I was about to call him on that and his promise of cooperation when I saw him throw a quick glance over his shoulder and realized he might be talking for the benefit of the other lawyer in the room.

“Sure,” I said instead. “And I know you have rules in regard to what you can tell me.”

“As long as we understand that, I can try to work with you. I can answer your questions to a point but I am not at liberty at this stage of the case to turn over any of the discovery to you.”

As he said this he swiveled in his seat to check that the other lawyer’s back was still to us and then quickly handed me a flash drive, a data-storage stick with a USB-port connection.

“You will have to get that sort of stuff from the prosecutor or the police,” he said.

“Who is the prosecutor assigned to the case?”

“Well, it has been Rosa Fernandez but she handles juvenile cases. They’re saying they want to try this kid as an adult, so that will probably mean a change in prosecutors.”

“Are you objecting to them moving this out of juvenile court?”

“Of course. My client is sixteen and hasn’t been going to school with any kind of regularity since he was ten or twelve. Not only is he not an adult by any legal standards but his mental capacity and acuity is not even that of a sixteen-year-old.”

“But the police said this crime had a degree of sophistication and a sexual component. The victim had been raped and sodomized with foreign objects. Tortured.”

“You are assuming my client committed the crime.”

“The police said he confessed.”

Meyer pointed to the flash drive in my hand.

“Exactly,” he said. “The police said he confessed. I have two things to say about that. My experience is that if you put a sixteen-year-old kid in a closet for nine hours, don’t feed or hydrate him properly, lie to him about evidence that does not exist and refuse to let him talk to anybody—no grandmother, no lawyer, nobody—well, then, eventually he’s going to give you what you want if he thinks it will finally get him out of the closet. And secondly, it’s a question of what exactly he confessed to that concerns me. The police point of view is definitely different from mine on that.”

I stared at him a moment. The conversation was intriguing but too cryptic. I needed to get Meyer to a place where he could speak freely.

“Do you want to go get a cup of coffee?”

“No, I don’t have time. And as I said, I can’t get into specifics of the case. We have our rules here and we are dealing with a juvenile—despite the state’s efforts to the contrary. And, ironically, the same District Attorney’s Office that wants to prosecute this child as an adult will happily come down on me and on my boss if I give you any case documents relating to a juvenile.