From Potter's field

Author: Patricia Cornwell
Publisher: Scribner Book Company

Condition: used - good
Format: hardcover
Pages: 412
Publication date: August 1995

Christmas eve in Central Park - Temple Brooks Gault stands over his latest victim, washing his bloody hands in the snow. Pleased with his new kill, he lifts the heavy steel door of an emergency exit and disappears in the fetid tunnels of the New York subway system.

In Richmond, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of Virginia and consultant for the FBI, is in the midst of a ate-night autopsy at the morgue when the call comes: Gault, the sadistic psychopath who has eluded capture for years has struck again. For Scarpetta, her worst nightmare returns.

She and longtime FBI and police colleagues Benton Wesley and Captain Pete Marino fly to the eerie early-morning scene, where they immediately recognize Gault's grizzly handiwork. But no one seems to know his bald female victim, whose naked body has been propped up against a frozen fountain. It makes no sense that she apparently disrobed in the bitter cold without a struggle and walked barefoot over the snow to her death.