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.