"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.
She wasn't going to talk about that with George Melvoy.
The clock in the window of the coffee shop across the street read 2:37 a.m.
Kyle Shelton sat in the window, glancing at the clock and the few people of the night who passed by the night-lit interiors of the shops. There was a young laughing couple, arm in arm. He thought of Becky and closed his eyes. There was a trio of young men whispering, emitting danger. Kyle could sense it.
The air conditioner in the window next to the one before which he was sitting rattled and gave off spurts of almost cool air. The night heat seeped through the windows, the walls.
He had gone through cycles about his plan. Sometimes he thought that for something improvised, it was reasonably good. Things could go wrong, but it should hold. At other times, he was certain it had been a terrible plan, that the CSI cop Taylor was gathering pinpricks of evidence, secrets of blood and DNA, fingerprints he had forgotten.
His friend Scott Shuman said Kyle could crash at his apartment for a few nights. Scott was a good guy who was taking a big chance harboring a fugitive. Kyle had known Scott- short, dark unkempt curly black hair, slightly pudgy- in college. Both had been philosophy majors. They had become friends. Scott had become a well-paid computer program designer for an Indian company that explored the universe. Scott had never married. Though they never discussed it, Kyle thought his friend was probably gay but hadn't yet admitted it to himself. Kyle could be wrong. He had been wrong about many things.
Middle of the night. Kyle felt it coming. He was going to allow himself to grieve. Actually, he had no choice. He could feel it happening.
Kyle could not remember crying as he was about to do, shaking with grief and loss, considering that there might really be a malevolent force that lived and thrived on the pain of humans. He wept and remembered Ovid's words: "Suppressed grief suffocates. It rages within the breast and is forced to multiply its strength."
The clock in the coffeehouse window read 2:49 a.m.
Mac's watch read 2:49 a.m. He was walking Rufus to the small dog park five blocks from his apartment. He should have returned the dog before coming home. Mac had long ago admitted that his one emotional weakness was dogs. He knew how to handle them, work with them, admire them. He also knew he did not want to own one in the city, not with his job.