Jake wiped tears streaming down the side of his face. “I can’t stand it here, Bee Dee. I can’t stand thinking I’m going to spend a year here.”
Bee Dee squatted. “You don’t think about a year. You don’t think about a month or a week. You don’t even think about tomorrow. You think about today. Just make it through today.”
“What if I can’t? What if I can’t make it through another day?”
Bee Dee stood. “Then I guess we wasted our time. I guess we should have just left you out there in the mud.” He started for the door, stopped and looked back. “You know why we didn’t? Because for those twenty-four minutes it wasn’t just you out there. It was all of us. We were all out there.”
“Really?” Jake spat. “’Cause I didn’t see anybody out there but me.”
For a moment Bee Dee didn’t speak. Then he said, “They ain’t gonna let you lie there. So, the way I see it you have two choices. Let them get you up and continue to punish you, or get up. You get your ass out of bed and you’ll see. You’ll see you’re not alone.
K
NOCK
-M
E
-S
TIFF
R
ANCH
G
OLD
C
REEK
, C
ALIFORNIA
Dave Bennett’s home on the Knock-Me-Stiff Ranch was a two-story log cabin that looked like something out of the old western TV show
Bonanza,
with a circular drive leading to a portico and a tall, wide door beneath a hanging chow bell. The bunkhouse sat several hundred yards down a dirt road. Bennett hadn’t oversold it. Longer than it was wide, the narrow structure had two doors beneath a rickety overhang that faced a field of black oaks and brush. The knotted pine siding had weathered nearly black and the building looked as if it would fall over in a stiff breeze. Inside, a third door at the back led to the outhouse, perhaps thirty yards across an open grass field.
“That could be an adventure in the middle of the night,” Molia had said, holding up one of two propane camp lights Bennett had provided.
The four-paned windows still had the original silica glass and weren’t constructed to open. Bennett propped open the doors to create a cross draft and let out the heat of the day while Sloane and Molia moved headless and limbless mannequins, which Harper used to design her clothing, along one wall. Before bunking down, Molia had dressed one in a long-sleeve shirt and fastened a baseball cap atop a stick, rigging it where the head would be. Then he positioned the mannequin near a window. “I saw it in
Home Alone,
” he said.
Molia and Sloane had slept in the lower bunks though neither slept much, if at all, and finally got up well before dawn. Sloane used Bennett’s battery-operated hot plate to heat water for coffee. Later that morning Bennett stopped by to jerry-rig two plugs that allowed them to fire up the computer equipment, which they set on the table, a massive rectangular slab of wood. Bennett was working to get the wireless modem set up when Alex called Sloane’s phone.
“I think I got your article,” she said. Sloane had called her the night before and asked her to search for any articles on Fresh Start, hoping she’d find the one Eileen Harper had mentioned. “It’s called ‘The Selling of Youth Offenders.’ I’ll forward it when your computers are set up. It’s strong on details but weak on quotes and provides no names.”
“Any luck finding the reporter?”
“You got a pen and paper?”
“In hand.”
“Then I have a name and a number.”
S
HANGHAI
A
LE
H
OUSE
W
INCHESTER
C
OUNTY
, C
ALIFORNIA
Tamara Rizek rose from her chair as Sloane and Molia entered the brick ale house. Tall and athletic with a black ponytail, she waved them over to join her at a table far from the picture windows in the
back near floor-to-ceiling glass enclosing stainless steel beer vats that prevented anyone from sitting close.
Sloane greeted Rizek over the guitar riffs of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” and introduced Molia. “You indicated you might not have much time?”
Rizek had hesitated at Sloane’s invitation when they spoke by phone, though not because she was reluctant to talk. She had a newborn son, three months, along with a three-year-old daughter. “Double trouble” she had called them on the phone. Sloane had offered to meet at her house, but that just made her laugh.
“I take it you don’t have a toddler,” she’d said. She told Sloane she’d make arrangements with her mother-in-law to help out and would call Sloane back with a time and a place to meet.
“I’m good for a couple hours,” she said, retaking her seat.
A waiter refilled Rizek’s coffee mug. Sloane opted for an iced tea and Molia joined Rizek with a cup of coffee. “And I’ll have a Guinness,” Rizek said.
“A woman after my own heart,” Molia said.
“Doctor’s orders.”
“No kidding? Where can I find him? I’d like a prescription with a lifetime renewal.”
“You’d have to give birth first.”
“There’s always some small catch.”
“I’m anemic since my son’s birth. Happened with my daughter too. Guinness is loaded with iron. Also helps with the milk production.”
“Maybe two catches,” Molia said.
Molia never ceased to impress Sloane with his ability to put a witness at ease. He’d seen the detective do it more than once. “Can I buy you breakfast?” Sloane asked Rizek.
Rizek declined. “The Last Stop is better for breakfast.” She paused. “I thought there’d be fewer people in here this hour of the morning.”
“You’re concerned?” Sloane asked.
She shook her head. “Curious. I wrote that article two years ago and it didn’t generate much interest then.”
“Is that when you moved to Winchester County?”
“About six months before. My husband wanted to get out of the Bay Area after my daughter was born to get out of the traffic and congestion. He’s a lawyer and he was looking to change careers, and we both wanted to be home more for the kids than either of our jobs would have allowed living in the Bay Area. He grew up not far from here. Country living sounded like a good thing at the time.”
“So how did the article come about?” Sloane asked.
“I took a job part-time with the
Winchester Recorder
just to keep from going stir-crazy. Mostly fluff pieces, you know, the local Girl Scout troop raising money for a mission to Mexico. It was fine. I was burned-out. I’d spent ten years at the
Mercury
doing investigative pieces.” She pulled her ponytail tight at the back of her head. “Then the phone rings one day. Aubrey Garzinni. I won’t forget that name. She tells me she’s filing a complaint against Judge Earl Boykin, that he’s sent her son to someplace called Fresh Start without her knowledge and without any trial.”
“At least he’s consistent,” Molia said.
“Honestly, I thought it was bullshit, you know. You get that a lot as a reporter, people wanting to use you for their personal vendettas. But I confirmed she’d filed the complaint and told her I’d look into it. When I tried to get a copy of the hearing, the clerk wouldn’t release it. She said juvenile records are sealed. When I had Aubrey try to get a copy she got the runaround, and I got more interested.”
“Funny how that works,” Molia said.
“Are you a reporter?”
“Detective.”
She nodded. “I made an FOIA request on her behalf to get copies of Judge Earl’s sentences. It took awhile and I didn’t get names, but I got a list of the offenses and the sentences. When I compared them with other counties I found them completely out of whack, kids being sent away for minor stuff that other counties were giving home confinement, and Boykin’s sentences much longer than the average. That was all very interesting, but what really caught my attention was it seemed they were all being sent to this place Fresh Start.”
“We know it,” Molia said.
“So I shifted focus and I find out Fresh Start is a private detention facility, that the parents have to pay when their kids get sentenced there. Now I’m really interested. So I call up and ask if there is someone I can talk to. I tell them I want to do a feature article on the place. They put me in touch with a woman, I forget what they called her.”
“Parent liaison,” Sloane said.
“That’s it. But really she’s just a PR person.”
“Felt like she was going to sell us a time-share,” Molia said.
The waiter returned with Rizek’s Guinness and Sloane’s ice tea. Rizek sipped her beer and wiped the foam with a napkin. “I asked if I could tour the facility but she shined me on for a week or two then said the request had been denied because it could violate the privacy of the occupants. Now I’m just pissed. So I arranged to go with Aubrey when she went to visit her son. She said I was her sister.”
“Did you get in?” Sloane asked.
She nodded. “We got in. They dress the place up nice enough, kids playing on the basketball courts, shooting pool and playing pinball in the recreation room, but there was something that made my skin crawl, you know? The guy who runs the place calls himself ‘Captain’ something, I can’t remember his name. Freaky guy. Something not quite right, you know? Anyway, when Aubrey’s kid enters the room and sees me with his mother he pauses like he’s wondering what’s up. When Aubrey tells him I’m a reporter the blood drains from the kid’s face and he gets skittish. He tells her she has to stop whatever she’s doing. He says she’s making things worse but he won’t say how. When I try to ask a question he leaves the table.”
Sloane looked to Molia, an unspoken thought between them.
“I’ll tell you, I worked the police desk at the
Mercury
for two years, and I’d met a lot of victims of crime. I’d seen fear etched on faces before, and this kid was scared, I’m talking genuinely terrified. And that’s when I realized what was bothering me. The kids were all going through the motions, but not one was smiling.”
F
RESH
S
TART
Y
OUTH
T
RAINING
F
ACILITY
S
IERRA
N
EVADA
M
OUNTAINS
Getting up had been agony, putting on clean clothes he found by the side of the bunk worse. But Bee Dee had been right; the more Jake moved, the more the initial pain and stiffness lessened. His chest felt as if someone had stomped on it with a boot and he could barely bend his fingers. When he did his blistered palms burned. He forced himself to walk about the room before sitting on the edge of Bee Dee’s bed to carefully slip on socks and push his feet into his boots. He didn’t bother to tighten the laces and the boots made a shuffling sound when he walked across the concrete floor. The door to the dorm was open, but no breeze greeted Jake when he stepped out. He saw no one in the yard.
Despite the torrential downpour the sun had already begun to bake the ground dry, leaving the imprints of the soles of boots, like molded clay dried in a kiln. The camp was eerily quiet as he made his way across the yard to the mess hall. When he pulled open the door he saw inmates seated at tables, others carrying their canary yellow and orange trays, and others still waiting in line to be served.
As Jake stepped into the room, Henry looked up at him then nudged the kid sitting beside him. It had a domino effect, elbows and whispers spreading throughout the cafeteria until each pair of eyes found him, including the guards stationed around the perimeter. Having stopped in the doorway, Jake’s muscles and joints felt as if they’d refrozen, and he grimaced when he started again, the sound of his shoes sliding on the floor more pronounced. He flinched when the tray pressed against his palm, and placed it on the horizontal metal bars, adding a plate and utensils. As he made his way down the line the first server heaped what appeared to be a larger than usual stack of pancakes on his plate. The second added two slabs of ham instead of one. At the end of the line Jake added a milk and grimaced when he picked up his tray and turned in search of a table.
He took a step and heard a knocking sound. Uncertain, he took another and heard the knock again. A third step and the knock grew
louder. The guards, Atkins not among them, turned and looked at one another, an indication they too had heard but not expected the sound. Jake took another step, and when the knock again accompanied him he realized the source. Bee Dee held a spoon, and with each step Jake took he knocked the handle on the table. Henry had joined him, along with the others at his table, and the beat quickly spread, infectious, growing in both numbers and in volume.
S
HANGHAI
A
LE
H
OUSE
W
INCHESTER
, C
ALIFORNIA
“But you wrote the article,” Sloane said, sliding the copy Alex had sent to him that morning across the table.
“Not the article I originally intended,” Rizek said. “When I went to Fresh Start that day I realized the story wasn’t just one boy; it was the facility, and Judge Earl’s sentences. That’s the story I wanted to write but of course he wasn’t about to comment, and the prosecutor gave me some bullshit quote about how getting tough on juvenile offenders reduces recidivism. I decided to find out for myself.”
“Does it?” Molia asked.
“Depends on who you talk to and what you read. Most of the studies I read said these boot camps do little to decrease the rate of recidivism and some contend graduates have
higher
rates than more traditional detention facilities because the juveniles don’t complete the aftercare programs once they’re out.”
“The notion of being ‘scared straight’ wears off when the immediate threat of punishment evaporates,” Molia said.
“Exactly. The correctional and military experts I spoke to said most juveniles lack the maturity and self-control to succeed once they leave a disciplined military environment. A boot gets out of boot camp and he or she is still in the army, still in a highly structured, rule-oriented environment with a chain of command. The kid graduating from a boot camp is sent home to the same parents that couldn’t control him in the first place. That’s what the studies say, anyway. But I think there’s a better explanation.”