After the war, Magda and Stefan were sent to a DP camp in Cyprus. They married there and emigrated to the United States two years later, sponsored by Magda’s uncle. Eventually, they settled in Southern California and went about the business of making a living and raising a family. Stefan went into the “schmata” business, manufacturing clothing for Sears, Penney’s, and later for Target. He did very well, allowing him to send his three children to private religious school. Rina’s older brother, David, is an ophthalmologist and lives back east with his wife and their children. Her middle brother, née Scott now Shlomo, lives in a religious area of Tel Aviv, Israel, and he and his wife have seven children.
Rina was the youngest child and only daughter, a beautiful little girl with thick black hair and bright blue eyes, just like her mother. She was a daddy’s girl with an impish sense of humor, but she was always a bit on the serious side. She grew up in a Conservative home, she was a spiritual girl, and was greatly influenced by her religious day school training. When she was only eighteen, she married, even though her parents were very disapproving at her taking such a permanent step at such a young age.
But at least they liked the boy.
Yitzchak Lazarus was smart, handsome, and very idealistic. Within a year of their marriage and at Rina’s urging, the couple packed up their belongings and moved to a religious outpost in Kiryat Arba in the Judean and Samarian area of Israel. Within two years, they had two sons, Shmuel and Yaakov. Life was not only hard on an outpost of civilization, it was dangerous. The area was surrounded by enemies. To prevent the infiltration of suicide bombers, the vast acreage was enclosed with barbed wire, and when the men of the community weren’t learning Talmud, they were doing guard duty. Just a simple trip into Jerusalem to buy food and supplies was a perilous trek. The rigors of life finally began to take a toll, and a few years later, Yitzchak and Rina moved back to the States.
Yitzchak and Rina were still committed to an ultra-religious Jewish life. Since Yitzchak was from New York, they debated moving to the East Coast, where he could study at any one of the many fine established yeshivot, or seminaries. But then Yitzchak heard of a new yeshiva called Ohavei Torah in the North San Fernando Valley in California. It was headed by Rabbi Aaron Schulman, who was not only a renowned scholar but also a dynamic human being. The community was built in the middle of a large area of undeveloped land and bordered by mountains. The rural setting appealed to Yitzchak. He had grown up in Brooklyn and after two years in the wilderness of Israel, he wasn’t anxious to go back to city living. He was also very considerate of his young wife. He thought it might help her if she was a little closer to her parents.
About a year into his studies, Yitzchak began to get headaches. Rina pressed him to go to a doctor, and when he did, the news was devastating. He had an inoperable brain tumor. Within a few years he passed on, and at the age of twenty-four, Rina was a widow with two young sons to care for.
There is no role or place for a single woman in the community of a yeshiva, which is essentially a men’s college of Torah learning. Rina had made friends with some of the married women, but now that she was single, she was the odd one out. Although couples continued to be polite, most social interaction revolved around Rina inviting people to her home for one of the two main Sabbath meals or someone inviting her to eat with them. She had a few girlfriends, but without Yitzchak, she felt awkward and alone. She knew she didn’t belong, but with no college education and no real skills, she had nowhere else to go-except back home with her parents. It was a move she considered until Rabbi Schulman insisted that she stay at the yeshiva in order to regain her equilibrium.
The kindly rabbi, or rav, told her to remain in her house on the premises for as long as she wanted. This way, while she was formulating a life plan, her children could continue to go to school at the yeshiva. In exchange for room and board, Rina would help with day care of the younger children and she could also run the yeshiva’s ritual bath, or mikvah.
For the next two years, she settled down into a bland, monotonous, loveless life. Though many couples tried to set her up with other religious men, nothing clicked. After a year of shidduch dating-matchmaking-she gave up altogether and went about the business of raising her sons without a father.
Then one night while Rina was working in the mikvah, the unthinkable happened. A woman walking back to her house was abducted into the thick brush surrounding the yeshiva and raped. The unfortunate woman, Libba Sarah, was traumatized but managed to escape with her life. When Rina found her, she was dazed. Rina took her back into the mikvah and immediately called her husband, Zvi, who wasn’t home. The second call Rina made was to Rabbi Schulman, who was teaching a class. The third call was to the police.
Enter Detective Peter Decker.
An oldest child in every sense of the word, Decker was a natural leader. With his can-do, take-charge attitude combined with his obsessive nature, he could have been a CEO for any major corporation. He could have been a high-priced attorney raking in the big bucks. Instead he went into police work.
Adopted in infancy by Lyle and Ida Decker, salt-of-the-earth Baptists, Decker grew up in Gainesville, Florida, a university town near a lot of wide open space. When the boy turned four, the Deckers adopted a second son named Randall. The two boys were close and had a typical sibling relationship. The elder bossed around the younger, and the younger idolized the elder.
The Deckers had their roots in Kentucky and Tennessee, and Peter’s upbringing was decidedly homespun and miles away from the glittering Miami coastline. He was a tall and muscular kid with an easy personality that garnered him many friends-boys and girls. But he was also book smart and quick witted, and that made him a favorite with his teachers. He played football, he souped up engines on cars and raced them, he rode horses at his uncle’s ranch, and he excelled at shop classes. He probably would have gone to a local community college if it hadn’t been for the Vietnam War. It was never in Decker’s plans to volunteer for the war, but when he was called up-saddled with a low lottery number-it never occurred to him to try to get out of military duty.
Two years in Southeast Asia, working as a medic on the front lines, changed him markedly. He grew from a lanky, carefree teen to a troubled man who had witnessed the worst of humanity. Two years later, at the end of his tour and at the age of twenty, he came back to civilization without a clue as to where he was going.
He could have gone back to college-he certainly wasn’t much older than the average college freshman-but academics no longer interested him. Studies seemed sterile and pointless. Plus, the average student held little sympathy for veterans, calling them a variety of nasty epithets. He wasn’t exactly a flag waver, but he had grown up with a sense of duty and loyalty and he couldn’t understand why students were so angry with army vets even when they personally didn’t believe in the war. It was a case of shooting the messenger.
Within weeks, Decker grew restless with people, and he suspected why this was so. Having lived through two years of horror and panic, he had gotten used to the adrenaline rush. After experiencing years of crises and stress, his heartbeat had gotten used to an accelerated pace. If an event didn’t cause a rise in his blood pressure, it wasn’t worth anything.
He thought about flight school. He had keen vision and good coordination, but flight school cost money, and there were loads of trained pilots coming out of the military. He considered racing cars, but the job market for professional drivers was very small. For lack of anything more attractive, he signed up with the police academy. It was a paramilitary organization-he was used to that-and at times, it was exciting. He had a keen sense of justice, so he figured why not put bad people behind bars? Six months later, he was a uniformed officer for the Gainesville Police Department.