Finally, he raised his head. "So what am I going to do?"
She moved away, a gentle extrication. Leaning back now against the table, she didn't answer right away. "I don't mean to put you through any more agony, Andrew. God knows you've got enough to deal with as it is. But I needed to make you see, and see very clearly, some of the really powerful and convincing evidence that they've got against you."
"But it's still…"
"Please. Let me go on." She paused. "Count the ways," she said. "They've got an eyewitness, someone who saw you at Mr. Mooney's that night both before and after. They've got motive and lots of it. Your gun was there. You were there, walk or no walk. They've got the testimony of your best friend, showing premeditation. They've got the gun that you threw away, when if you'd saved it, it could have proved you innocent. All this, and then there's all the rest of their discovery we haven't even seen yet. Laura's mother's testimony, Mr. Mooney's colleagues and associates, forensics and medical reports. Your lies to the police…" She stared fixedly at him.
"What if a jury doesn't believe all that?" he asked.
"They don't have to believe all of it." She kept her tone soft. "But let me ask you one, Andrew. What part of it isn't true?"
He bit at his lip, ran his hand back through his hair.
Wu drove home another point. "And even if a jury drew a slightly different conclusion from all this evidence, say they came back with some lesser offense, say second degree murder or even some kind of manslaughter, you're still, best case, looking at a minimum of ten and maybe up to thirty years."
"But none, if I got off."
"No," she agreed. "Not then. But think about what we've just been over in the past two days. That's just a part of what the prosecution is going to present. Think of how you'd feel if you were on your own jury and heard what they were going to hear."
"So you're saying it doesn't matter whether I actually did it or not."
"Of course it does. It's critical to who you are, to the person you'll be when you get out. I'm just asking you to consider your alternatives with great, great care. We've got a hearing tomorrow, and I have set it up so you can be done with all this and out of custody with your whole life ahead of you in no more than eight years. I know that seems like forever right now, but you'll still be a very young man, believe me, with everything to live for."
"But… eight years…"
She nodded. "No one's pretending this is an easy call. I understand that. Talk to your mom and to Hal, if you want, get their opinions."
"My mom and Hal," he said with withering dismissal. "My mom and Hal. What are they going to tell me? And whatever it is, why should I listen? They live their own lives, if you haven't noticed. They're not interested in mine."
"That's not true, Andrew. Your mother's been in here to visit you every day so far, hasn't she? She loves you. She wants what's best for you. I've just come from seeing them."
"Yeah? And what did she say?"
"She said this was your decision."
Andrew snorted. "See? She'd love it if somebody else took care of me for eight years. It'd leave her and Hal freer to party."
Wu sat back, shook her head. "I don't think that's true," she said, "but it's really neither here nor there. What's important is that you've seen how hard it is to control the way evidence comes out, what it looks like. Your friend Lanny, your own… mistakes in talking to the police."
"So you really don't think you can win?"
Wu empathized with his despair, but it would be a disservice to sugarcoat his predicament. "I will try with everything in me, Andrew. You're free to get another lawyer if you want, but I promise you that I will live and breathe this case for as long as it takes if you decide to go as an adult. But I want you to have a clear understanding of what we're looking at. It will be a long haul, with no guarantees."
"How long?"
She drove in yet another nail. "It might go as long as two years before we can get to trial, maybe eighteen months if we're extremely lucky. And all that time you're in custody anyway. There's no bail, so you're right here until you're eighteen and after that probably at the county lockup downtown."
"Two years?" He swallowed, his eyes pleading. "Two more years?"
"I'd try to speed it up, of course, but that's about the average wait."
"Even if I didn't do it? Even if they found me innocent?"
"I'm afraid so. Either way. I'm sorry."
Bailiff Nelson again picked up Andrew at the door to the visitor's room. If Judge Johnson had reprimanded him over his conduct in the courtroom after the detention hearing, or even discussed it, Nelson gave no sign of it. Wu watched the two of them trundle off to wherever Andrew's cell was located back in the confines of the building. She thought that having a goon like Nelson monitor- hell, shadow- your every move must be one of the most debilitating things about confinement here.
In the women's room down in the main admin building, she fixed her makeup, then found she had to gather her emotions for several minutes. Andrew's disaffection with his parents had bothered her more than she could allow herself to show- it so closely mirrored her now forever unresolved ambivalence about her own father. How much had he really cared about her? Now she would never know. Maybe, she thought, Andrew's approach was healthier- just go on the accumulated evidence of absenteeism and benign neglect and admit that there is no profound connection. If you really believe that there is no parental love at all, you don't spend any time searching for it, either in your parents or in surrogate and successive sexual partners. You don't keep trying to please them, to live off the crumbs of praise or approval that you can then falsely interpret as a proof of their affection for you, their esteem.
Her next stop, Jason Brandt's office, added to the volatility of the emotional mix. She knew that she had to have a talk with the prosecutor and didn't want to acknowledge their physical intimacy of the night before in any way. And though she might have preferred to believe for a moment last night that they actually had potential to connect as people, Brandt had put the lie to that by getting up and leaving soon after the sex. Proof positive, she knew- she'd done the same thing herself- that all it had been was physical. Two consenting adults, thank you very much. In fact, rather than signal any kind of openness to see each other again, she thought this might be a good opportunity to score a few professional points, a payback for the grief she'd taken from him in the courtroom yesterday.
Brandt's work space was a reconverted closet that held his desk and chair, a bookshelf and nothing else. The door could only be closed because somebody had sawed several inches off the corner of the desk. One window, high up and tiny, provided neither light nor view. A bare lightbulb hung from a cord four feet above his desk.
Brandt was behind the desk, crammed amid his books and filing cabinets. The place was literally overflowing with binders, case files, periodicals. For a moment while Wu stood in the doorway, he didn't look up. When he finally did, in the first two seconds his face contorted through several iterations of arrangement- he was glad to see her; he wasn't sure why she was here; some kind of hope that they might get together again?
If it was that, Wu moved to quash it immediately. "Don't worry, I'm not stalking you. I was just up visiting my client and wanted to ask you if you thought I could get a little more time to plead him out."
Brandt's face instantly grew stern. "Why?"
Wu had decided upon a plausible explanation. "I'm having a slight problem with the parents. I doubt Boscacci would mind."
"He would. I talked to him just before the hearing yesterday and he was the soul of inflexibility."
"Really? That's funny, because when I talked with him, he didn't seem awfully concerned about timing."
"Provided Andrew admits."