Stuart Kaminsky: Blood On The Sun

Aaron and Maya gently sat Maybelle down on the lawn. She was breathing rapidly, trying to catch her breath. Then she said, "Dead."

"Dead?" Aaron repeated. "Who?"

"All of them," Maybelle said, looking over her shoulder at the house behind her.

The door to the house was open. Aaron, who had been a medic in the first Gulf War, rose and turned toward the house. Maybelle's breathing was even harsher now. She reached for her chest and muttered, "Oh my sweet Jesus."

"I think she's having a heart attack," Aaron said, reaching into his pocket for his cell phone.

"The devil came to that house," Maybelle whispered.

"Don't talk," said Maya as Aaron punched in 911.

But Maybelle had one more thing to say.

"The blood, sweet Jesus. They are washed in the blood of the lamb. They're floating in the blood of the lamb. The devil…"

Aaron decided not to enter the house until the police arrived.

Six hours earlier, Danny Messer had gotten on an A train. There was no one in the car but Danny, who put down his backpack, sprawled on a seat, took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

He had spent the last sixteen hours, with two short breaks, looking at maggots, most of which had been found in the torn stomach cavity of ten-year-old Teresa Backles. Teresa's body had been buried under garbage in a Dumpster behind a subsidized apartment complex in Harlem. There were times when the garbage wasn't picked up for a week or more. This had been one of those times. The heat had accelerated the growth of the maggots and the decomposition of the girl's body.

Danny put his glasses back on and closed his eyes, seeing crawling white maggots. They were the Crime Scene Investigator's friend, revealing secrets of the dead, but that didn't stop Danny from thinking that someday he…

He had determined that the girl had died five days earlier. He could almost pinpoint the hour. The maggots were sometimes better at that than the medical examiner, especially if you knew what you were looking for. Danny knew.

Danny had put on a mask and climbed into the Dumpster, going through every item, including rotting, ant-covered takeout food and a single skinny dead rat with its mouth open, showing its teeth.

Teresa's mother's boyfriend had lied about when he had last seen Teresa. The maggots had told Danny. There was no mistake. The boyfriend, twenty-two-year-old Cole Thane, when confronted with the evidence, which included a single fingerprint on the outside of the Dumpster, had talked. He had planned to rape the girl and then kill her, but when the time came, he couldn't do it- a rapist-murderer of children with a conscience. So he had only killed and mutilated the child instead.

Cole Thane had searched Dannys eyes for sympathy.

A pill and a few hours' sleep and Danny would be ready to go back to work. The crime scenes didn't stop. They piled up. Bodies: fresh, decayed, surprised, at peace. More every day.

Was the search for the killers motivated by justice, revenge, morbid curiosity or professional pride?

Maggots. Cole Thane looking for sympathy. Danny's arm, the arm he had thrown out in his tryout for the majors, began to ache. Nothing new.

The air-conditioning in the subway car was running at about half power. Danny's wrinkled white shirt clung to him. He could feel the drops of sweat dripping down his chest and stomach.

A shower. A pill. Some sleep.

To Danny's right, the door between cars opened. He slowly sat up, languidly put his right hand on top of his backpack.

The two who had come in were Hispanic, no more than twenty, one lean, one muscled up. They wore identical black T-shirts with a single letter "T" in white over the heart.

There was a chance they would walk past Danny, but Danny Messer was from the streets above and, in the tunnels below, he knew better. They were only a few feet from him now.

Danny felt something- not fear, but something he hadn't felt in years. The feeling mixed with the flashing images of crawling maggots, a little black girl in a Dumpster covered in dried blood and maggots, Cole Thane convincing himself he deserved mercy.

The two young men stopped in front of Danny. The lean one took a knife out of a sheath in his pocket. The stocky one had a short lead pipe in his hand.

Danny's backpack was jammed with heavy books. He swung it at the stocky man as he rose. He swung it hard, with an animal grunt.

At six in the morning, Mac Taylor sat alone at a table in Stephan's Deli on Columbus, a copy of The New York Times in front of him. He had taken his usual three-mile morning run in Central Park at dawn before the sun gathered strength.

It was scheduled to get up to a humid 100 degrees by noon. Mac had finished his eggs over easy, wheat toast and small orange juice and was working on his second cup of coffee while he read.

Stephan's wasn't crowded; there were about a dozen people at the counter and the six tables. He wouldn't be bothered at Stephan's. The waitresses respected his faraway look. They knew he was a cop who saw things they prayed they would never have to see.

Connie, approaching sixty, with an ever-present weary smile, came to fill Mac's cup. He nodded his thanks.

"Gonna be a hot one," Connie said.

Mac nodded as he lifted his cup to drink.

"Got a busy day today?" she asked.

Mac met her lonely eyes and smiled.

"Not yet," he said.

His cell phone rang. Mac took it out of his pocket and said, "Taylor."

He listened and Connie stood nearby, hoping to keep contact with the soulful policeman, who said, "On the way."

He flipped the phone closed, took a ten-dollar bill and two singles from his wallet, placed them next to the check Connie had left, and got up from his seat.

"Bad?" she asked.

"Bad," Mac confirmed.

Danny Messer pushed his glasses back up his nose and listened to NPR as he drove. Traffic was heavy. It was always heavy in Manhattan, but he knew ways to get around it. It was his city.

Danny had managed four hours of troubled sleep. He hadn't dreamed about the dead little girl or what he had done to the two men on the subway.

Instead he dreamed about an incident that had occurred more than a month earlier when he had worked a rape-murder case. The victim, fifteen, had been torn up badly during the rape, her eyes gouged out. Then the killer had left the body in an alley, where the rats had gotten to it.

The killer had left his semen, and identifying him had been routine. The murderer's name was Lenny Zooker and he had already done five years for rape. He had been in his one-bedroom ratty apartment on 98th Street watching a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show when Danny and Don Flack came to pick him up. He was gaunt, cadaverous, his hair thin and brushed back. Teeth uneven. Eyes a moist brown.

Zooker had smiled as he let them in. In the middle of the room was the body of a ten-year-old girl and a thick pool of nearly black, fly-covered blood.

Zooker looked at the blood. Splatters of it covered the floor and shabby furniture.

"Haven't had time to clean up," Zooker said apologetically. "Should have. Was expecting you."

Danny had let out a grunt of pain and punched the grinning killer in the face. Zooker fell back, tripping, slipping in the dead girl's blood.

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.