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obvious! Will you?”
    Nina sensed the tension in Bob’s shoulders as she watched the eight ball heading for the pocket in her mind. Did she want to represent a teenaged girl accused of killing her uncle?
    Looking into Daria Zack’s red-rimmed eyes, Nina felt the tug of her desperation. She was war-torn, a single mother like Nina with a teenaged child, struggling just to get by. If what her eyes told her and Bob had said was true, Daria Zack had a lot of trouble taking care of simple, everyday needs in the best of times. Faced with this, of course she felt desperate. And Nina could help her.
    As for the case, she didn’t have enough information to judge it on its merits, but she knew one thing. It had fantastic elements she couldn’t even begin to enumerate, the most profound being that teenaged girls did not make a practice of attacking people with swords.
    And there was the plane crash. Apparently, the son had died the same night as his father, although miles away and under utterly different circumstances. Could the two deaths be connected? The idea made her shiver. Here she was being offered a chance to make sense out of events that made no sense, bring some order into the chaos of death and accusations. She couldn’t bring her husband back, couldn’t create meaning where there was none, but she might be able to do something useful for this girl.
    “I may be able help you,” she said, intentionally tamping down the strange excitement she was feeling at the prospect, “but we’ll need to talk some more.” There were money issues. She could not afford to take a murder case
pro bono.
“I’ll talk with Nicole before the detention hearing that’s scheduled tomorrow, and make a special appearance on her behalf. If I don’t end up representing her, at least she’ll have counsel tomorrow.” She got up, trying to look half as graceful as Daria. “I promise I will see you there.”
    “But can’t you get her out now?”
    “There’s a process involved. She’s stuck for tonight, but I’ll call Juvenile Hall and make sure everything’s okay over there. She’ll be all right until we can straighten things out.”
    “I just knew you were going to fix everything,” said Daria valiantly, struggling to hide her disappointment at the news. “In this kind of situation I’m worthless. We’re so lucky to have someone as smart as you on our side!”
    “One last thing,” Nina said from the doorway. Bob had already run out to the Bronco to let Hitchcock out and was throwing a stick for him in the yard. “Bob mentioned that the police questioned Nicole after they read her her rights. Did she tell them anything?”
    Daria’s eyes seemed to search the room for an answer. “Bob had the balls and presence of mind to remind her she had a right to remain silent, which is more than I could do with all those uniforms and shiny badges flashing around the room like they owned it.”
    Nina felt a little like a cowboy rounding up a bunch of wayward cattle, trying to keep Daria on track. “Did she admit something?”
    “Thank God, my poor baby had the smarts not to confess or anything. But—it’s bad. There’s a witness. Someone told the police they saw her there that night.”

CHAPTER 3
    JUST BEFORE NOON, Nina finished her Superior Court appearances in Tahoe and drove down the mountain to see Nicole Zack. The thicker air hit as she descended the first few thousand feet and its rich earthy smells, along with the lushness of an aquamarine sky and the stretch of dry open road, tinged a cheerful pink in the spring sunshine, intoxicated her.
    It took an ugly tangle of traffic to bring her mood back down to earth. She edged into a spot on the street, and walked a block to the center.
    The Juvenile Detention Center in Placerville was not the horror story of B movies, but it wasn’t Grandma’s kitchen either. The kids milling around acted like a group of high schoolers passing in the halls between classes, joking and nudging