Decker poured himself another cup of coffee and fingered his yarmulke through his shirt pocket, contemplating for the hundredth time how he would have turned out had his Jewish biological mother kept and raised him. He would have been the same physically—chromosomes didn’t change—but all his life experiences, everything that made him the man he was today, would have been different.

Yet, forty-one years later, he was returning to his ancestral bloodline. Part of the reason was Rina; she wouldn’t marry him unless he was Jewish and religious. But there was more than just her love that kept it going. Something inside had pulled him to Judaism, kept him tethered even though it meant long hours of biblical studies and added restrictions to his already harried life. Ask him what it was and Decker couldn’t define it. Paul ribbed him about the transformation—all the guys at the station had at one time or another. They were baffled. How did you dismiss forty-one years of being a Gentile? Decker’s answer: You didn’t. He still considered himself the child of the parents who’d raised him, the offspring of a solid mother and a strong father who’d reared him Baptist.

He’d finished his second cup of coffee when Marge and a fifty-year-old pouchy-cheeked man walked into the squad room.

“Sergeant Decker,” she said, “this is Charlie Benko—the bounty hunter who thought that Baby Sally might have been the kid he was looking for. He’s going to look over our mug books and see if he can’t recognize the scumbag kidnapper husband amongst our finest.”

“Good idea,” Decker said. “How’s the mother doing?”

Charlie splayed the fingers of his right hand and rocked his wrist back and forth. “She’d be doing better with a better husband.”

“Number two is a creep also?” Marge asked. “Some women just seem to pick all the winners.”

“Ah, number two doesn’t beat her or drink or anything like that,” Benko said. “He just doesn’t give her much of a shoulder to cry on. What the hell, he figures, it ain’t his kid. But at least he should fake it better. Know what he told Dotty? Forget about this one, we’ll make our own.”

“Sensitive man,” Marge said.

“Yeah, like the kid was a baseball lost in the bushes, lose one, buy another. Well, Charlie Benko finds all the fucking baseballs, even if he has to get down on his hands and knees and crawl through the bush himself, know what I’m talkin’ about? That’s why I’m givin’ Dotty a hundred and ten percent. Hell, I’m not even charging her for half my time. In the end, it pays off. I can sleep at night, and if I need a future referral, Dotty’s gonna tell them that Charlie Benko ran the extra mile for her.”