COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

To my daughter Rachel.
Brains, beauty, grace, wit, style.
And a heart of gold.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Sheriff's Deputy Kurt Ebert.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER

1

It came in a plain brown wrapper.

Padded envelope, book rate, book sized. I assumed it was an academic text I'd forgotten ordering.

It went on to the mail table, along with Monday's bills and announcements of scholarly seminars in Hawaii and St. Croix. I returned to the library and tried to figure out what I was going to do in ten minutes when Tiffani and Chondra Wallace showed up for their second session.

A year ago their mother had been murdered by their father up on a ridge in the Angeles Crest Forest.

He told it as a crime of passion and maybe he was right, in the very worst sense. I'd learned from court documents that absence of passion had never been a problem for Ruthanne and Donald Dell Wallace. She'd never been a strong-willed woman, and despite the ugliness of their divorce, she had held on to “love feelings” for Donald Dell. So no one had been surprised when he cajoled her into taking a night ride with sweet words, the promise of a lobster dinner, and good marijuana.

Shortly after parking on a shaded crest overlooking the forest, the two of them got high, made love, talked, argued, fought, raged, and finally clawed at one another. Then Donald Dell took his buck knife to the woman who still bore his name, slashed and stabbed her thirty-three times, and kicked her corpse out of his pickup, leaving behind an Indian-silver clip stuffed with cash and his membership card in the Iron Priests motorcycle club.

A docket-clearing plea bargain landed him in Folsom Prison on a five to ten for second-degree murder. There he was free to hang out in the yard with his meth-cooking Aryan Brotherhood bunkmates, take an auto mechanics course he could have taught, accrue good behavior brownie points in the chapel, and bench press until his pectorals threatened to explode.

Four months into his sentence, he was ready to see his daughters.

The law said his paternal rights had to be considered.

An L.A. family court judge named Stephen Huff—one of the better ones—asked me to evaluate. We met in his chambers on a September morning and he told me the details while drinking ginger ale and stroking his bald head. The room had beautiful old oak paneling and cheap country furniture. Pictures of his own children were all over the place.

“Just when does he plan on seeing them, Steve?”

“Up at the prison, twice a month.”

“That's a plane ride.”

“Friends will chip in for the fare.”

“What kind of friends?”

“Some idiocy called The Donald Dell Wallace Defense Fund.”

“Biker buddies?”

“Vroom vroom.”

“Meaning it's probably amphetamine money.”

His smile was weary and grudging. “Not the issue before us, Alex.”