Faye Kellerman_Decker & Lazarus 02

by Sacred;Profane

  “Closer to you,” Fordebrand said.

  “Detective, how ’bout you and me slicing through the shit,” said Beckham. “You don’t want to do this now. And I don’t want to do this now. We’d both rather be home, downing a brew and singing carols to the Savior.”

  “How about a joint operation?” Fordebrand tried. “Cut the paperwork by half.”

  “Why don’t you flip a coin?” suggested Decker.

  “I like the man’s logic,” Beckham said. He won the toss and smiled. Fordebrand made a last-ditch effort.

  “I still think it’s on your side of the border, Sheriff,” he said.

  “You’re being a sore loser, Detective,” said Beckham.

  “Go home,” Decker said. “We’ll work it out.”

  Fordebrand gave Decker a dirty look.

  “My replacement’s coming in a half hour,” Beckham said. “I’d appreciate it if you could fill him in. If any questions should come up, who do I call?”

  The big bull took out his card and gave it to him.

  “Edward,” Beckham said, reading it and sticking out his hand, “it’s been a pleasure.”

  Fordebrand grumbled, then pumped the deputy’s hand firmly. “You call and ask for me or call the same extension and ask for Detective Sergeant Decker here—”

  “I’m not working Homicide,” Decker said.

  Fordebrand smiled cryptically, still digging at his forearm. The rashes and welts were manifestations of an allergic reaction that occured whenever he dealt with corpses—inconvenient, considering his chosen profession.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll leave you gentlemen now,” said Beckham.

  “Yeah,” Fordebrand said. “Merry Christmas. Merry fucking Christmas.”

  Beckham jogged away and Fordebrand turned to Decker.

  “Goddam hillbilly shitheads. What the hell do they do all day? Sit up in the ranger station and jerk their chains?”

  “He’s right,” Decker said. “The area does belong to Foothill. He might as well save himself the hassle.”

  “Stop being so noble.”

  “What’s with the shit-eating grin when I said I wasn’t working Homicide?”

  “Well, when you get back you’ll notice that we’re slightly shorthanded.”

  “We’ve got five homicide dicks.”

  “Pilkington’s transferred to Harbor Division, Marriot’s on vacation, Sleighton’s father took sick in Canada, so he flew out to be with him for the holidays. That leaves me and Bartholemew. I just found out today that Bart broke his leg riding a bicycle.”

  “Shit.”

  “Morrison did a little rearranging. Starting December twenty-sixth, you and Dunn are working Homicide. Dunn is actually jockeying back and forth between Homicide and Sex and Juvey—”

  “I don’t want to hear about this, Ed. I’m still on vacation.” Decker looked at the boys. “Such as it is.”

  “Rina’s kids?” Fordebrand asked.

  Decker nodded. “The older one found the bones. What a crappy deal! Nice weather, so I take them for a few days in the wild—unpolluted skies, unspoiled nature—and they have to be exposed to this crud.”

  “That’s too bad.” Fordebrand’s right arm had begun to swell. He clawed at it and winced. “So you want this one, Deck?”

  “All right. Starting the twenty-sixth. Nothing’s going to go down between then and now anyway.”

  “Easy case,” Fordebrand said. “Open and shut. Poke around a little just to say you did something. Look through a few Missing Persons files and forget about it. A week’s worth of desk work—nice and clean.”

  “If it’s so appealing, Ed, you can take the case.”

  “I’ll be happy to, Decker, if you take the packinghouse slashings.”

  “Pass.”

  Fordebrand ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Yeah, you look through a couple of Missing Persons files, then close the books, and they go down in the annals as a couple of John Does.”

  “Jane Does,” Decker said. “They look like females to me.”

  “Jane Does, John Does, who the hell cares? Nobody’ll hear from ’em again.” Fordebrand slapped him on the back. “I’ll handle the preliminary garbage. You go off and finish your vacation. Take care of the boys.”

  “Sorry I had to drag you out on Christmas Eve.”

  “Ah, it’s okay,” Fordebrand said magnanimously. “I’ll be back in time for the honey-glazed ham and the turkey. The ham’s in the oven; the turkey’s coming in from Cleveland.”

  Decker smiled. “Your mother-in-law?”

  “Who else?”

  “Have fun.”

  “If you get lonely tonight, Deck—”

  “I’ll be up here with the boys, but thanks anyway.”

  Fordebrand nodded.

  “Yeah, you probably don’t go in for Christmas anymore, do you, Rabbi?”

  Decker shrugged.

  “You like playing Daddy, Deck?”

  “They’re good kids.”

  “What’s with you and their mama anyway?”

  “Beats me, Ed.”

  Decker called out to Jake, and jogged over to Sammy and sat down beside him. The younger boy came running and jumped onto Decker’s lap.

  “The police will take it from here, guys, so we can go back to the campsite now. We’d better get going. We still have to pitch the tent—”

  “Peter, I want to go home,” said Sammy.

  Decker blew out air forcefully. “All right. Is that okay with you, Jakey?”

  “Yeah, I’d like to go home, too. I’m sick of peanut butter.”

  Decker put his arms around the boys. “I’m awfully sorry, guys.”

  Sammy leaned his head on the detective’s shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Are you guys a little spooked?”

  “Maybe a little,” Sammy answered.

  “How about you, Jake?”

  Jacob shrugged.

  “It’s a normal feeling to be freaked out. You kids handled this very well.” Decker helped them to their feet. “Let’s go pack up. I hope you guys had a good time before all this happened.”

  “I did,” Sammy said. “I really really did.”

  It was hard to tell whether he was convincing Decker or himself.

  Decker drove them home in the jeep. The boys said nothing as they rode down the winding, one-lane dirt paths with five-hundred-foot drops bouncing along bumpy mountain roads. When the four-wheeler finally exited the mountain highway and hooked onto the freeway on-ramp, Sammy let out a big sigh.

  “Do you ever worry about getting killed?” he asked Decker.

  “I used to when I was a uniformed policeman, but not anymore, Sammy. My work is pretty safe. It’s mostly pushing papers and talking to people.”

  “Were you ever shot?” the older boy continued.

  “No.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I don’t want to be a cop.”

  Decker nodded. “It can get pretty gross sometimes.”

  “Know what I want to be?” said Jake.

  “What?” the big man asked.

  “A pilot in the Israeli Air Force.”

  “Not me,” said Sammy. “I don’t want to get killed.”

  “They never get killed,” Jake protested.

  “’Course they get killed, Yonkie. The Arabs are shooting at you. You think they don’t get lucky and get a hit once in a while?”

  “Well, I’m not gonna get killed!” Jake said firmly.

  “Yeah! Right!”

  Silence.

  “I don’t know what I want to do,” Sammy pondered. “I’d like to get smicha, but I don’t want to learn full time like my abba or my uncles did.”

  “Are all your uncles rabbis?” asked Decker.

  “All except one,” answered Sammy. “One of my eema’s brothers lives in Jerusalem. He’s a sofer. That’s kind of interesting I guess.”

  �
��What’s that?” Decker asked.

  “Uh, you know, the guy who writes the Torah and the mezuzahs,” explained Sammy.

  “A scribe,” Decker said.

  “Yeah, I think that’s what they call them,” said Sammy. “My other uncles, the ones married to my abba’s sisters, used to teach in yeshiva, but now they’re businessmen. They live in New York.”

  “We’ve got tons of family there,” Jake said, excitedly. “We’ve got a bubbe and zayde and two great-grandmothers, and a whole bunch of cousins. We’re not alone at all.”

  Then the little boy licked his lips and frowned. “But sometimes it feels like it.”

  “Especially when you see scary stuff like today?” said Decker.

  “Aw, that doesn’t bother me,” Jake said mustering up bravado. “That was kinda neat…sort of.”

  “Eema’s other brother, the one that’s not a rabbi, sees dead bodies all the time,” Sammy said. “He’s a pathologist and owns cemeteries…Anyway, him and Eema get into fights about that all the time because he’s a kohain—a Jewish priest—and kohains aren’t supposed to to be around corpses.”

  “Your uncle’s not religious?” Decker asked.

  Sammy nodded. “Him and Eema fight about that, too. You can bet that we don’t see much of Uncle Robert.”

  They rode another mile in silence. Decker broke it.

  “Are you interested in medicine, Sammy?” he asked.

  “No way,” Sammy answered. “I don’t like blood.”

  “How about business? Like your New York uncles?”

  “Borrrrring,” said Sammy.

  Decker smiled.

  “Well, you boys have plenty of time to figure out what you want to be. Heck, it’s okay to do a lot of different things in a lifetime. I used to do ranching when I was a kid in Florida. I did construction work in high school. I was a lawyer for a while, and I don’t see myself as being a cop forever. You’ve got loads of time to experiment.”

  Sammy mulled that over for a while.

  “You know what I’d like to be?” he said. “I think I’d like to be a journalist. Maybe write editorials that make people think.”

  The kid was all of eight and a half.

  The grounds of Yeshivas Ohavei Torah were located on twenty acres of brush and woodland in the pocket community of Deep Canyon. It was twenty freeway minutes from the police station and fifteen minutes from Decker’s ranch. The locals of Deep Canyon were working-class whites, and they and the Jews had little to do with each other, but over the past few years there had grown an uneasy, mutual tolerance.

  The locals weren’t the only ones who felt uncomfortable with the Jewish community. The Foothill cops were equally baffled by the enclave, imagining it a slice of old Eastern Europe that had been frozen in a time warp. Actually, the yeshiva embodied aspects of both past and present, but the cops never delved that deeply. They had nicknamed the place Jewtown, which is what Decker had called it before his own personal involvement. Now, at least when Decker was around, they referred to it by its rightful name.

  The lot for the yeshiva had been cut out of the mountainside. Huge boulders had been hauled away and the ground had been leveled, leaving a mesa of flat land surrounded by thick foliage, evergreens, and hillside. Set in the middle of a broad carpet of lawn was the main building—a two-story cement cube that contained most of the classrooms. On one side were smaller buildings—additional classrooms, the library, the synagogue, and the ritual bathhouse. The other side was open space for a thousand feet, then housing—a dormitory and a cluster of prefab bungalows.

  Most of the yeshiva residents were college-age boys engaged in religious studies, but the place also had a high school, with secular and Jewish curricula, and an elementary school for children of the kollel students—married men studying Talmud full time. Private homes were provided for the kollel families, the two dozen rabbis who served as full-time teachers, and the headmaster—the Rosh Yeshiva. He was a meticulously dressed, distinguished man in his seventies named Rav Aaron Schulman. Rina’s husband had been his protégé and most brilliant student. Because of that, she and her sons had been allowed to stay on after he died.

  Rina had once admitted to Decker that she was an outsider at the yeshiva. The women who lived on the grounds simply came along with their husbands or fathers. The school catered exclusively to men, and as a widow, she had no role there whatsoever. Though the residents treated her kindly—it was demanded of them by the Torah—she still felt like an interloper living in free housing, even though she taught math at the high school and operated the ritual bath. She knew she’d have to leave one day, but in the meantime she was grateful for the interlude that let her try to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.

  Decker parked in front of the main gate, told Ginger to stay, and walked with the boys across the lawn. The place was almost empty at this time of the year; most of the boys had gone home to their families. Still, a seminar was being held on the grass. A full-bearded rabbi wearing a black suit and hat sat with five pupils—bochrim—under an elm. The students and their teacher were engaged in animated dialogue. Decker and the kids walked down the main pathway, turned onto a dirt sidewalk that cut through the residential portion, and stopped in front of a white bungalow.

  “I’d appreciate it if you boys didn’t mention the bones until after I’ve spoken with your mother.”

  They nodded.

  Rina opened the door at Decker’s knock, her eyes widening with surprise, lips opening in a full smile.

  “I didn’t expect you guys back until tomorrow!”

  Sammy fell into his mother’s arms and embraced her tightly. He leaned his head against her breast and hid his gaze from hers. Rina cupped his face in her palms and looked at him, noticing moisture in his eyes and the tremble of his lower lip. She kissed him on his forehead and he broke away. Jake gave her a playful hug and smothered her face with kisses.

  “I think they missed you,” Decker said.

  “Happy to be home?” she asked them as they went inside.

  The boys nodded.

  “I’ve got surprises for you both. They’re on your beds.”

  “Oh boy!” Jake exclaimed, heading for the bedroom. Sammy lagged behind.

  “Shmuel,” she said, holding his arm, “is everything okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Something’s bothering you.”

  “I’m fine, Eema. I’m just tired.”

  “Okay,” said Rina, disconcerted at his evasion.

  He gave his mother another hug, then trudged off to the bedroom.

  “What happened?” she asked Peter as soon as they were alone.

  “Could I have a cup of coffee, Rina?”

  “Uh…sure. Of course,” she said. “Sit down, Peter. You look exhausted.”

  He took a seat on the left side of her brown sofa, letting his head flop back against the cushion, then ran his hands over his face.

  “Why are the boys upset?” she asked.

  “It’s complicated. But everyone’s fine.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Relax. I’ll make coffee and then you can tell me what’s going on.”

  Her house was tiny—800 square feet crammed with mementos—tchatchkas, she called them. Display cases full of Jewish figurines, propped photos, and sketches of Israel. The white walls were dotted with landscapes of the Judean dessert, charcoals of the Old City of Jerusalem and the Wailing Wall, and photos of the Lower East Side of New York. Hanging above the sofa was a magnificently colored and elaborately scrolled Hebrew document—her wedding contract, her ketubah.

  That’s what a Jewish marriage is, she had said. A contract. You’re supposed to know what you’re getting yourself into.

  But do you ever really know, he had wondered out loud.

  Emotionally, of course not. But a ketubah spells out the specific obligations for a husband as well as a wife. You’ve got to remember that back then, most societies considered women things—objects. The idea that a man was
accountable to his wife was revolutionary.

  Her entire east wall was the family gallery—snapshots of her parents, and her brothers and their families, pictures of her sons as infants and toddlers clumsy in bulky diapers, and antique sepia portraits of her grandparents and great-grandparents in gilt frames. And the wedding pictures—Rina and Yitzchak under a canopy holding a shared wine glass. The groom was looking directly at the rabbi, his eyes intense and serious. He’d been a handsome young man, Decker thought, lean, with even, strong features. But Rina was the focus of the photograph—a stunningly beautiful girl with sapphire eyes and gleaming ebony hair that fell to her waist. She was dazzling as a bride. Whenever he looked at the picture, he felt a twinge in his chest.

  His eyes drifted from the photo to the overflowing bookcases. She owned some secular books, but most were religious—Hebrew and Aramaic books of prayer, law, and ethics that were double and triple stacked on the shelves. She had skimmed through some of them, she had told him, but Yitzchak had known them all by heart.

  Rina came back with black coffee for him and a milk-laced cup for herself. She sat down, tucked her legs under her denim skirt, and brushed midnight silk out of her eyes.

  “Now,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Everything’s okay,” he started out. “Sammy went exploring in the woods and came across a couple of human skeletons—”

  “What?”

  “It scared him, of course. It scared Jake, also, but they’re okay,” he said.

  “What’d they do?”

  “They asked a lot of good questions and I answered them. Kids do well with the honest approach.”

  “Was it disgusting?”

  “It was graphic.”

  “What’d they ask you, Peter?”

  “They acted pretty characteristically. Jake seemed more interested in the bones per se. How did they get there? Did the bad man who dumped them still live in the city? Is he going to kill us—”

  “Dear God, I’d better talk to him—”

  Decker held up the palm of his hand and continued.

  “He watched the police procedures, and it was good for him. Gave him a sense of resolution. He’s not the one who took it to heart.”