Blood On The Sun Read online

  "You won't believe me," said Joshua. "My faith is being tested."

  "Try," said Stella.

  Joshua looked tired. He leaned forward, hands clasped. He wore black Dockers, a gray polo shirt and sneakers. He sighed deeply and said, "The priest killed Glick and Joel Besser."

  "Why?"

  "They were Jews," said Joshua. "That's enough."

  "Why the shooting and the crucifixion?"

  Joshua shook his head.

  "Anti-Semites have tortured Jews, crucified Jews, for over two thousand years. Yeshua was one of thousands of Jews crucified."

  "How do you know he killed Glick and Besser?"

  "Got a phone call," Joshua said. "Man with a heavy Spanish accent said he had found something and was afraid to go to the police. He told me where it was and said he thought his priest was a murderer. He was crying. I tried to ask him more but he hung up."

  He lifted his head and faced Stella.

  "You don't believe me," he said.

  "Go on," Stella said.

  "I went to the church," Joshua said. "I went behind the altar, behind the statue of Yeshua, and there it was."

  "The bag," said Stella.

  "Yes."

  "You hadn't put it there earlier?"

  "No."

  "You had the gun in your hand when we came," said Stella. "Were you going to shoot Father Wosak?"

  "I wanted to stop him from killing more Jews."

  "That's not an answer," said Stella.

  "I don't know what I was going to do, but it doesn't matter. You came. Here I am and you don't believe me."

  Aiden opened the door and nodded at Stella, who got up. Flack came into the room to continue the interrogation. In the hallway, Aiden said, "I haven't had time to go over everything, but I can tell you that the hammer in the bag is probably the same one used to crucify the two victims. I found traces of iron oxide on the head. It matches the bolts used in the crucifixions. The only prints on the handle are Joshua's."

  "But?" said Stella, seeing that Aiden had more to tell her.

  "Joshua's fingerprints are on two of the bolts and on the gun," said Aiden. "No other prints. No prints on the other two bolts."

  "Could he have been wearing gloves?" said Stella.

  "Then why touch the bolts with his bare hands in the church? Why handle the hammer barehanded in the church? There are no gloves in his pockets or in the bag. And the bolts are all wrong. They're not sharpened. They're almost blunt. Hammering them through flesh and into the floor would have been nearly impossible."

  "So," said Stella. "Joshua might be telling the truth. Which means he was set up."

  "Which doesn't tell us why," said Aiden. "I'm going back to the tote bag."

  And, thought Stella, I'm going to look for a man with a thick Spanish accent. She had the feeling that the accent had not been real. She also had the feeling that the man himself might not be real.

  Joshua would have a long night in jail.

  * * *

  At two a.m. Danny Messer awoke in the darkness of his bedroom, sat up sweating and fumbled for his glasses on the table next to the bed.

  Something was different. He clicked on the light and looked at his hands. The tremor was completely gone. His first reaction was relief. This was followed almost immediately by fear, fear that it would come back.

  It was clear to him now. Maybe it had always been clear. His grandfather and his father had both become police officers to face their fear. They had been good, honest, often decorated and well respected. There had never been any question about Danny becoming a cop. It was a given. Danny understood. He had acknowledged the fear and now he sat up in his bed and wondered if he had chosen CSI because it was relatively safe but would still allow him to carry on the Messer tradition. Were the street fights he had been in growing up, the drug dealers he had stood up to, gangbangers he had refused to back away from and even sought out, part of the pattern of facing his fear?

  At this point, it didn't matter. He was who he was and was dedicated to and fascinated by his job. He wondered if he would tell all this to Sheila Hellyer. Probably.

  He got up, moved to his computer, pressed a button on the keyboard and pulled up the on-screen version of the report he had given Mac on the Vorhees murder. He read it carefully, trying to make sense of what he saw, and then came up with a theory. In the morning, he would share his thoughts with Mac. In the morning he would find out that Mac had come to the same conclusion he had. Kyle Shelton had not murdered the Vorhees family. They would have to go back to the computer and create a new virtual reality scenario.

  Danny put his computer to sleep, went to the kitchen for a bottled water and went back to bed. He placed the bottle on the table next to the bed, checked his hands again to be sure they were not shaking, put his glasses on the table and turned off the light. He was asleep almost instantly.

  It was 2:15 in the morning.

  * * *

  Stella stirred and came awake. She got out of the chair and moved to the side of the hospital bed.

  There was some light from the slightly open door of the bathroom. She could see George Melvoy's tube-connected face, could hear him breathe. The breathing was shallow, with a painful sandpapery rasp. The monitor, however, bouncing with mountains being painted by green light, showed that his vital signs were steady. The man was strong.

  Stella ran her fingers through her hair and touched his arm. She liked the man who had tried to kill her. In the morning she would tell him that he had almost certainly saved a life. She wasn't yet certain whose life he had saved.

  She appreciated the irony. Because this man had stalked her, planned to kill her, he had seen something that led to the saving of a life.

  She didn't know where she had heard or read it, but the words came back to her as they had in the past. It was a kind of non-prayer: Lord, if you'll forgive the little tricks I've done to you, I'll forgive the great big one you've done to me.

  Satisfied that Melvoy was all right, Stella went back to the aluminum-armed chair and sat. The chair wasn't made for comfort but for brief visits to the ill. For visitors of the dying, more comfortable chairs would magically appear.

  Joshua had broken down in the church and Father Wosak had moved to put his arm around and comfort the man. In the morning, she would let Flack take the lead interrogating Joshua. Stella would sit in.

  Before she left the hospital, she wanted to talk to Melvoy. She had decided not to talk to him about Matthew Heath, the lab assistant who had taken his own life. If Stella had contributed to his suicide, the contribution had been infinitesimal. It wasn't Stella with whom he could not cope. It was the world that had been too much for Matthew Heath. She saw that now. Perhaps she should have seen signs of it when the boy had dutifully, but with no signs of developing skill, gone through the day.

  She wasn't going to talk about that with George Melvoy.

  * * *

  The clock in the window of the coffee shop across the street read 2:37 a.m.

  Kyle Shelton sat in the window, glancing at the clock and the few people of the night who passed by the night-lit interiors of the shops. There was a young laughing couple, arm in arm. He thought of Becky and closed his eyes. There was a trio of young men whispering, emitting danger. Kyle could sense it.

  The air conditioner in the window next to the one before which he was sitting rattled and gave off spurts of almost cool air. The night heat seeped through the windows, the walls.

  He had gone through cycles about his plan. Sometimes he thought that for something improvised, it was reasonably good. Things could go wrong, but it should hold. At other times, he was certain it had been a terrible plan, that the CSI cop Taylor was gathering pinpricks of evidence, secrets of blood and DNA, fingerprints he had forgotten.

  His friend Scott Shuman said Kyle could crash at his apartment for a few nights. Scott was a good guy who was taking a big chance harboring a fugitive. Kyle had known Scott- short, dark unkempt curly black hair, sligh
tly pudgy- in college. Both had been philosophy majors. They had become friends. Scott had become a well-paid computer program designer for an Indian company that explored the universe. Scott had never married. Though they never discussed it, Kyle thought his friend was probably gay but hadn't yet admitted it to himself. Kyle could be wrong. He had been wrong about many things.

  Middle of the night. Kyle felt it coming. He was going to allow himself to grieve. Actually, he had no choice. He could feel it happening.

  Kyle could not remember crying as he was about to do, shaking with grief and loss, considering that there might really be a malevolent force that lived and thrived on the pain of humans. He wept and remembered Ovid's words: "Suppressed grief suffocates. It rages within the breast and is forced to multiply its strength."

  The clock in the coffeehouse window read 2:49 a.m.

  * * *

  Mac's watch read 2:49 a.m. He was walking Rufus to the small dog park five blocks from his apartment. He should have returned the dog before coming home. Mac had long ago admitted that his one emotional weakness was dogs. He knew how to handle them, work with them, admire them. He also knew he did not want to own one in the city, not with his job.

  There was another single figure, a man, in the dog park. He sat across from Mac on a wooden bench and watched his short-legged pug waddle around the grass and dirt. The man, in his forties or fifties, looked tired. His arms were draped over the bench and he eyed Mac and Rufus warily. This was Manhattan, the middle of the night.

  Rufus and the pug walked slowly up to each other, sniffed and then stepped away to take care of their own business.

  Then Rufus moved to the man on the bench, sniffed and hurried back to Mac, who reached down, petted him and whispered, "I know."

  The man on the other bench was carrying something that Rufus had been taught to detect and report. It could be drugs or a gun. In spite of the heat that had bled into the night, Mac wore a light jacket under which were his holster and gun.

  He had decided that the man with the pug was almost certainly not a threat. He was a man with a dog.

  Mac thought about his wife, Claire, again. His thoughts of grief were not that different from those of Kyle Shelton, though he didn't put them in the words of a philosopher.

  A hot night like this back in Chicago, coming back from the wedding of Claire's cousin. Too much to drink but happy, comforted by her closeness. They had walked instead of going home, talked instead of sleeping, made plans instead of accepting the need for sleep. It had been a good night. There had been many of them. Not enough of them.

  Mac got up. The man on the bench watched him leave, his pug rubbing against his leg.

  In a few hours, he would find Kyle Shelton. In a few hours he would talk to Jacob Vorhees again. In a few hours the investigation of the murder of the Vorhees family would be over, but it would not be the end of the horror for the boy and the young man who liked to quote philosophers.

  Mac looked at his watch: 3:20 a.m.

  * * *

  It was 3:20 a.m.

  Sak Pyon looked at the illuminated dial of the clock on the bedside table. He carefully peeled back the sheet, sat up slowly and got out of bed, moving softly across the floor toward the bathroom. He did not want to disturb his sleeping wife.

  Nothing like this had happened in at least five years, maybe more. He slept without an alarm clock and woke automatically at 4:15 a.m. every day. He got washed, brushed his teeth and hair, dressed and left the apartment without making a sound. He would pick up coffee and a fresh blueberry muffin before he got to the shop.

  Because he was early and because he had much to think about, Pyon decided to walk to work. The young policeman would probably be back about the sketch Pyon had drawn, a sketch not of the man who had gone through his shop and almost certainly killed the strange Jewish boy next door. Only last night before he had fallen asleep did he realize that he had drawn a stand-up comedian from one of the television shows he had seen on the Comedy Network. The policeman would almost certainly be back.

  Pyon kept walking, the day already pre-dawn muggy. In Korea, the summer heat had not bothered him, but a quarter of a century in New York had changed him.

  He thought of the man he should have sketched, should have told the policeman about, but Pyon had remembered the moment when the other man had entered the store and moved to the counter and leaned over, invading Pyon's space, eyes unblinking as he quietly said, "I have your home address and the home address in Hartford of your daughter. Your granddaughter's name is Anna. She's five."

  Pyon nodded, afraid that he understood what he was being told.

  "I have not been here today," the man said. "If you tell anyone, the police, your wife, your daughter, anyone, I will kill your family. Do you believe me?"

  Pyon believed the man, who hovered over him with a look much like that of the militia officer who had killed Pyon's father with a single shot to the head, killed him calmly in front of the family. Pyon believed this man.

  And so he had lied to the policeman and made a sketch of a television actor whose name he did not know. Pyon, as he approached the shop on the still-darkened street, gave serious consideration to quietly selling the shop to one of the several people who had shown interest. He could sell the shop, pack and… no. The man would find him. He would certainly know where to find Pyon's daughter, Tina, who lived in Hartford with her husband and Pyon's granddaughter. The man would find them. Of this he was sure.

  Perhaps the oddest thing about the threat delivered by the man, thought Pyon, was the fact that it had been delivered in almost perfect Korean.

  He looked at his watch as he turned on the light. It was almost 5:30 a.m. Through the window he could see the coming dawn over the buildings across the street.

  * * *

  At 5:30 a.m., Aiden Burn's radio came on with the news on the half hour. She got up. She was meeting Hawkes at 6:30 a.m. He had left a voice message on her cell phone saying he had reexamined the bodies of the two dead men and had returned to the crime scenes. He had found something interesting.

  Stella and Flack would be wearing down Joshua again this morning, but she wasn't sure about him. Evidence led both toward and away from Arvin Bloom. Her report had laid out the pros and cons. Her report did not include her gut feeling.

  She was dressed, showered and through the door by six a.m.

  * * *

  At six a.m. Joshua was found in his holding cell by a guard bringing breakfast. Joshua sat still on his cot, palms out, both deeply gashed. Blood drenched the cot and formed a small dark lake on the floor. Joshua's face was white.

  The guard, a man named Michael Molton who had twenty-two years of service, put the tray on the floor, called out for help and moved to find something with which he could stop the bleeding. It was only when Adams was bent over and pressing the part of the blanket that wasn't covered with blood against the wounds that he looked down at Joshua's bare feet in a second pool of blood. Both feet also bore gashes like the ones in his palms. On the floor near the cot, the guard saw a bloody piece of rusted metal about the size of a cell phone.

  Molton thought he had seen everything, but this was a new one. And, he thought, the day is just starting.

  It was six minutes past six in the morning.

  11

  "THEY LOOK LIKE MOB HITS," said Hawkes, his eyes moving between the two sheet-covered dead men on the tables in front of him. They were turned facedown. "But whoever did it is even better than a mob hit man."

  Aiden watched as Hawkes leaned over the body of Asher Glick.

  "Two shots,.40 caliber fired from no more than an inch away," Hawkes said. "Found the bullets in the flesh under the tongue, less than half an inch apart. The other one…"

  He pointed at the body of Besser.

  "Same thing. Bullets from the same gun fired about an inch away. Bullets found lodged in the skull over the right temple about an inch apart."

  An examination of the bullets from the victims iden
tified them as.40 caliber Smith & Wessons. They were looking for a pistol, one that could fit in a pocket. They were also looking for a semiautomatic, which would allow the killer to get off two shots quickly. Aiden knew there were pistols no more than five and a half inches long and weighing twenty-two ounces. Aiden told Hawkes.

  "Indeed," said Hawkes, "but there was something interesting, which was why I left you the message."

  Aiden's eyes were fixed on him.

  "Victim one, Glick," said Hawkes, "was standing when he was shot."

  "Blood trail a little over three feet from where he fell or was placed," she confirmed.

  "Right," said Hawkes. "Victim two was seated."

  "Blood spatter on the chair he was sitting in," she said.

  "Checked the angle of entry again," said Hawkes. "This time assuming we were dealing with a pro. If he held the gun something like this…"

  Hawkes stood straight up, hand out as if he were a kid playing war, aimed at Aiden.

  "Pretty much standard position," he said.

  Aiden agreed.

  Hawkes nodded and said, "Your shooter is about six feet four inches tall. Given the angle of the entry on both victims, I got a dummies and put a gun in its hand. Then I found dummies the same height as the two victims."

  "And," said Aiden, "given the angle of entry, if the shooter was standing, he had to be tall."

  "Six-four is close," said Hawkes. "Got any suspects that tall?"

  "Indeed we do," said Aiden.

  "Coffee?" asked Hawkes.

  "No time," said Aiden. "Later maybe."

  "I've got to get Glick's body to the widow today," said Hawkes. "If I don't, there'll be a protest in front of the mayor's office before the day is over."