We leave the diner and hurry to the car. I put the key in the ignition, but before I can start the car, Lovely grabs my arm. “We had an agreement. You’re going to honor it, right?”

I inhale deeply. I should turn the car around, but I say, “Tell me how to get there.”

We drive another five miles south. I keep checking the rearview mirror. Luckily, the landscape is so flat and desolate that we can see for miles around us. Several of the turnoffs are unmarked, so we guess at direction. Isolated homes pop out of the barren landscape, aluminum-siding oases. We pass trucker cafés that couldn’t possibly stay in business but apparently do. We finally come upon a small, square, one-story house made of adobe and white stucco that has baked gray in the sun.

“This is it,” Lovely says.

“We’re in the crystal meth capital of the world.”

She frowns at me, ever protective of her client.

There’s no curb or sidewalk. I park halfway off the road so a passing vehicle won’t sideswipe me. The air is warm and dry. A few imported trees that must need constant watering set the house off from the vacant desert. Some persistent blades of dried-out grass grow on what passes for a front lawn. There’s an old-fashioned mailbox out on the curb, but it’s rusted and looks as though it hasn’t been used for years. While Lovely retrieves her backpack from the back seat, I scan the terrain. I see only uninhabited desert and the distant San Gabriel Mountains.

We look for a doorbell, but there isn’t one. Lovely tries to open the screen door, but it’s locked, so she knocks on the frame. I don’t know whether to expect a victim or a monster. Maybe both. We wait thirty seconds, forty seconds, a minute, but no one answers. Lovely pounds on the screen door with her fist this time. There’s a rumbling inside, and the door cracks from behind the screen.

The woman opens the door. I know from the court records that she’s thirty-six, a year younger than me, but she carries herself like someone thirty years older. Her drab housecoat can’t hide her pear-shaped body. She dyes her short frizzy hair an orangey-red. Her face is puffy, and her chin droops and doubles in on itself. This woman seems so straight and dowdy that I can’t believe that she knows anything about the Internet, much less that she maintains her own website devoted to child pornography.

Lovely smiles broadly. “Tyler? I’m Lovely Diamond, and this is Professor Parker Stern.”

She motions for us to come in.

The house is tiny—a cramped living room and a small kitchen with a stove and refrigerator jammed into a tiny space. There’s a rancid smell, as if last week’s garbage was left inside the house too long. The furniture, consisting of a mismatched green cloth sofa, two blue Naugahyde armchairs, and a scratched up walnut coffee table, looks like it came from a thrift shop. Although Tyler lives in the desert, all the drapes are drawn. The brightest thing in the room is her clownish red hair.

“Sit wherever you like,” she says. She speaks with a slight southwestern drawl—Missouri or Oklahoma, I’d guess.

Lovely and I sit down on the sofa. Tyler maneuvers herself into an armchair across from us.

“Anyway,” she continues. “I’m hoping this will all be behind me soon. Do you think that can happen? By next month or so?”

“There’s only one way to do that,” I say. “Negotiate a plea bargain.”

Lovely frowns at me. “Tyler wants to fight this.”

“Is that right?” I ask Tyler.

She nods. “I did not do anything wrong. I will not plead guilty.”

Lovely takes out her notes and launches into what should be an interview, but that instead turns out to be a virtual monologue that treads over what I’m sure is old ground—the government’s claims, our legal defenses, the case law pro and con. Like so many inexperienced lawyers—and all too many veterans—Lovely thinks that the more she talks the more she accomplishes. All this time, Tyler doesn’t say more than a few words at a time. On the rare occasions when Lovely does ask a question, it’s leading, requiring only a one-word answer. The questions should be open-ended so that Tyler has to do the talking. Only then can we truly tease out all the facts and evaluate what kind of witness she’ll make.

“I have some questions,” I say when Lovely finishes.

Tyler looks at me and immediately begins kneading her hands.

“Why don’t you tell me about your background.”

She looks confused for a moment, but then starts speaking in a halting voice. She’s been itinerant for most of her life, living in Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Nevada before coming to California. She’s had various jobs, all of them menial—supermarket checker, pharmacy clerk, waitress, telephone psychic. She lives off state disability payments, the result of social anxiety disorder and a bad back from a slip-and-fall at Wal-Mart. She has no known living relatives and no close friends. She had one semester of community college and then dropped out. This last fact is the most puzzling, because in a strange, horrible way, her stories show literary talent that seems far beyond her range.

When she finishes, I say, “How many members of your website were there? At its peak?”

“There were twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six hundred?” Lovely asks. “Or twenty-six thousand?” That she doesn’t know this already is another reminder that she’s still just a law student.

“No. Twenty-six people in all. That was about a year ago. Then about ten dropped off, so maybe sixteen when the FBI came in and seized the computer.”

“Why would the US Attorney sue over twenty-six members?” Lovely says. “There’s so much crap on the Internet that’s just as bad. Worse. Stuff that goes to tens of millions of people. Why bring charges over this? Neil Latham’s a liberal, right?”

“He’s a liberal except when it comes to issues of what he considers personal morality. He’s a devout Christian, a rare right-to-life Democrat. Fighting obscenity is one of his causes. He’s dead serious about this case. On top of that, he’ll welcome the publicity. Mr. Latham has higher aspirations.”

“But this is a progressive administration,” Lovely says. “Is the Justice Department really going to just let him go forward with this?”

“This case might not be to the administration’s taste, but they’re not going to shut it down. Not in this political climate.”

Tyler follows this exchange like an observer at a tennis match who doesn’t quite understand the rules. But there’s one thing she does understand. “There can’t be any publicity. Please. There just can’t be.”

“There will be,” I say.

She interlaces her fingers and squeezes them together hard. “Can’t you just ask the judge to close the court? I’ve seen on Law & Order that they can close the court.”

“There’s no basis for closing the courtroom. We have freedom of the press in this country. The First Amendment doesn’t apply only to you.”

Tyler doesn’t seem to get the sarcasm, but Lovely glares at me and says, “It wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

“Yes, it would. We’d antagonize the judge and look like buffoons.”

“Maybe I could just talk to the judge in private,” Tyler says. “I’m sure I could straighten this whole thing out.” She’s behaving so naïvely that I find myself wondering if it’s an act.

“We can’t do it that way. Courtrooms are open. And the other side gets to be present for every court hearing.”

“Why don’t we move on to something else?” Lovely says.

“Sure. I want Tyler to tell me why she wrote those stories.” I look at Tyler. “The US Attorney claims you did it for the money. That’s one of the reasons they’ve come after you.”

“Oh, no, sir. I don’t write my stories to make money.”

“Then why did you charge a fee for the website?”

“Because I wanted to keep the children away. They shouldn’t be reading these kinds of things. I never want them to read my stories. I figured out that if I required a credit card, the kids’d keep out.”

“Why did you write the stories if it wasn’t for money?” I say.

Tyler twists her fingers with so much force that I can hear her knuckles pop in a sickening arpeggio. She sighs. “I told this to Ms. Diamond already, sir. Over the phone.”

“Tell it to me.”

“Well. I guess my stories are a way to deal with an eternal dread, a heavy darkness that never leaves me. My dreams and days are full of scary beasts. My stories let me create a place where the demons can’t harm me.” She shrugs and looks down at the sofa, arms crossed.

“There’s a question I’ve never asked you before,” Lovely says. “I should have. It’s hard for me to say. But it’s very important for your defense. Were you abused as a child? I mean, sexually?”

“I wish I knew,” Tyler says.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “Either you know something like that or you don’t.”

“No, sir. The truth is, I have no memory of my life before I was nine years old. I don’t know what happened in the blank period. I just know that there are monsters all around me, and I felt powerless to fight them until I started writing my stories.”

“Are you protecting somebody?” I ask. “Are you covering up for the person who really wrote those stories? Someone who’s abusing you now? Because if that’s what’s happening, if you’re being hurt—”

Tyler shakes her head vigorously. “Oh, no sir. I’m not protecting anybody. The stories are all my own.”

“Husband? Boyfriend? Brother?”

“No, sir. I wrote them stories!” It’s the first time this morning that she’s used poor grammar.

“She’s the author, Professor,” Lovely says. “Now, let’s move on. Please.”

I’ve alienated Tyler already, though that doesn’t bother me much. And I still think she’s hiding something. But if I press any harder, we’ll both lose her trust, and I don’t want to do that to Lovely. So I ask some innocuous questions just to button down the facts. The bad odor I smelled when I walked in seems to be getting worse. As we’re about to leave, I say, “Your arraignment is in a few weeks. January . . . ?”

“January eleventh,” Lovely says.

“January eleventh. You’ll have to come to court. Do you have transportation to LA? Because we can arrange—”

“Oh, no. I can’t go to Los Angeles. I’m a homebody. I don’t leave the house much.”

“But, it’s a requirement that you—”

“I’m sorry. I’d like to help you but I can’t. I like to stay at home. I’m safe here in my house.”

“You need to help yourself,” I say. “You could go to jail. Your freedom is at stake.”

Lovely gives me a withering stare. “Let’s drop it.”

I shrug. “If that’s what you want. It’s your case to try.”

“Yes it is.” She reaches over and puts her hand on Tyler’s wrist. “Everything will be OK. We’ll be in touch.” She gets up to leave, but then stops. “I have to ask you something, Tyler. Before we drove out here, Professor Stern and I stopped at the Perth Café in town. Some guy attacked us.”

“Why, that’s terrible! Are y’all OK?”

“We’re fine,” Lovely says. “The man was short, skinny, about forty, brown hair. Not a very good description, but does he sound like anyone you know around town?”

“No ma’am. I don’t know very many people. And I would never go to that diner. Too crowded.” She shakes her head in dismay. “It’s just like I said. The world is full of scary beasts. They’re everywhere.”