Patricia Cornwell - From Potter's Field

'He was kicked in the side of the head,' I said.

'You don't know that he didn't hit his head,' Dr. Jonas said defensively.

I stared at her. 'I do know,' I asserted.

'How do we know he wasn't stomped?' an officer asked.

'His injuries are inconsistent with that,' I replied. 'People usually stomp more than once and in other areas of the body. I would also expect there to be injury to the other side of his face, which would have been against the concrete when the stomping occurred.'

A train blew by in a rush of warm, screeching air. Lights floated in the distant dark, the figures attached to them shadows with voices that faintly carried.

'He was disabled by a kick, then shot with his own gun,' I said.

'We need to get him to the morgue,' the medical examiner said.

Commander Penn's eyes were wide, her face upset and angry.

'It's him, isn't it?' she said to me as we began to walk.

'He's kicked people before,' I said.

'But why? He has a gun, a Clock. Why didn't he use his own gun?'

'The worst thing that can happen to a cop is to be shot with his own gun,' I said.

'So Gault would have done that deliberately because of how it would make the police… make us feel?'

'He would have thought it was funny,' I said.

We walked back over rails and through trash alive with rats. I sensed Commander Penn was crying. Minutes passed.

She said, 'Davila was a good officer. He was so helpful, never complained, and his smile. He brightened a room.' Her voice was clenched in fury now. 'He was just a goddam kid.'

Her officers were around us but not too close, and as I looked down the tunnel and across the tracks, I thought of the subterranean acres of twists and turns of the subway system. The homeless had no flashlights, and I did not understand how they could see. We passed another squalid camp where a white man who looked vaguely familiar sat up smoking crack from a piece of car antenna as if there were no such thing as law and order in the land. When I noticed his baseball cap the meaning didn't register at first. Then I stared.

'Benny, Benny, Benny. Shame on you,' one of the officers impatiently said. 'Come on. You know you can't do this, man. How many times are we going to go through this, man?'

Benny had chased me into the medical examiner's office yesterday morning. I recognized his filthy army pants, cowboy boots and blue jean jacket.

'Then just go on and lock me up,' he said, lighting his rock again.

'Oh yeah, your ass is gonna be locked up, all right. I've had it with you.'

I quietly said to Commander Penn, 'His cap.'

It was a dark blue or black Atlanta Braves cap.

'Hold on,' she told her troops. She asked Benny, 'Where did you get your cap?'

'I don't know nothing,' he said, snatching it off a tuft of dirty gray hair. His nose looked as if something had chewed on it.

'Of course you do know,' the commander said.

He stared crazily at her.

'Benny, where did you get your cap?' she asked again.

Two officers lifted him up and cuffed him. Beneath a blanket were paperback books, magazines, butane lighters, small Ziploc bags. There were several energy bars, packages of sugarless gum, a tin whistle and a box of saxophone reeds. I looked at Commander Penn, and she met my eyes.

'Gather up everything,' she told her troops.

'You can't take my place.' Benny struggled against his captors. 'You can't take my motherfucking place.' He stomped his feet. 'You goddam son of a bitch…'

'You're just making this harder, Benny.' They tightened his cuffs, a cop on each arm.

'Don't touch anything without gloves,' Commander Penn ordered.

'Don't worry.'

They put Benny's worldly belongings in trash bags, which we carried out with their owner. I followed with my flashlight, the vast darkness a silent void that seemed to have eyes. Frequently, I turned back and saw nothing but a light I thought was a train, until it suddenly moved sideways. Then it became a flashlight illuminating a concrete arch Temple Gault was passing through. He was a sharp silhouette in a long dark coat, his face a white flash. I grabbed the commander's sleeve and screamed.

More than thirty police officers searched the Bowery and its subways throughout the overcast night. No one knew how Gault had gotten into the tunnels, unless he never left after murdering Jim Davila. We were clueless as to how he had gotten out after I spotted him, but he had.

The next morning, Wesley headed for La Guardia while Marino and I returned to the morgue. I did not encounter Dr. Jonas from the night before, nor was Dr. Horowitz in, but I was told Commander Penn was here with one of her detectives and we would find them in the X-ray room.

Marino and I slipped in with the silence of a couple arriving late for a movie, then we lost each other in the dark. I suspected he found a wall, since he had trouble with his balance in situations like this. It was easy to get almost mesmerized and begin to sway. I moved close to the steel table, where dark shapes surrounded Davila's body, a finger of light exploring his ruined head.

'I would like one of the casts for comparison,' someone was saying.

'We've got photos of the shoe prints. I've got some here.' I recognized Commander Penn's voice.

'That would be good.'

'The labs have the casts.'

'Yours?'

'No, not ours,' said Commander Penn. 'NYPD's.'

'This area of abrasion and patterned contusion right here is from the heel.' The light stopped below the left ear. 'The wavy lines are fairly clear and I see no trace embedded in the abrasion. There's also this pattern right here. I can't make it out. This contusion, uh, sort of a blotch with a little tail. I don't know what that is.'

'We can try image enhancement.'

'Right, right.'

'What about his ear itself? Any pattern?'

'It's hard to tell, but it's split versus cut. The jagged edges are nonabraded and connected by tissue bridges. And I would say based on this curved laceration right down here' - the latex-sheathed finger pointed - 'the heel smashed the ear.'

'That's why it's split.'

'A single blow delivered with great force.'

'Enough to kill him?'

'Maybe. We'll see. My guess is he's going to have fractures of the left temporal parietal skull and a big epidural hemorrhage.'

'That's what I bet.'

The gloved hands manipulated forceps and the light. A hair, black and about six inches long, clung to the bloody collar of Davila's commando sweater. The hair was collected and placed in an envelope as I worked my way through thick darkness, finding the door. Returning my tinted glasses to a cart, I slipped out. Marino was right behind me.

'If that hair's his,' he said in the corridor, 'then he's dyed it again.'

'I would expect him to have done that,' I said, envisioning the silhouette I had seen last night. Gault's face was very white but, I could not tell about his hair.

'So he's not a redhead anymore.'

'By now he may have purple hair, for all we know.'

'He keeps changing his hair like that, maybe it will fall out.'

'Not likely,' I said. 'But the hair may not be his. Dr. Jonas has dark hair about that long, and she was hovered over the body for a while last night.'

We were in gowns, gloves and masks and looked like a team of surgeons about to perform some remarkable procedure like a heart transplant. Men were carrying in a shipment of pitiful pine boxes destined for Potter's Field, and behind glass, the morning's autopsies had begun. There were only five cases so far, one of them a child who obviously had died violently. Marino averted his gaze.

'Shit,' he muttered, his face dark red. 'What a way to start your day.'

I did not respond.

'Davila'd only been married two months.'