‘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?’
‘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?’