“Could that have been an act?”

“Sure, he could have been snowing me blind, except she did seem so dependent on him. He even said that he’d return her to me intact when things cooled down. I guess I just decided to believe him because it was my only option.”

“What do you mean ‘intact’?”

“He screws the kids he pimps. I think he does the boys as well as the girls. He said he wouldn’t do it with her.” Decker waved him away. “I don’t know…I should have made a grab for her when I had the chance.”

“He would have killed both of you.”

“Probably. You don’t want him on your bad side. Although I’ve certainly pissed him off and he’s never done anything to my family or me. I don’t know. Psychos like him… they’re like these half wolf/half dogs that people adopt for pets. They’re okay for a while. Then they just turn on you when the mood hits. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe he just turned. Maybe he considered it biblical revenge against me—eye for an eye, a girl for a girl. He thinks I screwed up his relationship with this girl. This could have been his big revenge.”

“What girl was that?”

“That’s irrelevant. It was one of my cases, about eight years ago. When Donatti lived in L.A.”

“He lived in L.A.?”

“For about a year.”

Jonathan sat back in his seat. “That’s not what the Bible means when it states ‘eye for an eye.’”

Once a rabbi… Decker said, “I know. Rina explained it to me. It means monetary compensation. Can you dispense with the nit-picking right now? And let’s get off the expressway. It wouldn’t be good to make two women widows in one day.”

Jonathan started up the motor and carefully merged into speeding traffic. “You’re angry at me.”

“I’m angry at myself. I screwed up royally. I keep thinking to myself… what should I have done? Should I have gotten a gun and shot him? Should I have bribed him? Should I have gone to the police? All this Monday-morning quarterbacking. But at the time, I thought I was handling it pretty well.”

“You did the best you could.”

“So did you,” Decker answered back. “Make you feel any better?”

“No. I feel that God was punishing me for breaking my word. Ridiculous, of course, but tell that to my conscience. Also, I can’t help but feel that I set her up somehow. I should have gone to the police. Like you said, at the very least, they could have traced the call to a source. They might have sent out troops to look for her.”

They rode without speaking for several minutes.

Jonathan said, “You honestly don’t think that Donatti killed her?”

“Honestly, no. Because why would he do it?”

“What did he say after you told him that Shayndie had been murdered?”

“First I went into a rage. Then he went into a rage.” Decker pointed to his eye.