Faye Kellerman - Decker 13 - The Forgotten Read online

  They hugged - a long and romantic one. And she did get paint onto his suit. He didn't care. That's why God invented dry cleaning.

  10

  It was past eight and the Goldings still hadn't made it home. Decker would try them in the morning. Still, he wasn't ready to call it a working day. Six months ago, Ernesto Golding had a girlfriend named Lisa Halloway. Golding had mentioned her, and so had Yonkie. His stepson had stated that she had been devastated by the breakup. Decker wondered if she had picked up any telltale signs of Ernesto's antisocial behavior before the actual vandalism.

  The problem was getting past the parents. But that turned out to be the easy part: the parents weren't home.

  At least she didn't slam the door in his face.

  Under the illumination of a porch lamp, he noticed the winking of metal - multiple studs in her ears and a small stone in the side of her nose. Who knew what was in her belly button? Decker realized he shouldn't judge by externals - if Yonkie had liked her, she must be a girl of some substance - but he was a middle-aged guy with old-guy prejudices. Trying to be objective, if he looked beyond the holes, he saw a pretty, dark-eyed girl with a clear complexion, an oval face, and dimples in the cheeks. Lots of long curls framed her face. She had her shoulders hunched over as if she were cold, and her arms were strapped across her chest. She was unhappy and not afraid to express it.

  'I don't know anything about the vandalism.' Her voice was raspy and low. 'But even if I did know anything about the vandalism, I wouldn't rat on Ernesto.'

  'All I want to do is talk for a few minutes,' Decker said.

  'Why should I let you in? You could be a rapist!'

  Decker smoothed his ginger mustache, aware of Lisa as an angry, young girl wearing a clingy, white tank top and jeans and no underclothes. He could see her nipples even in the poor light. Being alone with her - in private - was not a good idea. He said, 'So we'll talk out here.'

  'For all the neighbours to see?'

  'Yeah.' Decker smiled. 'That's the point. You'll feel more comfortable that way.'

  'You can come in,' Lisa sneered. 'I don't seriously believe you're a rapist.'

  'Thank you, but I'm fine out here.' Decker kept his face flat. 'Can I talk to you on a conceptual level for a moment, Lisa? Let's say we are given competing attributes - loyalty and justice. Both are admirable traits, agreed?'

  'I don't see the point of all this!' She rubbed her arms. 'Also, I'm cold.'

  'I'll wait while you get a sweater.'

  'Never mind!'

  She was thoroughly sullen, but Decker continued anyway. 'If the party in question is accused of doing something criminal, but there is no definitive guilt or innocence, maybe the party deserves the benefit of the doubt, ergo loyalty. But if you know for sure that he did it - because he himself has admitted it -doesn't his criminal act abnegate his right to expect loyalty, and isn't loyalty moot because he already admitted the act?'

  She swished her curls. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

  'Why be loyal when you know he did it?'

  'Lieutenant Lazarus, it's all moot. I don't know anything about the vandalism. Can I go now?'

  Lieutenant Lazarus - using Yonkie's surname. 'It's Lieutenant Decker,' he corrected. 'And it's a free country. You can leave anytime you want.'

  But she didn't leave.

  Decker said, 'You went with Ernesto for a while, didn't you?'

  'You know I did. Otherwise, why would you talk to me? What's the point?'

  'Any of his friends twang your antenna?'

  'You mean did he hang out with Brown Shirts?' She rolled her eyes. 'And if he did, do you think he would have told me about it? I'm Jewish.' She gave a snort. 'Not the right kind of Jewish, for

  you.'

  Decker's eyes bored into hers. ' What did you say?'

  The intensity in his voice threw her off-balance. She blushed, and pressed her lips together and turned away, the implicit message being she blew it with her mouth. The other implicit message was that it probably hadn't been the first time.

  'Who have you been talking to, Lisa?' Decker pressed.

  He knew damn well to whom she'd been talking. Now Decker had the advantage. She knew she had gotten Jacob in trouble. She'd have to call him and explain. But first she'd have to deal with Decker. If she remained snotty, she would add to Jacob's woes.

  Now she was scared, didn't make eye contact. 'Can I go now?'

  Decker was relentless. 'Have you been talking to my son?'

  'Stepson—'

  'I stand corrected. Where do you know him from?'

  'Just around—'

  'Where?'

  'I met him at a party. What's the big deal? Jesusl Now I know why—'

  Again, she stopped herself.

  'Go on!'

  Lisa rubbed her hands together. 'Look! I met Jake at a party. Ernesto was there. Maybe Jake mentioned Ernesto or me to you in passing.'

  'Maybe he didn't.'

  'Well, then, okay. Maybe he didn't. I'm just saying that parents don't need an excuse to rag on their children. Even my par-ents... who are pretty cool... they still snoop. All parents snoop. Jake told me you snooped. Maybe it was true, maybe it

  wasn't. But let me tell you something about your son—' "Stepson.'

  'He feels brainwashed by your stifling way of life. He struggles with it. But in the end, you must have succeeded because he hasn't answered my phone calls for the last four months. Congratulations.'

  So she had made a play for Jake, and it had failed. So not only was it his fault that Jake was conflicted, but it was also his fault that she didn't succeed in getting him. 'You know what, Lisa? I'm going to do you a big favor. I'm going to forget what you just said, and how you just insulted four thousand years of my stepson's heritage. Let's go back to talking about Ernesto—' 'It's my heritage, too, you know,' she defended herself. 'Then if it is, you should be even more offended by what your ex-boyfriend did. I'm going to ask you straight out. Did Ernesto have any friends that made you nervous?'

  She paused for a long time. So many emotions walked past her face - defiance, shame, insecurity, embarrassment, anger, hate -the whole gamut. Finally, she settled on resignation. 'I hope I'm not sounding spiteful. I don't want to appear like the scorned woman.'

  'Go on.'

  She sighed. 'There's a kid in our class - Doug Ranger. He has an older sister - Ruby. She's around twenty-two or -three... graduated from Berkeley with a degree in computer science. She's smart... sexy... not to me, but to the boys. She's full of ideas... more like full of shit!' Wet eyes. 'I've seen her car at Ernesto's house a couple of times.'

  'Maybe it's Doug's car and he's visiting Ernesto.' 'It's not him, it's her.'

  'I guess parents aren't the only people who snoop?' She wilted, her voice soft and plaintive. 'Please, Lieutenant.' 'So you've seen Ruby Ranger go into Ernesto's house? Yes or no?'

  'Yes.' Totally defeated now. 'Several times.' 'What's she like?'

  A long sigh. 'Politicized.' 'What kind of ideas does she have?'

  'Libertarian stuff. Government should stop being everyone's baby-sitter. And it certainly doesn't have any right to be a censor when it's so corrupt itself. She's really big on a free Internet. That's her raison d'etre at the moment... to maintain an uncensored Internet. You're twelve years old and wanna talk about porn in the chat room with convicted sex offenders, that's fine with her. You wanna talk about incest or NAMBLA, fine. You wanna talk about scoring drugs, fine. You wanna talk about neo-Nazis and Hitler as heroes or buy Nazi stuff over the Internet, that's fine, too. She said that... those exact words.' Decker nodded.

  'She also said - right to my face while people were listening in - she also said that I would have been perfect concentration camp fodder because I have typical Jewish looks.'

  Decker winced. 'That's awful. Not that you look Jewish, but the Nazi fodder part. That's absolutely disgusting.' 'It creeped me out.'

  'I can certainly understand that.' Immediately, Decker was
thinking about how this woman might be stoking Ernesto's sadistic sexual fantasies. Her prodding would be especially potent if Golding felt that he was from Nazi heritage. 'What'd you say to her?'

  'Nothing. I was too shocked to respond. And, of course, that's exactly what she wanted. To get attention by being outrageous.' Her eyes were focused somewhere on her bare toes. 'Jake wasn't there. I told him about it afterward. He told me his grandparents were in concentration camps.'

  Decker nodded.

  'But they're not your parents?'

  'My parents are American,' Decker said.

  'So are mine. And my father isn't even Jewish. I was very offended by her statement. Then, there's this side of me... I was embarrassed by looking so Jewish, because Jewish girls don't

  have a reputation for being hotties. That's why I got the nose pierce. You probably think that's awful, right?'

  He did think it was awful. Awful and an awful shame. But he tried to keep his face neutral. 'Feelings aren't awful.'

  She wasn't buying. 'Not true. Self-destructive feelings are very awful.'

  Decker softened his tone. 'Do you know where Ruby Ranger lives?'

  Lisa nodded. 'With her parents. Are you going to go talk to her?'

  'Definitely/ Decker said. 'But it didn't come from you, all right?'

  'She'll think it came from Jake. He hated her. Every time she walked in the room, he'd leave. She once confronted him... something about him living an outdated life. That was a mistake! Wow, he got real scar—'

  She suddenly shut down.

  Jake got real scary, she had wanted to say. Decker would bring it up with him, a task he dreaded. A father part of him just didn't have the energy to deal with another crisis. But the cop part kept pushing him on. He folded his notebook. 'Thank you. You've been helpful.'

  'Maybe I've been helpful to you,' she said. 'But I certainly have not been helpful to Jake or Ruby.'

  He was minutes away from the shul. But his head was still spinning from what Lisa Halloway had just told him. He decided to make a quick pit stop at home. Be a concerned father and check up on his children. Besides, the longer car ride to his house would give him a few more minutes of thinking time.

  How to approach Ruby Ranger. At twenty-two, she was not a minor, but he imagined that her parents still exercised monetary control over her. If he could get them on his side, maybe that would give him an in to Ruby. Still, if the young woman were so strongly opinionated with such outrageous ideas, it indicated that she wasn't dominated by her parents. The age, early to

  mid-twenties, was unpredictable.

  It was getting late. The best thing was to wait until tomorrow. Maybe he'd have some other clever idea as to how to approach her. Maybe if she enjoyed baiting people, baiting a cop would be a big kick for her. He'd play dumb. If she hated Jacob, it would be even more of a kick to mess up his cop

  father.

  Which brought him back to his stepson. After fifteen years of having a no-fuss, no-hassle kid, he was getting paid back in spades. Jacob was moody, sullen, and sarcastic. But scary? The kid never failed to surprise him.

  He opened his front door, then went into the kitchen. Jacob looked up from the kitchen table. He was in his pajama bottoms, eating a sandwich, and reading Beowulf, yellow highlight marker in his hand. 'Hi. What are you doing home? I thought you were going to the shul to help out?'

  'I decided to come home first... see if you need anything.'

  'I'm fine. Hannah's asleep.'

  'Any problems?'

  'Nah, she's a great kid.'

  'Yes, she is.'

  'You look tired,' Jacob said. 'Like you just had a very bad conversation with a hysterical seventeen-year-old girl.'

  Decker sat down at the table. 'I'm loath to get you involved. But I need help. As a cop, the more information the better.' He stared at Jacob's food. 'What are you eating?'

  'Tuna. There's more in the fridge. I'll make you dinner.'

  Til do it.'

  'Sit.' Jacob got up. 'Kibud Av. Honoring your dad gives you brownie points upstairs. I could use extra.' He fixed Decker a tuna on rye, complete with lettuce and tomato. Decker ritually washed his hands, then said the blessing over the breaking of bread. Within two bites, half the sandwich was gone.

  'You are hungry.'

  'I'm always hungry.' Decker patted his stomach. Still firm but a bit wider. 'Can we talk about lisa?'

  'If you want.'

  'Actually, I'm more interested in a woman named Ruby Ranger. Lisa told me you knew her, also that you disliked her.'

  'That is a gross understatement. Ruby Ranger is psycho!'

  'Lisa said that Ruby tried to bait you once. You took offense and got pretty aggressive.'

  'What really happened was I told her if she ever got in my face again, I'd blast her face to smithereens.'

  Decker didn't answer, too stunned to talk.

  Jacob said, 'I not only threatened to kill her, I told her how I'd do it. Then I told her how I'd cover it up. Then I told her I knew all about homicide investigations and how to trip them up because I was your son, and I'd seen you conduct enough of them to know the pitfalls.' He looked at his lap. 'Actually, I think she believed me.'

  Decker bit his lip, trying to figure out how to respond. He couldn't get any words out.

  'She never talked to me again,' Jacob said. 'Course, I never saw her again. I stopped going to the parties. So I guess I'll never know what she really thought.'

  'Did people hear you threaten her?'

  'Yeah, we attracted quite a crowd. For a while, I was worried that someone was going to report me to the authorities - the real authorities, not you. Which would have been the correct thing to do. But no one did. All of them... the convictions of a turnip.'

  Silence.

  Jacob said, 'Being arrested would have been consistent with my self-image. I was in the nadir period of my life. I was smoking weed and taking pills and screwing around and screwing up. I was out of control. Thank God, you got to me first.' He looked up. 'That's a compliment.'

  'Thank you.' Decker stared at him, as if looking at a stranger. 'You didn't tell me you were taking pills.'

  He waved Decker off.

  'What else didn't you tell me?'

  Jacob threw his head back. 'You're a good guy, Dad. You try to

  be understanding. But even good guys have their limits.' He faced his stepfather. 'I'm scaring the hell out of you, aren't I?'

  'Yes, you are.'

  'I hate everything and everyone,' Jacob said. 'I'm furious all the time. But I'm the problem, not the world. I'm trying to channel it all into constructive endeavors. Probably sounds like a crock of crud to you, but it's true.'

  Decker was quiet.

  Jacob looked away. 'I really am trying. For Eema, especially, because she deserves better. I haven't touched anything chemical beyond an aspirin in six months. I'm doing well in school. I'm still working the suicide hot line once a week. I feed the homeless once a month. I am tryingl But it's hard!.'

  Decker put his hand on his son's shoulder. He leaned over and kissed his forehead. 'What can I do for you, Jacob?'

  He shook his head. 'I guess you can just keep doing what you're doing. Like not freaking when I tell you these things.'

  'It's hard,' Decker said. 'Inside, I'm freaking pretty badly.'

  The teen pushed his plate away and closed the book. 'You've seen a lot of psychos in your day, right?'

  'Right.'

  'Do I fit the profile?'

  Decker didn't dare to contemplate the thought. 'No.'

  Jacob smiled with watery eyes. 'You're just being nice.'

  'You have a conscience,' Decker said. 'Psychos don't. But that doesn't mean that you couldn't do damage if you blew.'

  'I know that.'

  'Were you just spouting off at Ruby Ranger or did you really mean it?'

  'At the time, I think I really meant it. She's a bad person. She defends people like Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot. When I threatened her, she
played it real cool. In truth, I think she liked it. I know she liked it. She got excited - aroused. Her nipples got hard.'

  'That could have been fear.'

  'It was a sexual thing, Dad. Believe me, I know. These

  people... they are so rich, so privileged. Nothing is novel to them, so they're always looking for kicks. When drugs don't do it anymore, they move on to other things. Ruby Ranger thinks mass murderers and serial killers are misunderstood geniuses. Do I think she's behind the vandalism after what Lisa told me -that she and Ernesto are playing the mating game? Absolutely! I wouldn't be surprised if Ruby did it just to get to me, that she was waiting for me to come after her with a gun. She's probably all wet and horny about it—' 'Jacob please!'