Free The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman

case?”
    Decker sat up in his chair and pulled out a sheet of scrap paper.
    “Yes, I am, Ms….?”
    “I was wondering about that last girl who was raped…. You know, the librarian?”
    “Yes,” Decker said encouragingly. He could barely hear her over the background drone. “Could you speak up, please?”
    “What was her name? Ball or Bell…. It was in the papers….”
    “What about her?”
    “Um, was she by any chance wearing black-and-white dress pumps?”
    “Could be,” Decker answered trying to contain his excitement. “That very well could be. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you come down to the station, and the two of us can find out about it together, Ms….?”
    The line disconnected.
    “Fuck,” he said out loud. “Damn it!” He slammed down the receiver and quickly dialed communications.
    “Arnie, it’s Pete Decker.”
    “How’s it going Pete?”
    “Just fine. Could you get me a location on my last incoming call? She hung up about a second ago.”
    “I’ll see what I can do.”
    “Thanks.”
    Decker hung up.
    Was she wearing two-tone pumps? You bet your sweet ass she was wearing two-tone pumps, and only the police were supposed to know it. The fact that that perp was a foot fetishist had been held back from the press. The lady knew something, and she’d slipped out of his hands.
    Typical!
    Fuck!
    He knew he’d spoken to her before. She must have been one of the hundreds of anonymous tips that had floated through the station since the rapes began. But her voice stuck in his memory bank. He noted the date, time, and contents of the call, including the background noise, on a tip list and stuck it back in the file. A half-empty aspirin bottle lay on his desk. Opening it up, he popped two tablets in his mouth and washed them down with a cold sip of leftover coffee. He sat thinking. After a few minutes he got up, walked over to the central files and looked up the yeshiva vandalism episodes.
    Nothing particularly illuminating. Broken windows, garbage strewn over the grounds, swastikas and obscene messages spray-painted on the walls: Kikes, Cocksuckers, Baby Killers, Flesh Eaters, Christ Killers . Maybe it should have bothered him more than it did, but he had passed it off as the same old stuff. Nothing new. Nothing that hadn’t ever been said before. A few of the local punks were questioned, no arrests were made. Case closed. Kaput.
    Decker put the file away, closed the drawer, and went back to his desk.
    Anti-Semitism was nothing new to him. He’d grown up a good ole boy in Gainesville, where there was little direct contact with Jews but still a lot of prejudice. The locals regarded decadent Miami as a pinko watering hole for kikes, spics, and niggers. His first personal experience with a Jew came when he was fourteen. One of his buddies had been bumped off the first string of the local junior high football team by a Jew—a big strong boy who defied the stereotype. Later on in the day Decker and his friends ran into the Jew off campus. His buddy was pissed and baited the boy into a fight by calling him a Christ Killer. Decker did nothing as the two boys started duking it out, standing on the sidelines even when the rest of the gang jumped into the melee. It wasn’t until he clearly saw that the Jewish boy was hopelessly outmuscled that he’d intervened and stopped the fighting. At fourteen, he was five ten, 170, with a developing pad of musculature that made grown men jealous. The boys listened to him, but weren’t happy about it.
    That evening at dinnertime he told his parents about the Jew and what had happened. After an initial silence, his father—a large, taciturn man with broad shoulders—spoke first. Gotta fight, he had said, when you’re threatened. Gotta protect yourself, protect your family and country. But it’s no damn good to fightsomeone just because of the way he was born. It’s wrong, and it’s stupid.
    His mother’s comment was more theological. The Lord Jesus