Wu forced herself to look into Linda's eyes, to feign a confidence she didn't feel. "The fact is, we have to face that as an option. If we plead him out as a juvenile, then there's no life without parole hanging over his head."

"But he's not guilty," Linda repeated. She turned to Hal. "We talked about this every time the inspectors came by with some new thing, didn't we? And then this terrible lineup mistake…" The voice wore down. "He just didn't do this, Hal. Don't tell me you don't believe that."

Wu was fairly certain that she knew what Hal believed, and stepped in to save him. "I don't think we have to discuss the actual fact of whether he's innocent or guilty right now, Mrs. North. The issue is that he saves the court the considerable time and expense of a trial if he admits. In return, the DA agrees he's a juvenile and he avoids the LWOP."

"LWOP?" Linda asked. "What's LWOP?"

"Life without parole. That's what he would get as an adult."

North let out a snort. "But it's moot for now, anyway. He's not charged as an adult today, right?"

Linda turned to Wu. "He's not?"

"No, ma'am. That's why we're here, having this detention hearing. So we have a chance to let Andrew go home for a few days."

"We can get it all straightened out there," Hal said, "at home. We'll have plenty of time there."

Still unsure, Linda blew out in evident frustration. She looked back up to the cottages, wrapped in their razor-wire dressing, and her shoulders sank. "Okay," she said with great weariness. "Let's at least first get him out of here."

"That's the plan." Wu offered her a brave smile. "Really."

Wu sat at the defense table awaiting the judge's entrance. In juvenile court proceedings, the district attorney was said to represent not the people, but the petitioner, and the person accused of a crime was not the defendant, but the minor. This nicety functioned to preserve the legal fiction that youthful felons were not lost causes. The district attorney's role was not to prosecute miscreants, but rather to ask, or petition, the state to recommend a treatment for the minor that stood a chance to result in the child's complete rehabilitation back into society. Even if that treatment was six or eight years locked up at the California Youth Authority, or CYA, it technically wasn't the same thing as prison, although its inmates might be hard-pressed to elucidate the precise difference.

To Wu's left, at the petitioner's table, sat her opposite number, Jason Brandt. Not yet thirty, Brandt already had four years as a prosecutor under his belt, all of it here at the YGC. Brandt had a full head of neatly combed dark brown hair and wore a well-cut dark gray suit with a white shirt and muted blue tie. Affable, quick-witted, charming even, he smiled a lot and made it a point to get along well with everyone, including the defense attorneys against whom he was pitted. Wu, herself, had long harbored a bit of a secret crush on him. They'd shared drinks more than once- although his reputation was that as soon as the gavel came down, he was nobody to play with.

Suddenly Brandt lifted his head like an animal catching a scent. He caught Wu in the middle of her surreptitious glance at him and, nodding genially, went back to his papers. Wu made it a point to continue looking about the room, which was smaller than most of the courtrooms downtown at the Hall of Justice, but had the advantage of natural light pouring in from large windows set high in one wall.

Beyond Brandt, a very young-looking uniformed bailiff sat talking to a middle-aged woman whom Wu presumed was the court recorder. There were no jurors- juvenile trials did not have juries- and yet a nice jury box held twelve perennially empty chairs. There was no one in the gallery on the prosecution side- for the protection of the minors involved, the public was not admitted into the courtroom.

Wu turned around farther in her chair and gave a confident nod to Andrew's parents, the sole occupants of Wu's side of the gallery. Hal and Linda sat hip to hip, next to each other on the bench behind the bar rail. They held hands and seemed to be leaning into each other. Wu's eyes went briefly to Hal, and he inclined his head an inch, then raised a finger and pointed to one side of the room, where the door had started to open. Wu turned at the sound and watched as the bailiff from the cottages ushered Andrew ahead of him into the bullpen.

As Andrew shuffled toward her now, handcuffed in his shapeless gray prisoner's clothes, he seemed to her utterly defeated. Stopping in front of her table, he raised his head to look at his mother. His eyes opened in a silent plea, lips tightened down over a frankly quaking jaw. She was afraid that in another moment he might start to cry, and to forestall that, she stood, came around her table and helped him get seated.

"He doesn't need to be handcuffed," she said to the bailiff. "What's your name?"

"Nelson." The bailiff kept his hand on Andrew's shoulder and replied in some surprise. He played no formal role in this proceeding, and it was decidedly unusual for an attorney to speak to him for any reason.

"Well, Officer Nelson, this young man doesn't need to be handcuffed."

It didn't matter to Nelson one way or the other. "That's up to the judge," he said. He did take his hand off Andrew, however, and stepped aside a few paces. He stood leaning against the front of the jury box, facing Wu, sublimely indifferent, which was almost more chilling to her than outright antagonism would have been.

Wu reached over and patted Andrew's arm. "It's all right," she said. "It'll be fine."

He turned his face to her, then farther around, back to his mother again. "Mom," he said, then couldn't continue. Tears threatened to spill, but he blinked them back. Raw vulnerability took years off his age. The idea of this pathetic boy aiming a gun at a person and pulling a trigger not once but twice suddenly struck Wu for the first time as incongruous.

Her heart went out to him, while at the same time she was a bit relieved to see the depth of his despair. He would probably have to hit bottom and see that there was no hope in pleading not guilty. After they got to talk and she showed him the evidence, he'd realize the futility of pretending he hadn't done it. When the truth must be clear to him if he dared to look at it objectively. Andrew wasn't stupid- she glanced over at him one last time, confident that he would come to accept that he had to admit if he wanted to save himself.

Now in his early sixties, Judge W. Arvid Johnson had built a reputation as a reasonable and fair jurist with no particular ax to grind. Irreverently, secretly and universally called "Warvid" by the city's legal community, Johnson took the bench today with little fanfare and no formal announcement by the bailiff or court recorder. Suddenly, it seemed, he had materialized up there, seated behind the slightly raised podium- white-haired and faintly jocular, he projected an amiable solidity.

After a business-like nod to both counsel, he said, "All right" to no one in particular, pulled his glasses down to the end of his patrician nose and asked the probation officer to call the first case. When he'd done this, the officer listed those present in the courtroom, including the gallery, for the record, and then Judge Johnson began. "Mr. Brandt, comments on detention?"

"Yes, your honor."

"Go ahead."

Brandt stood up behind his table. His voice sounded clear and relaxed in the small room. "Your honor, as this is a murder case, the petitioner requests that the minor be detained."

"He's here under juvenile jurisdiction," the judge said sharply. "The district attorney has decided not to file against him directly as an adult. I have to gather that that was done on purpose? Am I wrong?"

"No, your honor, not at all." Brandt took the rebuke calmly, probably because he had a ready answer, and a good one. "We anticipate that Mr. Bartlett will admit this petition and receive the maximum commitment to the YA"- the Youth Authority. "He'll still be confined here at YGC, of course, rather than downtown, for a brief period since he's under eighteen, but we anticipate a quick disposition on two counts of first degree murder. So naturally the petitioner considers this a detention case."