One afternoon, a shadowy figure whispered, just loud enough, "skinny white bitch". She walks where others do not go. She knows the cuts & drug corners of the city, searches for a house without numbers, crossing concrete slabs sliced apart, where broken toys & tufts of weeds survive. A knock, the door opens to the smell of kerosene & the monotone of the tv. She sits with mother & son at the kitchen table. First, the easy questions, then the ones hard to ask, even harder to answer. She backhands a curious cockroach from her notes, written in cryptic shorthand, till the pages full. The afternoon shadows lengthen, she says good-bye to this family. Her task: to meld the facts with her intuitions, the question: salvageable or lost to the streets? The "skinny white bitch" drives into the twilight.