I believed he had sat in this dark theater with the woman whose name we did not know, and she unwittingly had watched her own death on screen. She had watched her own blood spilled, her own flesh sliced. Gault had given her a preview of what he had in store for her. The exhibit had been his foreplay.

We returned to the rotunda, where a barosaurus fossil was surrounded by schoolchildren. Her elongated neck bones rose to the lofty ceiling as she eternally tried to protect her baby from an attacking allosaurus. Voices carried, and the sounds of feet echoed off marble as I glanced around. People in uniforms were quiet behind their ticket counters as they guarded the entrances of exhibits from people who had not paid. I looked out glass front doors at dirty snow piled along the cold, crowded street.

‘She came in here to get warm,’ I said to Marino.

‘What?’ He was preoccupied with dinosaur bones.

‘Maybe she came in here to get out of the cold,’ I said. ‘You can stand here all day looking at these fossils. As long as you don’t go into the exhibits, it doesn’t cost you anything.’

‘So you’re thinking this is where Gault met her for the first time?’ He looked skeptical.

‘I don’t know if it was the first time,’ I said.

Brick smokestacks were quiet, and beyond guardrails of the Queens Expressway were bleak edifices of concrete and steel. Our taxi passed depressing apartments, and stores selling smoked and cured fish, marble and tile. Coils of razor wire topped chain-link fences, and trash was on roadsides and caught in trees as we headed into Brooklyn Heights, to the Transit Authority on Jay Street.

An officer in navy blue uniform pants and commando sweater escorted us to the second floor, where we were shown to the three-star command executive office of Frances Penn. She had been thoughtful enough to have coffee and Christmas cookies waiting for us at the small table where we were to confer about one of the most gruesome homicides in Central Park’s history.

‘Good afternoon,’ she said, firmly shaking our hands. ‘Please have a seat. And we did take the calories out of the cookies. We always do that. Captain, do you take cream and sugar?’

‘Yeah.’

She smiled a little. ‘I guess that means both. Dr. Scarpetta, I have a feeling you drink your coffee black.’

‘I do,’ I said, regarding her with growing curiosity.

‘And you probably don’t eat cookies.’

‘I probably won’t.’ I removed my overcoat and took a chair.

Commander Penn was dressed in a dark blue skirt suit with pewter buttons and a high-collared white silk blouse. She needed no uniform to look imposing, yet she was neither severe nor cold. I would not have called her bearing militaristic, but dignified, and I thought I detected anxiety in her hazel eyes.