“Did he?” Ableson said softly. “Did he indeed? And you want to know why, is that it?” His voice made her skin crawl. She didn’t say anything and after a moment Ableson sighed and said, “I’ll tell you what I think, Mrs. Levy. I think Hawkins wanted to be Jacob’s son and Adam’s brother. Part of a family he could respect. And maybe he thought Jacob could make that happen somehow, and he would be transformed from a lonely black man of no special ties to a Polish Jew who belonged to the village. And maybe when you left him behind and took it all with you, maybe he realized that he’d never known or understood you people and maybe he thought he’d gone too far to come back and now wasn’t one thing or the other. Which maybe, he thought, made him nothing.” Ableson was quiet for a moment, then he said, “But that’s a lot of cheap-­shit psychology, isn’t it, Mrs. Levy?” Now he sounded angry.

“I don’t know,” Rachel said.

“It is, because there’s a better reason.” Ableson took a breath. “He thinks your father-­in-­law and his mish­pochah killed the kids on President Street.”

“That’s crazy . . .” Rachel cried.

“Why?”

“They couldn’t.”

“Someone saw your car there. Parked in front of the clubhouse. A dark green Dodge van, right?”

Rachel didn’t answer.

“You still got that car?” Still no answer. “Sell it, give it away. It’s tumah, that car. Corrupt.”

He was sounding a little crazy. His wife said something about soup and he told her to shut up.

Rachel said, “Don’t get upset, Lieutenant.”

“Upset!” he shouted. “Do you know what they did to those kids . . . do you know what we found in that basement? Revenge is one thing, lady. I’ll go with it, maybe. But this wasn’t just that. This was hate like I never saw or imagined. They beat them to death, all five of them. They tore one to pieces and, oh God, that’s the one that haunts me still. Can you imagine? I mean, how long did that kid live with parts of him missing? Did he pull his torso along the floor with the one arm he had left? Did he see his own leg lying next to him? What was it like for the kid, Mrs. Levy?” Rachel sobbed, but he didn’t stop. “And that wasn’t enough. They hated them so much that they threw dirt on the bodies. Clay. Why clay? Where’d they get clay? And why didn’t they just shoot them or stab them—anything.”

“Shut up,” Rachel screamed and slammed down the phone.

Levy came running out to the porch. “Rachel, what happened?”