Stuart Kaminsky - Blood On The Sun

At the hospital, they would probably place a tube down Melvoy's nose and into his stomach, a nasogastric tube, to wash out his stomach. He would be treated with activated charcoal and examined with an endoscopy, the placement of a camera down the throat, to determine the extent of the burns to the esophagus and stomach. IV fluids would be given. If the treatment worked, there could still be extensive damage to the mouth, throat and stomach. Damage might continue for weeks. He might recover and he might die in pain a month later. A hard way to die.

Now Stella sat across from Joshua in the same room at CSI headquarters where they had sat before. Aiden was working on the contents of the tote bag and Flack was in the next room listening. They had decided that Joshua would be more likely to talk to a single person. Stella, after a cup of thick, terrible tasting coffee, had volunteered.

Stella remembered that she would have to clean Melvoy's vomit off her tub. It might take a while. It would be hard and she would have to work at getting rid of the foul acrid odor. She had seen worse, worked with worse, but not in her own home.

"You won't believe me," said Joshua. "My faith is being tested."

"Try," said Stella.

Joshua looked tired. He leaned forward, hands clasped. He wore black Dockers, a gray polo shirt and sneakers. He sighed deeply and said, "The priest killed Glick and Joel Besser."

"Why?"

"They were Jews," said Joshua. "That's enough."

"Why the shooting and the crucifixion?"

Joshua shook his head.

"Anti-Semites have tortured Jews, crucified Jews, for over two thousand years. Yeshua was one of thousands of Jews crucified."

"How do you know he killed Glick and Besser?"

"Got a phone call," Joshua said. "Man with a heavy Spanish accent said he had found something and was afraid to go to the police. He told me where it was and said he thought his priest was a murderer. He was crying. I tried to ask him more but he hung up."

He lifted his head and faced Stella.

"You don't believe me," he said.

"Go on," Stella said.

"I went to the church," Joshua said. "I went behind the altar, behind the statue of Yeshua, and there it was."

"The bag," said Stella.

"Yes."

"You hadn't put it there earlier?"

"No."

"You had the gun in your hand when we came," said Stella. "Were you going to shoot Father Wosak?"

"I wanted to stop him from killing more Jews."

"That's not an answer," said Stella.

"I don't know what I was going to do, but it doesn't matter. You came. Here I am and you don't believe me."

Aiden opened the door and nodded at Stella, who got up. Flack came into the room to continue the interrogation. In the hallway, Aiden said, "I haven't had time to go over everything, but I can tell you that the hammer in the bag is probably the same one used to crucify the two victims. I found traces of iron oxide on the head. It matches the bolts used in the crucifixions. The only prints on the handle are Joshua's."

"But?" said Stella, seeing that Aiden had more to tell her.

"Joshua's fingerprints are on two of the bolts and on the gun," said Aiden. "No other prints. No prints on the other two bolts."

"Could he have been wearing gloves?" said Stella.

"Then why touch the bolts with his bare hands in the church? Why handle the hammer barehanded in the church? There are no gloves in his pockets or in the bag. And the bolts are all wrong. They're not sharpened. They're almost blunt. Hammering them through flesh and into the floor would have been nearly impossible."

"So," said Stella. "Joshua might be telling the truth. Which means he was set up."

"Which doesn't tell us why," said Aiden. "I'm going back to the tote bag."

And, thought Stella, I'm going to look for a man with a thick Spanish accent. She had the feeling that the accent had not been real. She also had the feeling that the man himself might not be real.

Joshua would have a long night in jail.

At two a.m. Danny Messer awoke in the darkness of his bedroom, sat up sweating and fumbled for his glasses on the table next to the bed.

Something was different. He clicked on the light and looked at his hands. The tremor was completely gone. His first reaction was relief. This was followed almost immediately by fear, fear that it would come back.

It was clear to him now. Maybe it had always been clear. His grandfather and his father had both become police officers to face their fear. They had been good, honest, often decorated and well respected. There had never been any question about Danny becoming a cop. It was a given. Danny understood. He had acknowledged the fear and now he sat up in his bed and wondered if he had chosen CSI because it was relatively safe but would still allow him to carry on the Messer tradition. Were the street fights he had been in growing up, the drug dealers he had stood up to, gangbangers he had refused to back away from and even sought out, part of the pattern of facing his fear?

At this point, it didn't matter. He was who he was and was dedicated to and fascinated by his job. He wondered if he would tell all this to Sheila Hellyer. Probably.

He got up, moved to his computer, pressed a button on the keyboard and pulled up the on-screen version of the report he had given Mac on the Vorhees murder. He read it carefully, trying to make sense of what he saw, and then came up with a theory. In the morning, he would share his thoughts with Mac. In the morning he would find out that Mac had come to the same conclusion he had. Kyle Shelton had not murdered the Vorhees family. They would have to go back to the computer and create a new virtual reality scenario.

Danny put his computer to sleep, went to the kitchen for a bottled water and went back to bed. He placed the bottle on the table next to the bed, checked his hands again to be sure they were not shaking, put his glasses on the table and turned off the light. He was asleep almost instantly.

It was 2:15 in the morning.

Stella stirred and came awake. She got out of the chair and moved to the side of the hospital bed.

There was some light from the slightly open door of the bathroom. She could see George Melvoy's tube-connected face, could hear him breathe. The breathing was shallow, with a painful sandpapery rasp. The monitor, however, bouncing with mountains being painted by green light, showed that his vital signs were steady. The man was strong.

Stella ran her fingers through her hair and touched his arm. She liked the man who had tried to kill her. In the morning she would tell him that he had almost certainly saved a life. She wasn't yet certain whose life he had saved.

She appreciated the irony. Because this man had stalked her, planned to kill her, he had seen something that led to the saving of a life.

She didn't know where she had heard or read it, but the words came back to her as they had in the past. It was a kind of non-prayer: Lord, if you'll forgive the little tricks I've done to you, I'll forgive the great big one you've done to me.

Satisfied that Melvoy was all right, Stella went back to the aluminum-armed chair and sat. The chair wasn't made for comfort but for brief visits to the ill. For visitors of the dying, more comfortable chairs would magically appear.

Joshua had broken down in the church and Father Wosak had moved to put his arm around and comfort the man. In the morning, she would let Flack take the lead interrogating Joshua. Stella would sit in.

Before she left the hospital, she wanted to talk to Melvoy. She had decided not to talk to him about Matthew Heath, the lab assistant who had taken his own life. If Stella had contributed to his suicide, the contribution had been infinitesimal. It wasn't Stella with whom he could not cope. It was the world that had been too much for Matthew Heath. She saw that now. Perhaps she should have seen signs of it when the boy had dutifully, but with no signs of developing skill, gone through the day.