From Potter's Field (12 page)

'His jacket was unzipped and the revolver was just like that?'

'Just like that.' The detective's face was flushed and sweating, and he would not meet my eyes.

The medical examiner looked up. I could not make out the face behind the plastic hood. 'We can't rule out suicide here,' she said.

I leaned closer and directed my light at the dead man's face. His eyes were open, head turned a little to the right. Blood pooled beneath him was bright red and getting thick. He was short, with the muscular neck and lean face of someone who was seriously fit. My light traveled to his hands, which were bare, and I squatted to take a closer look.

'I see no gunshot residue,' I said.

'You don't always,' said the medical examiner.

'The wound to his forehead is not contact and looks to me as if it's slightly angled.'

'I would expect it to be slightly angled if he shot himself,' the medical examiner replied.

'It's angled down. I wouldn't expect that,' I said. 'And how did his gun come to rest so neatly on his chest?'

'One of the street people in here might have moved it.'

I was beginning to get annoyed. 'Why?'

'Maybe someone picked it up and then had second thoughts about keeping it. So he put it where it is.'

'We really should bag his hands,' I said.

'One thing at a time.'

'He didn't wear gloves?' I squinted up in the circle of bright light. 'It's very cold down here.'

'We haven't finished going through his pockets, ma'am,' said the woman medical examiner, who was the young, rigid sort I associated with anal-retentive autopsies that took half a day.

'What is your name?' I asked her.

'I'm Dr. Jonas. And I'm going to have to ask you to back away, ma'am. We're trying to preserve a crime scene here and it's best you don't touch or disturb anything in any way.' She held up a thermometer.

'Dr. Jonas' - and it was Commander Penn who spoke - 'this is Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner of Virginia and consulting forensic pathologist for the FBI. She is quite familiar with preserving crime scenes.'

Dr. Jonas looked up and I caught a glint of surprise behind her face shield. I detected embarrassment in the long moment it required her to read the chemical thermometer.

I leaned closer to the body, paying attention to the left side of his head.

'His left ear is lacerated,' I said.

'That probably happened when he fell,' said Dr. Jonas.

I scanned the surroundings. We were on a smooth concrete platform. There were no rails to strike. I shone my light over concrete supports and walls, scanning for blood on any structure that Davila might have hit.

Squatting near the body, I looked more closely at his injured ear and a reddish area below it. I began to see the class characteristics of a tread pattern that was wavy with small holes. Under his ear was the curve from the edge of a heel. I stood, sweat rolling down my face. Everyone was watching me as I stared down the dark corridor at a light getting closer.

'He was kicked in the side of the head,' I said.

'You don't know that he didn't hit his head,' Dr. Jonas said defensively.

I stared at her. 'I do know,' I asserted.

'How do we know he wasn't stomped?' an officer asked.

'His injuries are inconsistent with that,' I replied. 'People usually stomp more than once and in other areas of the body. I would also expect there to be injury to the other side of his face, which would have been against the concrete when the stomping occurred.'

A train blew by in a rush of warm, screeching air. Lights floated in the distant dark, the figures attached to them shadows with voices that faintly carried.

'He was disabled by a kick, then shot with his own gun,' I said.

'We need to get him to the morgue,' the medical examiner said.

Commander Penn's eyes were wide, her face upset and angry.

'It's him, isn't it?' she said to me as we began to walk.

'He's kicked people before,' I said.

'But why? He has a gun, a Clock. Why didn't he use his own gun?'

'The worst thing that can happen to a cop is to be shot with his own gun,' I said.

'So Gault would have done that deliberately because of how it would make the police . . . make us feel?'

'He would have thought it was funny,' I said.

We walked back over rails and through trash alive with rats. I sensed Commander Penn was crying. Minutes passed.

She said, 'Davila was a good officer. He was so helpful, never complained, and his smile. He brightened a room.' Her voice was clenched in fury now. 'He was just a goddam kid.'

Her officers were around us but not too close, and as I looked down the tunnel and across the tracks, I thought of the subterranean acres of twists and turns of the subway system. The homeless had no flashlights, and I did not understand how they could see. We passed another squalid camp where a white man who looked vaguely familiar sat up smoking crack from a piece of car antenna as if there were no such thing as law and order in the land. When I noticed his baseball cap the meaning didn't register at first. Then I stared.

'Benny, Benny, Benny. Shame on you,' one of the officers impatiently said. 'Come on. You know you can't do this, man. How many times are we going to go through this, man?'

Benny had chased me into the medical examiner's office yesterday morning. I recognized his filthy army pants, cowboy boots and blue jean jacket.

'Then just go on and lock me up,' he said, lighting his rock again.

'Oh yeah, your ass is gonna be locked up, all right. I've had it with you.'

I quietly said to Commander Penn, 'His cap.'

It was a dark blue or black Atlanta Braves cap.

'Hold on,' she told her troops. She asked Benny, 'Where did you get your cap?'

'I don't know nothing,' he said, snatching it off a tuft of dirty gray hair. His nose looked as if something had chewed on it.

'Of course you do know,' the commander said.

He stared crazily at her.

'Benny, where did you get your cap?' she asked again.

Two officers lifted him up and cuffed him. Beneath a blanket were paperback books, magazines, butane lighters, small Ziploc bags. There were several energy bars, packages of sugarless gum, a tin whistle and a box of saxophone reeds. I looked at Commander Penn, and she met my eyes.

'Gather up everything,' she told her troops.

'You can't take my place.' Benny struggled against his captors. 'You can't take my motherfucking place.' He stomped his feet. 'You goddam son of a bitch . . .'

'You're just making this harder, Benny.' They tightened his cuffs, a cop on each arm.

'Don't touch anything without gloves,' Commander Penn ordered.

'Don't worry.'

They put Benny's worldly belongings in trash bags, which we carried out with their owner. I followed with my flashlight, the vast darkness a silent void that seemed to have eyes. Frequently, I turned back and saw nothing but a light I thought was a train, until it suddenly moved sideways. Then it became a flashlight illuminating a concrete arch Temple Gault was passing through. He was a sharp silhouette in a long dark coat, his face a white flash. I grabbed the commander's sleeve and screamed.

8

More than thirty police officers searched the Bowery and its subways throughout the overcast night. No one knew how Gault had gotten into the tunnels, unless he never left after murdering Jim Davila. We were clueless as to how he had gotten out after I spotted him, but he had.

The next morning, Wesley headed for La Guardia while Marino and I returned to the morgue. I did not encounter Dr. Jonas from the night before, nor was Dr. Horowitz in, but I was told Commander Penn was here with one of her detectives and we would find them in the X-ray room.

Marino and I slipped in with the silence of a couple arriving late for a movie, then we lost each other in the dark. I suspected he found a wall, since he had trouble with his balance in situations like this. It was easy to get almost mesmerized and begin to sway. I moved close to the steel table, where dark shapes surrounded Davila's body, a finger of light exploring his ruined head.

'I would like one of the casts for comparison,' someone was saying.

'We've got photos of the shoe prints. I've got some here.' I recognized Commander Penn's voice.

'That would be good.'

'The labs have the casts.'

'Yours?'

'No, not ours,' said Commander Penn. 'NYPD's.'

'This area of abrasion and patterned contusion right here is from the heel.' The light stopped below the left ear. 'The wavy lines are fairly clear and I see no trace embedded in the abrasion. There's also this pattern right here. I can't make it out. This contusion, uh, sort of a blotch with a little tail. I don't know what that is.'

'We can try image enhancement.'

'Right, right.'

'What about his ear itself? Any pattern?'

'It's hard to tell, but it's split versus cut. The jagged edges are nonabraded and connected by tissue bridges. And I would say based on this curved laceration right down here' - the latex-sheathed finger pointed - 'the heel smashed the ear.'

'That's why it's split.'

'A single blow delivered with great force.'

'Enough to kill him?'

'Maybe. We'll see. My guess is he's going to have fractures of the left temporal parietal skull and a big epidural hemorrhage.'

'That's what I bet.'

The gloved hands manipulated forceps and the light. A hair, black and about six inches long, clung to the bloody collar of Davila's commando sweater. The hair was collected and placed in an envelope as I worked my way through thick darkness, finding the door. Returning my tinted glasses to a cart, I slipped out. Marino was right behind me.

'If that hair's his,' he said in the corridor, 'then he's dyed it again.'

'I would expect him to have done that,' I said, envisioning the silhouette I had seen last night. Gault's face was very white but, I could not tell about his hair.

'So he's not a redhead anymore.'

'By now he may have purple hair, for all we know.'

'He keeps changing his hair like that, maybe it will fall out.'

'Not likely,' I said. 'But the hair may not be his. Dr. Jonas has dark hair about that long, and she was hovered over the body for a while last night.'

We were in gowns, gloves and masks and looked like a team of surgeons about to perform some remarkable procedure like a heart transplant. Men were carrying in a shipment of pitiful pine boxes destined for Potter's Field, and behind glass, the morning's autopsies had begun. There were only five cases so far, one of them a child who obviously had died violently. Marino averted his gaze.

'Shit,' he muttered, his face dark red. 'What a way to start your day.'

I did not respond.

'Davila'd only been married two months.'

There was nothing I could say.

'I talked to a couple guys who knew him.'

The personal effects of the crack addict named Benny had been unceremoniously heaped on table four, and I decided to move them farther away from the dead child.

'He always wanted to be a cop. I hear that all the damn time.'

The trash bags were heavy, a foul odor drifting from the top of them, where they were tied. I began carrying them over to table eight.

'You tell me why anybody wants to do this?' Marino was getting more furious as he grabbed a bag and followed me.

'We want to make a difference,' I said. 'We want to somehow make things better.'

'Right,' he said sarcastically. 'Davila sure as hell made a difference. He sure as hell made things better.'

'Don't take that away from him,' I said. 'The good he did and might have done is all he has left.'

A Stryker saw started, water drummed and X-rays bared bullets and bones in this theater with its silent audience and actors that were dead. Momentarily, Commander Penn walked in, eyes exhausted above her mask. She was accompanied by a dark young man she introduced as Detective Maier. He showed us the photographs of tread patterns left in the snows of Central Park.

'They're pretty much to scale,' he explained. 'I will admit that the casts would be better if we could get them.'

But NYPD had those, and I was willing to bet that the Transit Police would never see them. Frances Penn almost did not look like the same woman I had visited last night, and I wondered why she really had invited me to her apartment. What might she have confided had we not been summoned to the Bowery?

We began untying bags and placing items on the table, except for the fetid wool blankets that had been Benny's home. These we folded and stacked on the floor. The inventory was an odd one that could be explained in only two ways. Either Benny had been living with someone who owned a pair of size seven and a half men's boots. Or he had somehow acquired the possessions of someone who owned a pair of size seven and a half men's boots. Benny's shoe size, we were told, was eleven.