Stuart Kaminsky: Blood On The Sun

He knew the value of good teeth, had his own straightened, cleaned and whitened regularly and a nine-to-five haircut.

Even though he held a college degree, he now held down a job on the shipping dock of a super-sized hardware store in Manhattan, caused no trouble, smiled when the others laughed. A year of combat infantry in Iraq had changed him. Death, violent death, was now a part of his everyday experience.

He had earned his degree in philosophy at City University of New York. Kyle had been lucky enough to find a young professor with a Ph.D. from Brown to mentor him. The degree was validation, a sheet of paper he could show but never would. If he had ambition before, he had lost it in Iraq. He already knew more of philosophy than others he had seen graduate before him.

The sun had been up for a few hours. Kyle looked back in the general direction of Queens, back on what was lost forever. He had gone back to his one-room apartment on 101st, packed one large bag, and stopped for gas when he hit New Jersey, using his Visa card as payment.

He drove slowly. Cars, trucks passed him. He saw it all. Was it just hours ago? A dream? No dream. Becky, her mother, her father, dead. The knife. The knife sat on the seat next to him wrapped in paper towels. He hadn't decided what to do with it.

Just before three in the morning on the night before, in drenching heat and darkness, he had driven a mile, no more, saw the dirt path he was looking for in the wooded area next to the road, and turned onto it. After going a few feet, sure he couldn't be spotted from the road, he had parked, turned off his lights, got out of the car and with the flashlight from his glove compartment in hand, entered the thicket. He found what he was looking for, a clearing. He decided it would do and went back to the truck to get what he had placed in the back and covered with his stained canvas tarp.

No more than five minutes later, Kyle Shelton had stood in the darkness, looking at the bicycle on its side, front wheel bent. He had been through the wooded area. Signs of the boy- bloody shirt and pants, socks and even Nike sneakers- were spread out.

Kyle imagined the boy racing through the trees and bushes naked, wearing only his glasses, looking over his shoulder. He thought of the Truffaut movie The Wild Child, the supposedly true story of a boy who had lived all his life naked among the animals in a forest. Henri Poincare's words came to Kyle: "It is better to foresee, even without certainty, than not to foresee at all."

It hadn't been much of a plan, thought out at a moment's notice, full of holes. It might work. Probably not.

Kyle Shelton knew about fingerprints, DNA, blood samples. He didn't know much, but he knew enough. He wasn't safe.

There had been a half moon and some light from passing cars beyond the bushes. He imagined the boy, shivering, not from the night cold but from fear and horror, imagined that he had taken off all his clothes but not his glasses. Shelton got back in his pickup, backed off the dirt path to the road and headed for the bridge, headed for his small room. The running had begun.

"Mrs. Glick?" Stella said, approaching the woman in the crowd.

Both children at her side were boys with yarmulkes and locks of hair hanging down in front of their ears.

Yosele Glick looked up at Stella. Her eyes were bright, wary, a deep brown. She was fair-skinned, pretty, no more than thirty years old. At her side stood a mountain of a man in black with a massive girth, rimless glasses perched on his nose. His beard was full, dark and curly.

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.