I was silent.
'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.
'
'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
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.
Central to this eerie spectacle was a gilt and wrought iron ice-coated fountain that did not work any time of year, we were told. It was here a young woman's nude body had been propped. She had been mutilated, and I believed Gault's purpose this time was not to remove bite marks, but to leave his signature so we would instantly identify the artist.
As best we could tell, Gault had forced his latest victim to strip and walk barefoot to the fountain where her frozen body had been found this morning. He had shot her at close range in the right temple and excised areas of skin from her inner thighs and left shoulder. Two sets of footprints led to the fountain, and only one led away. The blood of this woman whose name we did not know brightly stained snow, and beyond the arena of her hideous death Central Park dissolved into thick, foreboding shadows.
I stood close to Wesley, our arms touching, as if we needed each other for warmth. He did not speak as he intensely studied footprints and the fountain and the distant darkness of the Ramble. I felt his shoulder lift as he took a deep breath, then settle more heavily against me.
'Jeez,' Marino muttered.
'Did you find her clothes?' I asked Commander Penn, though I knew the answer.
'Not a trace.' She was looking around. 'Her footprints are not shoeless until the edge of this plaza, right over here.' She pointed about five yards west of the fountain. 'You can clearly see where her bare footprints start. Before that she had on some sort of boot, I guess. Something with no tread and a heel, like a dingo or cowboy boot, maybe.'
'What about him?'
'We may have found his footprints as far west as the Ramble, but it's hard to say.
There are so many footprints over there and a lot of churned-up snow.'
'So the two of them left the Museum of Natural History through the subway station, entered the west side of the park, possibly walked to the Ramble, then headed over here.' I tried to piece it together. 'Inside the plaza, he apparently forced her to disrobe and take off her shoes. She walked barefoot to the fountain, where he shot her in the head.'
'That's the way it appears at this time,' said a stocky NYPD detective who introduced himself as T. L. O'Donnell.
'What is the temperature?' asked Wesley. 'Or better put, what was it late last night?'