From Potter's Field (3 page)

We drove to the Aero Services International terminal, where we stood behind plate glass and watched Benton Wesley descend turbulently in a Belljet Ranger. The helicopter settled neatly on a small wooden platform as a fuel truck glided out of deep shadows. Clouds slid like veils over the full face of the moon.

I watched Wesley climb out and hurry away from flying blades. I recognized anger in his bearing and impatience in his stride. He was tall and straight and carried himself with a quiet power that made people afraid.

'Refueling will take about ten minutes,' he said when he got to us. 'Is there any coffee?'

'That sounds like a good idea,' I said. 'Marino, can we bring you some?'

'Nope.'

We left him and walked to a small lounge tucked between rest rooms.

'I'm sorry about this,' Wesley said softly to me.

'We have no choice.'

'He knows that, too. The timing is no accident.' He filled two Styrofoam cups. 'This is pretty strong.'

'The stronger the better. You look worn out.'

'I always look that way.'

'Are your children home for Christmas?'

'Yes. Everyone is there - except, of course, me.' He stared off for a moment. 'His games are escalating.'

'If it's Gault again, I agree.'

'I know it's him,' he said with an iron calm that belied his rage. Wesley hated Temple Brooks Gault. Wesley was incensed and bewildered by Gault's malignant genius.

The coffee was not very hot and we drank it fast.

Wesley made no show of our familiarity with each other except with his eyes, which I had learned to read quite well. He did not depend on words, and I had become skilled at listening to his silence.

'Come on,' he said, touching my elbow, and we caught up with Marino as he was heading out the door with our bags.

Our pilot was a member of the Bureau's Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT. In a black flight suit and watchful of what went on around him, he looked at us to acknowledge he was aware we existed. But he did not wave, smile or say a word as he opened the helicopter's doors. We ducked beneath blades, and I would forever associate the noise and wind caused by them with murder. Whenever Gault struck, it seemed, the FBI arrived in a maelstrom of beating air and gleaming metal and lifted me away. '

We had chased him now for several years, and a complete inventory of the damage he had caused was impossible to take. We did not know how many people he had savaged, but there were at least five, including a pregnant woman who once had worked for me and a thirteen-year-old boy named Eddie Heath. We did not know how many lives he had poisoned with his machinations, but certainly mine was one of them.

Wesley was behind me with his headset on, and my seat back was too high for me to see him when I glanced around. Interior lights were extinguished and we began to slowly lift, sailing sideways and nosing northeast. The sky was scudded with clouds, and bodies of water shone like mirrors in the winter night.

'What kind of shape's she in?' Marino's voice sounded abruptly in my headset.

Wesley answered, 'She's frozen.'

'Meaning, she could've been out for days and not started decomposing. Right, Doc?'

'If she's been outside for days,' I said, 'you would think someone would have found her before now.'

Wesley said, 'We believe she was murdered last night. She was displayed, propped against. . .'

'Yo, the squirrel likes that. That's his thing.'

'He sits them up or kills them while they're sitting,' Wesley went on. 'Every one so far.'

'Every one we know about so far,' I reminded them.

'The victims we're aware of.'

'Right. Sitting up in cars, a chair, propped against a Dumpster.'

'The kid in London.'

'Yes, he wasn't.'

'Looks like he was just dumped near railroad tracks.'

'We don't know who did that one.' Wesley seemed certain. 'I don't believe it was Gault.'

'Why do you think it's important to him that the bodies are sitting?' I asked.

'It's his way of giving us the finger,' said Marino.

'Contempt, taunting,' Wesley said. 'It's his signature. I suspect there is a deeper meaning.'

I suspected there was, too. All of Gault's victims were sitting, heads bowed, hands in their laps or limply by their sides, as if they were dolls. The one exception was a woman prison guard named Helen. Though her body, dressed in uniform, was propped up in a chair, she was missing her head.

'Certainly the positioning . . .' I started to say, and the voice-activated microphones were never quite in sync with the tempo of conversation. It was an effort to talk.

The bastard wants to rub our noses in it.'

'I don't think that's his only . . .'

'Right now, he wants us to know he's in New York. . .'

'Marino, let me finish. Benton? The symbolism?'

'He could display the bodies any number of ways. But so far he's always chosen the same position. He sits them up. It's part of his fantasy.'

'What fantasy?'

'If I knew that, Pete, maybe this trip wouldn't be happening.'

Sometime later our pilot took the air: 'The FAA's issued a SIGMET.'

'What the hell is that?' Marino asked.

'A warning about turbulence. It's windy in New York City, twenty-five knots gusting at thirty-seven.'

'So we can't land?' Marino, who hated to fly, sounded slightly panicky.

'We're going to be low and the winds are going to be much higher.'

'What do you mean low? You ever seen how high the buildings are in New York?'

I reached back between my seat and the door and patted Marino's knee. We were forty nautical miles from Manhattan, and I could just barely make out a light winking on top of the Empire State Building. The moon was swollen, planes moving in and away from La Guardia like floating stars, and from smokestacks steam rose in huge white plumes. Through the chin bubble at my feet I watched twelve lanes of traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, and everywhere lights sparkled like jewels, as if Faberge had crafted the city and its bridges.

We flew behind the Statue of Liberty's back, then passed Ellis Island, where my grandparents' first introduction to America was a crowded immigration station on a frigid winter day. They had left Verona, where there had been no future for my grandfather, born the fourth son of a railroad worker.

I came from a hearty, hardworking people who emigrated from Austria and Switzerland in the early eighteen hundreds, thus explaining my blond hair and blue eyes. Despite my mother's assertion that when Napoleon I ceded Verona to Austria, our ancestors managed to keep the Italian bloodline pure, I believed otherwise. I suspected there was genetic cause for some of my more Teutonic traits.

Macy's, billboards and the golden arches of McDonald's appeared, as New York slowly became concrete and parking lots and street sides banked high with snow that looked dirty even from the air. We circled the VIP Heliport on West Thirtieth Street, lighting up and ruffling the Hudson's murky waters as a bright wind sock stood on end. We swayed into a space near a gleaming Sikorsky S-76 that made all other birds seem common.

'Watch out for the tail rotor,' our pilot said.

Inside a small building that was only vaguely warm, we were greeted by a woman in her fifties with dark hair, a wise face and tired eyes. Bundled in a thick wool coat, slacks, lace-up boots and leather gloves, she introduced herself as Commander Frances Penn of the New York Transit Police.

'Thank you so much for coming,' she said, offering her hand to each of us. 'If we're ready, I have cars waiting.'

'We're ready,' Wesley said.

She led us back out into the bitter cold, where two police cruisers waited, two officers in each, engines running and heat on high. There was an awkward moment as we held doors open and decided who would ride with whom. As so often happens, we divided by gender, and Commander Penn and I rode together. I began to ask her about jurisdiction, because in a high-profile case like this one, there would be many people who thought they should be in charge.

'The Transit Police has an interest because we believe the victim met her assailant on the subway,' explained the commander, who was one of three command chiefs in the sixth-largest police department in America. This would have been late yesterday afternoon.'

'How do you know this?'

'It's really rather fascinating. One of our plain-clothes officers was patrolling the subway station at Eighty-first and Central Park West, and at around five-thirty in the afternoon - this was yesterday - he noticed a peculiar couple emerge from the Museum of Natural History exit that leads directly into the subway.'

We bumped over ice and potholes that shook the bones in my legs.

'The man immediately lit a cigarette while the woman held a pipe.'

'That's interesting,' I commented.

'Smoking is against the law in the subway, which is another reason the officer remembers them.'

'Were they given a summons?'

'The man was. The woman wasn't because she hadn't lit the pipe. The man showed the officer his driver's license, which we now believe was false.'

'You said the couple was strange looking,' I said. 'How so?'

'She was dressed in a man's topcoat and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Her head was shaved. In fact, the officer wasn't certain she was a she. At first he assumed this was a homosexual couple.'

'Describe the man she was with,' I said.

'Medium height, thin, with strange sharp features and very weird blue eyes. His hair was carrot red.'

'The first time I saw Gault his hair was platinum. When I saw him last October, it was shoe-polish black.'

'It was definitely carrot red yesterday.'

'And is probably yet another color today. He does have weird eyes. Very intense.'

'He's very clever.'

'There is no description for what he is.'

'Evil comes to mind, Dr. Scarpetta,' she said.

'Please call me Kay.'

'If you call me Frances.'

'So it appears they visited the Museum of Natural History yesterday afternoon,' I said. 'What is the exhibit?'

'Sharks.'

I looked over at her, and her face was quite serious as the young officer driving deftly handled New York traffic.

'The exhibit right now is sharks. I suppose every sort you can imagine from the beginning of time,' she said.

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.'

'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.'