‘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.’