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Taking a deep swig as she came face-to-face with him. Staring right back at her with the coldest fuck-you eyes she’d seen in a long time.

  Ignore the eyes and he was a surprisingly small, frail-looking kid with pipe-stem arms and a pale triangular face under a mop of untrimmed dirty-blond hair. He’d shaved his head clean at the sides, which made the top-growth look even bigger. The manager had said he was twelve; he could’ve passed for younger.

  Randolph Duchay was good-sized and broad-shouldered, with wavy, short brown hair and a puffy, thick-lipped face plagued by wet-looking zits. His arms had already started to pop veins and show some definition. Him, Sue would’ve placed at fifteen or sixteen.

  Big and scared. Sue’s flashlight picked up his fear right away, the sweat on his brow and nose. A bead of moisture rolled off his pimply chin. Repeated eyeblinks.

  She moved right in on him, pointed a finger in his face. “Where’s Kristal Malley?”

  Randolph Duchay shook his head. Started to cry.

  “Where is she?” she demanded.

  The kid’s shoulders rose and fell. He slammed his eyes shut and began rocking.

  She hauled him to his feet. Fernie was doing the same to Troy Turner, asking the same question.

  Turner tolerated being frisked with passivity. His face was as blank as a sidewalk.

  Sue put pressure on Duchay’s arm. The kid’s biceps were rock hard; if he resisted he’d be a challenge. Her gun was on her hip, holstered, out of reach. “Where the hell is she, Randy.”

  “Rand,” said Troy Turner. “He ain’t no Randy.”

  “Where’s Kristal, Rand?”

  No response. She squeezed harder, dug her nails in. Duchay squawked and pointed to the left. Past the swings and across the play area to a pair of cinder-block public lavatories.

  “She’s in the bathroom?” said Fernie Reyes.

  Rand Duchay shook his head.

  “Where is she?” Sue growled. “Tell me now.”

  Duchay pointed in the same direction.

  But he was looking somewhere else. To the right of the lavs. South side of the cinder block, where a corner of dark metal stuck out.

  Park Dumpsters. Oh, Lord.

  She cuffed Duchay and put him in the back of the Crown Victoria. Ran over to look. By the time she got back, Troy was cuffed, too. Sitting next to his bud, still unruffled.

  Fernie waited outside the car. When he saw her he raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

  Sue shook her head.

  He called the coroner.

  The boys had made no attempt to conceal. Kristal’s body lay atop five days’ worth of park refuse, fully clothed but with one shoe off. The white sock underneath was grimy at the toe. The child’s neck was broken like that of a cast-off doll. Delicate neck like that, Sue figured— hoped— she had died instantaneously. Several days later the coroner verified her guess: several broken cervical vertebrae, a ruptured windpipe, concomitant cranial bleeding. The body also bore two dozen bruises and internal injuries that could have proved fatal. No evidence of sexual assault.

  “Does it really matter?” said the pathologist who’d done the post. A usually tough guy named Banerjee. When he reported to Sue and Fernie he looked defeated and old.

  * * *

  Placed in a holding cell at the station, Rand-not-Randy Duchay hunched, immobile and silent. He had stopped crying and his eyes were glassy and trancelike. His cell stank. Sue had smelled that feral reek plenty of times. Fear, guilt, hormones, whatever.

  Troy Turner’s cell smelled faintly of beer. The cans the detectives had found indicated each boy had downed three Buds. With Troy’s body weight, not an insignificant amount, but there was nothing spacey about him. Dry-eyed, calm. He spent the ride to the station glancing out the window of the unmarked as it passed through dark Valley streets. As if this were a field trip.

  When Sue asked him if there was anything he wanted to say, he gave a strange little grunting noise.

  A grumpy old man’s sound— annoyed. Like they’d messed up his plans.

  “What’s that, Troy?”

  His eyes became slits. Sue had two kids, including a twelve-year-old son. Turner freaked her out. She forced herself to outstare him and he finally looked away and gave another grunt.

  “Something on your mind, Troy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “Can I have a smoke?”

  Both boys, as it turned out, were thirteen, and Troy was the older one, a month from fourteen. Neither had known Kristal Malley. As the papers reported it, the pair had run out of change; as they left the video arcade they spied the little girl wandering around the mall looking lost. Deciding it would be “cool” to “fool around,” they gave Kristal some stale candy from Rand’s gritty jeans pocket and she accompanied them willingly.

  Despite evidence to the contrary, implications of sexual assault laced the local coverage. The story was picked up by the national press and the wire services, tilting toward the lurid, feeding sensation to their international clients.

  That brought the usual swarm of talking heads, public intellectuals, and other misery pimps sounding off. Op-ed editors found themselves in a buyer’s market.

  The obvious root cause of such an outrage was: poverty; rampant societal breakdown; media violence; junk food and poor nutrition; the erosion of family values; godlessness; the failure of organized religion to meet the needs of the underclass; the absence of moral training in school; truancy; insufficient government funding for social programs; too much government control over the lives of the citizenry.

  One genius, a pundit funded by the Ford Foundation, attempted to connect the crime to the post-Christmas sale season— pernicious materialism had led to frustration had led to murder. “Acquisitional rage,” he called it. The same thing happens all the time in the favelas of Brazil.

  “Shop till you drop it on someone,” Milo had remarked at the time. “What an asshole.” We hadn’t discussed the case much and I’d done most of the talking. He has solved hundreds of homicides but this one bothered him.

  The media noise lasted awhile. Over at the Hall of Justice, the legal process kicked in, stealthy and gray. The boys were placed in the High Power ward at the county jail. With both of them too young to qualify for a 707 hearing to determine if they could be tried as adults, most experts felt the disposition would end up in Juvenile Court.

  Citing the brutality of the crime, the District Attorney’s Office made a special request to kick the case up to Superior Court. Troy Turner and Randolph Duchay’s court appointed P.D.s filed papers in strong opposition. A couple more days of editorial columns were devoted to that matter. Then another lull, as briefs were written and a hearing judge was appointed.

  Juvey judge Thomas A. Laskin III— a former D.A. with experience prosecuting gang members— had a rep as a hard case. Courtroom whispers said it was going to get interesting.

  I got the call three weeks after the murder.

  “Dr. Alex Delaware? Tom Laskin. We’ve never met but Judge Bonnaccio said you’re the man for the job.”

  Peter Bonnaccio had been presiding judge of Superior Court, Family Division for a couple of years, and I’d testified before him. I hadn’t liked him much at first, thinking him hasty and superficial when making custody decisions. I’d been wrong. He talked fast, cracked jokes, was sometimes inappropriate. But plenty of thought went into his decisions and he was right more often than not.

  I said, “What job is that, Judge?”

  “Tom. I’m the lucky guy who got handed the Kristal Malley murder and I need the defendants evaluated psychologically. The main issue, obviously, is, was there enough mature forethought and mental capacity prior to and during the commission of the crime to qualify the defendants for full, adult psychological capacity. The D.A.’s broken new ground, but from what I’ve seen the sixteen-year minimum for a 707 isn’t inviolate. Issue Two— and this is as much personal as official— I’d like to know what makes them tick. I have three kid
s of my own and this one makes no sense to me.”

  “It’s a tough one,” I agreed. “Unfortunately, I can’t help you.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m not the man for the job.”

  “Why not?”

  “Psychological tests can reveal how someone’s functioning intellectually and emotionally in the present, but they say nothing about past state of mind. On top of that, they were developed to measure things like learning disabilities and giftedness, not homicidal behavior. In terms of what made these boys tick, my training’s even less helpful. We’re good at creating rules about human behavior but lousy at understanding exceptions.”

  “We’re talking bizarre behavior, here,” said Laskin. “Isn’t that your bailiwick?”

  “I’ve got opinions, but they’re just that— my personal point of view.”

  “All I want to know is were they thinking like kids or like grown-ups.”

  “There’s nothing scientifically definitive I could say about that. If other shrinks tell you different, they’re lying.”

  He laughed. “Pete Bonnaccio said you could get like this. Which is exactly why I called you. Everything I do on this one is going to be put under the microscope. The last thing I need is one of the usual expert whores turning it into a circus. I didn’t take Pete’s word that you were unbiased, I talked to some other judges and a few cops. Even people who think you’re a compulsive pain-in-the-ass admit you’re not doctrinaire. What I need here is an open mind. But not so open your brain falls out.”

  “Are you open-minded?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You really haven’t made up your mind?”

  I heard him breathing. Rapidly, then slower, as if forcing himself calm. “No, I haven’t made up my mind, Doctor. I just had a look at the autopsy photos. Went by the jail and looked at the defendants, too. In jail duds, with their hair cut, they look like they got kidnapped themselves. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know, but— ”

  “Cut the crap, Doctor. I’ve got solid citizens clamoring for vengeance and the ACLU and their buddies wanting to make political hay. Bottom line: I’ll evaluate the data and make up my own mind. But I need to be sure I’ve got the best information. If it’s not you evaluating those boys, it’ll be someone else— probably one of the whores. You want to opt out of your civic duty, fine. Next time something bad happens, tell yourself you did your best.”

  “Impressive guilt trip.”

  “Hey,” he said, laughing. “Whatever works. So how about it? Talk to them, test them, do whatever the hell you want and report directly to me.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Don’t think too long. Okay, decided yet?”

  “I need to be clear,” I said. “I could end up with no recommendation on adult versus juvey.”

  “I’ll deal with that if and when it happens.”

  “I’d need unlimited access,” I said. “And no time pressure.”

  “Yes to the first, no to the second. I’m due to rule within thirty days. I can extend it to forty-five, maybe sixty, but if I don’t act in a timely manner it leaves me open to all sorts of appeal static. You in?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What’s your fee?”

  I told him.

  “Stiff,” he said, “but not out of line. Send your bill directly to me. You might even get paid within a reasonable amount of time.”

  “Comforting.”

  “That’s all the comfort you’re going to get on this one.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Social Services had evaluated the boys’ families before settling them in the housing project. It took a subpoena but I got the records.

  Troy Turner Jr. lived with his mother, a twenty-eight-year-old alcoholic and cocaine addict named Jane Hannabee. She’d been in and out of rehab for most of her adult life and had spent two years, as a teenager, at the state mental hospital in Camarillo. Her diagnoses ranged from mood disorder, depressed type, to personality disorder, narcissistic-borderline type, to schizoaffective disorder. Meaning no one really understood her. During her attempts at treatment, Troy had been sent to her parents in San Diego. Troy’s grandfather, a retired army sergeant, found the boy’s wild ways intolerable. He’d been dead for seven years, his wife for six.

  A habitual felon and addict named Troy Wayne Turner was the boy’s alleged father. Jane Hannabee claimed that at age fifteen, she’d shared a rock and a one-night stand with the thirty-nine-year-old in a San Fernando motel. Turner had recently turned to bank robbery to support his habit, and after his tryst with Hannabee was caught fleeing from a Bank of America in Covina. Sentenced to ten years at San Quentin, he succumbed three years later to liver disease, never meeting, or acknowledging, his son.

  Shortly after her boy’s arrest, Jane Hannabee had left 415 City for parts unknown.

  Rand Duchay’s parents were long-distance truckers who’d perished on the Grapevine in a thirty-vehicle winter pile-up. Six months old at the time of the crash, Rand had been riding in the truck, swaddled in a storage compartment behind the front seat. He had survived without obvious injury, lived all his life with his grandparents, Elmer and Margaret Sieff, uneducated people who’d failed at farming and a number of small businesses. Elmer died when Rand was four and Margaret, afflicted with diabetes and circulatory problems, moved to the project when her money ran out. The way the social workers saw it, she’d done her best.

  As far as I could tell, neither boy had spent much time in school and no one had noticed.

  I put in my request to visit the prisoners and the A.D.A.s assigned to the case requested a prior meeting. So did the boy’s deputy public defenders. I didn’t need priming by either side and refused. When all the lawyers protested I had Judge Laskin run interference. A day later, I was authorized to enter the jail.

  * * *

  I’d been to the county jail before, was used to the grayness, the wait, the gates, the forms. The squinty scrutiny by reflexively suspicious deputy sheriffs as I stood in the sally port. I knew the High Power ward, too, had visited a patient there, years ago. Another kid who’d teetered over the edge. As I walked down the corridor with a deputy escort, moans and giggles sprayed from distant cells and the air filled with the battling stenches of excreta and disinfectant. The world might change but this place didn’t.

  Psych evaluations had been ordered alphabetically: Randolph Duchay, first. He was curled up on a cot in his cell, facing front but sleeping. I motioned to the deputy to hold back and took a few seconds to observe.

  Big for his age, but in the cold, unadorned, custard yellow space, he looked insignificant.

  The furnishings were a sink, a chair, a lidless toilet, a shelf for personal items that was bare. Weeks behind bars had left him sallow, with sooty half-moons under his eyes and chapped lips and a slack face ravaged by furious acne. His hair had been clipped short. Even from a distance I could see the scourge of pimples stretching up into his scalp.

  I motioned that I was ready and the deputy unlocked the cell. As the door clicked behind me, the boy looked up. Dull brown eyes barely took the time to focus before closing.

  The deputy said, “I pass through every quarter hour. You need me sooner, holler.”

  I thanked him, put my briefcase down, sat in the chair. When he left, I said, “Hello, Rand. I’m Dr. Delaware.”

  “H’lo.” Hoarse, phlegmy voice, barely above a whisper. He coughed. Blinked several times. Remained prone.

  “Got a cold?” I said.

  Head shake.

  “How are they treating you?”

  No response, then he half sat, remaining slumped so low that his trunk nearly paralleled the cot. Big torso, disproportionately short legs. His ears were low-set, flaring on top, folded over in an odd way. Stubby fingers. Webbed neck. A mouth that never fully closed. His front teeth were small and ragged. The overall picture: “soft signs”— suggestions of abnormality that didn’t qualify for any
formal syndrome.

  “I’m a psychologist, Rand. Know what that is?”

  “Kinda doctor.”

  “Right. Know what kind?”

  “Hnnh.”

  “Psychologists don’t give shots or examine your body.”

  He flinched. Like any other inmate he’d been subjected to the full course of physical scrutiny.

  I said, “I deal with how you’re feeling emotionally.”

  His eyes floated upward. I touched my forehead. “What’s in your mind.”

  “Like a shrink.”