She paused for a long time. So many emotions walked past on her face—defiance, shame, insecurity, embarrassment, anger, hate—the whole gamut. Finally, she settled on resignation. “I hope I’m not sounding spiteful. I don’t want to appear like the scorned woman.”

“Go on.”

She sighed. “There’s a kid in our class—Doug Ranger. He has an older sister—Ruby. She’s around twenty-two or-three…graduated from Berkeley with a degree in computer science. She’s smart…sexy…not to me, but to the boys. She’s full of ideas…more like full of shit!” Wet eyes. “I’ve seen her car at Ernesto’s house a couple of times.”

“Maybe it’s Doug’s car and he’s visiting Ernesto.”

“It’s not him, it’s her.”

“I guess parents aren’t the only people who snoop?”

She wilted, her voice soft and plaintive. “Please, Lieutenant.”

“So you’ve seen Ruby Ranger go into Ernesto’s house? Yes or no?”

“Yes.” Totally defeated now. “Several times.”

“What’s she like?”

A long sigh. “Politicized.”

“What kind of ideas does she have?”

“Libertarian stuff. Government should stop being everyone’s baby-sitter. And it certainly doesn’t have any right to be a censor when it’s so corrupt itself. She’s really big on a free Internet. That’s her raison d’être at the moment—to maintain an uncensored Internet. You’re twelve years old and wanna talk about porn in the chat room with convicted sex offenders, that’s your perogative. Fine with her. You wanna talk about incest or NAMBLA, fine. You wanna talk about scoring drugs, fine. You wanna talk about neo-Nazis and Hitler as heroes or buy Nazi stuff over the Internet, that’s fine, too. She said that…those exact words.”

Decker nodded.

“She also said—right to my face while people were listening in—she also said that I would have been perfect concentration-camp fodder because I have typical Jewish looks.”

Decker winced. “That’s awful. Not that you look Jewish, but the Nazi fodder part. That’s absolutely disgusting.”

“It creeped me out.”

“I can certainly understand that.” Immediately, Decker was thinking about how this woman might be stoking Ernesto’s sadistic sexual fantasies. Her prodding would be especially potent if Ernesto felt that he was from Nazi heritage. “What’d you say to her?”

“Nothing. I was too shocked to respond. And, of course, that’s exactly what she wanted. To get attention by being outrageous.” Her eyes were focused somewhere on her bare toes. “Jake wasn’t there. I told him about it afterward. He told me his grandparents were in concentration camps.”

Decker nodded.

“But they’re not your parents?”

“My parents are American,” Decker said.