Blood On The Sun

2

"NO SIGN OF THE BOY," Danny said. "No sign of the knife. We did find this."

He held up a thick see-through sealed plastic bag. Inside the bag were dozens of pieces of colored glass. Mac took the bag and held it up to the light.

"I used the spectroscope," Danny went on. "No sign of any blood on the fragments. Not surprising, since they were all killed with a knife, but…"

"I'll take this back to the lab," said Mac.

Danny and Mac were standing outside the bedroom where the dead were lying. Mac looked over the wooden railing and down at the polished wooden floor of the living room. The sofa was a dark green. Two oak, brown leather armchairs with matching hassocks. A solid, dark oak coffee table and standing lamps with glass shades. A large, colorful rug that looked handmade and Native American lay at an angle on the floor. A single, large gold-framed painting on the wall, the Vorhees family, about five or six years old. The girl was no more than twelve, the boy about seven. All were looking directly forward, displaying the same artificial smile that failed to capture anything about what any of them were thinking or feeling.

Danny followed Mac's gaze and looked at the painting. Mac didn't look at him as he said, "When we get back you make an emergency appointment to see a department psychologist about that tremor."

Mac also noticed- but said nothing about- the raw, red bruises on Danny's knuckles.

Danny searched for something to say, but couldn't come up with anything. Besides, Mac was right.

In the parents' bedroom, Mac found a framed nine-by-eleven color photograph of the entire family. The parents were seated and smiling. The children stood behind them, also smiling. All the smiles were those of people who had been told to smile, the same smile Mac and Danny had seen in the painting in the living room.

"Recent," Danny said, looking at the photograph. "The girl looks about the same."

Mac agreed and kept looking at the photograph. "Possible scenarios?"

Danny adjusted his glasses, looked at the photograph.

"The boy killed them and ran," he said.

"But?" asked Mac.

"But, the kid's no more than one hundred pounds, puny," said Danny. "Whoever did this picked up the two women and placed them on the bed. The mother weighs at least 150. The daughter weighs about 120. Blood drops but no drag marks. Whoever did this picked up the women, placed them gently on the bed and folded their arms, which leaves out the boy."

Mac nodded. Danny didn't know what the nod meant.

"Intruder," tried Danny. "Came in to rape the girl, got caught by the mother and father, killed everyone, felt guilty and laid out the women."

"You checked the windows?" asked Mac.

"No sign of forced entry. Windows all locked."

"How did he get in?" asked Mac.

"Don't know yet," answered Danny.

"And the boy?"

"Saw or heard what happened," said Danny. "Ran. Or the killer caught him and decided not to kill him, at least not here."

"Why?" asked Mac.

"Hostage," said Danny. "Or…"

"Pedophilia," said Mac. "Get all the samples to the lab. Tell Jane to get the DNA run as fast as possible."

"I'd better get to the lab," Danny said as they went downstairs.

"Psychologist," Mac reminded him.

Danny didn't speak.

"As soon as you get back," said Mac.

The front door opened and Detective Defenzo stepped in.

"Side door of the garage is wide open," he said from the living room. "Cleaning lady says the boy has a bike. There's no bike in the garage."

"I'll check it before I leave," said Danny, starting down the stairs.

Mac nodded an okay and moved down the hall. They had already gone over the other bedrooms. No blood, everything in place in the parents' room. Clothes neatly hung in the closet, bathroom clean with white towels hung symmetrically on white plastic rods.

The boy's room was small, relatively neat, with a pair of jeans and a shirt slung over a chair that faced a computer on a cluttered desk. The white light on the computer was on, indicating the unit was asleep. The bed was unmade, blankets thrown back, pillow crumpled.

The walls were surprisingly bare except for a large poster of a group of four young men who looked out at the world as if they had a dirty secret. A single word, "Coldplay," was written in script at the top of the poster. A large cluttered metal bookcase stood next to the bed. Mac picked up a book, one of the Harry Potters. A second book was a biography of John Glenn. The third book he picked up was different. The dust jacket of the book said it was The Tick-Tock Man of Oz. Mac opened it. It was definitely not about the Oz the dust jacket promised. It was a book about clinical sexual behavior.

Mac rechecked the boy's room for blood traces and found none. On the way to the boy's closet, he almost missed a small leaf no larger than a baby's fingernail in the threads of a bath mat-sized blue throw rug in the middle of the room. Mac bent, picked up the leaf with tweezers from his kit and deposited it in a plastic bag.

The closet was a mess of clothes piled on the floor and more clothes on hangers, the pants wrinkled, the shirts unbuttoned.

Mac was done here, for now. It was time to talk to the living, listen to the dead and ask questions of the evidence.

In the Gohegan home next to the house of the dead, the young black detective Trent Sylvester was alone in the living room with Maybelle Rose. He spoke to her gently and held her hand.

When Mac entered, the woman looked up fearfully.

"It's all right," said Sylvester. "He's one of us. A police officer."

An untouched glass of water already dancing with dust in the morning sunlight rested on the table next to the sofa on which Maybelle Rose sat.

"Never saw anything like that," she said.

"Almost no one has," said Mac, sitting on the arm of a chair next to the stunned woman. "How long have you worked for the Vorhees family?"

"Two years," she said. "Is he…?"

"We haven't found him yet," said Mac.

"He's a good boy," she said. "They were all good to me, my family."

"Any of the family have enemies?" asked Mac.

"None," she said. "Good people. Not church people, but good people."

"Relatives?" Mac asked.

"None I heard of," said Maybelle.

"They ever fight?" he asked.

"Not much," she said, looking at Sylvester for reassurance.

"What did they fight about?" asked Mac.

"Becky's boyfriend," she said. "Name's Kyle Shelton. Mr. Vorhees thought he was too old for her."

"How old is he?"

"Don't know. Maybe twenty-five. He was always nice to me the few times I saw him."

"Know where he lives?" asked Mac.

"No," she said.

"He have a car?"

"He does," she said. "Some kind of blue pickup truck, you know? Dented fender on the passenger side. Don't know what make."

"Anything else you can tell me about the truck?"

"License number," she said. "Easy to remember. BEAST 1."

"Could you come back to the house with me and tell me if you notice anything missing, particularly a knife?" Mac asked.

"They still in there?" she asked, looking toward the hall, beyond which stood the house of the dead.

"Yes, but we won't go back till the paramedics take them away in a few minutes."

"I can wait," she said, reaching for the glass of water.

When Mac got up, the front door opened and Detective Defenzo stepped in.

"I think we have a witness," he said.

Lying in bed, she could hear the sounds of the city street traffic rumbling by even with the air conditioner on full blast. She was fully clothed, in a loose-fitting white cotton dress with odd, almost symmetrical patterns of color that reminded her of the works of Piet Mondrian.

She had been an art major, had painted, but knew she wasn't good enough or daring enough to make even a small scratch in the Manhattan art market.

The television set was on, but she had turned off the sound. She closed her eyes and put her left arm over her eyes to block out the sun and the world.

She was going to be forty-three on her next birthday. She knew she looked at least ten years older. She was eleven pounds overweight and had no plans for losing any more.

The woman did not consider herself a failure. She certainly didn't consider herself a success either. She simply went through each day with books, trips to the Museum of Modern Art. Once she had enjoyed cooking. No more. Carry-out food was cheap, close by.

Her father, a big man, had been in army intelligence during and after the Korean War. He had always worn an accepting smile that suggested that he knew things others, especially his children, would never know and would be better off not knowing. When he had died in his room, he had insisted on being alone and having no clergy at his side. She didn't even know if he believed in God or had been born into any religion.

What did she know of him beyond that? His favorite food was duck. His favorite movie was Wild Boys of the Road. He read The New York Times from cover to cover every day that he was home. He seemed to be content with whatever television show the family wanted to watch. She had no idea if he had been a Republican, a Democrat or a Socialist.

Her mother, shaped not unlike the woman in the bed was now, had clearly loved her husband, had spent her days teaching at the local elementary school and writing in her diary. She had been born a Methodist. As far as the woman in the bed knew, her father had never tried to talk his wife out of her religious beliefs. She had simply let them slide away.

She heard footsteps coming up the stairs, light, almost noiseless. There was no point in pretending to be asleep. He would know.

Just as she had known, when her father had come back from one of his "duties" out of the country, that the man coming up the stairs had done something or seen something about which she would never learn.

The footsteps were at the top of the stairs now. The door opened.

"Tea," he said, holding out the tray with the small blue-and-white pot and the matching cup and saucer.

She looked up.

Yes, he wore the same look she had seen on the face of her father when he had returned from one of his "duties." The next few days would be dark.

She sat up, accepting the offered tray.

She strongly suspected that he had killed. She strongly suspected that he would soon be doing so again. Maybe it was her imagination, but they had been together for so much of their lives that she could sense it.

And he was well aware that she could sense it.

Defenzo and Mac walked across the street to the house of Maya Anderson. It was well maintained, recently painted, probably the most modest house in the neighborhood.

The gawkers, not many of them, were still there. Now they were watching the paramedics take out their cart and wheel it into the Vorhees house. It would be the first of three carts and the crowd would be thrilled, frightened, repulsed, and happy that they were still alive as each draped body was removed from the house. They would have a story to tell, something new to fear, something that could become part of the backlog of stories that almost everyone carried with them.

Maya Anderson opened the door immediately. Her gray hair was cut short and she wore jeans and a green long-sleeved shirt over her compact body. She was definitely more than seventy; her bright green eyes revealed a dancing intelligence.

She ushered them in, moved ahead of them to a small kitchen, motioned for them to sit and asked what they wanted to drink. "Coffee, Diet Coke, water, a beer, schnapps?"

"Nothing, thanks," said Mac.

Defenzo accepted a Diet Coke.

When they were all seated, Maya, hands folded in front of her, said, "I garden."

She looked over her shoulder out the window, where Mac could see a colorful array of blue, red, white and yellow flowers.

"I garden, read, watch HBO, take long walks and snoop on my neighbors," she said. "Used to be a bank manager. I don't sleep very much, which gives me a lot of time at the front window reading, watching old movies and seeing what's going on."

"What went on last night?" asked Mac.

"Morning. Around two. Vorhees girl's boyfriend pulls up in his pickup truck, parks down the block in front of the Packers', driver gets out and walks back to the Vorhees house. Goes in back."

"The pickup truck?" asked Defenzo, working on his Diet Coke.

"Blue," the woman said. "Dent on the right side."

"The man?" asked Mac.

"Sort of tall. White. Dark hair. One of those swaggerers, you know? Can't be sure if it was the boyfriend, too dark, but it definitely looked like him and he was driving his truck."

"Boyfriend come here often?" asked Mac.

"I probably shouldn't say," Maya answered with a sigh, "but what the hell. He'd drop the girl off in the afternoon, after school."

"Last night?" asked Mac.

Maya Anderson nodded somberly.

"Maybe some noise a few minutes after the boyfriend goes in through the back," she said. "Hard to tell. My eyesight's good, but my hearing leaves something to be desired. Besides, that old house has thick walls and windows. To tell the truth, I think I dozed off for a few minutes. Then I heard a car door open, got my glasses on and saw the boyfriend's pickup go riding off."

"Which way?" asked Mac.

"That way," she said, pointing, "toward Queens Boulevard." Queens Boulevard fed directly into the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan.

"Why didn't you call the police?" asked Defenzo, finishing his drink. Maya rose, took the can and dropped it into a covered receptacle marked RECYCLE.

"Over the last four years I've called the police fourteen times," she said. "Family fights, televisions turned too loud, dogs walking without leashes and pooping without anyone picking it up, Parker Niles from the next block drunk and throwing rocks at the streetlights, things like that. They don't take me seriously anymore."

"Thank you, Mrs. Anderson," said Mac, standing.

"They're all dead, aren't they?" she asked.

"We haven't found the boy yet," said Mac.

"I hope the boy got away," she said.

"We're going to find out," said Mac.

Instead of heading for his car, Mac crossed the street with Defenzo at his side, paused in front of the Vorhees house and looked around at the trees. For the next fifteen minutes, Mac inspected every tree on the Vorhees property and every one two houses down on either side of it.

Finally, he stopped, looked up and down the street.

"What?" Defenzo finally said, unable to hold it in any longer.

"No match," said Mac, deep in thought.

"For what?" asked Defenzo.

Instead of answering, Mac headed for his car, behind which the paramedic truck was parked. He paused for an instant as the paramedics brought out the first body.

Kyle Shelton drove.

To the world afraid of tomorrow and grieving over yesterday, he was Kyle Shelton, who knew how to put on clean jeans and a pressed long-sleeved shirt to hide his tattoos.

He knew the value of good teeth, had his own straightened, cleaned and whitened regularly and a nine-to-five haircut.

Even though he held a college degree, he now held down a job on the shipping dock of a super-sized hardware store in Manhattan, caused no trouble, smiled when the others laughed. A year of combat infantry in Iraq had changed him. Death, violent death, was now a part of his everyday experience.

He had earned his degree in philosophy at City University of New York. Kyle had been lucky enough to find a young professor with a Ph.D. from Brown to mentor him. The degree was validation, a sheet of paper he could show but never would. If he had ambition before, he had lost it in Iraq. He already knew more of philosophy than others he had seen graduate before him.

The sun had been up for a few hours. Kyle looked back in the general direction of Queens, back on what was lost forever. He had gone back to his one-room apartment on 101st, packed one large bag, and stopped for gas when he hit New Jersey, using his Visa card as payment.

He drove slowly. Cars, trucks passed him. He saw it all. Was it just hours ago? A dream? No dream. Becky, her mother, her father, dead. The knife. The knife sat on the seat next to him wrapped in paper towels. He hadn't decided what to do with it.

Just before three in the morning on the night before, in drenching heat and darkness, he had driven a mile, no more, saw the dirt path he was looking for in the wooded area next to the road, and turned onto it. After going a few feet, sure he couldn't be spotted from the road, he had parked, turned off his lights, got out of the car and with the flashlight from his glove compartment in hand, entered the thicket. He found what he was looking for, a clearing. He decided it would do and went back to the truck to get what he had placed in the back and covered with his stained canvas tarp.

No more than five minutes later, Kyle Shelton had stood in the darkness, looking at the bicycle on its side, front wheel bent. He had been through the wooded area. Signs of the boy- bloody shirt and pants, socks and even Nike sneakers- were spread out.

Kyle imagined the boy racing through the trees and bushes naked, wearing only his glasses, looking over his shoulder. He thought of the Truffaut movie The Wild Child, the supposedly true story of a boy who had lived all his life naked among the animals in a forest. Henri Poincare's words came to Kyle: "It is better to foresee, even without certainty, than not to foresee at all."

It hadn't been much of a plan, thought out at a moment's notice, full of holes. It might work. Probably not.

Kyle Shelton knew about fingerprints, DNA, blood samples. He didn't know much, but he knew enough. He wasn't safe.

There had been a half moon and some light from passing cars beyond the bushes. He imagined the boy, shivering, not from the night cold but from fear and horror, imagined that he had taken off all his clothes but not his glasses. Shelton got back in his pickup, backed off the dirt path to the road and headed for the bridge, headed for his small room. The running had begun.

"Mrs. Glick?" Stella said, approaching the woman in the crowd.

Both children at her side were boys with yarmulkes and locks of hair hanging down in front of their ears.

Yosele Glick looked up at Stella. Her eyes were bright, wary, a deep brown. She was fair-skinned, pretty, no more than thirty years old. At her side stood a mountain of a man in black with a massive girth, rimless glasses perched on his nose. His beard was full, dark and curly.

The small crowd of men, women and children moved close to Stella and Aiden to hear what was being said.

"Can we go somewhere quiet where we can talk?" asked Stella.

Yosele looked at the massive man at her side who said, "Timken's."

"You are?" asked Aiden.

"Hyam Yussel Glick," the man said. "Asher was my brother. You are detectives?"

"Crime scene investigators," said Stella.

"They had no men to send?" said Glick.

"They're working other cases," said Stella. "Timken's?"

The man led the way across the street, and traffic stopped. Glick held up a hand to signal to the crowd that he should not be followed. A lean old man hurried out of the crowd ahead of them.

Timken's was a modest storefront kosher restaurant with the name written in Hebrew and English.

The old man who had broken away from the crowd used one of the keys from the chain he removed from his pocket to open the front door, and stood back so they could enter.

There was a murmur of voices from the street and a single word: "Joshua." Then the door closed and there was silence. Glick moved to a round table. There was no question about using a booth. Glick was too large. They sat and the overhead lights tinkled on.

The younger of the two boys standing next to the seated Yosele was sobbing. She comforted him with a hand on his head.

"Zachary," said Glick, "can you take your brother to the back room? Mr. Schwartz will bring you some cookies."

Behind the counter where he where brewing some tea, old Schwartz nodded. The two boys reluctantly left their mother's side. When they were gone, Stella asked, "Who is Joshua?"

"A zealot with a false and mad cause," said Glick.

"Joshua is a messianic Jew," Yosele said softly as the old man set out tea and rugalach. "A test brought on us by the Lord."

"He is not a Jew," Glick corrected.

"He claims to be a Jew who believes Jesus was the Messiah," said Yosele. "He and his followers, the Jewish Light of Christ, believe it is their mission to convince the most orthodox of Jews to accept Jesus."

"He is so mad that other messianics and Jews for Christ have renounced him," said Glick. "He opened a storefront temple two blocks down on Flatbush less than a year ago. He has no more than two dozen followers, but they come here, right here to the front of our synagogue, to hand out offensive flyers and try to engage our congregants in discussion. Since they come only a few at a time, the police can do nothing."

"And," said Stella, "your brother had conflicts with them?"

"Asher confronted them, argued with them, out-shouted them," said Glick. "Persuaded, reasoned. He even got a few of them to renounce the idiocy of Joshua and move away."

"So Joshua was particularly upset with your brother?"

Glick stopped chewing a dark poppy-seed rugalach and said, "Less than a week ago, right across that street, Asher tried for perhaps the one hundredth time to reason with the lunatic. It ended with Joshua saying that my brother would be crucified like the ancient Hebrews for his unwillingness to accept the truth of the second coming."

"Can you give us the names of the men who were part of this morning's minyan?" asked Stella.

Glick hesitated, shrugged and said, "Ten of us. Me, Asher, Rabbi Mesmur, Simon Aaronson, Saul Mendel, Justin Tuchman, Herman Siegman, Sanford Tabachnik, Yale Black, and Arvin Bloom."

"All regulars?" asked Aiden.

"All except Mendel and Bloom," said Glick. "I don't know Bloom. He came with one of the members, spent some time talking to my brother. Mendel still works. Can't always make it. The others are retired. The minyan and the shul are their life."

"Is there some reason your brother would have stayed after the minyan?" asked Stella.

"No," said Glick, sipping his cup of coffee. "He had to get to work."

"He did say something about having to do something at the synagogue after the minyan," Yosele remembered. "He said it would take only a few minutes."

"It took more than a few minutes," said Glick, looking down. "It took his entire life."

"Did your husband say anything about what it was he had to do?" asked Stella.

"No," the widow said, "but I could tell that he wasn't looking forward to it."

Hyam Glick began to rock in his chair, eyes closed. He spoke softly in Hebrew.

Yosele translated, " 'Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm. For love is as strong as death, passion fierce as the grave… Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.' "

"Song of Songs," said Stella.

Yosele nodded and looked at her now weeping brother-in-law.

Detective Trent Sylvester drove slowly down the road, letting traffic pass him. He concentrated on the right side, pausing whenever he saw anything that might be suspicious, finding nothing for thirty-five minutes. Then he came to the slight break in the bushes. He slowed down, parked and passed carefully through the opening.

In the clearing beyond the bushes, Sylvester saw the bicycle, front wheel twisted, handlebars turned almost around. He walked carefully for a few steps and then stopped, not wanting to contaminate the scene.

Beyond the bicycle lay a crumpled bloody white shirt next to a scattering of clothes- underwear, denim jeans, socks and a single sneaker. He scanned the ground looking for a second sneaker, but couldn't see it. Nor could he see the boy's body, but that could have been carried deeper into the trees or buried and covered with leaves.

Sylvester backed away, took his phone from his hip and called in what he had found. He was told, though he didn't have to be, to cordon off the crime scene.

Mac, who was still at the Vorhees residence when the call came in, arrived at the scene less than ten minutes later. Danny had already headed back to the lab with the samples they had taken.

"We start searching for the body?" asked Detective Defenzo at his side.

Defenzo felt the warm moist sweat under his arms and on his forehead. It wasn't even noon and his underpants were clinging and itching against his groin.

Mac didn't answer. He scanned the scene- bike, scattered clothes, shoe, ground. What he didn't yet see was the boy's second shoe and the glasses he always wore.

Mac opened his kit, pulled on his gloves and handed a second pair to Defenzo. Find the body, find the blood, find footprints, fingerprints, hair, anything.

But there was something else to look for. Mac was not ready to give it a name. The ground cover of leaves, hundreds, perhaps thousands, would make the search more difficult, but Mac was always suspicious when it was too easy.

He stepped forward and began his search, watching where he stepped, carefully reaching back to remove an insect from his neck, imagining a frightened, pale, skinny twelve-year-old boy standing nude in this dark tiny clearing.

"Look for the boy," said Mac. "Watch where you step. Touch nothing."

Defenzo nodded and headed into the trees to his left.

Mac took photographs, knelt at each piece of evidence and examined it with a portable microscope that looked nothing like the one Sherlock Holmes used. The one in Mac's hand looked like a small metallic pocket-sized eyeglass case. He went from item to item, sometimes focusing the built-in tilting light on something he enlarged by almost one hundred times.

For the next fifteen minutes, Mac gently picked up leaves, examined them, and bagged them.