"We've seen crazier," she said.
"Watch your back," said Flack. "Hungry?"
"No."
"There's a kosher restaurant over there," said Flack. "Kishke and herring in cream sauce."
It sounded far from appealing, especially the stuffed intestines. Besides, she wanted to get back to the lab and start her search for the man in the cap. She had no intention of focusing only on him. She would check the alibi of every man in the Orthodox congregation and keep up the search for others. Flack could have another shot at Joshua and check to see if the furniture dealer, Arvin Bloom, had an alibi for the time of the second murder.
"Kreplach soup?" Flack tried. "Matzoh ball soup?"
Stella smiled.
"Let's make it fast," she said.
Flack smiled back.
As they crossed the street, Stella didn't tell him that he wouldn't be able to order the two items he wanted. It wasn't kosher to mix dairy products with meat. She had learned that back when she was nineteen and dancing at the Broadway Dance Center. Her friend Ann Ryan, whose real name was Ann Cornridge, had invited her home for dinner not four blocks from where she and Flack were now standing in front of the restaurant. Ann's parents had explained kosher law when Stella had asked if there was butter for her bread.
Stella was sure she remembered seeing this same restaurant fifteen years earlier on the way to Ann's house. New York was a small town if you lived here long enough.
Wearing white latex gloves, Mac carefully laid out the glass fragments taken from the Vorhees' garbage shortly after their initial investigation. The fragments looked like pieces of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, which was how Mac was treating them.
First he had used the spectrometer for signs of blood or fingerprints on any of the fragments. He found none and had given the fragments to Chad Willingham, who took the assignment as a welcome challenge.
Now after a little over two hours Chad had returned with the fragments and a disc that he inserted into the computer, which began to hum, and then an image began to form.
"Scanning electron microscope," Chad said. "You can enlarge any microscopic surface or any part of a surface."
Mac nodded, looking at the screen covered not in enlarged fragments but tiny images that filled the page.
"Can enlarge any piece," Chad said with pride, moving the mouse to a random image and clicking.
The tiny fragment now filled the screen. Chad moved the three-dimensional image around so that Mac could see all sides.
"Neat, huh?" asked Chad.
Mac nodded.
"You ain't seen nothing yet," said Chad, who pressed a series of keys. The tiny fragments on the screen moved rapidly, came together. Chad enlarged the image.
Now Mac knew what had bruised the arm and dented the bone of Howard Vorhees.
"Print three of them," said Mac.
"Print three of them," Chad sang.
The printer next to the computer hummed to life and three full-color eight-by-ten pictures of the object emerged.
Mac gathered them, put them in an envelope. He had people to show the pictures to.
"OK if I put the real fragments together?" asked Chad.
"Maybe when the case is closed," said Mac.
Chad nodded in understanding and said, "Can I ask you a question?"
"Yes," said Mac.
"You ever dream about dying horses?"
Mac was used to Chad's non sequiturs, but this one was different.
"Yes," said Mac.
"So do I," said Chad. "I wonder what it means."
It wasn't a question Mac had ever really asked himself and he didn't intend to do so now, although the dream image of the collapsing horse pulling a fire truck flashed through his head.
7
MAC SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, red and white checkered cloth on top of it, plus two cups of coffee, one for him and one for Maya Anderson. He had placed the envelope on the table in front of her.
"Tell me again what you saw this morning."
"Nothing," she said. "I was sitting by the window, looking out, listening to music on my stereo. Show tunes. You like show tunes?"
"Some," said Mac patiently.
"My favorite is still Oklahoma," she said. "Second musical my mother took me to. First was Brigadoon."
"This morning?" Mac said gently.
"I'm just playing with you," the woman said, leaning forward as if it were a secret. "You get away with a lot when you get old."
Mac nodded.
"You knew I was playing, right?" she asked.
"Yes," said Mac. "This morning," he prodded.
"Nothing," she said. "No unfamiliar cars on the street. Nobody but you and the police going in the house or coming out."
"You didn't see Kyle Shelton go into the Vorhees' house?"
"Nor come out," she added. "He could have come through the back, through the kitchen, or he could have gone in there late at night when I got a few hours of sleep. But I did see him the night he killed everybody. I'd swear it on a Bible."
"You might have to do just that. Doors of the Vorhees house were locked," said Mac. "So were the windows."
"Like Yul Brynner said in The King and I," said Maya, "it's a puzzlement. Maybe he had a key. Maybe someone let him in. No, there's no one in there."
Mac unclasped the envelope on the table, opened it and removed the printout of a colorful Asian flowered vase.
"You recognize this?" he asked.
"No," she said. "Should I?"
"We think it was in the Vorhees house."
"Search me," Maya said with a shrug. "I could count the number of times I've been in there on the fingers of my late brother Arthur's right hand. He only had two fingers and a thumb."
"You'll keep watching?" asked Mac.
"Would even if you didn't ask," she said.
"Thank you," he said, carefully putting the picture of the vase back in the envelope and getting up.
Outside Mac opened his notebook, found the number he needed and punched it in and waited.
Maybelle Rose said, "Yes?"
Mac described the vase in the photo he held up in front of him.
"One black little flower right near the top?"
"Yes," said Mac.
"That was Becky's. Mr. Vorhees gave it to her after a business trip to Tokyo last year."
"Where was it kept in the house?" he asked.
"Becky's bedroom on the dresser," said Maybelle. "You find Jacob?"
"Not yet," said Mac, but he thought it would be soon.
"I pray he's alive," said Maybelle.
Mac thought the boy was alive. He was close to knowing it with some certainty, but he needed the help of a friend.
Professor of botany Leo Dobrint looked up at Aiden and said, "Do you mind sitting down?"
They were in Dobrint's small laboratory/office at Columbia University. The room was hot and had a bitter, acidic smell. Given a choice between that smell and the blood and body odors of some of the dead she routinely encountered, a decision would be hard.
Dobrint, in his sixties, thin, wearing jeans and a heavy wool shirt in apparent defiance of the weather, was sitting in front of a microscope looking at what Aiden had brought him. Dobrint's hair was salt-and-pepper, mostly salt, and he could definitely have used a haircut.
He was also definitely irritable. She sat in the chair he pointed to a few feet away and went back to the microscope.
After five minutes or so of adjusting, mumbling to himself, he looked up at her and said, "That is the smallest specimen I've ever been asked or chosen to look at."
Aiden waited.
"Yes," he said. "It's bloodwood. It's been treated and preserved. It comes, most likely, from a piece of furniture or from a bloodwood floor."
"Could you match it to a specific piece of furniture?" Aiden asked.
"Bloodwood is bloodwood," he said with slight irritation.
"If you had the piece of furniture," she said, "could you match it to this specimen?"