Blood on the Sun (CSI: NY)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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.
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  “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 b
y 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.

  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.