Patricia Cornwell - From Potter's Field

There was nothing I could say.

'I talked to a couple guys who knew him.'

The personal effects of the crack addict named Benny had been unceremoniously heaped on table four, and I decided to move them farther away from the dead child.

'He always wanted to be a cop. I hear that all the damn time.'

The trash bags were heavy, a foul odor drifting from the top of them, where they were tied. I began carrying them over to table eight.

'You tell me why anybody wants to do this?' Marino was getting more furious as he grabbed a bag and followed me.

'We want to make a difference,' I said. 'We want to somehow make things better.'

'Right,' he said sarcastically. 'Davila sure as hell made a difference. He sure as hell made things better.'

'Don't take that away from him,' I said. 'The good he did and might have done is all he has left.'

A Stryker saw started, water drummed and X-rays bared bullets and bones in this theater with its silent audience and actors that were dead. Momentarily, Commander Penn walked in, eyes exhausted above her mask. She was accompanied by a dark young man she introduced as Detective Maier. He showed us the photographs of tread patterns left in the snows of Central Park.

'They're pretty much to scale,' he explained. 'I will admit that the casts would be better if we could get them.'

But NYPD had those, and I was willing to bet that the Transit Police would never see them. Frances Penn almost did not look like the same woman I had visited last night, and I wondered why she really had invited me to her apartment. What might she have confided had we not been summoned to the Bowery?

We began untying bags and placing items on the table, except for the fetid wool blankets that had been Benny's home. These we folded and stacked on the floor. The inventory was an odd one that could be explained in only two ways. Either Benny had been living with someone who owned a pair of size seven and a half men's boots. Or he had somehow acquired the possessions of someone who owned a pair of size seven and a half men's boots. Benny's shoe size, we were told, was eleven.

'What's Benny got to say this morning?' Marino asked.

Detective Maier answered, 'He says the stuff in that pile just showed up on his blankets. He went up on the street, came back and there it was, inside the knapsack.' He pointed to a soiled green canvas knapsack that had many stories to tell.

'When was this?' I asked.

'Well now, Benny isn't real clear on that. In fact, he's not real clear on just about anything. But he thinks it was in the last few days.'

'Did he see who left the knapsack?' Marino asked.

'He says he didn't.'

I held a photograph close to the bottom of one of the boots to compare the sole, and the size and stitching were the same. Benny had somehow acquired the belongings of the woman we believed Gault had savaged in Central Park. The four of us were silent for a while as we began going through each item we believed was hers. I felt lightheaded and weary as we began reconstructing a life from a tin whistle and rags.

'Can't we call her something?' Marino said. 'It's bugging me she's got no name.'

'What would you like to call her?' Commander Penn asked.

'Jane.'

Detective Maier glanced up at Marino. 'That's very original. What's her last name, Doe?'

'Any possibility the saxophone reeds are Benny's?' I asked.

T don't think so,' Maier said. 'He said all this stuff was in the knapsack. And I'm not aware Benny's musically inclined.'

'He plays an invisible guitar sometimes,' I said.

'So would you if you smoked crack. And that's all he does. He begs and smokes crack.'

'He used to do something before he did that,' I said.

'He was an electrician and his wife left him.'

'That's no reason to move into a sewer,' said Marino, whose wife also had left him. 'There's gotta be something else.'

'Drugs. He ended up across the street in Bellevue. Then he'd sober up and they'd let him out. Same old thing, over and over.'

'Might there have been a saxophone that went with the reeds, and perhaps Benny hocked it?' I asked.

'I got no way to know,' Maier answered. 'Benny said this is all there was.'

I thought of the mouth of this woman we now called Jane, of the cupping of the front teeth that the forensic dentist blamed on smoking a pipe.

'If she has a long history of playing a clarinet or saxophone,' I said, 'that could explain the damage to her front teeth.'

'What about the tin whistle?' Commander Penn asked.

She bent closer to a gold metal whistle with a red mouthpiece. The brand was Generation, it was British made and did not look new.

'If she played it a lot, then that probably just added to the damage to her front teeth,' I said. 'It's also interesting that it's an alto whistle and the reeds are for an alto sax. So she may have played an alto sax at some point in her life.'

'Maybe before her head injury,' Marino said.

'Maybe,' I said.

We continued sifting through her belongings and reading them like tea leaves. She liked sugarless gum and Sensodyne toothpaste, which made sense in light of her dental problems. She had one pair of men's black jeans, size thirty-two in the waist and thirty-four in length. They were old and rolled up at the cuffs, suggesting they were hand-me-downs or she had gotten them in a secondhand clothing store. Certainly they were much too big for the size she was when she died.

'Are we certain these don't belong to Benny?' I asked.

'He says they don't,' Maier replied. 'The stuff he says belongs to him is in that bag.' He pointed to a bulging bag on the floor.

When I slipped a gloved hand into a back pocket of the jeans, I found a red-and-white paper tag that was identical to the ones Marino and I had been given when we visited the American Museum of Natural History. It was round, the size of a silver dollar and attached to a loop of string. Printed on one side was Contributor, with the museum's logo on the other.

'This should be processed for prints,' I said, placing the tag in an evidence bag. 'She should have touched it. Or Gault may have touched it if he paid for admission into the exhibits.'

'Why would she save something like that?' Marino said. 'Usually you take it off your shirt button and drop it in the trash on your way out.'

'Perhaps she put it in her pocket and forgot,' Commander Penn said.

'It could be a souvenir,' suggested Maier.

'It doesn't look like she collects souvenirs,' I said. 'In fact, she seems very deliberate about what she kept and what she didn't.'

'Are you suggesting she might have kept the tag so someone would eventually find it?'

'I don't know,' I said.

Marino lit a cigarette.

'That makes me wonder if she knew Gault,' Maier said.

I replied, 'If she did, and if she knew she was in danger, then why did she go with him into the park at night?'

'See, that's what don't add up.' Marino exhaled a large cloud of smoke, his mask pulled down.

'It doesn't if she was a complete stranger to him,' I said.

'So maybe she knew him,' Maier said.

'Maybe she did,' I agreed.

I slid my hand into other pockets of the same black pants and found eighty-two cents, a saxophone reed that had been chewed and several neatly folded Kleenex tissues. An inside-out blue sweatshirt was size medium, and whatever had been written on the front of it was too faded to read.

She also had owned two pairs of gray sweatpants and three pairs of athletic socks with different-colored stripes. In a compartment of the knapsack was a framed photograph of a spotted hound sitting in the dappled shadows of trees. The dog seemed to be grinning at whoever was taking the picture while a figure in the far background looked on.

'This needs to be processed for prints,' I said. 'In fact, if you hold it obliquely you can see latents on the glass.'