Faye Kellerman - The Ritual Bath

“May I see your license, sir?” Decker asked.

“Officer, I’m sorry about the outburst-”

“Your license, sir?”

“Oh sure.” The man fumbled around, finally locating the ID, then handed it to him through the open window.

Decker looked it over.

Ronald Elward. Five eight, 160. Blue eyes, brown hair. Twenty-eight years old. A little prick.

“Mr. Elward, you need to learn about freeway manners.”

“I’m sorry-”

“I could arrest you as a public nuisance.”

The man blanched.

“This is a warning. Consider yourself lucky.”

“Yes, sir.”

Decker pulled the car out and edged back into the traffic. He was still crawling, but he felt a little better.

It had been a long night-the murder, four hours of interrogation, and a mound of paperwork.

Moshe Feldman had been an impossible suspect to grill because the usual techniques of interviewing didn’t work on a schizophrenic. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was a suspected murderer. The possibility of incarceration left him apathetic. The man was in outer space. He spoke freely and uninhibitedly, talking even when advised to remain silent, but most of what he said was gibberish-not all of it in English. Decker asked the rabbi to translate the Hebrew (actually Aramaic, the detective learned), and the old man said he was quoting from the Gemara Sukkot .

Feldman’s counsel was equally difficult. The rabbi had brought in some mouthpiece from Beverly Hills-a contentious bastard if ever Decker had seen one-but sharp. The attorney objected to every question he posed, so the detective had spent at least half his time trying to rephrase himself.

Hours of interviewing had led nowhere.

The search of Feldman’s living quarters had proved equally fruitless. The wandering scarecrow lived meagerly, out of choice, in a potting shed covered with sheets of tarpaper to keep the rain out. The shack was bereft of basics such as bed or bathroom, but loaded with mowers, hoes, shovels, claws, clippers, stakes, wire, fertilizer, potting soil, seeds, and plant food. Against the rotted wooden planks was a makeshift closet of stapled boxes full of old clothes of varying sizes. Most of the garments were soiled white shirts, stale-smelling black pants, old black hats, and fringed dickies, but in the corner hung a white robe embellished with gold thread, lace, and embroidery, and a prayer shawl trimmed with a collar of silver. These were set aside from the rest of his wardrobe, encased in a plastic cleaners’ bag. Rabbi Schulman told Decker that Moshe slept on the floor and ate only fresh fruits and raw vegetables that he grew in a small garden patch behind the lean-to. For the Sabbath, he indulged in challah, wine, and a pot of soup and boiled chicken that the Rosh Yeshiva’s wife cooked for him.

The oddest thing about the place was the room’s centerpiece-a bookcase fashioned of dark, oiled walnut and windowed with leaded beveled glass. It was an antique and, judging from the amount of marquetry and carving, obviously worth money. Inside were prayer books in Hebrew and phylacteries.

Some potentially incriminating evidence had been found at the scene of the murder. A shred of material from Feldman’s jacket was hanging on an adjacent oak branch, and nearby were fresh footprints that matched the shoes he was wearing. But it was nothing to make a charge of murder stick. The man was a compulsive hiker. The jacket could have been ripped a long time ago, and he could have left his tracks before the murder took place. Most important, there was no concrete evidence in the preliminary lab reports to link him directly to the murder-no bloody clothes, no weapon, no fingerprints, no micro-fibers of his clothes or hairs found on the deceased or vice versa.

Moshe was released, a free man-of sorts.

Decker pulled the car into the precinct lot, walked into the squad room, poured himself a cup of coffee, then summoned Hollander and Marge into an empty interview room for a powwow.

“Who wants to go first?” Decker asked.

“Feldman walked, huh?” said Hollander.

“We don’t have anything on him except that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not enough to sock him with a robust Murder One.”

“Do you think he did it?” Marge asked Decker.

“No. What do you think?”

“I don’t think he did it, either. Mike?”

“I’ll make it unanimous.”

“I don’t think he did it,” said Decker, “not because he’s not crazy enough, but because he’s not strong enough.”

He paused, gulped some coffee, and continued: “The woman outweighed him by seventy pounds and was taller by five inches. More important, Florence had confidence. She was a pro.”

“Unless he was on PCP,” said Marge.

“According to the serum and urine analyses, he was clean,” Decker said.

“So who are we dealing with?” Hollander asked, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

“Someone big and strong,” Marge said. “Like your size, Pete.”

Decker nodded. “I could have restrained her. I’ve got four inches on the woman and know what I’m doing, but let me tell you guys, it would have been a struggle. To subdue a big woman like that who’d be lashing out would require beef-real muscle.”

“Remember, about fifteen years back, a sweetheart named Edward Kemper from Santa Cruz? A real psycho,” Marge said, slumping in the folding chair. “Blasted his grandparents and mother. A necrophile. Cut up a slew of coeds, screwed ’em, and traveled around with their dismembered hands.”

“Reach out and touch someone, huh?” said Hollander.

Marge ignored him. “The darling was six nine, two-eighty.”

“Yeah, we could be dealing with someone like him,” Decker said. “Or someone even a little smaller but with a lot of bulk-like Fordebrand.”

“The anonymous linebacker,” Marge thought out loud.

“Yup. So how about we do this?” Decker said. “We’ll run a check on all the bad boys around town with large builds-six feet, two hundred pounds minimum.”

“Gonna come up with a healthy list,” Hollander grunted.

“Yeah, but we won’t know shit unless we try. Any other possibilities besides Feldman and football players?”

“Weight lifters?” Hollander said.

“They’ll show up on the list, Mike,” said Decker.

“How about someone who knows karate?” Marge suggested.

“Then why would he bother with a knife?” Hollander responded.

“Maybe he gets a thrill out of slicing?”

“It’s a possibility,” said Decker. “Low on the list, but a possibility. The Bruce Lee killer. Who else?”

“How about the Foothill prick?” Hollander asked, lighting up his pipe. The room became blanketed with a thick haze. “He knows how to manhandle women.”

“Florence wasn’t raped,” Marge reminded him.

“So maybe he crossed the border and decided to kill,” Hollander said.

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the bastard eventually does kill,” said Decker. “He’s getting increasingly more violent, and we all know that rape and murder are on one big continuum. But rapists who start killing usually mix the violence with sex. Florence wasn’t sexually assaulted in any way.”

“Let’s back it up,” Marge said, finishing her coffee. “Maybe the killer wasn’t Mr. Muscles. Maybe Florence just freaked at the sight of an attacker and froze with fear.”

“Not that woman,” Decker shook his head. “She once stopped me on the way to the mikvah. She was tough and loud.”

“Did the preliminary autopsy show any head injuries?” Marge asked.

“No,” Hollander answered.

“So she wasn’t knocked out beforehand,” Marge said.

“Also, her facial expression was pure terror,” Decker said. “I think the poor woman was wide awake and knew what was going to happen to her.”