“Eema’s other brother, the one that’s not a rabbi, sees dead bodies all the time,” Sammy said. “He’s a pathologist and owns cemeteries…Anyway, him and Eema get into fights about that all the time because he’s a kohain—a Jewish priest—and kohains aren’t supposed to to be around corpses.”

“Your uncle’s not religious?” Decker asked.

Sammy nodded. “Him and Eema fight about that, too. You can bet that we don’t see much of Uncle Robert.”

They rode another mile in silence. Decker broke it.

“Are you interested in medicine, Sammy?” he asked.

“No way,” Sammy answered. “I don’t like blood.”

“How about business? Like your New York uncles?”

“Borrrrring,” said Sammy.

Decker smiled.

“Well, you boys have plenty of time to figure out what you want to be. Heck, it’s okay to do a lot of different things in a lifetime. I used to do ranching when I was a kid in Florida. I did construction work in high school. I was a lawyer for a while, and I don’t see myself as being a cop forever. You’ve got loads of time to experiment.”

Sammy mulled that over for a while.

“You know what I’d like to be?” he said. “I think I’d like to be a journalist. Maybe write editorials that make people think.”

The kid was all of eight and a half.

The grounds of Yeshivas Ohavei Torah were located on twenty acres of brush and woodland in the pocket community of Deep Canyon. It was twenty freeway minutes from the police station and fifteen minutes from Decker’s ranch. The locals of Deep Canyon were working-class whites, and they and the Jews had little to do with each other, but over the past few years there had grown an uneasy, mutual tolerance.

The locals weren’t the only ones who felt uncomfortable with the Jewish community. The Foothill cops were equally baffled by the enclave, imagining it a slice of old Eastern Europe that had been frozen in a time warp. Actually, the yeshiva embodied aspects of both past and present, but the cops never delved that deeply. They had nicknamed the place Jewtown, which is what Decker had called it before his own personal involvement. Now, at least when Decker was around, they referred to it by its rightful name.

The lot for the yeshiva had been cut out of the mountainside. Huge boulders had been hauled away and the ground had been leveled, leaving a mesa of flat land surrounded by thick foliage, evergreens, and hillside. Set in the middle of a broad carpet of lawn was the main building—a two-story cement cube that contained most of the classrooms. On one side were smaller buildings—additional classrooms, the library, the synagogue, and the ritual bathhouse. The other side was open space for a thousand feet, then housing—a dormitory and a cluster of prefab bungalows.