Faye Kellerman - The Forgotten

“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, then 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 whom she’d been talking to. 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? Je sus! 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 parents … 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—”

“ Step son.”

“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 two thousand years of my step son’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 on 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’être 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 your perogative. 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 Ernesto 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—”