Stuart Kaminsky: Blood On The Sun

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.

"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."