Stuart Kaminsky - Blood On The Sun

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.