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of it.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    I pushed the interview report back to him. “So now what?”
    Rothenberg stopped smiling, looked resigned. “We plead him to a reduced charge. If we can.”
    “ ‘If we can’?”
    “Put yourself in the DA’s place. Better, in the assistant’s place. The guy who’ll try the case. This is worth at least eight, nine days of jury trial. Great media exposure for the trial counsel, including two minutes easy on the six o’clock news each night. Say we go with insanity, or diminished capacity. That means we’re putting the kid’s mental condition in issue, and that waives the patient-psychotherapist privilege. That means the jurors definitely get to hear Marek—that’s his shrink—telling about the séance with the gun. Oh, the judge has to instruct the jury to consider the testimony only on the issue of Daniels’ mental condition, and not on his doing the shooting, but no jury alive can keep those things separate. Also, the trial then becomes a forum for everybody to rail about the insanity defense, John Hinckley, the safety of our streets, et cetera, et cetera. I think the court-ordered report’ll stand up. I’ve talked to this Marek, and briefly to his former shrink, some U Mass staffer.”
    “Dr. Lopez?”
    “Yes, that’s her.” Rothenberg went from resigned to gloomy. “No, we all think he was and is legally sane, so to speak.”
    “Does that mean that if you don’t plead insanity, you can keep out his confession at the ‘séance’?”
    “Maybe, maybe not. Daniels’ story itself was after hypnosis, so that ought to stay out. But does the patient-psychotherapist privilege include the therapy group members, does it include his physical agitation, his taking the murder weapon out of his pocket? No, with the circumstantial stuff this strong, not to mention the black boy/white girl angle, nineteen juries out of twenty will convict. In an hour. They’ll stay out three to make it look good, like they really wrestled with the case. But they’ll convict.”
    “Any chance of bail?”
    “No. Oh, the arraignment judge set bail at three-hundred-thousand surety, thirty-thousand cash alternative. But Mrs. Daniels can’t swing either. I’d bet my retainer, which was half what I should have taken, nearly tapped her out as it is.” He looked down at his watch. “I’ve got to run. Anything else?”
    “Yeah. Can you get me in to see Daniels at Middlesex?”
    “I guess,” Rothenberg said—wondering, no doubt, how big a favor I must be repaying.

Five
    R OTHENBERG AND I rattled to the Lechmere stop on the Green Line subway/trolley and walked the three blocks to the tall, modern court-house facility. Rothenberg flashed his Board of Bar Overseers card at the Middlesex County Police security team on the first floor. I had to go through the metal detector.
    We rode the first elevator to the seventeenth floor. Rothenberg vouched for me with the Sheriff’s Department correctional officer inside the thick-windowed control center, then left for his court appearance downstairs. I completed a “Request to Visit Inmate” form and fed it with my photo ID to the officer through a Diebold tray like a drive-up bank’s. He returned a blue and white visitor’s pass, which I clipped onto my lapel.
    The officer waved me to the entrance trap. A red heavy-metal door slid open, unsealing one end of the trap. I entered and cleared another metal detector. Then, and only after the first door chunked closed, the officer opened the second door, admitting me to the visitors’ area. I sat in a glassed-in room on an old, but surprisingly comfortable, green leatherette chair.
    Ten minutes later, a husky guard escorted to me a slim black man I recognized from the television tapes to be William Daniels. Dressed in a medium-green inmate’s shirt and faded green trousers, Daniels had the graceful gait and fine-featured face of a young Arthur Ashe. He eyed me warily as I stood to shake his hand, the guard