It was clear that the priest's interest in the Talmud and its teachings came close to that of the old rabbi.
They moved to the rabbi's office and spoke for two hours. The priest returned on a weekly basis. Rabbi Mesmur looked forward to the meetings and their arguments over interpretation of holy writings. They never met at St. Martine's. Father Wosak never suggested it. He knew the rabbi would have to refuse. The moment would be awkward.
They had not had their usual meeting this week, but today Father Wosak felt that with two days passing, he could stop by briefly and give his condolences.
Rabbi Mesmur looked frail, his age increased by tragedy.
Rabbi Mesmur had insisted that the priest join him in his office. For reasons neither man could explain, they spoke in English.
"My congregation prayed for you and your loss," said Father Wosak. "I hope that was acceptable."
Rabbi Mesmur lifted a hand from the arm of his chair and said with almost a smile, "It can't hurt. And the misguided young dead boy who believed in Joshua's rantings?"
"We prayed for him too," said Father Wosak.
In the past, both men had spoken of the Jews for Jesus and Joshua. Both men had rejected the passionate overtures of Joshua and his followers to accept them. Rabbi Mesmur had refused to engage in discussion with Joshua, but Father Wosak had gladly allowed himself to be engaged in discussion with the man. It wasn't a matter of Joshua and his people trying to convert the Catholic priest as it was with Rabbi Mesmur's congregation. The Catholics already accepted Yeshua as their savior. But, like Rabbi Mesmur, Father Wosak did not believe one could be a Jew and a Christian at the same time.
Father Wosak had realized early in the conversation with Joshua that the man was only superficially knowledgeable about both Judaism and Christianity. But it was not just the man's ignorance that caused the priest to stop engaging in any further confrontations or discussions with Joshua. Fanaticism had been in the eyes of Joshua, a burning fanaticism. Joshua had wide-open eyes that couldn't stay focused for more than a few seconds.
With great reluctance, but with an understanding that he must do it, when Father Wosak left the synagogue he would walk the two blocks to the Jewish Light of Christ and express his condolences.
* * *
Half a block away, plastic cup of tepid coffee in one hand and a copy of the Post in front of his face, the man leaned against a wall next to a small kosher Chinese restaurant. His eyes seemed focused on the stories of mayhem, corruption and tragedy. He turned a page and took a sip of coffee without looking up. He had checked the thermometer in a resale shop window on the way here. The temperature was one hundred and one. The sky was clear, but the air moist. It had been the same for the past two weeks. People moved slowly, people who had to be outdoors or had a high tolerance for heat and humidity. Perspiration formed a beaded rain forest around his hairy chest.
The man he was waiting for came out of the building he was watching on the other side of the street and started down the sidewalk.
The man across the street would be the next to be symbolically crucified.
It would have to be done soon. One more death and it would be finished. He pushed away from the wall, dropped the coffee cup in a trash basket, tucked the newspaper under his arm and felt the weight of the bolts in one pocket and the heft of the hammer in the other.
The priest walked briskly. On the opposite side of the street, the man followed.
9
"YOU KNOW WHERE JACOB IS, DON'T YOU?" asked Kyle Shelton, who spoke slowly, drained.
Mac sat in the chair in the Vorhees living room, a cell phone to his ear. His temporary partner sat silently as darkness fell.
"Yes," said Mac.
"Then I'm going to disappear," said Shelton.
"Not possible," said Mac.
"Then you'll catch me," he said. "I'll tell you then what I tell you now. I killed them, Becky, her mom and her father. My prints are on the knife."
Mac was silent.
"You there, Taylor?" Shelton asked.
"I'm here."
"You think I'm a monster, Taylor?"
There was a touch of pleading in his voice.
" 'He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster,' " Shelton went on. "Friedrich Nietzsche. I stabbed three people to death."
"What monster did you fight?" Mac asked.
Kyle Shelton said nothing. After a long pause, he hung up.
Almost immediately the cell phone in Mac's hand began to vibrate quietly. Mac and Rufus went to the front door and stepped out. When the door was closed, Mac answered the call. Danny told him what he had found on Shelton's blog.
"I followed up and guess what I found?" said Danny.
Mac guessed. He was right.
"You want me there?" asked Danny.
"I want you to get at least eight hours of sleep," answered Mac.
Mac closed his cell phone and said, "It's time, Rufus."
* * *
Stella's cell phone rang and someone buzzed her apartment at the same time.
She popped her phone open and moved to the door to buzz her visitor in without asking who it was. She knew who it was.
Before he got up the elevator and to her door, Aiden had filled her in.
"Warrant?" asked Stella.
"This late?" asked Aiden. "It'll take too long. Let's hope he feels like being cooperative. If not, I'll wait there while Flack tracks down a judge who's awake and having a good day. You going to meet us there?"
Now there was a knock at the door.
"It's yours," said Stella. "Someone's knocking at my door."
She hung up, checked the pocket of her loose jeans, resisted the urge to tuck in her blue blouse, and opened the door.
"Agent Harbaugh, I presume?" she asked. "Right on time."
He was wearing a dark suit and tie, the FBI uniform. He was tall and older than she would have guessed from his voice on the phone. His neatly cut hair was white. His skin was weathered less from age than from the sun. He was definitely good looking.
"Come in," Stella said.
He did. She closed the door. There was no need for him to look at the paintings on the wall. He had looked at each one carefully the last time he was here.
"Would you like that Coke?" Stella asked.
"No, thanks. May I?" he asked, nodding at a chair.
"Please," said Stella.
He sat. She sat across from him.
He looked at her with a sad smile and sat back. He had come to kill her, but there was no hurry.
* * *
The shop was dark except for two low-wattage night-lights inside.
Flack knocked and looked at Aiden, who shifted the weight of her kit. Flack knocked again harder, much harder. The door rattled. If there were a sensitive alarm it would have gone off by now, but they heard nothing.
Flack didn't give up. More than two minutes passed before they could make out the figure of a man coming down the stairs inside the shop.
Arvin Bloom stopped for an instant at the bottom of the stairs, recognizing the police officers, and then, with what looked like a huge sigh that shook his body, he came to the door and opened it.
"We'd like to take another look at some of your furniture," said Aiden.
"Now?" said Bloom. "You are harassing me. Do you have a warrant?"
"No," said Flack, "but we can get one. Same deal as before. One of us gets the warrant. The other stays with you. How do you want it?"
"Come in," said Bloom, stepping aside. "I'd ask you to be fast if I thought it would do any good."
Flack and Aiden entered. Bloom closed the door behind them and made no move to turn on more light.
Flack stayed with Bloom and Aiden went into the darkness at the back of the shop. She was back in five minutes, saying, "The bloodwood cabinet. Where is it?"
"Sold, this afternoon," said Bloom. "I made a good sale. If I'd waited, I could have done better, but I wanted to get money ba
ck to the widow of Asher Glick, aleviah sholom."
"Who bought the bloodwood cabinet?" Aiden asked.
"A couple," said Bloom. "Maybe in their late fifties. Dressed like money. Handed me cash, $25,000. They didn't want a receipt and they had a van parked illegally in front of the shop. I helped them put the cabinet in the van."
"So you don't have a name or address for these customers?" asked Flack.
Bloom shook his head "no" and said, "It's not unusual."
"Where's the money?" asked Aiden.
"Got to the bank before it closed," he said. "You can check with the bank in the morning. I didn't kill Asher."
"We will," said Aiden, starting toward the door. Flack wanted to keep Bloom talking, but Aiden was now on the street, so Flack followed her, closing the door behind him.
"What's up?" he asked her.
They both looked through the window at Bloom, who looked back at them. Aiden and Flack moved toward their car.
"I picked up what looked like fresh latent prints on the wall the bloodwood cabinet was against. Two different sets."
"One Bloom's," said Flack. "The other the customer who bought the cabinet."
"Or the person who helped Bloom get it out of his shop," she said. "One more thing."
As they walked Aiden pulled a see-through packet out of her pocket and held it up for him to see.
"What is it?" asked Flack.
"Sawdust," said Aiden, smiling.
* * *
FBI Agent Harbaugh sat comfortably, legs crossed in the chair facing Stella.
"I like the paintings," he said, looking around the room. "That's an Andre Danton, isn't it?"
The painting he was looking at on the wall behind Stella was a scene of a narrow cobblestone street with houses seeming to bow toward the lone old woman on the sidewalk with a kerchief over her head and a basket of flowers under her arm.
"Yes," said Stella, without turning to look at the painting.
She examined Harbaugh again. He was lean, sat straight and was in obvious good shape, but she could see now from the age spots on his hands, the hair growing on his ears, that he was at least in his mid-sixties. His teeth were white, even and definitely his own. His face was weathered, the stereotyped image of a cowboy.
"Yes," he said, seeing the question in her eyes. "I'm a temporary retread, brought back as a consultant because this guy was mine until I retired. Nine people over a fifteen-year period. Texas, California, Illinois, Tampa. Stopped three years before my retirement."
Stella nodded, hands folded in her lap.
"Pattern," said Harbaugh. "Kills three. Gets his fix and goes underground till he has to start again."
"The crucifix? The victims? The words in Hebrew?" asked Stella.
Harbaugh shrugged and said, "All of his victims have been religious, not just Jewish. I think the last one in this cycle will be a Christian minister or a Catholic priest."
"Just a hunch?" asked Stella.
"Fits the previous pattern," he said.
"Is any of that true?" she asked.
For a few seconds they both sat silently and then Stella reached into the lacquered red box on the table next to her. She pulled out a small gun and a bottle and held them up for him to see.
The bottle was the antihistamine syrup from Stella's bathroom cabinet. The gun was her.38, and it was aimed at him.
"You were careful," she said, "but you moved a few things, not much, but enough for me to notice. A lot of my job is to notice small things."
"You think I moved your pill bottles?" he said.
"I know you did," she said.
He nodded, now understanding, and said, "Fingerprints."
"And two strands of hair in my bathroom drain where you poured the poison into my antihistamine bottle."
The man remained rigid, eyes on Stella.
"You're not and never were in the FBI," she said. "Your name is George Melvoy. You were born in Des Moines seventy-three years ago. You were a medic, an infantry corporal with MacArthur when he landed in Korea in 1950. After the war you went to Iowa State University, majored in pharmacy. You've had your own successful drugstore in Des Moines for more than forty years. Wife died six years ago. No children. I've got a photograph of you faxed from the Des Moines Register four hours ago."
Melvoy didn't move.
"You're losing hair," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"You know why?" asked Stella.
"Yes," he said.
Stella nodded and said, "Aluminum levels in your hair are high. The DNA we got from your hair shows three tiny abnormalities on some of your chromosomes, abnormalities that may be a sign of Alzheimer's."
" 'Tough old bird,' " he said, almost to himself. "And 'sharp.' That's what my customers say. In a year or so I'll be a grinning, helpless rag doll who doesn't recognize anyone. Well, I don't plan to be around when that starts happening. I'm glad you didn't use that medicine. It was a coward's way of killing."
"A capful wouldn't have killed me," she said. She had couriered the syrup over to the lab earlier, had them run an emergency analysis on the doctored syrup. "It might have made me sick. It would take the whole bottle to kill and even then it wouldn't be a certainty."
Melvoy shook his head and said, "Good thing I'm retired. I could probably kill a customer with a wrong prescription."
Stella put the bottle back in the open box on the table.
"Why didn't you arrest me when you found out?" he asked.
"I want to know why you want to kill me," she said.
"Don't anymore. I did when I walked through that door, but… Remember Matthew Heath?" he asked.
"Tall, thin, red hair, worked in the lab for a few months," she said. "He had a seizure. When he came back from the hospital, he was wearing thick glasses and found he couldn't look at the computer screen for more than a minute or two before he felt a seizure coming on. He just quit one day. I heard he was going to cooking school."
Melvoy was shaking his head "no" and said, "Matt went to a cooking school in Switzerland someplace. I paid. Matt's grandfather was my best friend. You've heard of the USS Walke?"
"Saw it on your cap in the videotapes at the two crime scenes," she said.
"Matt's grandfather died when the Walke was hit off the coast of Korea. He had one son and the son had one son, Matt. When Matt's parents died, the boy came to live with me. At the end, we were the only family we had."
"The end?" prompted Stella.
"Matt shot himself. At first I was angry with him for doing that to me, leaving me alone. Then I was relieved, relieved of the responsibility of propping him up. Then came the guilt. I loved the boy."
Melvoy laughed.
"Yes?" asked Stella.
"You're the first person I said that to," he said. "Never said it to Matt. Said it a few dozen times maybe to my wife. Saying 'I love you' doesn't come easy in my family."
He pulled himself together and sat up straight, letting out a deep breath and saying, "Ask it."
Stella knew what he meant.
"Why did you want to kill me?"
"Because you killed Matt," he said. "A good, happy kid who wanted nothing more than to please you. He wanted to be like you. Worked days without sleeping. Started to get headaches. Doctors warned him, told him to get another job. I told the boy I'd take him on as my partner and leave the drugstore to him when I died. Turned me down, talked about you. You never told him he was doing a good job, never encouraged him, kept pointing out the mistakes he was making."
Stella knew there was definitely some truth in what the man was saying, but there was also some ignorance.
"That's the way we work," said Stella. "It was the way I was treated when I started with the CSI unit. We see things, do things no one should have to see or do."
"And you like it," said Melvoy with a challenge.
"Yes," said Stella. "But it was the wrong career choice for Matt."
"He stayed with it because he wanted your approval," sai
d Melvoy. "And it killed him."
There wasn't much more for Stella to say, at least nothing that would help the man across from her. Melvoy's face had gone slack and his eyes were focused somewhere in the past.
Stella had treated Matthew Heath exactly as she had treated at least a dozen other incoming lab techs before him, lab techs who aspired to be in the field. The strong and the smart made it, many of them moving to other cities where there were jobs a step up on the forensic ladder. Stella had been sure the second day he was on the job that Matthew Heath was not going to make it, that the longer he stayed the more the job would get to him.
Melvoy forced himself back into the present, stood and began to reach into his pocket.
"Don't," said Stella firmly, the service revolver in her hand.
Melvoy slowly slid a small spiral-bound notebook from his pocket.
"I fill these things all the time now," he said. "Have a drawer full of them. I write down just about everything I have to do."
He flipped open the notebook, turned it so Stella could see the large block letters: KILL STELLA BONASERA.
"You're going to have to shoot me. Now's as good a time as any, just be sure to shoot to kill."
He put the notebook back in his pocket and stood.
"No," she said.
"For the past few months I've been having short blackouts, loss of memory. It's starting."
He closed the distance between them and Stella stood. "I won't shoot to kill," she said. "And I don't think you'll hurt me."
"I'm tired," said Melvoy, sitting again, eyes closed. "I'll make a trade."
"A trade?" asked Stella.
"I tell you who the next crucifixion target is and you shoot me," he said. "You a good shot?"
"Yes," she said.
"Deal?" he asked.
"No deal," she said.
"Didn't think so," he said with a sigh. "I can see why Matt wanted to be like you. Okay, I was watching you at the second crime scene. A priest in black, white collar, walked behind the crowd. I glanced at him. He looked at the storefront and crossed himself. When he walked past, a man at the rear of the crowd moved after him; only saw the back of him but he was definitely following the priest. Later, when the body was taken away, I went in the direction of the priest and the man who had followed him."
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