Blood On The Sun

10

JACOB VORHEES LOOKED DOWN AT THE KITCHEN TABLE and softly, without hesitation, said, "I was sleeping. I heard a noise from Becky's room. It was different from the other noises on other nights. I knew Kyle sometimes came through her window and they had sex. Sometimes she made a little noise. None of my business, but this was different. I got up and went down the hallway to Becky's room. I saw my father going in. When I got to Becky's door I saw it. Becky was on the floor. Kyle was on top of her. He had a knife and was stabbing her. My mother was on his back trying to stop him. Kyle was going crazy. I should have done something but I just stood there. Kyle stopped stabbing Becky, pushed my mother off of him and began stabbing her. Then my dad came in and went to help my mom and Becky. Kyle got up and ran at my dad with the knife. I ran out of the room."

"What were you wearing?" asked Mac.

"Wearing? I slept in my clothes. A lot of the time I fall asleep in my clothes."

"Your shoes?"

"I guess I was wearing them too," said the boy. "I don't remember. I just kept thinking, 'He's going to come and kill me next.' I ran downstairs to the garage, got my bike and started pedaling fast, getting away."

"You didn't think about going to a neighbor?" asked Mac.

"He was right behind me. I knew it. I could feel it. I just kept riding. Cars, a truck maybe went by. I think I was heading for the police station or the all-night gas station or the hospital. Then I heard him behind me, looked back. I drove off the road before he could run me over. Got scratched up, crawled into some bushes. I could hear Kyle coming after me. Then I saw the light, Kyle's flashlight. I got the crazy idea of taking off my clothes, dropping them on the way toward town, making him think that was where I was going."

"Why would he think you were taking off your clothes?" asked Mac.

"I don't know. I couldn't think of anything else. But it worked. I ran back here."

"Naked," said Mac.

"Yes," said the boy.

"Why didn't you call the police when you got back?"

"I thought Kyle might be right behind me," he said. "I closed my eyes when I passed Becky's room. I didn't want to see her and my mom laid out on the bed. I could smell the blood. I climbed up into the space over my closet. Even there I could smell the blood."

"Did Kyle come back looking for you?"

"Yes. I could hear him."

"He came in your room?"

"Yes. I could hear him moving around. I think he looked under the bed and I know he opened the closet door and turned on the light. I didn't cry till he was gone."

"Why didn't you come down when the police came?"

"I was afraid Kyle would find out and kill me. I just wanted to hide a few more days and then run away."

The boy was shaking. He was pale, sallow cheeked, filthy and covered with insect bites. Rufus sat next to him.

"He likes you," said Mac.

Jacob looked down at the dog and reached out a hand to pet him.

"You like dogs?" asked Mac.

"Some," said the boy. "Some scare me."

"Rufus is very friendly," said Mac. "Almost all bloodhounds are."

"He smells bad," said Jacob. "He stinks."

"Bloodhounds smell bad, especially when they're wet, which is why you don't see them at dog shows. Ever been to a dog show?"

"Seen one on television."

"It's better live," said Mac. "You sense it. The pride, training, grooming of the dogs."

The boy wasn't really listening. His hand rested on the head of the dog, whose eyes were closed in pleasure at the human touch. After he saw to taking care of the boy's injuries, he would make an appointment with a psychologist, hopefully Sheila Hellyer.

"Jacob," he said.

The boy looked up.

"Did you memorize what you just told me?"

The boy didn't answer. He took his hand from the dog's head and sat upright.

"Most of it wasn't true, was it?" asked Mac.

No answer from Jacob, whose eyes met Mac's and then turned away.

"That's the way it happened," the boy finally said without conviction.

Couldn't have, thought Mac. The boy had been through enough. He should be cleaned up, his wounds cared for and someone found who could comfort him. We'll go over it again in the morning, Mac thought, and see if we can get it right.

It was after midnight.

While she was waiting for the paramedics to arrive at her apartment, Stella had called in for an emergency department vehicle to pick her up immediately. When it arrived, she had simply told the uniformed officer behind the wheel where they were going.

The driver's last name was Fannon. When Stella told him that they were heading for St. Martine's Church in Brooklyn and a priest might be in danger, Fannon had made a serious attempt to break the sound barrier.

When George Melvoy had taken the poison, Stella had acted instantly. She knew the principle poison was turpentine. She had ipecac in her bathroom cabinet, but Stella knew that with turpentine poisoning vomiting should not be induced. Instead she gave him sips of water to ease the burning in his throat.

Stella helped the man off the chair. He resisted, but he was weak now and breathing hard. The convulsions were stronger now. She led him to the bathroom and sat him on the floor next to the tub.

Melvoy gagged twice, leaned over and spewed out a thick greenish spray of liquid that splattered in the tub. She held his head as he convulsed in pain again, that which he most prized, his dignity, now gone.

When the paramedics had arrived, Stella had held the hand of the man who had planned to kill her. The hand was dappled with age spots and his face looked as old as he really was.

At the hospital, they would probably place a tube down Melvoy's nose and into his stomach, a nasogastric tube, to wash out his stomach. He would be treated with activated charcoal and examined with an endoscopy, the placement of a camera down the throat, to determine the extent of the burns to the esophagus and stomach. IV fluids would be given. If the treatment worked, there could still be extensive damage to the mouth, throat and stomach. Damage might continue for weeks. He might recover and he might die in pain a month later. A hard way to die.

Now Stella sat across from Joshua in the same room at CSI headquarters where they had sat before. Aiden was working on the contents of the tote bag and Flack was in the next room listening. They had decided that Joshua would be more likely to talk to a single person. Stella, after a cup of thick, terrible tasting coffee, had volunteered.

Stella remembered that she would have to clean Melvoy's vomit off her tub. It might take a while. It would be hard and she would have to work at getting rid of the foul acrid odor. She had seen worse, worked with worse, but not in her own home.

"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, slightly 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.