“Yeah, go ahead.”

Decker pocketed the picture. Again he scanned the room. A fourteen-inch TV sat on several cinder blocks at the foot of the bed. Novack told them that he had found the two boxes underneath the bed-one held dog-eared paperback fiction, the other held standard porno magazines.

Decker bent down and sniffed the sheets.

Novack said, “I didn’t smell any jizz, if that’s what you’re doing. But I don’t need to bag the sheets. If we find the girl and she’s”-he made circles with his hand-“if she’s got stuff in her, I got plenty of tubes of humors from the stiff to do DNA testing.”

Gindi was scanning the adult magazines. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Except that this guy was supposedly a holy roller. But even them having stuff like this isn’t out of the ordinary. You go talk to anyone in the nine-oh. Right as the Chasids cross the bridge from the city into Williamsburg, they’ve got these hookers lined up, waiting to ream out their pipes. Okay, so no one’s perfect. But if that ain’t bad enough, they have a real elitist attitude. If you’re not one of them, you don’t count. That’s why it’s okay to skirt the law, because anything but their laws don’t apply to them.”

Novack held up his hands and dropped them to his sides. “It’s hard to believe that these are my people. Grandpa sacrificed everything just to make it over here, and these yutzes are too blind to notice what real freedom is.”

“Did you find anything to suggest that the vic was molesting the girl?” Decker asked.

“Not so far,” Novack said. “No dirty pictures of the kid, if that’s what you mean.”

Decker nodded. “Any camera equipment or videos?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you have a look in her room yesterday?”

“No, I haven’t been out to the house,” Novack said. “I only talked to the parents at the precinct. Like I told you before, I’m not saying they’re hiding something. Maybe they just find it hard to relate to anyone outside their chevrah.”

Decker knew that chevrah meant their circle of friends. “Could be.”

“That’s why, you being here, it’s a good thing for me if you’re legit. You probably could get insider’s info.”

“I’m probably closer than you are, but I’m far from one of them.” Again Decker regarded the picture. Just an uncle trying to do a good deed for a niece? Or a man obsessed with a young girl? “Do you think he brought her here?”

Gindi broke in. “You gotta know where you are, Lieutenant. This is a very religious neighborhood. People talk. How long before it would get around that a religious man is bringing a girl up to his apartment-let alone a girl child. Besides statutory rape being illegal, it’s not tzneosdik.”

Tzneos meant modesty. Decker said, “Maybe it did get back to the brother.”

“Nah.” Gindi shook his head. “If he was doing something bad to her, it wouldn’t be here in home territory.”

Novack came back from a closet holding a box. “Lookie here.”

“Whaddaya got, Micky?”

“Looks like work-related stuff.” Novack plopped the box on the floor and picked up some random pages. “Lists of items, prices, and bar codes from Lieber’s Electronics.”

Decker said, “Ephraim worked in the family business.”

“That’s what they told me.” Novack shuffled through the pages. “The old man told me Ephraim did whatever they needed him to do. And when he wasn’t doing that, he worked inventory. And from the looks of it, he had a pretty good idea of what was going in and out of the stores.”

Gindi tapped his toe. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that they’d put a man with a drug problem in charge of inventory? You know in business, there’s always a certain amount of theft. It’s like dangling a carrot.”

Novack said, “Help yourself as long as you don’t take too much?”

“Exactly.”

Decker broke in. “If they thought he was really a risk, would they have trusted him in any facet of the business? Maybe the old man would, but a brother?” He shook his head. “Betcha Chaim was watching him like a hawk.”

“Well, to me, it’s still an angle,” Gindi said.

“Hey, this is what I do with my people in La-La Land. We throw out ideas and see what sticks.”

“Here too, and you made a good point.” Novack rummaged through the papers. “Just more of the same. I’m gonna bag all this and go through this at my desk, slowly and methodically. Maybe there’re other things that I’m missing.”

“Like what?” Gindi asked.

“Like a bankbook for starters. Guy musta had a checking account.”

Decker said, “It could be that if he was part of one of those twelve-step programs, he didn’t have a checkbook or credit cards. He might have dealt only with cash.”

“Yeah, that’s a point,” Gindi stated. “Lots of addicts have had credit problems and have been caught bouncing or kiting checks.”

“Then that would make our life a little harder,” Novack said. “No paper trail.”

“Maybe he had some credit cards in the past,” Decker said.

Novack folded the ends of the box and began to tape the edges. “I still think we should think about theft within the family business. Maybe Ephraim was paying off old drug debts. Maybe he didn’t pay them off fast enough.”

“And the girl?” Gindi said.

Novack sighed. “She’s a big problem.”

“Poor parents,” Gindi said.

“Poor girl,” Decker said.

6

The crime took place in a dingy cell of a room with a stunning view of a brick wall, although Decker assumed that the killer-or killers-had drawn the faded shade. The chalk marks were still in place, the body positioned next to the bed. But because there wasn’t enough space on the floor, Ephraim’s left arm and leg had settled up on the wall. The tech had extended the white figuration onto the once-white painted surface now ambered to puke yellow. Inside the outline of the head was a deep brown stain-a single amoeba-shaped sticky puddle of dried and tacky blood about six to seven inches in diameter. The rest of the wall was covered with print powder, as were a lone nightstand, the phone, the clock, and almost all the cracked white tiled floor. There was a bathroom with a stained-gray porcelain toilet streaked with dirt lines and an equally stained porcelain sink.

Resisting the urge to rub his temples-his hands were newly gloved-Decker felt an encroaching headache. He hadn’t had a decent meal in sixteen hours and floating particles of fingerprint dust weren’t helping the situation. Plus, there was the odor of waste: a strong stench of urine with a hint of feces. Novack hadn’t bothered with the Vicks; neither did Decker. He had seen and smelled worse.

Novack took out his notepad and an envelope filled with postmortem photographs. “Single shot through the temple area-close range judging by the entrance wound, but it was lacking the usual star-burst pattern.”

“Why’s that?” Decker asked.

Novack shrugged.

Decker flipped through the snapshots. “Exit wound?”

“No exit wound. So whatever it was, it’s still in the skull. Probably a hollow point-something that exploded inside the poor bastard. We’ll know more after Forensics pulls it out. The casing was a thirty-two caliber.”

“A hollow point…” Decker looked up from the pictures and back at the kill site. “That would explain the lack of blood.” He went over and examined the chalk mark. “We’ve got a solid mass of blood here. Which meant that the vic had to have fallen with the wound side down. Any ideas how it played?”

“Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. First off, I considered that he was shot on the bed and fell off. But then there would have been blood on the sheets where he rolled off. Problem is… no blood on the sheets. So next, we figure he was popped while he was cowered in the corner, or standing up in the corner.”

“Splatter?”

“No, no splatter on the walls there. Not that we could find.”