“Definitely, Rina. We’ll work this to the max. Nothing in this geographical area comes to mind. But I remember a group in Foothills—the Ethnic Preservation Society or something like that. It’s been a while. I have to check the records, and to do that properly I need to go back to the office.”

“Go on. Go back. I’ll be okay.” She turned to face him. “Who’s coming down?”

“Wanda Bontemps. She’s from the Hate Crimes Unit. Try not to bite her head off. She had a bad experience with Jews in the past.”

“And this is who they bring down for a Jewish hate crime?”

“She’s black—”

“So she’s a black, and an anti-Semite. That makes it better?”

“She’s not anti-Semitic at all. She’s a good woman who was honest enough to admit her issues to me early on. I’m just…I shouldn’t have even mentioned it.” He looked around and grimaced. “I should learn to keep my mouth shut. I’ll chalk it up to being a little rattled. Wanda’s new and has worked hard to get her gold. It hasn’t been an easy ride for a black forty-year-old woman.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Rina answered. “Don’t worry about her, Peter. If she just does her job, we’ll get along just fine.”

2

The pictures of the concentration-camp victims had to have come from somewhere. It was possible that they were downloaded from a neo-Nazi on-line site and enhanced to make them look like real photographs. Still, it was equally as likely that they had come from some kind of local organized fascist group. The fringe group that Decker had remembered from his Foothills days had tagged itself the Preservers of Ethnic Integrity. When he had worked Juvenile, it hadn’t been much more than a post-office box and a once-every-six-months meeting in the park. A few quick phone calls told him that the group was still in existence and that it had evolved into something with an address on Roscoe Boulevard. Decker wasn’t sure what they did or what they espoused, but with that kind of a name, the hidden message had to be white supremacy.