Velocity

suffering.
    In the years to come, he will never know if trusting his heart at this moment is the right choice. But he does as it tells him.
    “I love you,” he says, and shoots his mother dead.
    Lieutenant John Palmer is the first officer on the scene.
    What initially appears to be the bold entrance of dependable authority will later seem, to Billy, like the eager rush of a vulture to carrion.
    Waiting for the police, Billy has been unable to move out of the kitchen. He cannot bear to leave his mother alone.
    He feels that she hasn’t fully departed, that her spirit lingers and takes comfort from his presence. Or perhaps he feels nothing of the sort and only wishes this to be true.
    Although he cannot look at her anymore, at what she has become, he stays nearby, eyes averted.
    When Lieutenant Palmer enters, when Billy is no longer alone and no longer needs to be strong, his composure slips. Tremors nearly shake the boy to his knees.
    Lieutenant Palmer asks, “What happened here, son?”
    With these two deaths, Billy is no one’s child, and he feels his isolation in his bones, bleakness at the core, fear of the future.
    When he hears the word son, therefore, it seems to be more than a mere word, seems to be a hand extended, hope offered.
    Billy moves toward John Palmer.
    Because the lieutenant is calculating or only because he is human, after all, he opens his arms.
    Shaking, Billy leans into those arms, and John Palmer holds him close. “Son? What happened here?”
    “He beat her. I shot him. He beat her with the wrench.”
    “You shot him?”
    “He beat her with the lug wrench. I shot him. I shot her.”
    Another man might allow for the emotional turmoil of this young witness, but the lieutenant’s primary consideration is that he has not yet made captain. He is an ambitious man. And impatient.
    Two years previous, a seventeen-year-old boy in Los Angeles County, far south of Napa, had shot his parents to death. He pleaded innocent by reason of long-term sexual abuse.
    That trial, having concluded only two weeks before this pivotal night in Billy Wiles’s life, had resulted in conviction. The pundits predicted the boy would go free, but the detective in charge of the case had been diligent, accumulating a convincing mass of evidence, catching the perpetrator in lie after lie.
    For the past two weeks, that indefatigable detective had been a media hero. He received lots of face time on TV. His name was better known than that of the mayor of Los Angeles.
    With Billy’s admission, John Palmer does not see an opportunity to pursue the truth but instead sees an opportunity.
    “Who did you shoot, son? Him or her?”
    “I s-shot him. I shot her. He beat her so bad with the wrench, I had to s-shoot them both.”
    As other sirens swell in the distance, Lieutenant Palmer leads Billy out of the kitchen, into the living room. He directs the boy to sit on the sofa.
    His question no longer is What happened here, son? His question now is, “What have you done, boy? What have you done?”
    For too long, young Billy Wiles does not hear the difference.
    Thus begins sixty hours of hell.
    At fourteen, he cannot be made to stand trial as an adult. With the death penalty and life imprisonment off the table, the pressures of interrogation should be less than with an adult offender.
    John Palmer, however, is determined to break Billy, to wring from him a confession that he himself beat his mother with the lug wrench, shot his father when his father tried to protect her, then finished her, too, with a bullet.
    Because the punishment for juvenile offenders is so much less severe than for adults, the system sometimes guards their rights less assiduously than it should. For one thing, if the suspect does not know he should demand an attorney, he might not be informed of that right on as timely a basis as would be ideal.
    If the suspect’s lack of resources requires a public defender, there is always the chance that the one assigned will be feckless. Or foolish. Or badly hung over.
    Not every lawyer is as noble as those who champion the oppressed in TV dramas, just as the oppressed themselves are seldom as noble in real life.
    An experienced officer like John Palmer, with the cooperation of selected superiors, guided by reckless ambition and willing to put his career at risk, has a sleeve full of tricks to keep a suspect away from legal counsel and available for unrestricted interrogation in the hours immediately after taking him