Blood on the Sun (CSI: NY) Read Free

tremor, which seemed to be getting worse.
    “What have we got?” Mac asked the officer, whose name tag read W YCHECKA .
    Wychecka couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
    “Multiple,” said Wychecka. “Upstairs. Two detectives in there, Defenzo and Sylvester.”
    “No one else comes in here,” said Mac. “No one. Not even you.”
    Wychecka nodded.
    Mac nodded back and moved past the officer with Danny behind him. Both men reached into their pockets and pulled out latex gloves. Danny had trouble getting his on.
    “You okay?” asked Mac.
    “Fine; let’s work.”
    Mac looked at Danny, who took a camera from his kit and started up the stairs, taking photographs as he moved.
    They could smell death, could smell blood as they moved up to the second-floor landing of the house.
    The house was sunlight bright, furnished with comfortable antiques, solid, slightly ornate, expensive. The air-conditioning was running on high.
    They walked on the well-polished wooden floor toward the sound of voices coming from one of the bedrooms. The door was open. On the bed were two female bodies, bloody bodies, hands folded across their chests, heads resting on pillows, eyes closed. The older of the two wore colorful Chinese pajamas. The younger victim wore only an XXXL T-shirt with U SHER printed on it over the picture of a young black man whose mouth was open, singing a silent song to the dead. On the floor, collapsed on his right side, legs at odd angles, eyes open, was a man in a blood-drenched white terry cloth robe.
    The two detectives on the scene greeted the CSIs with a shake of the head.
    “Defenzo,” the older one, short, solid, gray hair brushed back, said.
    The other detective was younger, black, no more than thirty, with TV-star good looks. He was introduced as Trent Sylvester.
    Mac handed each of the detectives a pair of latex gloves. They put them on, something they should have done when they entered the house.
    Danny took photographs of the bodies and the room and placed his kit on the floor while Defenzo said, “Two on the bed are Eve Vorhees, mother of victim two, Becky Vorhees, seventeen. Man on the floor is husband and father, Howard Vorhees.”
    Mac carefully collected blood samples on cotton swabs and dropped them gently into sealable plastic bags, which he deposited in his kit while Danny took photographs.
    Mac looked around the room. It was a teenage girl’s room, filled with makeup and small framed photographs of young boys and girls mugging for the camera. Becky Vorhees, blond, pretty, was in all the photographs, often with her tongue sticking out. Mac leaned over the dead girl and touched his wrist to her arm.
    She felt warm and stiff, suggesting that she had been dead between three and eight hours. If she had felt warm but not stiff, Mac would have estimated she had been dead less than three hours. Cold and stiff meant she had been dead eight to thirty-six hours, and if she were cold and not stiff she would have been dead thirty-six hours or more. It was a forensic rule of thumb; not precise, but helpful.
    A better sense of the time of death would come after Medical Examiner Sheldon Hawkes examined the bodies. As soon as the three members of the Vorhees family had died, organisms in their intestines became active and began attacking the intestines and the blood. Gas formation could lead to a rupture of the intestines, releasing the organisms to attack the other organs. Muscle cells deprived of oxygen produce high levels of lactic acid. This leads to a complex reaction in which the proteins that form our muscles, actin and myosin, fuse to form a gel, which stiffens the body until decomposition begins. The stiffening of the body, rigor mortis, is due to this chemical reaction.
    By examining the body, Hawkes would be able to determine a more precise time of death, among other things, dependent on the degree of decomposition.
    But there were many other things an autopsy could tell them, all of which meant