"How about another quote?" asked Mac.
Mac doubted if Shelton could resist the request. The young man clung to the wisdom of others. He wasn't showing off his education or intellect. Mac was sure it was one of the few things that sustained him.
" 'The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.' "
"Nietzsche?" Mac guessed.
"Anne Frank," answered Shelton, who hung up. So did Mac. Mac opened his notebook and wrote down the quote. There was something wrong about it. An error? Mac put away his notebook.
Had Shelton mentioned lunch to avoid talking about Jacob Vorhees? Probably, but it was more Shelton's style to deflect the question with a quotation. Mac looked around the kitchen, at the refrigerator, the cabinets, the door to the pantry, the white metal garbage can near the door. Mac moved to the can, stepped on the pedal and looked down at the contents of the fresh white plastic bag inside. It was empty. If Shelton had snacked before he left the house, he had either taken his trash with him or had eaten nothing that would leave trash. There was a third possibility. Shelton had lied about having a snack. But why?
Mac walked to the refrigerator and opened it carefully so he wouldn't compromise any fingerprints on the handle. The refrigerator was full.
Nash and Kitteridge came into the kitchen.
"Nothing," said Nash.
Kitteridge said nothing.
"What?" asked Mac.
"I don't know," said Kitteridge. "There's something creepy about the house. I think it's more than the murders. I don't know."
"Maybe you picked up on something you saw or heard or smelled," said Mac.
"Go with the gut," said Nash.
"This is going to take a while," said Mac. "Keep searching the house. Go with that feeling. Then go ask the neighbors if they saw Shelton. There's an older woman across the street. Her name's Maya Anderson. She spends a lot of time looking out her window and she knows what Shelton looks like."
"Got it," said Nash, who went back through the door.
Mac took out his cell phone and called Danny.
Danny was at home, sitting in his comfortable chair with the slight tear on the right arm, watching an ancient episode of The Rockford Files. His shoes were off and he had a glass of iced tea on the table next to him. The glass rested precariously atop a pile of magazines, mostly old, mostly about forensics. His tremor was still there, but he had the feeling, maybe just a hope, that it was somewhat better. He had taken Sheila Hellyer's advice and another one of the pills. He had also left a note on Mac's desk telling him that he had gone home and why he had done it.
He could tell from Mac's first words that he hadn't yet received the note. Danny hit the mute button on the remote he was holding.
"I'm at the Vorhees house," said Mac. "Shelton was here. He called me."
"You need me there?" asked Danny.
"The knife is here," said Mac. "And we've got to dust everything in the kitchen, contents of the refrigerator, pantry. It's going to take a while."
"I'll be right there," said Danny.
He hung up, sat for a few seconds, looked at James Garner, who seemed exasperated. Danny realized that he had no idea what was happening in the episode. He hit the power button to turn off the TV. He stood, reached for the iced tea, forgetting about the tremor. He knocked the glass over. Tea puddled on the magazines and wooden table and made its way around melting squares of ice.
Danny would clean it up later. He slipped on his shoes, got his kit, which was standing next to the door, and went out into the heat of the day, wondering if Shelton had said anything about what had happened to Jacob Vorhees.
The photographs of the crowds in front of the two temples where the murders had taken place were laid out on the table. There were eighteen of them, eight-by-tens. The photographs were also on a disc, but they wanted to look at them all laid out at the same time.
Flack, Aiden and Stella leaned over them, looking for people who might be in both crowds, searching for possibly familiar faces, scanning each person for a suspicious look, frown, smile.
"That guy, that guy, that woman," said Aiden, pointing at people in the photographs.
One man she had pointed to in the photographs was at least eighty. He had the same sad look in both photographs. Another man was dressed in black, bearded, wearing glasses, definitely Orthodox. He looked somber. None of the others were particularly interesting, but you never knew.
"That's it," said Flack.
"No," said Aiden. "Look at that man."
She pointed to a man in a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, his hands at his sides. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt. He stood between a weeping woman and a black man in a white shirt who craned his neck to get a better view of what was going on. There was a glint of light that suggested the man in the cap was wearing glasses, but it was impossible to clearly see his face or determine his age.
"And here," Aiden said, flipping through the pile of photographs from outside the second crime scene.
She pointed. The man's back was turned, but it was definitely the same man in a baseball cap, same height, shoulders and back straight, military bearing.
"Any other pictures of him?" asked Flack.
"One," said Aiden. "My favorite."
The man was moving away from the camera, looking back over his left shoulder, head down, eyes in the shadow of the brim of his cap, sun glinting from his glasses.
"He's looking at the camera," said Aiden. "And he doesn't want to be recognized."
There was something familiar about him to Stella. Maybe she was just tired. She knew her allergies were about to kick in and might be fueling her imagination and memory, but she didn't think so.
She looked at the man again and had the eerie sensation that he was looking directly at her.
"Let's blow him up and see what we can see," she said.
Aiden nodded.
6
HAWKES WORKED ON THE BODY OF JOEL BESSER, trying to get Nancy Sinatra singing that damned Bang Bang song out of his mind. He had left his iPod at home, forgetting to put it in its plastic case. That had never happened before, and now his punishment was the voice of Nancy Sinatra.
When he removed the two bullets from the skull and held them up with his tweezers, he knew he was dealing with a very small caliber weapon, a small weapon used by someone who knew what he was doing. The shots had been perfectly placed to kill instantly, the same pattern, almost the same location as the shots that had been fired into the head of Asher Glick.
The nails had definitely been driven in post mortem by someone with a strong arm, a left arm according to the angle of the penetration. It didn't take an expert to know that whoever had done this had also killed Asher Glick. Only this time he had not been hurried.
Unlike Glick's case, no member of the Jewish Light of Christ stepped forward to protest an autopsy. So Hawkes was as thorough as he could be.
He always felt like apologizing when he made that first incision. It had to be done. It was not Sheldon Hawkes who was violating the body. Hawkes was giving the dead person on the table a last chance to point a finger at his killer, the one who had fired two bullets into his brain. He made the first incision.
"Bang, bang," came Nancy Sinatra's voice.
They now knew a few things about the man in the baseball cap who had been in the crowds at both murders.
Stella and Aiden hovered over the blowups of the man. The resolution was good, not perfect but good enough to see that the hair at the back of the man's cap was gray. There were also age spots on his visible hand and, in a further blowup, they could make out several hairs growing on the ridge of the man's ear. They both agreed that the man was somewhere between his mid-fifties and sixty-five or even older.