Blood on the Sun (CSI: NY) (13 page)

Her paintings, paintings she loved and had picked up over the years in Europe, seemed to be in place. They were not without value, but they probably were not worth more than a few thousand each. She had never had them appraised. They were not an investment.

She moved cautiously to her kitchen, everything in place, cabinet doors closed. Nothing in the refrigerator—not that there was much there—seemed to have been touched. The clothes in her bedroom closet and her drawers did not seem to have been moved and her bed was well and tightly made as she had learned to do in the orphanage. Then she moved to the bathroom. She thought there was a trace of a scuff mark on the tile floor but she couldn’t be sure. She got her kit and carefully took a sample of the material from the scuff mark.

Paranoia, she decided when she was sure she was the only one in the apartment. I’m tired, paranoid and allergic to much that exists in the world. She sneezed and moved to the medicine cabinet in the small bathroom. She definitely needed some antihistamine. Stella opened the cabinet door, saw what she was looking for and reached for the bottle.

Flack stood in front of the counter of the electronics store and listened patiently to the man who was speaking with a heavy Indian accent. The man was short, dark, thick head of hair, bad skin and about forty. He was also perspiring. His name was Al Chandrasekhar.

“I’m a second cousin of the famous physicist,” Chandrasekhar said proudly.

Flack nodded.

The small shop was crowded with glassed-in cell phones, walkie-talkies, tiny radios, tape recorders that could fit in a side pocket or purse, electronic toys, compact computers and printers, cameras and clocks. There were two potential customers at the rear of the shop, a boy and girl in their twenties, casually dressed.

Flack counted five video cameras around the shop. None were hidden. Chandrasekhar wanted potential thieves to know they were being watched.

“You have some information about who killed those two men?” asked Flack.

“I’m sorry I called 911,” the man said. “I know it wasn’t an emergency, or perhaps it was. It is really for you to decide.”

Flack waited.

“I have two video cameras mounted outside my store,” the man said, looking toward the open front door through which warm air flowed, was spun by two ceiling fans, and was replaced by another stealthy wave of heat. “One is mounted so that it picks up the front of that store where the Jewish Jesus man was murdered.”

“Let’s take a look,” said Flack.

Chandrasekhar reached under the counter and pulled out a videotape. He put the tape in a compact player on a shelf behind the counter. He pressed a button and the image appeared.

“You see there?” the man said with excitement, pointing to a figure on the screen.

It was Stella and Flack. They came out of the storefront talking, heading up the street to their left. Flack could see steam rising from the sidewalk. The crowd was gone. When the body went, so did the gathering.

“Now,” said Chandrasekhar, “there.”

He pointed to someone who came out of a doorway, turned to his left and walked slowly about thirty yards behind Flack and Stella.

“Here,” said Chandrasekhar. “You turn your head and the man pauses to look in a store window. In that store is sold Jewish books. I’m saying to myself, this man does not look Jewish. This man is following you.”

For an instant, as he paused by the bookstore window, the man looked back, facing the camera. From the poor quality of the tape, Flack wasn’t sure how much they would be able to blow up the image, but there were two things Flack could make out. The first was that the man had salt-and-pepper gray hair. The second was that a baseball cap was protruding from the man’s left rear pocket. It wouldn’t be hard to confirm that this was the same man who had appeared in the crowd at both murder sites.

But, thought Flack, why is he following us?

“That’s almost an hour after the murder,” said Flack, concentrating again on the tape, which showed the date and time in the lower left-hand corner.

“Killer returns to scene,” said Chandrasekhar with a slow nod of his head meant to show wisdom.

“Let’s go back on the tape,” said Flack.

The two customers in the back were heading toward the front door. They glanced at Flack. He knew they had pegged him as a cop, which was fine with him.

The man behind the counter rewound and Flack watched at fast speed. People passed on the street and entered and left the storefront synagogue. Everyone who entered and left was a member of the congregation. No one entered or left from the moment the congregants went off for lunch and meditation till they returned an hour later.

No surprise there. Stella had agreed that the killer came through the back door. Something tugged at Flack’s memory.

“Go back to the time just before they went to lunch,” he said.

“Roger that,” said the man, hitting the rewind button.

Flack watched people move slowly down the street in both directions. Then he saw the image that had tugged his memory. From the angle of the camera, Flack could only see the back of the big man carrying a briefcase, but what he saw was familiar. The man didn’t stop at the synagogue but walked on and entered a doorway at his right.

“What’s in that shop?” asked Flack, pointing to the image.

Chandrasekhar took a pair of rimless glasses from a case in his pocket and looked at the frozen image on the screen.

“The newspaper and sundries shop of Mr. Pyon,” he said. “He’s from Korea. Don’t know him well.”

“Does he have video cameras?” asked Flack.

“It would be unwise not to,” said the man knowingly.

“Can I take the tape?” Flack asked.

Chandrasekhar removed the tape from the machine and handed it to Flack, who pocketed it and headed for the door.

T
HE PHONE RANG
.

Stella, who had fallen asleep in her living room while looking up at her paintings, answered, “Detective Bonasera.”

“George Harbaugh, FBI,” the man said. “Just got your crime scene photographs and preliminary report on the death of the two Jewish men. Good work.”

“Thanks,” said Stella, trying to wake up.

“I think you may be looking for a serial killer we’ve been after for three years,” Harbaugh said. “I’ve been authorized to give you a copy of our report. Our profilers think he’s going to kill again soon.”

Harbaugh was bypassing the chain of command by going to Stella. This was not the first time it had happened.

She said, “Give me a little time and I’ll meet you at—”

“I’d prefer to keep the FBI out of this for now,” Harbaugh said. “I can be at your apartment later tonight.”

She did not ask him how he knew where she lived. An FBI agent would have no trouble finding her.

“I hand you the report and you can ask some questions,” he said. “No guarantee I’ll answer them.”

“You drink tea?” she asked.

“Hate the stuff,” he said.

“Coffee?”

“Coke, if you’ve got it,” he said.

“Fine,” she said.

He hung up. So did Stella. She got up and moved toward the bedroom, phone in hand. She had a lot to do in the next hour.

In the darkness, Jacob Vorhees uncrossed his aching legs and looked at the green glow of the battery-operated clock on the floor in front of him. He had a pillow and two blankets, one to lie on and one to cover himself with. In addition to the clock, there was a small blue-and-white plastic box inside of which were an ice pack, eight peanut-butter-and-black-currant-jelly sandwiches and ten plastic twelve-ounce bottles of Coke. There was also a white plastic bucket which, in an emergency, he could use as a toilet. A nearly full roll of toilet paper sat next to it. Finally, there was his MP3 player, which he listened to for long, blackened hours.

Behind him, a dozen or more feet away, something scurried. He knew it was rats, more than one. So far they hadn’t bothered him, although once, during the night while he slept, he was awakened by a single rat running past him.

He had bolted up, immediately awake and breathing hard, seeing Becky and his mother bleeding, dying.

I’m twelve years old, he told himself. Things like this shouldn’t happen to a kid. Then he remembered the television images of the dying people of Africa, the near skeletons that once were children and were now large-headed, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, blank-
staring soon-to-be corpses. One of the sandwiches in the cooler near him might be able to save a child in Niger, but Jacob knew this was not a realistic possibility. Jacob lived in a hell no child should have to endure, but there were others whose hell was even deeper and darker than Jacob’s. He kept telling himself this, rocking back and forth, arms wrapped around himself.

Something, someone moved, not a rat in the tunnel, but someone on the other side of the wall. The wooden floors of the room creaked with almost every footstep.

Kyle’s coming back, Jacob thought, taking the pillow in his arms, not for protection but for comfort.

Then Jacob heard another sound on the other side of the wall, a sound he couldn’t make out, like…a dog sniffing.

Why would Kyle bring a dog here?

The news shop owner wanted to cooperate. He longed to cooperate. He sweated to cooperate with Flack.

The shop was small. So was the Korean man behind the counter, who knew he was sweating but was afraid to wipe his neck and brow, afraid the determined-looking policeman might think him guilty of something. In North Korea, Sak Pyon had lost most of his family by the 1980s. His mother, his brother, his oldest son, all of whom committed the crime of insufficient enthusiasm for Communism, at least in the minds of the five men in loose brown uniforms who came to his home just before sunrise on a day almost as hot as this one.

The five men, all barely men at all, had let Pyon, his wife and his daughter live to tend the rice field. But Pyon and what remained of his family knew they would be back, would almost certainly kill them. Pyon, his wife and his daughter had trekked through boggy fields of sickly rice and forests of skeleton trees and skirted villages, expecting to be shot from behind as traitors. After six weeks, moving only at night, they had made it to the forty-eighth parallel, crawled past the North Korean guards and almost been shot by the South Korean guards as they crossed the border.

It took four years working at the American embassy to finally be granted political asylum in the United States.

“Videotape,” said Flack, pointing up at a camera aimed at them and waking Pyon from his reverie.

“They don’t work,” said Pyon. “They just have a battery that powers the green light you see. Too much money to get real ones. Don’t need them.”

He had only a slight accent.

“And if you get robbed or shot?”

“I become less able to provide for my family,” said Pyon. “And if I’m shot, I have insurance if I am not killed.”

Pyon glanced at his watch. It was one of his two golf days. His wife would be in soon to relieve him so he could take the train to Queens and go to the golf course, where his clubs sat in a locker he rented. Golf was his meditation, an exercise in skill and precision. It was about losing oneself in the stroke and, at the end, finding a great satisfaction if a stroke or two could be cut from the last outing’s score.

“What about catching the robbers?” asked Flack with resignation.

“They will no longer have my merchandise or money,” Pyon said, hoping the sweat wasn’t streaming down his face as he imagined it was.

“What about them paying for shooting you?”

“It does me and my family no good,” said Pyon. “And I have insurance. I abandoned vengeance when I was in Korea.”

“Okay,” said Flack with a sigh. “Did you recognize the man?”

“Never saw him before,” said Pyon.

Flack neither believed nor disbelieved him. He had dealt with Asian refugees before. They were very good at lying. They had been taught how to do it in the hells of places like North Korea and Laos.

“So you couldn’t identify him?” asked Flack.

“Yes.”

“Yes you could or yes you couldn’t?” Flack said, calling on his reserves of patience.

Flack hadn’t had much sleep in the last twenty-four hours. To be precise, he had slept for approximately two hours and forty-eight minutes.

“Yes, I could,” said Pyon, no longer able to maintain control.

He pulled a large, crumpled white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and neck. Flack took his own already moist handkerchief out and did the same.

“It’s almost a hundred and four degrees out there,” said Flack, pocketing his handkerchief.

Pyon nodded.

“If you like,” said Pyon. “I could draw a picture of the man. I’ve been taking art courses.”

Flack smiled and said, “I’d like you to draw a picture of the man.”

“Now?” asked Pyon.

Pyon was trying hard to be cooperative, or at least appear to be.

“Now would be perfect,” said Flack. “You want to lock up for a while? I’ll take you someplace air-conditioned for a sandwich and coffee.”

“Scrambled eggs and Dr Pepper,” said Pyon. “Ginsberg’s is just around the corner.”

Aiden had been right.

“Yes,” said Jane Parsons, looking at the packet Aiden had handed her. “Trees have DNA. It’s been used a few times as forensic evidence. Landmark case by a professor at Purdue University. It held up in court.”

Aiden smiled.

“You think this might be from a piece of furniture?” asked Jane.

“A piece of furniture made out of bloodwood,” said Aiden.

“I’ll check the DNA. Tannic acid levels should be precisely the same in both specimens regardless of the type of tree we’re talking about. The same is true of arsenic levels.”

“Arsenic is in trees?” asked Aiden.

“Before it became illegal to do so,” said Jane, “arsenic was liberally sprayed on trees and furniture to protect them. Magnesium levels should also be the same in both sources. It’s going to take a little time.”

“How much time?” asked Aiden.

“This is a very small sample. Three days, maybe only two,” said Jane. “I’ll need a sample of whatever you want me to compare it with as soon as possible.”

“I’ll get it,” Aiden said. “Then you’ll have to work fast. In three days, he may kill again.”

“I’ll need approval from Mac to move this to the top,” said Jane.

“I’ll get that too,” Aiden said.

She made the call to Mac. It was after dark, but she was sure he wouldn’t mind. He didn’t. He gave her permission to move to the top of the testing chain. She handed the phone to Jane who said, “Yes?”

That was all she said. The call took no more than a few seconds.

“There was something wrong with the connection,” Jane said with a sigh as Aiden put her phone away.

“He was whispering,” Aiden said.

The next question that either could have asked of the other was ’Why?’ but neither did.

Aiden strode to the door and out. It was getting late but she knew Arvin Bloom and his wife lived above his shop and she was reasonably certain they went out very little, if at all. The shambling pale Bloom had a languid, sedentary look.

Aiden knew there were some holes in her theory. First, the killer was left-handed. Bloom was right-handed. Second, if Bloom had an alibi for the murder of Joel Besser, she had a major problem. Third, both killings had looked like the work of a professional—two small-pattern shots to the back of the head. A pro who was also some kind of religious nut, or a professional pretending to be. They had run a background check on Arvin Bloom. He seemed a very unlikely hit man.

When she ran his prints they matched to a job application that told her Arvin Bloom was fifty-three years old, a native of Tacoma, Washington, who had earned an undergraduate degree in botany at the University of Washington. No military record. No criminal record, not even a moving vehicle violation, at least none they could find. He had a wife, no siblings, no cousins, and his parents were dead, father from a heart attack, mother from lung cancer. Arvin Bloom had gone through six jobs in the past twenty years, making his way across the country, working as a carpenter, home builder, cabinet maker, and finally an owner of a furniture restoration shop in Manhattan. He had a weapons permit, which was the reason Aiden had found his fingerprints. Aiden had seen the gun, a .45 mm handgun that looked and smelled as if it had never been fired. Most shop owners in Manhattan had gun permits. The gun that had been used to kill Glick and Besser was a .33 mm.

There were other holes in the theory and she wasn’t giving up on Joshua, the man in the USS
Walke
cap or some third person they hadn’t even considered yet.

The cell phone she had placed in the cup holder by the steering wheel rang.

“Bloodwood,” Jane said, and hung up.

Before she could put the phone back in the cup holder it rang again.

“Got a drawing of the guy on the tape who went through the magazine shop,” said Flack. “Pyon, the guy who owns the place, is good enough to be a police sketch artist.”

“Is it Arvin Bloom?” asked Aiden.

Flack reached into a folder under his arm, opened it and pulled out the drawing. It didn’t look like Bloom. The man in the drawing was gaunt, receding hairline, about thirty, probably Hispanic, clean shaven.

“Could be any of a million people in this city,” he said. “And he’s not on our radar in this case. At least he wasn’t till now.”

“Bloom?” asked Flack.

“I’m not giving up on him. I’m on my way over to his place now,” she said.

“Then so am I,” said Flack. “You call Stella?”

“I’ll do it now,” said Aiden. “We’ll wait for her to meet us.”

Danny sat back in his chair in the dark, a sandwich in one hand, the remote in the other. He had forgotten what kind of sandwich he was eating. He adjusted his glasses, eyes on the glowing screen. Baseball game. The Mets. He didn’t know the score or what inning it was. The announcer said, “It’s more than hot out there today. The Mets’ white uniforms have turned gray from the sweat.”

Danny was wearing a pair of boxer shots an ex-girlfriend had given him. The shorts were black with penguins marching all over. Danny looked down at his New York Mets T-shirt and thought about his grandfather, the one with the tremor diagnosed as Parkinson’s. His grandfather had been a cop. His father had been a cop. The Messer men and a few of the women had been NYPD going back for generations.

Danny was tired, needed a shave, wondered if he could still throw a decent slider and changeup. He had been a genuine prospect ten years ago. He was encouraged by three major league teams. Then his arm went and along with it, after surgery, his fastball. He had been consistently clocked at ninety miles an hour, but now he knew he would be lucky to throw at eighty, which, for most major league pitchers, was just a changeup.