asked her.

'I'm Dr. Jonas. And I'm going to have to ask you to back away, ma'am. We're trying to preserve a crime scene here and it's best you don't touch or disturb anything in any way.' She held up a thermometer.

'Dr. Jonas' - and it was Commander Penn who spoke - 'this is Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner of Virginia and consulting forensic pathologist for the FBI. She is quite familiar with preserving crime scenes.'

Dr. Jonas looked up and I caught a glint of surprise behind her face shield. I detected embarrassment in the long moment it required her to read the chemical thermometer.

I leaned closer to the body, paying attention to the left side of his head.

'His left ear is lacerated,' I said.

'That probably happened when he fell,' said Dr. Jonas.

I scanned the surroundings. We were on a smooth concrete platform. There were no rails to strike. I shone my light over concrete supports and walls, scanning for blood on any structure that Davila might have hit.

Squatting near the body, I looked more closely at his injured ear and a reddish area below it. I began to see the class characteristics of a tread pattern that was wavy with small holes. Under his ear was the curve from the edge of a heel. I stood, sweat rolling down my face. Everyone was watching me as I stared down the dark corridor at a light getting closer.