“Our second-guessing isn’t worth too much without all the evidence. Once Ozzie Crandal notifies the family, one of them will no doubt come by for Katie tomorrow. Prelim forensics will have come back by then, also. Crandal will interview the immediate family down there. By this time tomorrow, we should know a lot more than we know now.”

“Good point, Detective,” Decker said. “So the upshot is, I’m going to go home and try to forget about it until then.”

“Let me know how successful you are.”

Decker didn’t answer. Instead, he thought of Rina. If anyone could temporarily obscure today’s ugliness, it would be her.

He smelled the coals burning before he killed the Plymouth’s motor.

Shit.

Rina was barbecuing.

Even though he was starved, the thought of red meat—rare red meat—made his stomach churn. All he wanted for dinner was a couple of bowls of cereal. Anything that didn’t bleed. But he had to be nice, excited, enthusiastic that she’d taken the initiative to be domestic.

He parked the car in the driveway, got out, and shouted a hullo as he walked toward the back.

Rina turned around, her hair pinned up, covered by a kerchief, her face sooty from smoke residue. She looked so earthy, so good, he forgot about his growling stomach.

“I didn’t know if your grill was pareve or fleishig, so I bought trout. You like trout, don’t you?”

Fish, Decker thought. God bless her, barbecued trout didn’t sound half bad.

“Trout is perfect.” He walked over, gave her a short kiss on the lips, and regarded his supper. Five fillets. The fish had been butterflied, the heads removed. Sharing the grill with the fish were two potatoes, the skins baked crackling crisp. The smell activated his salivary glands. “It’s too hot to eat meat anyway.”

“That’s what I figured.”

She’d covered his slab redwood table with a white paper tablecloth, had set red-checkered paper dinnerware, matching napkins and cups, and plastic cutlery upon the cloth. Gracing the tabletop were a pint of coleslaw, a pint of macaroni salad, a basket of French rolls, and a platter of green grapes mixed with cut canteloupe and watermelon. In a bowl of melting ice were cans of diet cola for her, brown bottles of Dos Equis for him.

“I’ve died and gone to heaven,” he said.

Rina smiled. “Doesn’t take much to make you happy.”

“You make me happy,” he said. “I really needed this.”

“You certainly couldn’t have timed it better. It’ll be ready in about two minutes. Take a shower, Peter, and put on something cooler. You can’t be comfortable in those clothes.”