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the scumbags!”
    “Yeah, for some reason it’s hard to get them to take those cases seriously, except when they’re actual homicides. They call them ‘spankers’.”
    “Spankers?” Marlene shook her head. “Oh shit, that’s nauseating.”
    “Yeah, well, they’re a hard bunch …” His voice trailed off. Marlene’s attention had turned to the business of the court. Karp stood up to go. “Gosh, thanks, Butch,” said Karp. “You’re welcome, Marlene.”
    She looked up at him sternly. “Thanks. For the candy. I’m not going to thank you for doing your job. Which you should have started doing a year ago.” A look of pain and guilt spread like a stain across Karp’s face. She saw it and felt an instant and stunning remorse, but kept her face hard. Somebody had to pay for all her misery, and Karp was her favorite target, both handy and vulnerable.
    “Fine, Marlene,” answered Karp tightly, “as long as we’re being so professional, what about this Segura case? She going to plead?”
    “As a matter of fact, no. She insists that she’s innocent. I offered her a good deal, but she turned me down. Wouldn’t even consider it.”
    “Shit, Marlene, you mean we’re going to try this thing?”
    “Yeah, we’re going to try it. Unless you want to say, ‘Hey, Mrs. Segura, sorry about the inconvenience, but try to watch it with the other kids, OK?’ What the fuck, Butch! I thought you were Mr. Trial.”
    Karp felt his face grow warm. It was true. He needed trial slots to threaten the professional badmen and their lawyers. Otherwise, why would anybody, even the most patently guilty, take a stiff prison sentence on a plea bargain? After all, didn’t they have the right to a speedy trial? So spending a trial slot on what in his true heart he saw as a crummy domestic slaying irked him, and worse, filled him with shame that his situation had led him to regard the brutal murder of a little girl as a professional annoyance. Marlene was still staring at him. The court was hearing a plea of not guilty on a vehicular homicide. Something nagged at his mind.
    “Umm, OK, Marlene, you offered manslaughter one?”
    “Of course! And negligent homicide. Nothing doing. She says she never touched the kid.”
    “Are you sure she did?” asked Karp.
    Marlene opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment the clerk called out “Segura!” and Marlene had to walk down the aisle to the well of the court to help Albert the Asshole arraign Maria Segura for the intentional murder of her daughter Lucy.
    Two burly female guards brought in the accused, who proved to be a small, biscuit-colored woman, barely out of her teens, with a sharp nose, a downcast mouth and dark, soft-looking pads under her eyes. Karp watched as she pleaded not guilty in an accented and almost inaudible voice. Karp thought she looked about as dangerous as a dust mop.
    The judge remanded her for trial. The public defender made a perfunctory argument for a reduction in bail. The woman had two small children to look after. The judge said that this woman asking for a bail reduction so she could look after her children was like the man who killed both his parents asking for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. The judge got his titter from the onlookers. He beamed horribly. The guards shuffled Maria Segura out the narrow door. Next case.
    Marlene came up the aisle tight jawed and frowning. Karp said, “I like the way your eyebrows almost touch when you have that expression on your face. What’s wrong? I thought you did OK. The dread Mrs. Segura is not out menacing our citizens.”
    “Fuck you, Karp! What did you mean, ‘Are you sure she did it?’”
    “Well, it just struck me that one explanation of Segura’s intransigence on the plea is that she is in fact innocent. Also, if you’re going to try a homicide against a defendant with no priors who doesn’t look up to wasting a cockroach, you better have the case really nailed down. Do