“Good. Well ... I’m worried about Dennis Farman,” she admitted. “I don’t know that he’s in the right place. He’s isolated there. He has no one his own age to interact with.”

Worth spread her hands. “He’s there or he’s in a juvenile facility. Those are the choices. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you he knifed a boy his own age. That’s not exactly healthy interaction.”

Anne sighed. “I know. And I know there are no boys his own age in the juvenile facility. There simply isn’t a good answer for him. If Child Services could place him somewhere ... in a halfway house or something.”

“He’s a violent offender, Anne,” Worth said. “If he was eighteen, you wouldn’t be so concerned about finding him anything outside a penitentiary.”

“That’s the problem, though. He’s not eighteen. He’s a little boy.”

Worth nodded, thoughtful for a moment as she weighed the pros and cons of what she was about to say.

“Let me tell you about ‘a little boy’ I dealt with when I was prosecuting sex crimes in Riverside,” she said. “Brent Batson. When I was prosecuting Batson he was twenty-eight. He was a serial rapist. A vicious, brutal monster. I put him away for three consecutive life sentences. He had raped nineteen women that I knew of. He later told a reporter that he had committed at least twice that many crimes.

“At the time of his first violent offense—a rape—he was twelve years old. He spent all his juvenile life in one program or another with people trying to straighten him out. When he turned eighteen, he celebrated by going out and raping a fourteen-year-old at knifepoint. When he got out of prison for doing that, he celebrated by raping a homeless woman and her ten-year-old daughter.”

“You’re saying there’s no fixing Dennis Farman,” Anne said.

“I’m saying the social worker that lost sleep over him when he was twelve will never get that time back,” Worth said. “Justice is a tough business, Anne. You won’t do yourself any favors by caring too much.”

“I know all that,” Anne said. “Believe me, if Dennis had one person in his life to sit on his side of the courtroom, I’d be out of there.”

“You got him an attorney,” Worth pointed out.

“I’m his advocate. And I just can’t stand the idea of being twelve and having absolutely no one give a damn about me. Imagine having your whole life stretching out ahead of you, and it’s just a long empty road.”

“Anne, you need to learn the difference between sympathy and empathy,” Worth said. “One makes you a humanitarian. The other will make you miserable.”