“If you don’t mind, I’ll leave you gentlemen now,” said Beckham.

“Yeah,” Fordebrand said. “Merry Christmas. Merry fucking Christmas.”

Beckham jogged away and Fordebrand turned to Decker.

“Goddam hillbilly shitheads. What the hell do they do all day? Sit up in the ranger station and jerk their chains?”

“He’s right,” Decker said. “The area does belong to Foothill. He might as well save himself the hassle.”

“Stop being so noble.”

“What’s with the shit-eating grin when I said I wasn’t working Homicide?”

“Well, when you get back you’ll notice that we’re slightly shorthanded.”

“We’ve got five homicide dicks.”

“Pilkington’s transferred to Harbor Division, Marriot’s on vacation, Sleighton’s father took sick in Canada, so he flew out to be with him for the holidays. That leaves me and Bartholemew. I just found out today that Bart broke his leg riding a bicycle.”

“Shit.”

“Morrison did a little rearranging. Starting December twenty-sixth, you and Dunn are working Homicide. Dunn is actually jockeying back and forth between Homicide and Sex and Juvey-”

“I don’t want to hear about this, Ed. I’m still on vacation.” Decker looked at the boys. “Such as it is.”

“Rina’s kids?” Fordebrand asked.

Decker nodded. “The older one found the bones. What a crappy deal! Nice weather, so I take them for a few days in the wild-unpolluted skies, unspoiled nature-and they have to be exposed to this crud.”

“That’s too bad.” Fordebrand’s right arm had begun to swell. He clawed at it and winced. “So you want this one, Deck?”

“All right. Starting the twenty-sixth. Nothing’s going to go down between then and now anyway.”

“Easy case,” Fordebrand said. “Open and shut. Poke around a little just to say you did something. Look through a few Missing Persons files and forget about it. A week’s worth of desk work-nice and clean.”

“If it’s so appealing, Ed, you can take the case.”

“I’ll be happy to, Decker, if you take the packinghouse slashings.”

“Pass.”

Fordebrand ran his fingers through his hair.

“Yeah, you look through a couple of Missing Persons files, then close the books, and they go down in the annals as a couple of John Does.”

“Jane Does,” Decker said. “They look like females to me.”

“Jane Does, John Does, who the hell cares? Nobody’ll hear from ’ em again.” Fordebrand slapped him on the back. “I’ll handle the preliminary garbage. You go off and finish your vacation. Take care of the boys.”

“Sorry I had to drag you out on Christmas Eve.”

“Ah, it’s okay,” Fordebrand said magnanimously. “I’ll be back in time for the honey-glazed ham and the turkey. The ham’s in the oven; the turkey’s coming in from Cleveland.”

Decker smiled. “Your mother-in-law?”

“Who else?”

“Have fun.”

“If you get lonely tonight, Deck-”

“I’ll be up here with the boys, but thanks anyway.”

Fordebrand nodded.

“Yeah, you probably don’t go in for Christmas anymore, do you, Rabbi?”

Decker shrugged.

“You like playing Daddy, Deck?”

“They’re good kids.”

“What’s with you and their mama anyway?”

“Beats me, Ed.”

Decker called out to Jake, and jogged over to Sammy and sat down beside him. The younger boy came running and jumped onto Decker’s lap.

“The police will take it from here, guys, so we can go back to the campsite now. We’d better get going. We still have to pitch the tent-”

“Peter, I want to go home,” said Sammy.

Decker blew out air forcefully. “All right. Is that okay with you, Jakey?”

“Yeah, I’d like to go home, too. I’m sick of peanut butter.”

Decker put his arms around the boys. “I’m awfully sorry, guys.”

Sammy leaned his head on the detective’s shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Are you guys a little spooked?”

“Maybe a little,” Sammy answered.

“How about you, Jake?”

Jacob shrugged.

“It’s a normal feeling to be freaked out. You kids handled this very well.” Decker helped them to their feet. “Let’s go pack up. I hope you guys had a good time before all this happened.”

“I did,” Sammy said. “I really really did.”

It was hard to tell whether he was convincing Decker or himself.

Decker drove them home in the jeep. The boys said nothing as they rode down the winding, one-lane dirt paths with five-hundred-foot drops bouncing along bumpy mountain roads. When the four-wheeler finally exited the mountain highway and hooked onto the freeway on-ramp, Sammy let out a big sigh.

“Do you ever worry about getting killed?” he asked Decker.

“I used to when I was a uniformed policeman, but not anymore, Sammy. My work is pretty safe. It’s mostly pushing papers and talking to people.”

“Were you ever shot?” the older boy continued.

“No.”

There was a brief silence.

“I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I don’t want to be a cop.”

Decker nodded. “It can get pretty gross sometimes.”

“Know what I want to be?” said Jake.

“What?” the big man asked.

“A pilot in the Israeli Air Force.”

“Not me,” said Sammy. “I don’t want to get killed.”

“They never get killed,” Jake protested.

“’Course they get killed, Yonkie. The Arabs are shooting at you. You think they don’t get lucky and get a hit once in a while?”

“Well, I’m not gonna get killed!” Jake said firmly.

“Yeah! Right!”

Silence.

“I don’t know what I want to do,” Sammy pondered. “I’d like to get smicha, but I don’t want to learn full time like my abba or my uncles did.”

“Are all your uncles rabbis?” asked Decker.

“All except one,” answered Sammy. “One of my eema’s brothers lives in Jerusalem. He’s a sofer. That’s kind of interesting I guess.”

“What’s that?” Decker asked.

“Uh, you know, the guy who writes the Torah and the mezuzahs,” explained Sammy.

“A scribe,” Decker said.

“Yeah, I think that’s what they call them,” said Sammy. “My other uncles, the ones married to my abba’s sisters, used to teach in yeshiva, but now they’re businessmen. They live in New York.”

“We’ve got tons of family there,” Jake said, excitedly. “We’ve got a bubbe and zayde and two great-grandmothers, and a whole bunch of cousins. We’re not alone at all.”

Then the little boy licked his lips and frowned. “But sometimes it feels like it.”

“Especially when you see scary stuff like today?” said Decker.

“Aw, that doesn’t bother me,” Jake said mustering up bravado. “That was kinda neat…sort of.”

“Eema’s other brother, the one that’s not a rabbi, sees dead bodies all the time,” Sammy said. “He’s a pathologist and owns cemeteries…Anyway, him and Eema get into fights about that all the time because he’s a kohain-a Jewish priest-and kohains aren’t supposed to to be around corpses.”

“Your uncle’s not religious?” Decker asked.

Sammy nodded. “Him and Eema fight about that, too. You can bet that we don’t see much of Uncle Robert.”

They rode another mile in silence. Decker broke it.

“Are you interested in medicine, Sammy?” he asked.

“No way,” Sammy answered. “I don’t like blood.”

“How about business? Like your New York uncles?”

“Borrrrring,” said Sammy.

Decker smiled.

“Well, you boys have plenty of time to figure out what you want to be. Heck, it’s okay to do a lot of different things in a lifetime. I used to do ranching when I was a kid in Florida. I did construction work in high school. I was a lawyer for a while, and I don’t see myself as being a cop forever. You’ve got loads of time to experiment.”

Sammy mulled that over for a while.

“You know what I’d like to be?” he said. “I think I’d like to be a journalist. Maybe write editorials that make people think.”

The kid was all of eight and a half.