From Potter`s Field

Doris was his ex-wife.

'I'd just signed on with the NYPD and she was pregnant with Rocky. I remember looking at stuffed monkeys and gorillas and telling her it was bad luck.

I told her the kid was going to end up swinging through trees and eating bananas.'

'I beg of you. Their numbers are dwindling and dwindling and dwindling!' The tour guide went on and on about the plight of sea turtles.

'So maybe that's what the hell happened to him,' Marino continued. 'It was coming in this joint.'

I had rarely heard him even allude to his only child. In fact, as well as I knew Marino, I knew nothing about his son.

'I didn't know your son's name was Rocky,' I quietly said as we started walking again.

'It's really Richard. When he was a kid we called him Ricky, which somehow turned into Rocky. Some people call him Rocco. He gets called a lot of things.'

'Do you have much contact with him?'

'There's a gift shop. Maybe I should get a shark key chain or something for Molly.'

'We can do that.'

He changed his mind. 'Maybe I'll just bring her some bagels.'

I did not want to push him about his son, but the topic was within reach, and I believed their estrangement from each other was the root of many of Marino's problems.

'Where is Rocky?' I cautiously asked.

'An armpit of a town called Darien.'

'Connecticut? And it's not an armpit of a town.'

'This Darien's in Georgia.'

'It surprises me I haven't known that before now.'

'He don't do anything you'd have any reason to know about.' Marino bent over, his face against glass as he stared at two small nurse sharks swimming along the bottom of a tank outside the exhibit.

'They look like big catfish,' he said as the sharks stared with dead eyes, tails silently fanning water.

We wandered into the exhibit and did not have to wait in line, for few visitors were here in the middle of this workday. We drifted past Kiribati warriors in suits of woven coconut husks, and Winslow Homer's painting of the Gulf Stream. Shark images had been painted on airplanes, and it was explained that sharks can detect odors from the length of a football field and electric charges as weak as one-millionth of a volt. They have as many as fifteen rows of backup teeth, are shaped the way they are to more efficiently torpedo through water.

During a short film we were shown a great white battering a cage and lunging for a tuna on a rope. The narrator explained that sharks are legendary hunters of the deep, the perfect killing machine, the jaws of death, the master of the sea. They can smell one drop of blood in twenty-five gallons of water and feel the pressure waves of other animals passing by. They can outswim their prey, and no one is quite certain why some sharks attack humans.

'Let's get out of here,' I said to Marino as the movie ended.

I buttoned my coat and put on my gloves, imagining Gault watching monsters ripping flesh as blood spread darkly through water. I saw his cold stare and the twisted spirit behind his thin smile. In the most frightening reaches of my mind, I knew he smiled as he killed. He bared his cruelty in that strange smile I had seen on the several occasions I had been near him.

I believed he had sat in this dark theater with the woman whose name we did not know, and she unwittingly had watched her own death on screen. She had watched her own blood spilled, her own flesh sliced. Gault had given her a preview of what he had in store for her. The exhibit had been his foreplay.

We returned to the rotunda, where a barosaurus fossil was surrounded by schoolchildren. Her elongated neck bones rose to the lofty ceiling as she eternally tried to protect her baby from an attacking allosaurus. Voices carried, and the sounds of feet echoed off marble as I glanced around. People in uniforms were quiet behind their ticket counters as they guarded the entrances of exhibits from people who had not paid. I looked out glass front doors at dirty snow piled along the cold, crowded street.

'She came in here to get warm,' I said to Marino.

'What?' He was preoccupied with dinosaur bones.

'Maybe she came in here to get out of the cold,' I said. 'You can stand here all day looking at these fossils. As long as you don't go into the exhibits, it doesn't cost you anything.'

'So you're thinking this is where Gault met her for the first time?' He looked skeptical.

'I don't know if it was the first time,' I said.

Brick smokestacks were quiet, and beyond guardrails of the Queens Expressway were bleak edifices of concrete and steel. Our taxi passed depressing apartments, and stores selling smoked and cured fish, marble and tile. Coils of razor wire topped chain-link fences, and trash was on roadsides and caught in trees as we headed into Brooklyn Heights, to the Transit Authority on Jay Street.

An officer in navy blue uniform pants and commando sweater escorted us to the second floor, where we were shown to the three-star command executive office of Frances Penn. She had been thoughtful enough to have coffee and Christmas cookies waiting for us at the small table where we were to confer about one of the most gruesome homicides in Central Park's history.

'Good afternoon,' she said, firmly shaking our hands. 'Please have a seat. And we did take the calories out of the cookies. We always do that. Captain, do you take cream and sugar?'

'Yeah.'

She smiled a little. 'I guess that means both. Dr. Scarpetta, I have a feeling you drink your coffee black.'

'I do,' I said, regarding her with growing curiosity.

'And you probably don't eat cookies.'

'I probably won't.' I removed my overcoat and took a chair.

Commander Penn was dressed in a dark blue skirt suit with pewter buttons and a high-collared white silk blouse. She needed no uniform to look imposing, yet she was neither severe nor cold. I would not have called her bearing militaristic, but dignified, and I thought I detected anxiety in her hazel eyes.

'It appears Mr. Gault may have met the victim in the museum versus the two of them having met prior to that,' she began.

'It's interesting you would say that,' I said. 'We were just at the museum.'

'According to one of the security guards, a woman fitting the victim's description was seen loitering in the rotunda area. At some point she was observed talking with a man who bought two tickets for the exhibits. In fact, they were observed by several museum employees because of their odd appearance.'

'What is your theory as to why she was inside the museum?' I asked.

'It was the impression of those who remember her that she was a homeless person. My guess is she went in to get warm.'

'Don't they run street people out?' said Marino.

'If they can.' She paused. 'Certainly if they're causing a disturbance.'

'Which she wasn't, I assume,' I said.

Commander Penn reached for her coffee. 'Apparently she was quiet and unobtrusive. She seemed to be interested in the dinosaur bones, walking round and around them.'

'Did she speak to anyone?' I asked.

'She did ask where the ladies' room was.'

'That would suggest to me she'd never been there before,' I said. 'Did she have an accent?'

'If she did, no one remembers.'

'Then it is unlikely she is foreign,' I said.

'Any description on her clothing?' Marino asked.

'A coat - maybe brown or black, short. An Atlanta Braves baseball cap, maybe navy or black. Possibly she was wearing jeans and boots. That's as much as anyone seems to remember.'

We were silent, lost in thought.

I cleared my throat. 'Then what?' I said.

'Then she was spotted talking with a man, and the description of his clothing is interesting. He's remembered as having worn a rather dramatic overcoat. It was black, cut like a long trench coat - the sort you associate with what the Gestapo wore during World War Two. Museum personnel also believe he had on boots.'