Blood On The Sun

by Stuart Melvin Kaminsky

  "We've got it. We're on the way."

  "Where?" asked Mac.

  "He called from the Vorhees' house."

  * * *

  Flack sat back, his hands folded on the table, his head cocked slightly to the right. He was looking at Joshua and waiting.

  "I'm not a fraud," said Joshua. "My mission is no small sordid cult."

  "Do the others know about the drinking?" asked Flack.

  "No," said Joshua. "I'm being tested by the Lord. Yeshua will show me the way."

  "Meanwhile you have to have a drink during the day," said Flack.

  "Yes," said Joshua with a sigh, "but I do not get drunk and I'm always lucid and focused."

  "You kill Glick?" asked Flack.

  "No."

  "Joel Besser?"

  "Why would I kill one of our own?" Joshua said incredulously.

  "Divert suspicion," said Flack. "Or maybe he knew you killed Glick and was going to tell us."

  The room was air-conditioned, but the air-conditioner was unable to function at full strength during a heat wave like this one. Flack knew from experience that there would be deaths from the heat, mostly old people living with open windows and unable to afford a fan, unable to get up, go down a flight of stairs or two and walk a block or more to an air-conditioned food market or a museum or the library. More people would die because of the suffocating heat than from murder.

  "You have a devious mind," said Joshua.

  "The job requires it," said Flack without emotion. He opened a file folder in front of him.

  "And the murder of an innocent like Joel Besser brings on the images I see waking and sleeping, the images that fade, but not completely, when I have a drink or two," said Joshua.

  "Images?" asked Flack.

  "Black babies, children," said Joshua, leaning forward. "Starving, ribs showing, leg bones without muscle, heads too large, pleading eyes too wide, beyond hope, mouths open, letting in flies. My faith is tested every moment of every day. Why would a benevolent God and His son allow this to happen? My mission is to understand. My weakness is that I am afraid the challenge is beyond my powers."

  Joshua put his head in his hands, sobbed and said, "In a very real sense, I am responsible for the death of Joel Besser. I brought him into our fold with the promise of fellowship, a return to his abandoned Jewish identity and the hope of eternal life."

  Joshua looked up at Flack, eyes wet, face slack.

  "At times like this, I find it almost impossible to believe in those things. Do you believe in God? That there is a God?"

  "Sometimes," said Flack, looking down at the file in the open folder. "You have any idea who might want to kill Joel Besser?"

  "Yes," said Joshua.

  "Let's talk about it and then check your hands for gun residue."

  "Always a policeman," said Joshua, shaking his head.

  "Always," said Flack.

  * * *

  The two uniformed officers at the Vorhees house had gone by the book. The problem was that the book changed every few years. A shrill sound was coming from a door across the entry hall. The two officers had gone to the door, weapons in hand, careful of where they were stepping in case there was trace evidence on the floor. The sound grew louder and more unpleasant with each step they took. The officer in the lead, Kitteridge, was young, broad shouldered, about thirty, a raspberry birthmark on his left cheek. The other officer, Nash, was overweight and probably close to retirement.

  The younger officer pushed open the kitchen door. There was no one inside, but on the white table in the middle of the room was a telephone steadily giving off a low scream. As much as they wanted the noise to stop, they knew enough not to step into the kitchen and hang it up. The older officer closed the kitchen door and said, "Front, back?"

  "Back."

  The officers moved toward the front door, stepped outside and closed the door behind them. The sound of the screaming telephone disappeared. The younger officer moved quickly around the house to cover the back door.

  "Nobody's been in, nobody out," Nash told Mac five minutes later. "We got here four minutes after you called it in."

  Mac nodded, checked his watch. That meant thirty minutes had passed since the call from Shelton.

  Mac put on a pair of latex gloves, shifted his kit to his left hand and took his gun from the holster on his belt with the right. Nash took out his service revolver again and followed Mac inside.

  As he stepped forward, Mac noted, not for the first time, that the old house constantly spoke, with settling beams, creaking old floors and ceilings. The noisy air-conditioning had been turned off. Mac was sure he could still smell blood. He could also hear a familiar sound from the direction of the kitchen.

  He moved forward, Nash at his side, weapon in hand, and pushed the kitchen door open. The four-chair white table was empty except for the white cordless phone that beeped to alert the owner that it was off the hook, the charger alongside it.

  Mac moved forward and told Nash to call his partner inside. When Kitteridge came in, Mac said, "Check the house. Be careful. If you see or hear something suspicious, don't do anything. Just come back here and let me know. Don't touch anything."

  "Right," said Nash.

  The two officers moved past Mac and went through the door.

  Mac moved to the kitchen table and looked around. Something wasn't right. He took out his camera and began taking pictures, ignoring the irritating screech of the phone.

  When he was finished with the photographs, Mac dusted the phone for prints. The prints came up immediately. Mac photographed them and did a tape transfer before turning off the phone.

  It rang almost immediately. Mac pressed the talk button and heard Shelton say, "Taylor?"

  "Yes."

  "I've been calling for the last ten minutes."

  Mac said nothing. Shelton's game was on.

  "I loved her," Shelton said after a long pause.

  Mac detected the hint of a sob.

  "Becky?" said Mac.

  "Becky," Shelton confirmed. "Antoine de Saint-Exupйry wrote, 'Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.' You understand?"

  "Yes," said Mac.

  The kitchen door swung open and Nash stepped in.

  "A knife," Nash said. "On the floor in the girl's bedroom. Looks like dried blood on it."

  "I heard," said Shelton. "You found the knife. My fingerprints are on it, but it's really the weapon that tells the story."

  "The ME will examine it carefully," said Mac. "You want us to catch you but you don't want to make it easy."

  "Something like that," said Shelton, "but not exactly."

  "Want to tell me why you did it?" asked Mac.

  "Not now," said Shelton.

  Nash stood watching, listening, figuring out that Taylor was talking to the killer.

  "The boy," said Mac.

  "Had lunch today?" asked Shelton.

  "No," said Mac.

  "You might want a snack before you finish there," said Shelton. "I did."

  "How about another quote?" asked Mac.

  Mac doubted if Shelton could resist the request. The young man clung to the wisdom of others. He wasn't showing off his education or intellect. Mac was sure it was one of the few things that sustained him.

  " 'The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.' "

  "Nietzsche?" Mac guessed.

  "Anne Frank," answered Shelton, who hung up. So did Mac. Mac opened his notebook and wrote down the quote. There was something wrong about it. An error? Mac put away his notebook.

  Had Shelton mentioned lunch to avoid talking about Jacob Vorhees? Probably, but it was more Shelton's style to deflect the question with a quotation. Mac looked around the kitchen, at the refrigerator, the cabinets, the door to the pantry, the white metal garbage can near the door. Mac moved to the can, stepped on the pedal and look
ed down at the contents of the fresh white plastic bag inside. It was empty. If Shelton had snacked before he left the house, he had either taken his trash with him or had eaten nothing that would leave trash. There was a third possibility. Shelton had lied about having a snack. But why?

  Mac walked to the refrigerator and opened it carefully so he wouldn't compromise any fingerprints on the handle. The refrigerator was full.

  Nash and Kitteridge came into the kitchen.

  "Nothing," said Nash.

  Kitteridge said nothing.

  "What?" asked Mac.

  "I don't know," said Kitteridge. "There's something creepy about the house. I think it's more than the murders. I don't know."

  "Maybe you picked up on something you saw or heard or smelled," said Mac.

  "Go with the gut," said Nash.

  "This is going to take a while," said Mac. "Keep searching the house. Go with that feeling. Then go ask the neighbors if they saw Shelton. There's an older woman across the street. Her name's Maya Anderson. She spends a lot of time looking out her window and she knows what Shelton looks like."

  "Got it," said Nash, who went back through the door.

  Mac took out his cell phone and called Danny.

  Danny was at home, sitting in his comfortable chair with the slight tear on the right arm, watching an ancient episode of The Rockford Files. His shoes were off and he had a glass of iced tea on the table next to him. The glass rested precariously atop a pile of magazines, mostly old, mostly about forensics. His tremor was still there, but he had the feeling, maybe just a hope, that it was somewhat better. He had taken Sheila Hellyer's advice and another one of the pills. He had also left a note on Mac's desk telling him that he had gone home and why he had done it.

  He could tell from Mac's first words that he hadn't yet received the note. Danny hit the mute button on the remote he was holding.

  "I'm at the Vorhees house," said Mac. "Shelton was here. He called me."

  "You need me there?" asked Danny.

  "The knife is here," said Mac. "And we've got to dust everything in the kitchen, contents of the refrigerator, pantry. It's going to take a while."

  "I'll be right there," said Danny.

  He hung up, sat for a few seconds, looked at James Garner, who seemed exasperated. Danny realized that he had no idea what was happening in the episode. He hit the power button to turn off the TV. He stood, reached for the iced tea, forgetting about the tremor. He knocked the glass over. Tea puddled on the magazines and wooden table and made its way around melting squares of ice.

  Danny would clean it up later. He slipped on his shoes, got his kit, which was standing next to the door, and went out into the heat of the day, wondering if Shelton had said anything about what had happened to Jacob Vorhees.

  * * *

  The photographs of the crowds in front of the two temples where the murders had taken place were laid out on the table. There were eighteen of them, eight-by-tens. The photographs were also on a disc, but they wanted to look at them all laid out at the same time.

  Flack, Aiden and Stella leaned over them, looking for people who might be in both crowds, searching for possibly familiar faces, scanning each person for a suspicious look, frown, smile.

  "That guy, that guy, that woman," said Aiden, pointing at people in the photographs.

  One man she had pointed to in the photographs was at least eighty. He had the same sad look in both photographs. Another man was dressed in black, bearded, wearing glasses, definitely Orthodox. He looked somber. None of the others were particularly interesting, but you never knew.

  "That's it," said Flack.

  "No," said Aiden. "Look at that man."

  She pointed to a man in a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, his hands at his sides. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt. He stood between a weeping woman and a black man in a white shirt who craned his neck to get a better view of what was going on. There was a glint of light that suggested the man in the cap was wearing glasses, but it was impossible to clearly see his face or determine his age.

  "And here," Aiden said, flipping through the pile of photographs from outside the second crime scene.

  She pointed. The man's back was turned, but it was definitely the same man in a baseball cap, same height, shoulders and back straight, military bearing.

  "Any other pictures of him?" asked Flack.

  "One," said Aiden. "My favorite."

  The man was moving away from the camera, looking back over his left shoulder, head down, eyes in the shadow of the brim of his cap, sun glinting from his glasses.

  "He's looking at the camera," said Aiden. "And he doesn't want to be recognized."

  There was something familiar about him to Stella. Maybe she was just tired. She knew her allergies were about to kick in and might be fueling her imagination and memory, but she didn't think so.

  She looked at the man again and had the eerie sensation that he was looking directly at her.

  "Let's blow him up and see what we can see," she said.

  Aiden nodded.

  6

  HAWKES WORKED ON THE BODY OF JOEL BESSER, trying to get Nancy Sinatra singing that damned Bang Bang song out of his mind. He had left his iPod at home, forgetting to put it in its plastic case. That had never happened before, and now his punishment was the voice of Nancy Sinatra.

  When he removed the two bullets from the skull and held them up with his tweezers, he knew he was dealing with a very small caliber weapon, a small weapon used by someone who knew what he was doing. The shots had been perfectly placed to kill instantly, the same pattern, almost the same location as the shots that had been fired into the head of Asher Glick.

  The nails had definitely been driven in post mortem by someone with a strong arm, a left arm according to the angle of the penetration. It didn't take an expert to know that whoever had done this had also killed Asher Glick. Only this time he had not been hurried.

  Unlike Glick's case, no member of the Jewish Light of Christ stepped forward to protest an autopsy. So Hawkes was as thorough as he could be.

  He always felt like apologizing when he made that first incision. It had to be done. It was not Sheldon Hawkes who was violating the body. Hawkes was giving the dead person on the table a last chance to point a finger at his killer, the one who had fired two bullets into his brain. He made the first incision.

  "Bang, bang," came Nancy Sinatra's voice.

  * * *

  They now knew a few things about the man in the baseball cap who had been in the crowds at both murders.

  Stella and Aiden hovered over the blowups of the man. The resolution was good, not perfect but good enough to see that the hair at the back of the man's cap was gray. There were also age spots on his visible hand and, in a further blowup, they could make out several hairs growing on the ridge of the man's ear. They both agreed that the man was somewhere between his mid-fifties and sixty-five or even older.

  "That shot," Stella said, pointing at one of the photographs. "Pull it up on the screen."

  Aiden nodded and started hitting keys. Images raced by until she found the one Stella had indicated. "What's that on his shirt pocket?"

  Aiden started to blow it up. Since the picture of the man was only a small section of a large crowd scene, the image began to lose resolution as Aiden enlarged and focused on what looked like a small gold pin.

  "I think we can enhance it a little," said Aiden. "Maybe partial images on other shots, but I think I know what it is."

  Stella looked at Aiden, who stared at the photograph.

  "I think it's military, a unit pin. My father had one. He never wore it. I'll see what I can find, but there's not much there."

  "He stands straight, military," said Stella. "Thick neck."

  "He works out," said Aiden.

  "Could be our killer," said Stella. "In some of the photographs, he's standing next to people who might remember him."

  Aiden knew what she meant. In one of the photogr
aphs, the man in the cap was standing next to a man in black, a man with a black beard and hat, a man Stella recognized as being one of the same men she had seen in Asher Glick's congregation.

  Stella wiped her nose.

  "You too?" asked Aiden, who was feeling the first effects of seasonal allergies in her itchy eyes.

  Stella, on the other hand, had a stuffy nose and a slight headache. It wasn't really bad and she knew it wouldn't be, but when she got home, she might have a dose of antihistamine syrup.

  She looked again at the photographs of the man in the cap. She had now looked dozens of times, sensing that she had seen him before, but not knowing where. She knew enough to let it alone and hope that it came to her like the name of a movie actor or author you know well but suddenly forget.

  "Let's find Flack," Stella said, standing.

  * * *

  Getting a search warrant for Joshua's apartment had been easy after Flack did his research. Judge Obert had signed it when Flack told him the story. The judge was well over seventy and more than ready to retire, but he had hung on through occasional lapses in which he could barely keep himself awake, even on the bench. Regular doses of Modafinil, originally used for narcolepsy, had alleviated the problem, though the judge found himself taking the pill far more often than his doctor had prescribed.

  Obert had handed the warrant to Flack, saying with both contempt and resignation, "These people."

  Flack didn't want to know who "these people" were. He was sure he would not like the answer.

  As he opened the door to Joshua's apartment, Flack went over what he knew. He knew that Joshua was an alcoholic and had done hard time. His prison medical record, which had come to CSI about an hour ago, showed Joshua had developed lightheadedness and temporary losses of memory. He also had violent episodes and had almost beaten another inmate to death after a disagreement over something Joshua had been unable to remember. Joshua had announced his new name after the attack on the man. No one really gave a shit. Joshua had begun to seek converts, going first to prisoners who had Jewish-sounding names. The effort had almost gotten him killed.