Blood On The Sun

1

MAYBELLE ROSE WAS SCREAMING.

It was a little after eight on a Tuesday morning on an usually quiet street in Forest Hills, a few miles from Flushing Meadows Park and Shea Stadium. Maybelle, black, overweight, around fifty, was standing in front of a white two-story house.

In the house next door, Aaron Gohegan was shaving, his electric shaver almost silent. He heard the screams and, shaver in hand, moved to the bedroom window, past his wife, Jean, who, night mask over her eyes and purple plugs in her ears, snored gently.

Maybelle Rose was looking around frantically, her screaming mixed with weeping.

Aaron, currently in his undershirt and trousers and barefoot, always left for work in Manhattan at 8:15 a.m. It had been his routine for twelve years. He had a reputation for punctuality and reliability, at fifty-two the youngest vice president at Raven-son Investments.

Today, he knew, as his eyes met Maybelle's, that reputation would suffer. Aaron put on the neatly pressed white shirt he had hanging on the closet door, slipped on his socks and shoes and headed out of the bedroom and down the stairs.

Behind him, his wife was dreamily saying something he didn't understand.

Maybelle was screaming louder now, hoarse, frantic, looking around for help as Aaron stepped through his front door.

As Aaron ran across the lawn toward Maybelle, Maya Anderson, the seventy-one-year-old widow who lived across the street, also hurried toward the screaming woman.

As the two neighbors came closer they could see thick beads of sweat on Maybelle's face.

Maybelle, who weighed almost 250 pounds, sagged into the arms of Maya Anderson, who weighed slightly more than 150. Amazingly, the older woman managed to hold up the now sobbing woman until Aaron stepped in to help.

On wobbly thick legs, Maybelle, gasping for air, turned her eyes toward Aaron, a pleading look on her face.

"What happened?" asked Maya gently.

Maybelle turned her head toward the older woman and tried to speak. Nothing came out but a dry rasp and something that might have been a word.

Aaron and Maya gently sat Maybelle down on the lawn. She was breathing rapidly, trying to catch her breath. Then she said, "Dead."

"Dead?" Aaron repeated. "Who?"

"All of them," Maybelle said, looking over her shoulder at the house behind her.

The door to the house was open. Aaron, who had been a medic in the first Gulf War, rose and turned toward the house. Maybelle's breathing was even harsher now. She reached for her chest and muttered, "Oh my sweet Jesus."

"I think she's having a heart attack," Aaron said, reaching into his pocket for his cell phone.

"The devil came to that house," Maybelle whispered.

"Don't talk," said Maya as Aaron punched in 911.

But Maybelle had one more thing to say.

"The blood, sweet Jesus. They are washed in the blood of the lamb. They're floating in the blood of the lamb. The devil…"

Aaron decided not to enter the house until the police arrived.

Six hours earlier, Danny Messer had gotten on an A train. There was no one in the car but Danny, who put down his backpack, sprawled on a seat, took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

He had spent the last sixteen hours, with two short breaks, looking at maggots, most of which had been found in the torn stomach cavity of ten-year-old Teresa Backles. Teresa's body had been buried under garbage in a Dumpster behind a subsidized apartment complex in Harlem. There were times when the garbage wasn't picked up for a week or more. This had been one of those times. The heat had accelerated the growth of the maggots and the decomposition of the girl's body.

Danny put his glasses back on and closed his eyes, seeing crawling white maggots. They were the Crime Scene Investigator's friend, revealing secrets of the dead, but that didn't stop Danny from thinking that someday he…

He had determined that the girl had died five days earlier. He could almost pinpoint the hour. The maggots were sometimes better at that than the medical examiner, especially if you knew what you were looking for. Danny knew.

Danny had put on a mask and climbed into the Dumpster, going through every item, including rotting, ant-covered takeout food and a single skinny dead rat with its mouth open, showing its teeth.

Teresa's mother's boyfriend had lied about when he had last seen Teresa. The maggots had told Danny. There was no mistake. The boyfriend, twenty-two-year-old Cole Thane, when confronted with the evidence, which included a single fingerprint on the outside of the Dumpster, had talked. He had planned to rape the girl and then kill her, but when the time came, he couldn't do it- a rapist-murderer of children with a conscience. So he had only killed and mutilated the child instead.

Cole Thane had searched Dannys eyes for sympathy.

A pill and a few hours' sleep and Danny would be ready to go back to work. The crime scenes didn't stop. They piled up. Bodies: fresh, decayed, surprised, at peace. More every day.

Was the search for the killers motivated by justice, revenge, morbid curiosity or professional pride?

Maggots. Cole Thane looking for sympathy. Danny's arm, the arm he had thrown out in his tryout for the majors, began to ache. Nothing new.

The air-conditioning in the subway car was running at about half power. Danny's wrinkled white shirt clung to him. He could feel the drops of sweat dripping down his chest and stomach.

A shower. A pill. Some sleep.

To Danny's right, the door between cars opened. He slowly sat up, languidly put his right hand on top of his backpack.

The two who had come in were Hispanic, no more than twenty, one lean, one muscled up. They wore identical black T-shirts with a single letter "T" in white over the heart.

There was a chance they would walk past Danny, but Danny Messer was from the streets above and, in the tunnels below, he knew better. They were only a few feet from him now.

Danny felt something- not fear, but something he hadn't felt in years. The feeling mixed with the flashing images of crawling maggots, a little black girl in a Dumpster covered in dried blood and maggots, Cole Thane convincing himself he deserved mercy.

The two young men stopped in front of Danny. The lean one took a knife out of a sheath in his pocket. The stocky one had a short lead pipe in his hand.

Danny's backpack was jammed with heavy books. He swung it at the stocky man as he rose. He swung it hard, with an animal grunt.

At six in the morning, Mac Taylor sat alone at a table in Stephan's Deli on Columbus, a copy of The New York Times in front of him. He had taken his usual three-mile morning run in Central Park at dawn before the sun gathered strength.

It was scheduled to get up to a humid 100 degrees by noon. Mac had finished his eggs over easy, wheat toast and small orange juice and was working on his second cup of coffee while he read.

Stephan's wasn't crowded; there were about a dozen people at the counter and the six tables. He wouldn't be bothered at Stephan's. The waitresses respected his faraway look. They knew he was a cop who saw things they prayed they would never have to see.

Connie, approaching sixty, with an ever-present weary smile, came to fill Mac's cup. He nodded his thanks.

"Gonna be a hot one," Connie said.

Mac nodded as he lifted his cup to drink.

"Got a busy day today?" she asked.

Mac met her lonely eyes and smiled.

"Not yet," he said.

His cell phone rang. Mac took it out of his pocket and said, "Taylor."

He listened and Connie stood nearby, hoping to keep contact with the soulful policeman, who said, "On the way."

He flipped the phone closed, took a ten-dollar bill and two singles from his wallet, placed them next to the check Connie had left, and got up from his seat.

"Bad?" she asked.

"Bad," Mac confirmed.

Danny Messer pushed his glasses back up his nose and listened to NPR as he drove. Traffic was heavy. It was always heavy in Manhattan, but he knew ways to get around it. It was his city.

Danny had managed four hours of troubled sleep. He hadn't dreamed about the dead little girl or what he had done to the two men on the subway.

Instead he dreamed about an incident that had occurred more than a month earlier when he had worked a rape-murder case. The victim, fifteen, had been torn up badly during the rape, her eyes gouged out. Then the killer had left the body in an alley, where the rats had gotten to it.

The killer had left his semen, and identifying him had been routine. The murderer's name was Lenny Zooker and he had already done five years for rape. He had been in his one-bedroom ratty apartment on 98th Street watching a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show when Danny and Don Flack came to pick him up. He was gaunt, cadaverous, his hair thin and brushed back. Teeth uneven. Eyes a moist brown.

Zooker had smiled as he let them in. In the middle of the room was the body of a ten-year-old girl and a thick pool of nearly black, fly-covered blood.

Zooker looked at the blood. Splatters of it covered the floor and shabby furniture.

"Haven't had time to clean up," Zooker said apologetically. "Should have. Was expecting you."

Danny had let out a grunt of pain and punched the grinning killer in the face. Zooker fell back, tripping, slipping in the dead girl's blood.

Now, in the car heading for Queens, he looked at his right hand. There was a definite tremor. It had begun when he woke up this morning. It had begun after dreaming about Lenny Zooker and those two dead girls.

In his dream, he willed them to live, to get up from the blood that shrouded them. Debbie, fifteen; Alice, ten. Danny had willed them to live, and just when he was sure Debbie's right hand had twitched, Danny woke up drenched in sweat, jaws aching, hand twitching. It had been 6:40 a.m. Danny had gotten up. He didn't want to sleep. He didn't want to dream.

Forty minutes later, Danny pulled into a parking spot behind Mac's car. This was a neighborhood in Forest Hills of well-kept, large old houses with matching immaculate lawns, far in distance and space and safety from where Danny had grown up. He got out of the car, first reaching back to get his evidence kit, and moved through the crowd of curious bystanders toward Mac, who was also carrying a kit, standing at the front door.

"What happened?" asked one woman with dyed red hair, wearing a robe she held close to her with both hands.

Danny didn't answer.

A uniformed officer stood at the front door. Both Mac and Danny had taken out their CSI ID badges and hung them around their necks. Danny had made a fist to conceal the tremor, which seemed to be getting worse.

"What have we got?" Mac asked the officer, whose name tag read WYCHECKA.

Wychecka couldn't have been more than twenty-five.

"Multiple," said Wychecka. "Upstairs. Two detectives in there, Defenzo and Sylvester."

"No one else comes in here," said Mac. "No one. Not even you."

Wychecka nodded.

Mac nodded back and moved past the officer with Danny behind him. Both men reached into their pockets and pulled out latex gloves. Danny had trouble getting his on.

"You okay?" asked Mac.

"Fine; let's work."

Mac looked at Danny, who took a camera from his kit and started up the stairs, taking photographs as he moved.

They could smell death, could smell blood as they moved up to the second-floor landing of the house.

The house was sunlight bright, furnished with comfortable antiques, solid, slightly ornate, expensive. The air-conditioning was running on high.

They walked on the well-polished wooden floor toward the sound of voices coming from one of the bedrooms. The door was open. On the bed were two female bodies, bloody bodies, hands folded across their chests, heads resting on pillows, eyes closed. The older of the two wore colorful Chinese pajamas. The younger victim wore only an XXXL T-shirt with USHER printed on it over the picture of a young black man whose mouth was open, singing a silent song to the dead. On the floor, collapsed on his right side, legs at odd angles, eyes open, was a man in a blood-drenched white terry cloth robe.

The two detectives on the scene greeted the CSIs with a shake of the head.

"Defenzo," the older one, short, solid, gray hair brushed back, said.

The other detective was younger, black, no more than thirty, with TV-star good looks. He was introduced as Trent Sylvester.

Mac handed each of the detectives a pair of latex gloves. They put them on, something they should have done when they entered the house.

Danny took photographs of the bodies and the room and placed his kit on the floor while Defenzo said, "Two on the bed are Eve Vorhees, mother of victim two, Becky Vorhees, seventeen. Man on the floor is husband and father, Howard Vorhees."

Mac carefully collected blood samples on cotton swabs and dropped them gently into sealable plastic bags, which he deposited in his kit while Danny took photographs.

Mac looked around the room. It was a teenage girl's room, filled with makeup and small framed photographs of young boys and girls mugging for the camera. Becky Vorhees, blond, pretty, was in all the photographs, often with her tongue sticking out. Mac leaned over the dead girl and touched his wrist to her arm.

She felt warm and stiff, suggesting that she had been dead between three and eight hours. If she had felt warm but not stiff, Mac would have estimated she had been dead less than three hours. Cold and stiff meant she had been dead eight to thirty-six hours, and if she were cold and not stiff she would have been dead thirty-six hours or more. It was a forensic rule of thumb; not precise, but helpful.

A better sense of the time of death would come after Medical Examiner Sheldon Hawkes examined the bodies. As soon as the three members of the Vorhees family had died, organisms in their intestines became active and began attacking the intestines and the blood. Gas formation could lead to a rupture of the intestines, releasing the organisms to attack the other organs. Muscle cells deprived of oxygen produce high levels of lactic acid. This leads to a complex reaction in which the proteins that form our muscles, actin and myosin, fuse to form a gel, which stiffens the body until decomposition begins. The stiffening of the body, rigor mortis, is due to this chemical reaction.

By examining the body, Hawkes would be able to determine a more precise time of death, among other things, dependent on the degree of decomposition.

But there were many other things an autopsy could tell them, all of which meant that Mac and Danny had to be quick, be thorough and get the three bodies to the lab as quickly as possible.

Mac looked down at the body of Howard Vorhees, who hugged himself, either to hold in his rapidly flowing blood or to protect himself from another attack.

"Cleaning lady, Maybelle Rose, found them when she came in a few hours ago," said Sylvester. "She's next door at a neighbor's. We tried to question her, but she just kept crying."

"We'll talk to her," said Mac.

"Weapon?" asked Danny.

"We're looking for it," Defenzo said. "But that's not all we're looking for. There's one more member of the family, a twelve-year-old son, Jacob. We can't find him."

Stella Bonasera and Aiden Burn stood in a small synagogue library on Flatbush Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and looked down at the body of a man who lay in the bright beam of morning sun that filtered through the only window in the room.

The black-bearded dead man wore a dark suit and blue tie. He lay on his back, eyes closed, head turned to the right. The man was laid out on a chalked cross, his hands- palms up- and bare feet pinned to the wooden floor by thick nails. Crucified. Printed in chalk on the floor were words in Hebrew: "Ein tov she-ein bo ra."

Against one wall was a loose pile of thick, long, almost black nails. There was also a hammer next to the nails.

On this wall, in what looked to Stella like the writing of a different hand than the one that had written the Hebrew words, scrawled in white paint were the words CHRIST IS KING OF THE JEWS. Were there two of them, two killers?

In the immaculately clean sanctuary just outside the door to the library, Detective Don Flack spoke to the bearded man in black. Flack had written the man's name in his notebook, Rabbi Benzion Mesmur. Rabbi Mesmur wore a wide-brimmed black hat. His wrinkled, arthritic hands were folded in front of him.

"Who is he?" asked Flack, who longed for a cup of coffee.

He had slept later than usual and hadn't had time to heat a cup of yesterday's coffee in the coffee-maker, nor had he had time to pick up a carry-out cup of coffee from the Korean deli on the corner near his apartment. Flack was not happy about this turn of events.

"Asher Glick," said the rabbi, looking at the closed door behind which Stella and Aiden were going over the crime scene.

Flack wrote down the name. "You have an address for him?"

The rabbi nodded and said, "I'll get it, but it's not necessary. His wife is outside with the others. Her name is Yosele. His children are Zachary and Menachem."

The rabbi closed his eyes.

"What was he doing here?" asked Flack.

The rabbi shrugged.

"I don't know. Morning minyan was over. The men all left for work, home."

Flack wrote that down.

"You know what a minyan is?" asked the rabbi.

"At least ten men who've been bar mitzvahed gather every morning for prayers," said Flack.

"You're not Jewish," said the rabbi.

"No, but my best friend, Noland Weiss, was."

"We had a Noland Weiss in our congregation years ago," said the rabbi. "He left us to join the conservatives."

"And the police. We were partners."

The rabbi waited for more.

"He's dead," said Flack. "Shooting during a routine drug bust. He saved my life."

The rabbi closed his eyes, leaned forward and said something in Hebrew.

"You know anyone who might do a thing like this?" asked Flack.

"Perhaps."

"Who?"

" 'Thou shalt not bear false witness,' " said the rabbi. "If he is innocent, as he well may be, I will have borne false witness."

"Rabbi…"

"Ask Yosele, his widow," the rabbi said. "She is outside with the others. She is the pregnant woman with two small children certainly clinging to her. I should let them in."

"It's a crime scene. Do you know why there's a pile of nails and a hammer next to the wall near the deceased?" asked Flack.

"Repairs," said the rabbi.

"Asher Glick?"

The rabbi nodded with understanding.

"Asher Glick was a respected member of our congregation," said the rabbi. "Devout without being pedantic."

"What did he do for a living?" Flack said, looking at the bimah, the raised platform on which the simple pulpit sat. In the wall behind the bimah was a recessed alcove with a sliding wooden door.

"The Torah," said the rabbi, following Flack's eyes.

"The first five books of the Scriptures," said Flack. "Transcribed by a sopher, a scribe, by hand on a single sheet of parchment using a quill pen. He devotes his life to slowly hand-printing the five books on a scroll. And if he makes even the smallest error, he has to discard the scroll and start again."

"It must be pristine," said the rabbi. "Like life, there is no going back. We have four Torahs. Your partner taught you something of our religion."

"A little," said Flack. "What did Mr. Glick do for a living?"

"Furniture," said the rabbi. "He bought antique furniture at estate sales, shops, usually from people who had no idea of the value of what they were selling. I am told he had a brilliant eye for what lay beneath a veneer of paint, polish, misadventures and neglect. He then found buyers who he knew would be interested in his acquisitions and the buyers would restore the pieces and sell them."

Inside the library, Stella and Aiden looked down at the body. It was time to call the paramedics and have them take the dead man away.

But Stella found herself studying the corpse. Something was wrong. They had missed something.

"How long has he been dead?" Stella asked.

Aiden had taken the dead man's temperature.

"About two hours," Aiden said.

"Those nails wouldn't have killed him," Stella said. "And he didn't call for help."

Stella knelt next to the body and gently lifted the head. Beneath it was a small pool of blood. Aiden had examined the body. Aiden had missed it.

Aiden knew why she had missed it. No sleep. Up all night in bed. Not alone. This morning, still hazy after two cups of coffee, she had been thinking of ways to tell him that it was over, that she didn't want to see him again. She wanted to let him down without pain, but she hadn't thought of a way. What she had done was foul up on the job.

"Bullet holes in the back of the head," said Stella. "Close together. No exit wounds."

She looked at Aiden, who was staring at the corpse.

"No harm, no foul," said Stella. "You all right?"

Aiden nodded, went for her kit to take more photographs and to vacuum the dead man's clothes. She also took samples of the thin layer of sawdust on the floor next to a makeshift carpenter's bench.

Three minutes later Aiden and Stella came out of the library. In addition to their kits, Aiden carried a plastic bag with a hammer inside and another one filled with nails. Stella carried the now folded chair.

The old rabbi and Flack were waiting for them, steaming cups of coffee in their hands. Aiden moved toward the door at the back of the synagogue to call in the paramedics.

"What do those Hebrew words mean?" asked Stella. "The ones printed by the body."

"Ein tov she-ein bo ra," said the rabbi. " 'There is no good with no evil in it.' It's a Kabbalah saying."

"So the killer was Jewish," said Flack.

"Not necessarily," said the rabbi. "The sole purpose of those words in Hebrew may well have been to make you think the killer was a Jew."

"You'd make a good detective," said Flack.

"The Talmud teaches us to be wary of simple answers," said the rabbi. "When can we have the body?"

"Maybe three days," said Stella.

"Unacceptable," said the rabbi. "He must be buried by tomorrow."

"Wrapped in a linen shroud," said Flack. "In a plain pine box. No embalming."

"He must be returned to the earth from which he came as soon as possible," said the rabbi.

"We'll try to get the autopsy done today," said Stella.

The rabbi was shaking his head "no."

"He must not be cut open, his organs removed," the rabbi said. "He must go naked and whole as he came."

"I'm afraid an autopsy is necessary," Stella said gently as two paramedics entered the synagogue, wheeling an aluminum cart that rattled and echoed loudly through the room.

"We will fight this," said the rabbi as he looked soulfully at the two paramedics.

"Many Orthodox Jews have had autopsies," said Flack. "Our medical examiner will be as unobtrusive as possible."

"But still he invades," said the rabbi. "We have lawyers. We will try to stop you."

"You'll fail," said Stella.

"I know," said the rabbi, "but since when is the certainty of failure a reason not to try?"

"We'll need the names of the other men at this morning's minyan," said Flack.

The rabbi shook his head.

"I cannot without their permission," he said.

"Then I'll get them another way," said Flack.

It was time to remove the nails in the hands and feet of Asher Glick. Stella returned to the small library, and with the help of the paramedics, she did just that, talking into a miniature tape recorder, indicating the depth of each wound through the body and into the floor. Then the paramedics exited the library, pushing the cart on which the body of Asher Glick now lay covered by a white sheet.

The rabbi watched as the cart was wheeled down the center aisle.

"If I get the names of those in the minyan another way, it'll take time, time I could be spending looking for Mr. Glick's killer," said Flack.

"I cannot," said the rabbi.

Flack gave up, put his hands on his hips and looked at Stella, who shrugged. They'd get nothing more here, not now.

"They should have sent a Jewish detective," the rabbi said softly, more to himself than Flack, Stella and Aiden.

No one said anything, but all three agreed.

"I should- must- go out to the congregation, bring them in," said the rabbi, leaning forward.

"It's a crime scene," said Flack. "You can't bring them in for a few hours."

The rabbi nodded and said, "Talk to Yosele. She is outside."

There was nothing more to say. The three investigators headed for the door, opened it and found themselves facing a crowd of bearded men of all ages, all wearing black suits and wide-brimmed black hats. The women had their heads covered by scarfs, and many of them herded children together. Behind this first crowd was another, smaller crowd of curious, young, mostly male black people.

Crown Heights had been the site of more than four days of rioting in August of 1991 after an ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher Jew drove his car into two black children. The African-American blacks and the growing number of Caribbean blacks joined in the riots and the attacks, focusing their rage not on whites, not on all Jews, but solely on the ultra-visible sect in black hats, suits and beards. Many in the black community had believed for years that these Jews got special treatment from the city. The belief erupted on that hot August night. Flack, a rookie cop, had been sent with hundreds of others to the 71st Precinct with full riot gear.

Tensions had grown somewhat less strained over the years, but they had not disappeared.

Had they heard that Asher Glick had been crucified? Flack was considering calling in the potential situation when a woman shouted, "Joshua" from the middle of the crowd of one hundred or more people.

The crowd picked up the chant, and the name "Joshua" echoed through the narrow street.

One of the men in the crowd, who was not dressed in black, and who did not pick up the chant, stood with one hand at his side and one in his pocket and watched the door. The hand in his pocket touched a photograph of Stella Bonasera.