Free Blood on the Sun (CSI: NY) by Stuart M. Kaminsky

picked the lock. It hadn’t been easy. It wasn’t something he knew how to do, but he had practiced at it, especially with the lock Stella had installed. He had purchased a lock just like hers, read a book on how to pick a lock, bought the right tools, and practiced.
    It had taken him almost twenty minutes that first time he had entered Stella’s apartment, and by the time he was finished he had been drenched in sweat from the fear of someone seeing him. He had also been afraid that he had left small scratch marks that she might notice.
    Now was the third time he had been in her apartment, and this time he didn’t bother searching drawers and accessing Stella’s computer. It took too much time to put everything back exactly as it was so she wouldn’t notice anyone had been there.
    He moved quickly to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. He knew where the bottle was. He took the bottle he had brought with him from his pocket and carefully, over the sink, poured the white-brown gel from the bottle he had brought into Stella’s medication and shook Stella’s bottle for a full two minutes.
    He had learned how to make the gel, which used simple fly strips and turpentine, from notes he found on a bookmarked web site on her computer.
    He had been certain it would work. The person who had written the notes knew about such things, but just in case, the man had tried the poison on a dozen white rats he had purchased at a pet show. He had told the woman who sold the rats to him that he was feeding them to his two corn snakes. The rats had died almost instantly. That wasn’t good. He moved on to guinea pigs and finally a rhesus macaque monkey, tried various mixtures, percentages, until he found one that made the monkey immobile for about two minutes before it died.
    She might take it that night. It might be days or weeks before she would need it, but she would need it. When she did take it, it would kill her quickly, but she would suffer.
    He carefully cleaned and dried the sink using toilet paper and a spray bottle of cleanser Stella kept under the sink. He flushed the paper down the toilet, made sure it was gone, pocketed the bottle he had brought with him and returned Stella’s half-full bottle of antihistamine syrup to the cabinet with the label facing out as he had found it.
    Less than a minute later, he left the apartment. He would return when the time came. He wanted to be there when she died. He wanted her to live long enough to know why this was happening to her, but he would settle for simply knowing that she was dead.
     
    Mac had returned just before dawn to the wooded area where Jacob Vorhees’ bicycle and clothes were found. He wanted to use an ALS on the area to look for signs of blood. With his luminol light on and wearing an amber eye-shield, Mac went over the ground, moving outward in circles to a distance of fifty yards.
    No signs of blood, but as dawn came, Mac found the missing sneaker behind a rock, half a football field away from the bike and clothes. Had the boy broken away from Kyle Shelton still wearing one shoe? Had the shoe come off when the boy was running away?
    Wearing latex gloves, Mac lifted the shoe and saw the blood. He bagged the shoe and put it in his kit.
    Mac had a few ideas. Some were simple, some—one in particular—were bizarre, but he had dealt with more than the bizarre before.
    There were at least six linden trees in the area Mac covered. He had examined leaves from beneath some of them. Most of them had the edges gnawed off or an irregularly shaped hole in the middle of the leaf. It didn’t take much searching to find silken threads on the trees and then cankerworm larvae on the still-living leaves of the linden tree.
    Magnified 120 times and focused, the leaves revealed two secrets.
    There was one small bite mark at the edge of one leaf near the stem. There was also a trace of something else, something white and pulpy. Mac increased the magnification until he was