Blood on the Sun (CSI: NY)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Jane had a massive headache. When she could, she would take a few aspirin. The pain was familiar. It went with the job. Her eyes burned. Her mouth was dry. She kept on working.

  Don Flack drank a cup of strong, heavily sweetened hot tea and listened to Hyam Glick, brother of the murdered man. They were sitting in the kitchen of Asher Glick’s house, four blocks from the synagogue in which he was murdered.

  More than a thousand observant Jews lived in the neighborhood, for many reasons. There was a sense of community, a wish to be near relatives, but most important, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, the Sabbath, they were forbidden to work or drive in cars. They were also required to attend services on both Friday night and Saturday morning. Far from ideal houses, many in the neighborhood were in need of major repair, but because of their location near the synagogue, when they went on the market, they sold for outrageous prices.

  The Glick house seemed to Flack to need no work. The floors were even. The walls were clean, white and unscratched, the furniture unscuffed, the ceiling showing no signs of water damage or sagging.

  Women were consoling Yosele and taking care of the children. Other men and women were preparing to sit shivah, covering mirrors, lining up chairs. Still others were out finding cakes, cookies and candy to set out on tables for those who would be coming to pay their respects and say the prayer for the dead.

  “The minyan,” Glick said with a sigh. “What can I tell you? I can imagine none of us doing a thing like this. Aaronson, Mendel, Tuchman and Siegman are over eighty. I can’t see any of them overpowering my brother or having the strength to drive nails into his…”

  Glick stopped, sighed and let out a sob. “My brother was a strong man,” he said. “He worked with his hands, his back, moving, lifting furniture. He…”

  Flack worked on his tea amid the bustle in the house and waited until Glick pulled himself together.

  “Black has Parkinson’s,” Glick finally said. “Tabachnik and Bloom are young enough, no more than fifty, and reasonably healthy as far as I know.”

  “Are they regulars at the minyan?” asked Flack. He knew Glick had already shared this information with Aiden and Stella, but he wanted to hear it for himself.

  “As I told your collegues, all of those present were regulars, except for Mendel and Bloom.”

  “Your brother particularly close to any of these men?”

  “To all of them. Asher was the solid rock of the congregation.”

  “What do these men do for a living?” asked Flack.

  “All retired but me, Asher, Mendel and Bloom. Mendel works in Schlosman’s Kosher Bakery. He’s a baker. His challah is acknowledged as the best in the city.”

  “Bloom?”

  “I know little of him. He’s new. I think he’s in the furniture business like Asher. Seems like a nice man.”

  Fifteen minutes later, on the computer in Asher Glick’s office next to the bedroom, Flack found a file of all the jobs Glick had performed for the past five years, including the work he had done, the cost to him in time and material and the money paid for each job. Flack also found a file showing outstanding debts. One of those was for $42,000 owed by Arvin Bloom from the morning minyan. It was almost two months overdue.

  In parentheses under the Bloom entry were the words “Time to face him.”

  Flack went through Glick’s e-mail, focusing on the last two days. There were ads for Viagra, Cialis, Rolex watches, cruises to Alaska. Flack went to the “Saved” file, opened it, scrolled down until he came to a recent one from Glick to Bloom. The message read:

  So you are my old Yeshiva school mate from Chicago. Welcome to New York. I’m sorry you have been ill, but I hope you are better now, at least well enough to see an old friend. Remember Chaver Schloct, how easy it was toget the poor little man flustered? I wonder what happened to him. In any case, I’d like to see you again. It would also be nice if you sent me a check for the money you owe me for the 18th century English dining room table and eight matching chairs your wife purchased from me. Partial payment would be fine for now. This financial transaction however has nothing to do with my desire to see you.

  Asher Glick

  Chad Willingham looked up from the microscope, rubbed his head, making him look even more like Stan Laurel, and grinned at Aiden.

  “Minute, minute, minute please,” he said, moving to the nearby computer and Googling the page he was searching for. “There.”

  He pointed to the web page, which showed what looked like a panel of dark wood at the top.

  “Bloodwood,” he said. “Great name. Grown in Brazil, French Guiana, Suriname.”

  “Rare?” she asked.

  “Think so,” he said. “Durable stuff, used for flooring, cabinets, furniture. Ever tried broiled iguana?”

  “This have something to do with bloodwood?” asked Aiden.

  “Not that I know of,” he said. “There’s just a place in Chinatown that serves it.”

  “You asking me to go to dinner with you to eat an iguana?”

  “No,” he said. “I just thought it was interesting, like seeing a unicorn.”

  “A unicorn,” Aiden said skeptically.

  “You know the James Thurber story?” he asked. “The one in which the man sees a unicorn in his garden and goes inside to tell his wife and she says he’s a booby and she’s putting him in a booby hatch, only she’s the one who winds up in the booby hatch?”

  “Is there a point to this, Chad?”

  “I like finding unicorns,” he said with a grin.

  The reasons for supporting the use of virtual autopsy were many, but the primary times Hawkes had used it were on members of the traditional Jewish faith. The procedure involved computer topography and magnetic resonance imaging. The procedure could also accurately determine the time of death using Virtopsy, MRI spectroscopy. When the procedure is used, a 3-D portrait of the corpse appears on a computer screen. The device can measure metabolites in the brain that emerge during post-mortem decomposition.

  The primary reason not to use Virtopsy was that few courts were inclined to accept the results. As a witness, Hawkes had always come to the point in the questioning by the defense attorney where he was asked if he had actually seen the organs. In this case involving an Orthodox Jew, the defense would have to be told that a Virtopsy was performed.

  A decent defense attorney would almost certainly ask if Dr. Hawkes thought the results from Virtopsy were as thorough as those in the far more accepted standard autopsy.

  “It would depend on who performed the procedure,” Hawkes would say.

  Then it would come. The defense attorney would ask: “Do you think this virtual autopsy was as thorough as you would have done in your standard autopsy?”

  And Sheldon Hawkes would be forced to say, “No.”

  Hawkes had decided to do his best to respect the wishes of Asher Glick and his religion, but when it came down to Hawkes looking at the very white naked man on the table in front of him, he reached for his long forceps. Even if he had to be intrusive, he would at least be able to say that he had tried. He had the information from the Virtopsy. He could focus on what the procedure had revealed. Three years earlier, Hawkes had been reamed by the deputy police commissioner for the bloody autopsy he had performed on a man named Samson Hoffman, who turned out to be an Orthodox rabbi, a singular fact that no one had bothered to share with Hawkes.

  So, now he began on Asher Glick by carefully removing the two bullets lodged in his brain. The Virtopsy had revealed their location. They came out cleanly, in good shape. He dropped the bullets in a metal bowl.

  Normally, he would simply cut across the corpse’s chest from shoulder to shoulder and then saw down the center of the rib cage. This would be followed by pulling back the ribs like two reluctant doors, beyond which were the vital organs. Instead, it took Hawkes about two hours to do this autopsy, being as careful and minimally intrusive as possible.

  He had three more corpses waiting for him, an
d who knew how many more might come in while he sat waiting?

  Hawkes was tired: sixteen hours without sleep, too much coffee, a badly burned corpse early that morning. He had discovered that she had been strangled before she was burned.

  When he was finished with Glick, he returned the man’s body to the drawer from which it had come, opened another drawer and moved the corpse of Eve Vorhees to the just-scrubbed steel table. She was a good-looking woman with neatly trimmed dark hair and punctured with holes.

  From time to time he had heard the comment at funerals that the corpse looked “peaceful.” Usually, that look had been manipulated by someone at the funeral home.

  This one, Hawkes thought, looking at the woman, looks genuinely at peace.

  He plugged the earpiece of his iPod into his right ear, put the iPod in his chest pocket and turned it on. It was a day for 1950s modern jazz, the plaintive trombones of J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, the deep soulful sounds of Gerry Mulligan’s sax and the sad knowing voice of Chet Baker singing You Don’t Know What Love Is.

  When Hawkes made the first incision he was unaware that he was singing along with Baker.

  The photographs were laid out on the clean laboratory table along with a small stack of computer printouts. Stella waited while Aiden took a white plastic bottle of saline solution from the drawer, tilted her head back and let two drops fall into each eye.

  Stella knew that looking at the computer screen for hours took its toll. Two years earlier, Matt Heath, a twenty-one-year-old computer geek with a winning smile and uncontrollable red hair, had finished a sixteen-hour shift at the computer. When he tried to get up, he was dazed, his vision blurred, and he had fallen to the ground with a seizure and gotten a split head that took ten stitches.

  He had come back to work after three days, wearing thick glasses. He seemed to be his old self until he sat down in front of the screen. He turned on the computer, listened to it hum to life, desktop images appearing against a light blue background. Matt Heath had immediately turned off the computer, gotten up and walked out the door. Stella heard he was now attending a gourmet cooking school in Zurich.

  “You okay?” asked Stella.

  “Fine,” Aiden said, picking up the printout and handing it to Stella. “Look what we’ve got.”

  “What time’s your appointment?” Mac said, looking over Danny’s shoulder at the computer screen.

  “Two,” said Danny.

  Mac had ordered Danny to make the appointment with Sheila Hellyer, the on-call NYPD psychologist. Everyone had periodic evaluative sessions, usually very short, with Sheila or one of the other psychologists.

  Mac had gone through five sessions with her after Claire died on 9/11. It had helped. He looked down at Danny’s hands on the keyboard. The tremor in the right hand was definitely there, but Danny managed to type, sometimes having to delete things and go back over keys.

  Mac didn’t have a tremor after Claire’s death. He had a sudden pronounced tic of his right cheek. It wasn’t something he could hide. He had taken time off and seen Sheila Hellyer. The tic had gone, but its disappearance had caused him to feel a constant guilt. While it made no sense, Mac felt that the tic was a reminder, maybe even a punishment, not just for his wife’s death, but for the vanished guilt. There were times when he missed the comfort of that affliction.

  A little more than a year earlier, Danny had been through a psychological evaluation after he had shot and killed a murderer who was shooting at him. At first Danny had simply seemed slightly distracted after the shooting. Gradually, he had begun to go into distant, dazed states for a minute or so. After the evaluation, Danny had gradually returned to his usual self, though the smile he had so often displayed appeared less and less.

  “Fingerprints all over the crime scene,” Danny said. “Most are what you’d expect, father, mother, daughter. Other ones, two in blood on the bed, look like a kid’s, but we have no prints on record for Jacob Vorhees, though prints in his room do match. But there are some other very interesting ones.”

  “Kyle Shelton,” said Mac.

  “His prints are all over the daughter’s room,” said Danny. “Some of them in blood.”

  “We have an address?” asked Mac.

  “Yeah. Should we get a pickup order out for him?”

  Mac looked at his wristwatch and said, “I’ll go on my own. You make it to your appointment with Sheila Hellyer.”

  Danny nodded, resigned.

  Joshua sat erect, a compact black leather Bible open in his hands. His black suit and white shirt were without wrinkles, recently cleaned. He wore no tie and was freshly shaved. He looked up over reading glasses when Aiden and Stella entered the room. He had been waiting for them.

  The two women sat across from him. Joshua closed the book and put it in his jacket pocket.

  Aiden put the printout on the table. Joshua didn’t look at it.

  “Your shoes had sawdust on them,” said Stella. “The sawdust matches the dust at the murder scene.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to tell me now that I can have a lawyer?” he asked.

  “You’re not under arrest,” said Stella. “But if you want a lawyer…”

  Joshua shook his head “no.”

  “I was there yesterday,” he said. “I went into that room and left a message on the wall: ‘Christ is King of the Jews.’ I did not criminally trespass. The doors to the synagogue were open. It is a house of worship. I did not deface property. The paint I used is easily washed off.”

  “Then let’s try harassment,” said Aiden.

  “I welcome it,” said Joshua. “A reprimand from a judge. Publicity for our beliefs. There is an evil among us, the devil. ’Be sober. Be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walks about, seeing whom he may devour.’ I Peter. Chapter five. Verse seven.”

  “Verse eight,” said Stella.

  Joshua looked up. Their eyes met. He took the Bible from his pocket, flipped through the pages, found what he was looking for and said, “Verse eight.”

  “When you read it almost every day, you don’t forget,” said Stella.

  “Nuns, priests?” Joshua asked, his voice betraying a slight quiver as he wondered who had influenced her.

  Stella didn’t answer. There were lots of things Stella didn’t forget. She had been one year old when she went into the city institute for orphans. When she was old enough, she was told that her father had abandoned her mother and his newborn baby and gone back to Greece, where he died in a knife fight in a bar. Stella’s mother died of pneumonia and the state had taken the baby.

  As she grew older she spent most of her time in the library, reading and watching movies. It was not nuns who had made her read both the Old and New Testament over and over. It was Stella herself.

  Some of the air of confidence had seeped out of Joshua as he returned the book to his pocket. For an instant he looked like a boy, a frightened boy braving it out. Stella nodded at Aiden, who looked down at the report in front of her.

  “Your name is not Joshua. It’s Warner Peavey,” Aiden said. “Your father wasn’t a rabbi. He was a Baptist minister in Rock Island, Illinois. You’re not even Jewish. As Warner Peavey, you do have three arrests on record. Did two years in Attica for armed robbery.”

  “I am Jewish,” Joshua insisted. “I converted to Reform Judaism and then to Messianic Judaism. Most Messianic congregations don’t believe you can be a Jew for Jesus unless you are born Jewish. Like Jesus, I was shunned by my faith. Did you know that anyone with Jewish parents is given the right to return to Israel as a citizen, even atheists and humanists, but not us? So here I am and here I and my congregation will grow in the heart of Crown Heights, and within these walls and in Yeshua’s eyes, I am a rabbi.”

  “Circumcised?” asked Stella dryly.

  “We don’t require that,” said Joshua. “All those things you have written there are the darkness of Warner Peavey. He was reborn five years ago as the person you see before you, Joshua,
second to Moses; he who led the Israelites into the promised land when God told Moses he couldn’t enter. It was Joshua who fought and defeated the armies of the people in the promised land. Joshua who brought down the walls of Jericho.”

  “You own a gun?” asked Stella flatly.

  “No,” said Joshua.

  “You’re left-handed,” said Aiden.

  “Yes,” said Joshua.

  Stella pushed a photograph in front of him. It showed the left side of Asher Glick’s body and the chalk outline. Joshua looked at it and shrugged.

  “Look at the chalk marks,” said Stella.

  Joshua looked down again and then up.

  “The crucifix is not one continuous line,” said Stella. “The killer paused every three feet or so. See how the chalk line is less heavy and tails off slightly to the left?”

  “No,” said Joshua.

  “The nails,” said Stella. “They’re through the hands and feet and deep into the hard wood. I hammered a nail in. I didn’t get it very deep and I wasn’t going through flesh. It took someone strong to drive them in like that.”

  Joshua was mute.

  “And,” said Stella, “the medical examiner called us just before we came down here. The nails were driven in at a slight angle from left to right.”

  Joshua waited.

  “So the killer was left-handed,” said Joshua. “So are millions. So was Christ. I can show you proof in the Bible.”

  “Medical examiner also said whoever shot Glick knew what he was doing,” said Aiden. “Two shots from behind, perfectly placed, like an assassination.”

  “Proving?” Joshua asked.

  Stella looked down at the sheet in front of her and said, “You’ve had a busy life.”

  Joshua shrugged.

  “When you left your parents, you did time for holding up a convenience store,” she said.