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.
He remembered the can of Sprite on the table, put down the remote and took a sip. The tremor was back, almost undetectable.
Then, with no warning, Danny was having an anxiety attack. He had had three attacks in his life. He put his head between his legs and took long, slow breaths until he was back under control. He stayed with his head bowed for a few minutes more, then stood suddenly.
He wanted, needed to find something to do, but he knew he couldn't get in bed, couldn't sleep, couldn't listen to music, couldn't watch the game. He considered getting dressed and finding a twenty-four-hour restaurant where he could sit with other customers, or at least a waiter, and nurse a decaf coffee and a donut.
He moved to the table in the corner on which his computer sat. There was more room in the bedroom, but Mac had once suggested that one shouldn't work in the same room in which one slept.
Danny sat, touched the mouse; the monitor gave off three tones that were meant to be calming, and the screen lit up.
He browsed for more than an hour, following a thread about the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, then he switched to a search for Kyle Shelton. There were dozens of Google hits, none that matched their suspect. He narrowed the search to "Kyle Shelton, philosophy."
He still got a long list of sites, but the first one brought Danny awake. He cleaned his glasses on his Mets shirt and found out some things that had not turned up in the routine bio check.
Kyle Shelton had a web site. At the top of the home page were three black-and-white photographs of a pair of hands. In the photograph on the left, the hands were open palms facing the camera. In the center photograph, the hands were folded in what appeared to be prayer. And in the last photograph, the hands were tightly clenched, knuckles white. Anger?
There was a comment in script just below the photographs. It read:
Imagine a vast valley full of rocks, boulders, as far as the eye can see in any direction. Now, imagine a butterfly the size of a baby's hand with wings so thin you can see through them. The butterfly lands on one boulder the size of a Volkswagen and begins fluttering its wings against the boulder, slowly, imperceptibly, wearing down the boulder. When the boulder is finally gone after more than ten times as long as life has existed on earth, the butterfly moves on to the next boulder, which is even larger than the first. When all the boulders and rocks have been worn to dust by the fluttering wings, then, and only then, will eternity have begun.
Beneath the words was typed in regular text, "Suggested by a passage in Ugo Betti's Crime on Goat Island."
Danny reread the paraphrased quotation and felt somewhat calmed by it. Kyle Shelton was also a blogger. Danny clicked on the image for the blog site. A check of past entries showed that the site was kept up to date, a new entry at least once a week. There were no more than a few dozen responses to Shelton's stream-of-consciousness meandering. Danny read Shelton's entries, forgetting his anxiety. Some of the entries were about philosophers, dead philosophers with whom Shelton agreed or disagreed. There were quotations from philosophers in every entry.
The entries were full of contradictions. Shelton did not believe in the goodness of man, but in the near sainthood of many individuals. He said he had learned that in Iraq. He did not believe in any religion, but he cited evidence of the power of prayer. The entries were all calm, not frenetic, not someone trying to convince his reader, but someone who felt the need to send his thoughts to the wind.
There was only one subject about which Kyle Shelton raged: child abuse. Shelton did not consider human life sacred. There were many, mostly those who abused children, who Kyle said "should simply, painlessly, be executed, burned and their remains dumped into the nearest toilet."
Danny kept reading, hand steady, focused.
William Wosak, SJ, thirty-eight, was a scholar-priest with a Ph.D. from Fordham. Wosak had written three books. His area of interest was correcting false conceptions and misreadings from holy scripture. Father Wosak, lean and graying, wore an almost constant bemused smile.
He was certain that most lay Catholics did not read the Gospels, and certainly not the writings of the saints, with an interest in learning. They read, those that did, to find in what they read and what they heard in church on Sundays confirmation of what they had learned from their parents and misinformed nuns and priests who taught them as children.