The room was depressing because it was so static, as if expecting its occupant to walk in at any moment, like a puppy waiting for its tardy master. Decker could tell that once the space had been alive: a changing diorama reflecting Ernesto’s whims and wishes, from the choice of CDs to the posters on the wall. The boy’s workstation was almost 360 degrees of desktop, hugging the room. Ernesto had an elaborate stereo system, an elaborate computer system, a VHS player, a DVD player, a fax machine, and a phone—state-of-the-art wherever Decker looked.

The boy with everything: now he was a statistic.

On the shelving above the counters were rows of videos, stacks of CDs, dozens of athletic trophies, wrinkled candy wrappers, old letters, overdue library books, piles of papers, notebooks, textbooks, and about thirty paperbacks, most of them fiction. The room had three doors—one to the bathroom, another leading to a walk-in closet, and a third that connected to a common hallway. A queen-size bed sat in the middle of the floor and was covered by a comforter emblazoned with a leopard-skin print. It made a perfect spot for sorting and stacking the piles of paper that Ernesto had left behind.

Decker pulled out the first stack and dug in.

Two and a half hours later, he had gone through six years of Ernesto’s life via his schoolwork. The boy was a decent student—better than Jacob had been in his old days—but not a superior student. He had organizational problems with his homework, with his math problems, with his essays. No surprise, judging by the entropy of the room, although the two aspects—neat room and organized schoolwork—weren’t always correlated. Sammy was a slob, but systematic when it came to his papers. Jacob was compulsively neat, but disorganized. Paying arduous attention to detail, Decker checked every drawer and every shelf and went through the bedding. He looked behind the machines, knocked on walls, and checked the floorboards. He found lots of loose paper, but nothing regarding a family tree project. Furthermore, Decker couldn’t even find notes or drafts or a hint of his research.

Maybe Ernesto had come to terms with his origins and had thrown out all the ancient history. There were no newsletters or computer printouts from any white supremacy or neo-Nazi groups, no flyers from PEI, and no photographs of SS officers or dead Jews. Decker didn’t find any obscene letters from Ruby Ranger.