“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

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.