Blood On The Sun

3

THE LARGE, DARKLY TINTED WINDOWS were emblazoned with the words THE JEWISH LIGHT OF CHRIST in neatly printed large gold letters. On the door were the words ENTER. ALL ARE WELCOME.

On the awning, down in front of both windows, were the faint remnants of the words GOLDMAN'S DRY CLEANING AND PROFESSIONAL TAILORING. The awning provided little relief from the angry sun.

Aiden and Stella had entered hoping to find air-conditioning. They found only a tired ceiling fan grinding away. Meanwhile, Flack had gone with Yosele Glick to her home to see if he could find names, leads, something to go on.

Inside the store fourteen chairs were in a half circle facing the door. All of the chairs were occupied. Seven men, seven women. The clean-shaven men in black all wore yarmulkes. The women all had their heads covered.

It struck both Aiden and Stella that these people were young, the oldest a man seated in the middle who might have been forty at the most.

The room was late-morning hot. The ancient ceiling fan turned slowly, making a tired scratchy sound.

"We've been expecting you," said the older man.

He was dark, lean, with thinning hair, a slightly pitted face and deep blue eyes that stayed focused on the two CSIs.

"Joshua?" asked Stella.

"I am," the man said. "And this is our congregation."

"All of it?" Stella asked.

"We will grow in numbers, faith and determination," he said. "There are fourteen million Jews in the world."

"Rabbi Mesmur says you've been harassing him and members of his congregation," said Stella.

The people seated in the other chairs barely moved. Some of them were now looking at Joshua with confident smiles.

"Our mission is to bring Jews to the true light of Christ as the Messiah," Joshua said. "To accomplish this, we must confront those who are misguided and convince them of the truth."

"Why?" asked Aiden.

"So they will be saved," said Joshua.

"A man was murdered in the temple this morning," said Stella.

"We know," said Joshua.

"Crucified," said Stella.

All eyes were now on the two women who stood before them.

"We'd like to collect your fingerprints and swab for DNA testing," said Aiden.

"We didn't kill anyone," said Joshua calmly. "We follow both the Commandments and the word of Christ the Savior."

"Then you won't mind our taking samples to eliminate you as suspects," said Stella.

"And did you do the same to the congregants at the minyan this morning?" asked Joshua. "Or Saint Martine's Church?"

"We're going to," said Aiden.

Joshua looked to those people seated at his right and said, "Devorah's father is a cantor in one of the largest orthodox congregations in Connecticut. David holds a doctorate in Jewish studies from Yale. Joel is an adjunct professor of classics at Columbia. Carole is a psychiatric social worker. Erik is a lawyer. Each of us knows the world beyond these walls. Each of us is committed to changing that world, saving those who will find peace only when they accept the word of Christ."

"Fingerprints," Aiden said calmly.

She had heard this kind of religious babble since she was a child and distrusted anyone with a hard religious line. She knew some of the religious zealots meant what they were saying, but often the words were a blanket over something dark beneath- seduction, money, power. Joshua struck Aiden as one who had secrets under his blanket of words. He also had the mad smile of certainty she had seen in true believers.

"We prefer not to," said Joshua, reaching out his hands on both sides and gently touching the shoulder of a girl on his right and a round-faced young man on his left.

"We can get a court order," said Stella.

"No," said a man on the left.

He was about thirty, wearing a suit and glasses.

"You don't have sufficient cause to compel us to comply," he said.

Joshua smiled, looked at Aiden and Stella and raised his eyebrows in victory.

"Erik…," Joshua began.

"… is a lawyer," Stella continued.

"No one in this congregation committed murder," Joshua said emphatically.

"I don't think we can simply take your word for that," said Stella.

"I did not imagine you would," said Joshua.

"And what were you before you found your religion?" asked Aiden.

"I was the son of a rabbi," said Joshua. "I was a writer of pornographic paperbacks, a lost soul. Now I have seen the light and the truth and am, myself, a rabbi, a teacher of the faith."

Devorah, the pretty, clear-skinned girl whose father was a cantor, rose and said, "You can take my fingerprints and a culture."

She did not look at Joshua, who nodded and said, "We are not a cult. If any member wishes to allow this, it is their choice."

David, lean, curly red hair, the one with the doctorate in Jewish studies, also rose and said, "I'll cooperate."

David looked at Joshua and said, "We have nothing to hide. We are in the hands of the Lord and will be saved."

Two others stood. Joshua was losing control and losing face in front of the two women. He looked at Stella. His mouth smiled but his eyes burned.

He rose, which prompted the rest of the small congregation to do the same.

There was a table against one wall. Aiden and Stella moved to it and asked the members of the congregation to line up. The process was reasonably fast, slowed down only by Stella searching the hands and clothing of each person for signs of blood or struggle and then checking the bottoms of their shoes for signs of blood or residue from the thin layer of sawdust at the murder scene. Aiden swabbed the inside of each person's cheek, bagged the swab and sealed and marked the see-through bag.

DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, is composed of tightly bound strands called chromosomes. Humans have forty-six paired chromosomes, twenty-three from each parent. Two of these chromosomes decide gender. About thirty thousand genes are attached to each DNA strand. Among other things, genes make up the blueprint for who we are, how we function, our development and growth. No two samples of DNA are exactly alike.

Stella scanned each person with a portable Alternative Light Source. There were traces of blood on only one person in the group, a hefty dark-haired well-groomed young man who identified himself as Earl Katz.

"You have fresh blood on your hands," said Stella.

The young man, who towered over the two women, said, "Yes. A woman with a broken nose bled on me," he said. "Domestic disturbance. I'm a police officer. I got off duty about an hour ago, changed clothes, showered, took my uniform to the cleaner."

"We'll check," said Stella.

"I'm sure you will," said Earl Katz. "You wouldn't be doing your job if you didn't."

Joshua was last and best- traces of blood on both hands and the bottoms of his shoes and what appeared to be patches of sawdust. Stella took samples of the blood and dust from the shoes.

"Want to explain this?" Stella asked, holding up the bags containing blood samples and samples of the sawdust.

"I prefer not to," said Joshua.

Stella took him in for questioning.

Medical Examiner Sheldon Hawkes was known to occasionally engage in gallows humor, but not today. He had the corpse of Becky Vorhees on the table before him. He had three more corpses in the sliding cabinets against the wall. It would be a long morning. Hawkes, an African-American, had recently been having dreams of walking through tall grass under a sun that looked too close. Ahead he could hear voices speaking in a language he didn't understand but was sure he once had. Hawkes wanted to run toward the voices but it was too hot. He was too tired. He finally made it through the grass and in the broad open space before him, three young bare-chested black men stood over a dead and bloody lion. The three men welcomed Hawkes, who moved toward them, knowing that his goal was the dead lion. It wasn't a bad dream at all.

Jane Parsons, who wore a white lab coat, blond hair dangling well-brushed down her neck, looked at the samples lined up on the large table in front of her. There were more than twenty samples. For years commercial laboratories had taken three to six weeks to run a DNA test. Gradually the testing time came down to three to seven days. Jane had cut the time to two days. If the samples were piling up and the CSI investigators were in a hurry, she could get it down to a day.

"Start with the daughter's blood," said Mac, leaning over her shoulder.

Was she wearing perfume? No. It was a combination of shampoo and conditioner. He backed away before… Jane looked over her shoulder at him.

"You all right?" she asked.

"Fine," said Mac. "How long will it take?"

"For all of this?" she said, looking at the table. "Two days. Can the budget take it?"

"It'll have to," he said, turning and walking across the room and through the glass doors.

Microscope in front of her, samples on her right, Jane began her work. She had the name of the willing or unwilling donor of each sample. She knew some of the donors had been murdered and others might be murderers. What she couldn't do, didn't want to do, was put bodies and faces and lives into the laboratory samples.

Using phenol and chloroform, she extracted the DNA from the first sample. She then precipitated the DNA with isopropanol. Next, under the electron microscope, she cut the DNA using restriction enzymes. This produced small DNA fragments. Jane then "loaded" the cut DNA onto an agarose gel that look like clear Jell-O. She mixed the gel and poured it into what looked like a rectangular baking dish. She moved on to the next sample. Each sample would have to sit for at least three hours before it could be used for the test.

When she had the completed gels for all the DNA samples, she would electrophorese the gel by running an electric current through it to separate the fragments according to their size. The fragments would be stained with ethidium bromide.

When this was done, she would be able to view separate fragments and compare the pattern to any DNA found at the crime scene. The separated fragments form the bar code pattern with which the public is familiar. She would end by taking photographs of the bar codes.

The work had to be done carefully. There were too many steps during which a mistake could be made. She assumed that Mac would want to submit the code to the FBI to search for and include in their CODIS (Combined DNA Index System).

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 to get 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, and 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.

"I was falling," Joshua said. "Like so many of the saints, I had to go to the depths before I raised myself up with the help of the Lord. How can one expect salvation without experiencing sin?"

"Your congregation knows you were in prison?" asked Aiden.

"Yes."

"When you got out," said Stella, "you became an apprentice to a carpenter."

"Humbly in the footsteps of Jesus, who never renounced his Jewish identity," said Joshua.

"Then," Stella continued, "you joined a Messianic temple."

"A gathering of the timid, the cowardly," said Joshua. "They didn't even turn the other cheek. They never stood up to let the first cheek be struck. I left them and started my own congregation."

Joshua looked at the two women and shook his head.

"I know how to fire a gun," he said. "I know how to wield a hammer and drive a nail. I am left-handed. But I did not kill Asher Glick. We believe in converting, convincing, not killing. If we kill, our cause is set back by years, decades."

"Look at this photograph," Aiden said.

He took it. It was the wall of the synagogue library on which was written CHRIST IS KING OF THE

JEWS. He handed it back to Aiden.

"That's what you believe, isn't it?" Aiden pressed.

"Yes," said Joshua. "Is there anything else you wish to say to me?"

"That you're free to go," said Stella, "but we'll be talking to you again."