Patricia Cornwell - From Potter's Field

'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.

'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.'

'We're not talking about two men,' Wesley stated.

'At a glance, the victim did not look like a female.'

'At whose glance?'

'The Transit Police. You really need to talk to them.'

'Hey, Mossberg, you ready with the dental stone?'

'I'd do another layer.'

'We've done four. We got a really good shell, I mean, if your stuff is cool enough.'

The officer whose surname was Mossberg squatted and began to carefully pour viscous dental stone into a red wax-coated impression. The victim's footprints were near the ones we wanted to save, her foot about the same size as Gault's. I wondered if we would ever find her boots as my eyes followed the trail to an area some fifteen feet from the fountain, where impressions became those of bare feet. In fifteen steps, her bare footprints went straight to the fountain where Gault had shot her in the head.

As I looked around at shadows pushed back from the lighted plaza, as I felt the bite of intense cold, I could not understand this woman's mind-set. I could not understand her compliance last night.

'Why didn't she resist?' I said.

'Because Gault had her scared out of her mind,' said Marino, now by my side.

'Would you take off your clothes out here for any reason?' I asked him.

'I'm not her.' Anger flexed beneath his words.

'We do not know anything about her,' Wesley logically added.

'Except that she had shaved her head for some wacko reason,' Marino said.

'We don't know enough to get a handle on her behavior,' Wesley said. 'We don't even know who she is.'

'What do you think he did with her clothes?' Marino asked, looking around, hands in the pockets of a long camel's hair coat that he had begun to wear after several dates with Molly.

'Probably the same thing he did with Eddie Heath's clothes,' Wesley said, and he could no longer resist walking into the woods, just a little way.

Marino looked at me. 'We know what Gault did with Eddie Heath's clothes. It's not the same here.'

'I suppose that's the point.' I watched Wesley with a heavy heart. 'Gault does whatever he pleases.'

'Me, I personally don't think the squirrel keeps shit like that for souvenirs. He don't want a lot of crap to haul around when he's on the move.'

'Sometimes he disposes of them,' I said.

A Bic lighter sparked several times before begrudgingly offering Marino a small flame.

'She was completely under his control,' I thought aloud some more. 'He led her here and told her to undress, and she did. You can see where her shoe prints stop and her bare footprints begin. There was no struggle, no thought of running away. No resistance.'

He lit a cigarette. Wesley backed away from the woods, careful where he stepped. I felt him look at me.

'They had a relationship,' I said.

'Gault don't have relationships,' Marino said.

'He has his own type of them. Bent and warped as they may be. He had one with the warden of the penitentiary in Richmond and with Helen the guard.'

'Yeah, and he whacked both of them. He cut off Helen's head and left it in a friggin' bowling bag in a field. The farmer who found that little present still ain't right. I heard he started drinking like a fish and won't plant nothing in that field. He won't even let his cows go there.'

'I didn't say he didn't kill the people he has relationships with,' I replied. 'I just said that he has relationships.'

I stared at her footprints nearby. She had worn a size nine or ten shoe.

'I hope they're going to cast hers, too,' I said.

The officer named Mossberg was using a paint stirrer to deftly spread dental stone into every portion of the shoe print he was trying to cast. It had begun to snow again, hard small flakes that stung.

'They won't cast hers,' Marino said. 'They'll get pictures and that's it since she ain't going to be on any witness stand in this world.'

I was accustomed to witnesses who did not speak to anyone but me. 'I would like a cast of her shoe impression,' I said. 'We have to identify her. Her shoes might help.'

Marino went to Mossberg and his comrades, and they all began to talk as they periodically glanced my way. Wesley looked up at the overcast sky as snow fell harder.

'Christ,' he said. 'I hope this stops.'

Snow fell more furiously as Frances Penn drove us to the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South. There was nothing more anyone could do until the sun came up, and I feared by then Gault's homicidal trail would be covered.

Commander Penn was pensive as she drove on streets that were deserted for the city. It was almost half past two a.m. None of her officers were with us. I was in front, Marino and Wesley in the back.

'I will tell you frankly that I do not like multijurisdictional investigations,' I said to her.

'Then you have had much experience with them, Dr. Scarpetta. Anyone who has been through them doesn't like them.'

'They're a pain in the butt,' Marino offered as Wesley, typically, just listened.

'What should we expect?' I asked, and I was being as diplomatic as possible, but she knew what I wanted.

'NYPD will officially work this case, but it will be my officers out there digging, putting in the most hours, doing the dog work. That's always the way it is when we share a case that gets a lot of media attention.'

'My first job was with NYPD,' Marino said.

Commander Penn eyed him in the rearview mirror.

'I left this sewer because I wanted to,' he added with his usual diplomacy.

'Do you still know anybody?' she asked.

'Most of the guys I started with have probably either retired, left on disability, or else they've been promoted and are fat and chained to desks.'

I wondered if Marino considered that maybe his peers might say the latter about him.

Then Wesley spoke. 'It might not be a bad idea to see who's still around, Pete. Friends, I mean.'

'Yeah, well, don't hold your breath.'

'We don't want a problem here.'

'No way to totally avoid that,' Marino said. 'Cops are going to fight over this and be stingy with what they know. Everyone wants to be a hero.'

'We can't afford that,' Wesley went on without the slightest fluctuation of intensity or tone.