Blood On The Sun

by Stuart Melvin Kaminsky

  Behind him, a dozen or more feet away, something scurried. He knew it was rats, more than one. So far they hadn't bothered him, although once, during the night while he slept, he was awakened by a single rat running past him.

  He had bolted up, immediately awake and breathing hard, seeing Becky and his mother bleeding, dying.

  I'm twelve years old, he told himself. Things like this shouldn't happen to a kid. Then he remembered the television images of the dying people of Africa, the near skeletons that once were children and were now large-headed, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, blank-staring soon-to-be corpses. One of the sandwiches in the cooler near him might be able to save a child in Niger, but Jacob knew this was not a realistic possibility. Jacob lived in a hell no child should have to endure, but there were others whose hell was even deeper and darker than Jacob's. He kept telling himself this, rocking back and forth, arms wrapped around himself.

  Something, someone moved, not a rat in the tunnel, but someone on the other side of the wall. The wooden floors of the room creaked with almost every footstep.

  Kyle's coming back, Jacob thought, taking the pillow in his arms, not for protection but for comfort.

  Then Jacob heard another sound on the other side of the wall, a sound he couldn't make out, like… a dog sniffing.

  Why would Kyle bring a dog here?

  * * *

  The news shop owner wanted to cooperate. He longed to cooperate. He sweated to cooperate with Flack.

  The shop was small. So was the Korean man behind the counter, who knew he was sweating but was afraid to wipe his neck and brow, afraid the determined-looking policeman might think him guilty of something. In North Korea, Sak Pyon had lost most of his family by the 1980s. His mother, his brother, his oldest son, all of whom committed the crime of insufficient enthusiasm for Communism, at least in the minds of the five men in loose brown uniforms who came to his home just before sunrise on a day almost as hot as this one.

  The five men, all barely men at all, had let Pyon, his wife and his daughter live to tend the rice field. But Pyon and what remained of his family knew they would be back, would almost certainly kill them. Pyon, his wife and his daughter had trekked through boggy fields of sickly rice and forests of skeleton trees and skirted villages, expecting to be shot from behind as traitors. After six weeks, moving only at night, they had made it to the forty-eighth parallel, crawled past the North Korean guards and almost been shot by the South Korean guards as they crossed the border.

  It took four years working at the American embassy to finally be granted political asylum in the United States.

  "Videotape," said Flack, pointing up at a camera aimed at them and waking Pyon from his reverie.

  "They don't work," said Pyon. "They just have a battery that powers the green light you see. Too much money to get real ones. Don't need them."

  He had only a slight accent.

  "And if you get robbed or shot?"

  "I become less able to provide for my family," said Pyon. "And if I'm shot, I have insurance if I am not killed."

  Pyon glanced at his watch. It was one of his two golf days. His wife would be in soon to relieve him so he could take the train to Queens and go to the golf course, where his clubs sat in a locker he rented. Golf was his meditation, an exercise in skill and precision. It was about losing oneself in the stroke and, at the end, finding a great satisfaction if a stroke or two could be cut from the last outing's score.

  "What about catching the robbers?" asked Flack with resignation.

  "They will no longer have my merchandise or money," Pyon said, hoping the sweat wasn't streaming down his face as he imagined it was.

  "What about them paying for shooting you?"

  "It does me and my family no good," said Pyon. "And I have insurance. I abandoned vengeance when I was in Korea."

  "Okay," said Flack with a sigh. "Did you recognize the man?"

  "Never saw him before," said Pyon.

  Flack neither believed nor disbelieved him. He had dealt with Asian refugees before. They were very good at lying. They had been taught how to do it in the hells of places like North Korea and Laos.

  "So you couldn't identify him?" asked Flack.

  "Yes."

  "Yes you could or yes you couldn't?" Flack said, calling on his reserves of patience.

  Flack hadn't had much sleep in the last twenty-four hours. To be precise, he had slept for approximately two hours and forty-eight minutes.

  "Yes, I could," said Pyon, no longer able to maintain control.

  He pulled a large, crumpled white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and neck. Flack took his own already moist handkerchief out and did the same.

  "It's almost a hundred and four degrees out there," said Flack, pocketing his handkerchief.

  Pyon nodded.

  "If you like," said Pyon. "I could draw a picture of the man. I've been taking art courses."

  Flack smiled and said, "I'd like you to draw a picture of the man."

  "Now?" asked Pyon.

  Pyon was trying hard to be cooperative, or at least appear to be.

  "Now would be perfect," said Flack. "You want to lock up for a while? I'll take you someplace air-conditioned for a sandwich and coffee."

  "Scrambled eggs and Dr Pepper," said Pyon. "Ginsberg's is just around the corner."

  * * *

  Aiden had been right.

  "Yes," said Jane Parsons, looking at the packet Aiden had handed her. "Trees have DNA. It's been used a few times as forensic evidence. Landmark case by a professor at Purdue University. It held up in court."

  Aiden smiled.

  "You think this might be from a piece of furniture?" asked Jane.

  "A piece of furniture made out of bloodwood," said Aiden.

  "I'll check the DNA. Tannic acid levels should be precisely the same in both specimens regardless of the type of tree we're talking about. The same is true of arsenic levels."

  "Arsenic is in trees?" asked Aiden.

  "Before it became illegal to do so," said Jane, "arsenic was liberally sprayed on trees and furniture to protect them. Magnesium levels should also be the same in both sources. It's going to take a little time."

  "How much time?" asked Aiden.

  "This is a very small sample. Three days, maybe only two," said Jane. "I'll need a sample of whatever you want me to compare it with as soon as possible."

  "I'll get it," Aiden said. "Then you'll have to work fast. In three days, he may kill again."

  "I'll need approval from Mac to move this to the top," said Jane.

  "I'll get that too," Aiden said.

  She made the call to Mac. It was after dark, but she was sure he wouldn't mind. He didn't. He gave her permission to move to the top of the testing chain. She handed the phone to Jane who said, "Yes?"

  That was all she said. The call took no more than a few seconds.

  "There was something wrong with the connection," Jane said with a sigh as Aiden put her phone away.

  "He was whispering," Aiden said.

  The next question that either could have asked of the other was 'Why?' but neither did.

  Aiden strode to the door and out. It was getting late but she knew Arvin Bloom and his wife lived above his shop and she was reasonably certain they went out very little, if at all. The shambling pale Bloom had a languid, sedentary look.

  Aiden knew there were some holes in her theory. First, the killer was left-handed. Bloom was right-handed. Second, if Bloom had an alibi for the murder of Joel Besser, she had a major problem. Third, both killings had looked like the work of a professional- two small-pattern shots to the back of the head. A pro who was also some kind of religious nut, or a professional pretending to be. They had run a background check on Arvin Bloom. He seemed a very unlikely hit man.

  When she ran his prints they matched to a job application that told her Arvin Bloom was fifty-three years old, a native of Tacoma, Washington, who had earned an undergraduate degree in botany at the Univers
ity of Washington. No military record. No criminal record, not even a moving vehicle violation, at least none they could find. He had a wife, no siblings, no cousins, and his parents were dead, father from a heart attack, mother from lung cancer. Arvin Bloom had gone through six jobs in the past twenty years, making his way across the country, working as a carpenter, home builder, cabinet maker, and finally an owner of a furniture restoration shop in Manhattan. He had a weapons permit, which was the reason Aiden had found his fingerprints. Aiden had seen the gun, a.45 mm handgun that looked and smelled as if it had never been fired. Most shop owners in Manhattan had gun permits. The gun that had been used to kill Glick and Besser was a.33 mm.

  There were other holes in the theory and she wasn't giving up on Joshua, the man in the USS Walke cap or some third person they hadn't even considered yet.

  The cell phone she had placed in the cup holder by the steering wheel rang.

  "Bloodwood," Jane said, and hung up.

  Before she could put the phone back in the cup holder it rang again.

  "Got a drawing of the guy on the tape who went through the magazine shop," said Flack. "Pyon, the guy who owns the place, is good enough to be a police sketch artist."

  "Is it Arvin Bloom?" asked Aiden.

  Flack reached into a folder under his arm, opened it and pulled out the drawing. It didn't look like Bloom. The man in the drawing was gaunt, receding hairline, about thirty, probably Hispanic, clean shaven.

  "Could be any of a million people in this city," he said. "And he's not on our radar in this case. At least he wasn't till now."

  "Bloom?" asked Flack.

  "I'm not giving up on him. I'm on my way over to his place now," she said.

  "Then so am I," said Flack. "You call Stella?"

  "I'll do it now," said Aiden. "We'll wait for her to meet us."

  * * *

  Danny sat back in his chair in the dark, a sandwich in one hand, the remote in the other. He had forgotten what kind of sandwich he was eating. He adjusted his glasses, eyes on the glowing screen. Baseball game. The Mets. He didn't know the score or what inning it was. The announcer said, "It's more than hot out there today. The Mets' white uniforms have turned gray from the sweat."

  Danny was wearing a pair of boxer shots an ex-girlfriend had given him. The shorts were black with penguins marching all over. Danny looked down at his New York Mets T-shirt and thought about his grandfather, the one with the tremor diagnosed as Parkinson's. His grandfather had been a cop. His father had been a cop. The Messer men and a few of the women had been NYPD going back for generations.

  Danny was tired, needed a shave, wondered if he could still throw a decent slider and changeup. He had been a genuine prospect ten years ago. He was encouraged by three major league teams. Then his arm went and along with it, after surgery, his fastball. He had been consistently clocked at ninety miles an hour, but now he knew he would be lucky to throw at eighty, which, for most major league pitchers, was just a changeup.

  He remembered the can of Sprite on the table, put down the remote and took a sip. The tremor was back, almost undetectable.

  Then, with no warning, Danny was having an anxiety attack. He had had three attacks in his life. He put his head between his legs and took long, slow breaths until he was back under control. He stayed with his head bowed for a few minutes more, then stood suddenly.

  He wanted, needed to find something to do, but he knew he couldn't get in bed, couldn't sleep, couldn't listen to music, couldn't watch the game. He considered getting dressed and finding a twenty-four-hour restaurant where he could sit with other customers, or at least a waiter, and nurse a decaf coffee and a donut.

  He moved to the table in the corner on which his computer sat. There was more room in the bedroom, but Mac had once suggested that one shouldn't work in the same room in which one slept.

  Danny sat, touched the mouse; the monitor gave off three tones that were meant to be calming, and the screen lit up.

  He browsed for more than an hour, following a thread about the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, then he switched to a search for Kyle Shelton. There were dozens of Google hits, none that matched their suspect. He narrowed the search to "Kyle Shelton, philosophy."

  He still got a long list of sites, but the first one brought Danny awake. He cleaned his glasses on his Mets shirt and found out some things that had not turned up in the routine bio check.

  Kyle Shelton had a web site. At the top of the home page were three black-and-white photographs of a pair of hands. In the photograph on the left, the hands were open palms facing the camera. In the center photograph, the hands were folded in what appeared to be prayer. And in the last photograph, the hands were tightly clenched, knuckles white. Anger?

  There was a comment in script just below the photographs. It read:

  * * *

  Imagine a vast valley full of rocks, boulders, as far as the eye can see in any direction. Now, imagine a butterfly the size of a baby's hand with wings so thin you can see through them. The butterfly lands on one boulder the size of a Volkswagen and begins fluttering its wings against the boulder, slowly, imperceptibly, wearing down the boulder. When the boulder is finally gone after more than ten times as long as life has existed on earth, the butterfly moves on to the next boulder, which is even larger than the first. When all the boulders and rocks have been worn to dust by the fluttering wings, then, and only then, will eternity have begun.

  * * *

  Beneath the words was typed in regular text, "Suggested by a passage in Ugo Betti's Crime on Goat Island."

  Danny reread the paraphrased quotation and felt somewhat calmed by it. Kyle Shelton was also a blogger. Danny clicked on the image for the blog site. A check of past entries showed that the site was kept up to date, a new entry at least once a week. There were no more than a few dozen responses to Shelton's stream-of-consciousness meandering. Danny read Shelton's entries, forgetting his anxiety. Some of the entries were about philosophers, dead philosophers with whom Shelton agreed or disagreed. There were quotations from philosophers in every entry.

  The entries were full of contradictions. Shelton did not believe in the goodness of man, but in the near sainthood of many individuals. He said he had learned that in Iraq. He did not believe in any religion, but he cited evidence of the power of prayer. The entries were all calm, not frenetic, not someone trying to convince his reader, but someone who felt the need to send his thoughts to the wind.

  There was only one subject about which Kyle Shelton raged: child abuse. Shelton did not consider human life sacred. There were many, mostly those who abused children, who Kyle said "should simply, painlessly, be executed, burned and their remains dumped into the nearest toilet."

  Danny kept reading, hand steady, focused.

  * * *

  William Wosak, SJ, thirty-eight, was a scholar-priest with a Ph.D. from Fordham. Wosak had written three books. His area of interest was correcting false conceptions and misreadings from holy scripture. Father Wosak, lean and graying, wore an almost constant bemused smile.

  He was certain that most lay Catholics did not read the Gospels, and certainly not the writings of the saints, with an interest in learning. They read, those that did, to find in what they read and what they heard in church on Sundays confirmation of what they had learned from their parents and misinformed nuns and priests who taught them as children.

  Catholicism was not in need of reform. It was the pervasive ignorance of Catholics about their religion that was in need of attention. Father Wosak also hoped that his writing would be read by the clergy of other religions. He wanted other Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and even atheists to understand, to be informed by his scholarship, not to get them to embrace Catholicism but to get them to understand what the religion really means. He expected very little success. It was enough that God had set him to his task and given him the intellect to undertake it.

  William Wosak's parents were immigrants from Poland. Both were dead
. Father Wosak had no siblings, only an aunt and uncle who had never left a small town outside of Warsaw.

  He had volunteered, both as part of his research and to strengthen his faith, to fill in for Father Cabrera at St. Martine's in Brooklyn for a year. He was in his fifth month at the church and it had turned out to be even more than he had hoped.

  Most of the congregation spoke Spanish. No problem for Father Wosak, who spoke fluent Spanish, Italian, Polish, German, Hebrew and rather rusty Latin. He conducted mass and services in Spanish.

  In his second week at St. Martine's, Father Wosak had made an appointment with Rabbi Benzion Mesmur, whose synagogue was six blocks from St. Martine's. The thirty-eight-year-old priest had introduced himself with respect for the eighty-one-year-old rabbi. Rabbi Mesmur had planned to make the meeting brief and remain in the small lobby of the synagogue.

  Father Wosak had spoken in Hebrew and Rabbi Mesmur responded in kind. It struck him that no one in his congregation spoke better conversational Hebrew than this priest. The smiling priest seemed to have no accent, while Rabbi Mesmur was well aware of the tinge of Crown Heights that clung to his Hebrew and would always be there.

  Within three minutes, the two men had spoken of the priest's interest. In his three file drawers, the rabbi knew he had at least forty sermons and as many as fifteen speeches on the misreading of the Scriptures and the Talmud.