‘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 where 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
Kay Scarpetta 6 - From Potter’s Field
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.