Free The Second Chair by John Lescroart

home for a few days.”
    “We can get it all straightened out there,” Hal said, “at home. We’ll have plenty of time there.”
    Still unsure, Linda blew out in evident frustration. She looked back up to the cottages, wrapped in their razor-wire dressing, and her shoulders sank. “Okay,” she said with great weariness. “Let’s at least first get him out of here.”
    “That’s the plan.” Wu offered her a brave smile. “Really.”
    Wu sat at the defense table awaiting the judge’s entrance. In juvenile court proceedings, the district attorney was said to represent not the people, but the petitioner, and the person accused of a crime was not the defendant, but the minor. This nicety functioned to preserve the legal fiction that youthful felons were not lost causes. The district attorney’s role was not to prosecute miscreants, but rather to ask, or petition, the state to recommend a treatment for the minor that stood a chance to result in the child’s complete rehabilitation back into society. Even if that treatment was six or eight years locked up at the California Youth Authority, or CYA, it technically wasn’t the same thing as prison, although its inmates might be hard-pressed to elucidate the precise difference.
    To Wu’s left, at the petitioner’s table, sat her opposite number, Jason Brandt. Not yet thirty, Brandt already had four years as a prosecutor under his belt, all of it here at the YGC. Brandt had a full head of neatly combed dark brown hair and wore a well-cut dark gray suit with a white shirt and muted blue tie. Affable, quick-witted, charming even, he smiled a lot and made it a point to get along well with everyone, including the defense attorneys against whom he was pitted. Wu, herself, had long harbored a bit of a secret crush on him. They’d shared drinks more than once—although his reputation was that as soon as the gavel came down, he was nobody to play with.
    Suddenly Brandt lifted his head like an animal catching a scent. He caught Wu in the middle of her surreptitious glance at him and, nodding genially, went back to his papers. Wu made it a point to continue looking about the room, which was smaller than most of the courtrooms downtown at the Hall of Justice, but had the advantage of natural light pouring in from large windows set high in one wall.
    Beyond Brandt, a very young-looking uniformed bailiff sat talking to a middle-aged woman whom Wu presumed was the court recorder. There were no jurors—juvenile trials did not have juries—and yet a nice jury box held twelve perennially empty chairs. There was no one in the gallery on the prosecution side—for the protection of the minors involved, the public was not admitted into the courtroom.
    Wu turned around farther in her chair and gave a confident nod to Andrew’s parents, the sole occupants of Wu’s side of the gallery. Hal and Linda sat hip to hip, next to each other on the bench behind the bar rail. They held hands and seemed to be leaning into each other. Wu’s eyes went briefly to Hal, and he inclined his head an inch, then raised a finger and pointed to one side of the room, where the door had started to open. Wu turned at the sound and watched as the bailiff from the cottages ushered Andrew ahead of him into the bullpen.
    As Andrew shuffled toward her now, handcuffed in his shapeless gray prisoner’s clothes, he seemed to her utterly defeated. Stopping in front of her table, he raised his head to look at his mother. His eyes opened in a silent plea, lips tightened down over a frankly quaking jaw. She was afraid that in another moment he might start to cry, and to forestall that, she stood, came around her table and helped him get seated.
    “He doesn’t need to be handcuffed,” she said to the bailiff. “What’s your name?”
    “Nelson.” The bailiff kept his hand on Andrew’s shoulder and replied in some surprise. He played no formal role in this proceeding, and it was decidedly unusual for an attorney to