Blood on the Sun (CSI: NY)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  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.

  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.

  Aid
en 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. Gradual
ly 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).