'It got down to eleven degrees last night,' said O'Donnell, who was young and angry, with thick black hair. 'The windchill was about ten below zero.'
'And she took off her clothes and shoes,' Wesley seemed to say to himself. 'That's bizarre.'
'Not if someone's got a gun stuck to your head,' O'Donnell lightly stomped his feet. His hands were burrowed deep inside the pockets of a dark blue police jacket, which was not warm enough for temperatures this low, even with body armor on.
'If you are forced to disrobe outside in this cold,' Wesley reasonably said, 'you know you are going to die.'
No one spoke.
'You wouldn't be forced to take off clothes and shoes otherwise. The very act of disrobing is to go against any survival instinct, because obviously, you could not survive naked out here long.'
Still, everyone was silent as we stared at the fountain's grisly display. It was filled with snow stained red, and I could see the indentations made by the victim's bare buttocks when her body was positioned. Her blood was as bright as when she had died because it was frozen.
Then Marino spoke. 'Why the hell didn't she run?'
Wesley abruptly moved away from me and squatted to look at what we assumed were Gault's footprints. 'That's the question of the day,' he said. 'Why didn't she?'
I got down beside him to look at the footprints, too. The tread pattern of the impression clearly left in snow was curious. Gault had been wearing some type of footwear with intricate raised diamond-shaped and wavy tread, and a manufacturer's mark in the instep, and a wreathed logo in the heel. I estimated he wore a size seven and a half or eight.
'How is this being preserved?' I asked Commander Perm.
Detective O'Donnell answered, 'We've photographed the shoe impressions, and over there' — he pointed to a cluster of police officers some distance away on the opposite side of the fountain — 'are some better ones. We're trying to make a cast.'
Casting footwear impressions in snow was rife with perils. If the liquid dental stone wasn't cool enough and the snow wasn't frozen hard enough, one ended up melting the evidence. Wesley and I got up. We walked in silence to where the detective had pointed, and as I glanced around I saw Gault's steps.
He did not care that he had left very distinctive footprints. He did not care that he had left a trail in the park that we would painstakingly follow until we reached its end. We were determined to know every place he had been, and yet it did not matter to him. He did not believe we would catch him.
The officers on the other side of the fountain were spraying two shoe impressions with Snow Print Wax, holding aerosol cans a safe distance away and at an angle so the blast of pressurized red wax would not eradicate delicate tread detail. Another officer was stirring liquid dental stone in a plastic bucket.
By the time several layers of wax had been applied to the shoe prints, the dental stone would be cool enough to pour and make casts. The conditions were actually good for what was ordinarily a risky procedure.
The conditions were actually good for what was ordinarily a risky procedure. There was neither sun nor wind, and apparently the NYPD crime scene technicians had properly stored the wax at room temperature, because it had not lost its pressure. Nozzles were not spitting or clogged as I had so often seen with attempts in the past.
'Maybe we'll be lucky this time,' I said to Wesley as Marino headed our way.
'We're going to need all the luck we can get,' he said, staring off into dark woods.
East of us was the outer limits of the thirty-seven acres known as the Ramble, the isolated area of Central Park famous for bird-watching and winding footpaths through dense, rocky terrain. Every guidebook I had ever seen warned tourists that the Ramble was not recommended for lone hikers at any season or time of day. I wondered how Gault had enticed his victim into the park. I wondered where he had met her and what it was that had set him into motion. Perhaps it was simply that she had been an opportunity and he had been in the mood.
'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.'