"What's on your mind?"

"I'm having a little problem and I thought maybe you could help me."

I didn't respond. Experience has taught me that dealing with I. A., at best, is never much fun. If she was having a "little problem" and managed to lay it off on me, then I was going to end up hosting a disaster.

"I got a letter from Corcoran State Prison two days ago," she began. "It was sent to me by an inmate named Truit Hickman who's doing life for Murder One. Tru is twenty-five and a crank addict. He pleaded guilty to killing his mother, Olivia Hickman, a little less than a year ago. The police report states he got into an argument with his mom over two hundred dollars she apparently had in her purse and wouldn't give him. She had just cashed her paycheck from a part-time job as a checker at a Vons Supermarket. The detective report speculates her son wanted the money to do crystal meth."

"I've only got about twenty minutes. Is this going to be a really long story?"

"I'll go fast," she said. "According to neighbors, Tru and his mother hadn't been getting along for years. The police report says when she wouldn't give him the cash in her purse he waited that night for her to come home and stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife. Then he took the money and ran. According to the primary detective's notes and the confession he eventually signed, Tru woke up from a drug haze the next morning in some alley, realized what he'd done, and came up with a revised plan. He knew he'd be the prime suspect in his mom's murder, so he returned home and pretended to find the body. Then he called nine-one-one. His original story was he'd been at a party, got tweaked on meth and can't remember who was there, stumbled out to the alley and passed out. So basically he had no alibi. Later, in the I-room at Van Nuys Station, they threatened him with a premeditated, lying in wait murder for financial gain. A death penalty case.