Arguments are not common in this house, but neither are they rare. Usually disagreements remain quiet, intense, and brief. If bitterness lingers, it is expressed in sullen silences that in time heal, or seem to.

Billy does not think of his parents as unhappy in marriage. They love each other. He knows they do.

Barefoot, bare-chested, in pajama bottoms, waking as he walks, Billy Wiles follows the hallway, descends the stairs...

He does not doubt that his parents love him. In their way. His father expresses a stern affection. His mother oscillates between benign neglect and raptures of maternal love that are as genuine as they are overdone.

The nature of his mother's and father's frustrations with each other has always remained mysterious to Billy and seemed to be of no consequence. Until now.

By the time that he reaches the dining room, within sight of the kitchen door, Billy is immersed against his will-or is he?-in the cold truths and secret selves of those whom he thought he knew best in the world.

He has never imagined that his father could contain such fierce anger as this. Not just the savage volume of the voice but also the lacerating tone and the viciousness of the language reveal a long-simmering resentment boiled down to a black tar that provides the ideal fuel for anger.

His father accuses his mother of s.e.xual betrayal, of serial adultery. He calls her a wh.o.r.e, calls her worse, graduating from anger to rage.

In the dining room, where Billy is immobilized by revelation, his mind reels at the accusations hurled at his mother. His parents have seemed to him to be as.e.xual, attractive but indifferent to such desires.

If he had ever wondered about his conception, he would have attributed it to marital duty and to a desire for family rather than to pa.s.sion.

More shocking than the accusations are his mother's admission of their truth-and her countercharges, which reveal his father to be both a man and also something less than a man. In language more withering than what is directed at her, she scorns her husband, and mocks him.

Her mockery puts the pedal to his rage and drives him into fury. The slap of flesh on flesh suggests hand to face with force.

She cries out in pain but at once says, "You don't scare me, you can't scare me!"

Things shatter, crack, clatter, ricochet-and then comes a more terrible sound, a brutal bludgeoning ferociousness of sound.

She screams in pain, in terror.

Without memory of leaving the dining room, Billy finds himself in the kitchen, shouting at his father to stop, but his father does not appear to hear him or even to recognize his presence.

His father is enthralled by, hypnotized by, possessed by the hideous power of the bludgeon that he wields. It is a long-handled lug wrench.

On the floor, Billy's devastated mother hitches along like a broken bug, no longer able to scream, making tortured noises.

Billy sees other weapons lying on the kitchen island. A hammer. A butcher knife. A revolver.

His father appears to have arranged these murderous instruments to intimidate his mother.

She must not have been intimidated, must have thought that he was a coward, fatuous and ineffectual. A coward he surely is, taking a lug wrench to a defenseless woman, but she has badly misjudged his capacity for evil.

Seizing the revolver, gripping it with both hands, Billy shouts at his father to stop, for G.o.d's sake stop, and when his warning goes unheeded, he fires a shot into the ceiling.

The unexpected recoil knocks back through his shoulders, and he staggers in surprise.

His father turns to Billy but not in a spirit of submission. The lug wrench is an avatar of darkness that controls the man at least as much as he controls it.

"Whose seed are you?" his father asks. "Whose son have I been feeding all these years, whose little b.a.s.t.a.r.d?"

Impossibly, the terror escalates, and when he understands that he must kill or be killed, Billy squeezes the trigger once, squeezes twice, a third time, his arms jumping with the recoil.

Two misses and a chest wound.

His father is jolted, stumbles, falls backward as the bullet pins a boutonniere of blood to his breast.

Dropped, the lug wrench rings against-and cracks-the tile floor, and after it there is no more shouting, no more angry words, just Billy's breathing and his mother's muted expressions of misery.

And then she says, "Daddy?" Her voice is slurred, and cracked with pain. "Daddy Tom?"

Her father, a career Marine, had been killed in action when she was ten. Daddy Tom was her stepfather.

"Help me." Her voice grows thicker, distressingly changed. "Help me, Daddy Tom."

Daddy Tom, a juiceless man with hair the color of dust, has eyes the yellow-brown of sandstone. His lips are perpetually parched, and his atrophied laugh rasps any listener's nerves.

Only in the most extreme circ.u.mstances would anyone ask Daddy Tom for help, and no one would expect to receive it.

"Help me, Daddy Tom."

Besides, the old man lives in Ma.s.sachusetts, a continent away from Napa County.

The urgency of the situation penetrates Billy's immobilizing shock, and terrified compa.s.sion now moves him toward his mother.

She seems to be paralyzed, the little finger on her right hand twitching, twitching, but nothing else moving from the neck down.

Like broken pottery poorly repaired, the shape of her skull and the planes of her face are wrong, all wrong.

Her one open eye, now her only eye, focuses on Billy, and she says, "Daddy Tom."

She does not recognize her son, her only child, and thinks that he is the old man from Ma.s.sachusetts.

"Please," she says, her voice cracking with pain.

The broken face suggests irreparable brain damage of an extent that wrings from Billy a choking sob.

Her one-eyed gaze travels from his face to the gun in his hand. "Please, Daddy Tom. Please."

He is only fourteen, a mere boy, so recently a child, and there are choices he should not be asked to make. "Please."

This is a choice to humble any grown man, and he cannot choose, will not choose. But, oh, her pain. Her fear. Her anguish.

With a thickening tongue, she pleads, "Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, where is me? Who's you? Who's in here crawling, who is that? Who is you in here, scares me? Scares me!"

Sometimes the heart makes decisions that the mind cannot, and although we know that the heart is deceitful above all things, we also know that at rare moments of stress and profound loss it can be purged pure by 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 s.e.xual 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, acc.u.mulating a convincing ma.s.s 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 h.e.l.l.

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 a.s.siduously 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 a.s.signed will be f.e.c.kless. Or foolish. Or badly hung over.

Not every lawyer is as n.o.ble as those who champion the oppressed in TV dramas, just as the oppressed themselves are seldom as n.o.ble 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 into custody.

One of the most effective of these ploys is to make Billy into a "busboy." A public defender arrives at the holding facility in Napa only to discover that because of limited cell s.p.a.ce or for other bogus reasons, his client has been moved to the Calistoga substation. On arriving in Calistoga, he hears that a regrettable mistake has been made: The boy has actually been taken to St. Helena. In St. Helena, they send the attorney chasing back to Napa.

Furthermore, while transporting a suspect, a vehicle sometimes has mechanical problems. An hour's drive becomes three hours or four depending on the required repairs.

During these two and a half days, Billy pa.s.ses through a blur of drab offices, interrogation rooms, and cells. Always, his emotions are raw, and his fears are as constant as his meals are irregular, but the worst moments occur in the patrol car, on the road.

Billy rides in back, behind the security barrier. His hands are cuffed, and a chain shackles his cuffs to a ring bolt in the floor.

There is a driver who never has a thing to say. In spite of regulations forbidding this arrangement, John Palmer shares the backseat with his suspect.

The lieutenant is a big man, and his suspect is a fourteen-year-old boy. In these close quarters, the disparity in their sizes is of itself disturbing to Billy.

In addition, Palmer is an expert at intimidation. Ceaseless talk and questions are punctuated only by accusing silences. By calculated looks, by carefully chosen words, by ominous mood shifts, he wears on the spirit as effectively as a power sander wears on wood.

The touching is the worst.

Palmer sits closer some times than others. Occasionally he sits as close as a boy might want to sit to a girl, his left side pressed to Billy's right.

He ruffles Billy's hair with patently false affection. He rests one big hand on Billy's shoulder, now on his knee, now on his thigh.

"Killing them isn't a crime if you had a good reason, Billy. If your father molested you for years and your mother knew, no one could blame you."

"My father never touched me like that. Why do you keep saying he did?"

"I'm not saying, Billy. I'm asking. You've nothing to be ashamed about if he's been poking you since you were little. That makes you a victim, don't you see? And even if you liked it-"

"I wouldn't like it."

"Even if you did like it, you've no reason to be ashamed." The hand on the shoulder. "You're still a victim."

"I'm not. I wasn't. Don't say that."

"Some men, they do awful things to defenseless boys, and some of the boys get to like it." The hand on the thigh. "But that makes the boy no less innocent, Billy. The sweet boy is still innocent."

Billy almost wishes that Palmer would hit him. The touching, the gentle touching and the insinuation are worse than a blow because it seems that the fist might come anyway when the touching fails.