The fact that the story sounded like something Hamlin would do, didn’t mean to Donnally that he’d done it.
“How long have you been in remission?”
“A year and a half, but I didn’t want to make a move until I was sure it was gonna stick.” Madison’s face darkened and he slapped the edge of the desk. “But then that asshole Hamlin tried to fuck me. He stopped putting the money on my books like he was supposed to.”
“And so you sent him a letter threatening to file a motion to withdraw your plea.”
Madison nodded. “A little sooner than I’d planned. I was hoping to wait until after my next scan. But I’d gotten used to the finer things in prison life, and doing without was pissing me off, so I made my move.”
“How do you know it wasn’t the husband who stopped paying Hamlin, so he had to stop paying you?”
“Because the deal was there would always be a hundred grand on account, in cash. I could draw out as much as I needed every month. The husband would add to it if it went under. Even if the guy stopped paying, it would’ve taken a couple of more years for the money to run out.”
“I guess they didn’t expect you to live so long.”
“So what? That’s not my problem. A deal’s a deal.”
“And you figure the husband killed Hamlin.”
“Has to be. Only way for a surefire cover-up.”
“Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to take you out?”
“They tried.” Madison pointed out the window toward the prison blocks. “I’ve been in isolation for the last month, after an Aryan Brotherhood guy tried to shank me. Since then, if hubby was gonna break the chain, he was gonna have to do it at the Hamlin link. Ain’t no way they’re getting to me again.”
Madison pointed toward the door. “That guard outside? He ain’t standing there to protect you from me, but me from them.”
Chapter 10
Takiyah Jackson was sitting at her desk when Donnally arrived at Hamlin’s office.
Donnally had called Navarro while he was driving back from Vacaville and got confirmation his earlier theory had been right. Navarro knew the players in town. He’d recognized the name of the victim’s husband, not because he’d worked on the Bennie Madison case, but because the husband owned a well-known biker bar in the mostly Hispanic Mission District. It now made sense that the husband could’ve sicced an imprisoned gang member on Madison.
Navarro walked in a few minutes after Donnally had taken Jackson into the conference room.
Donnally glanced over at Navarro, pointed at the two-foot-square safe in the corner, and said to Jackson, “I have reason to believe there is evidence related to Mark’s death in that thing and I wanted a witness when we opened it up.”
Jackson swallowed and twisted her hands together on top of the conference table. Her daunted gaze shifted between Navarro and Donnally.
“Why do you need a witness?”
“There may be money in there and I don’t want anybody accusing me of stealing any.”
She tilted her head toward the row of filing cabinets. “You tell him about the file?”
Donnally shook his head, hoping Navarro wouldn’t react and give him away.
“It wasn’t relevant to any of the leads we’re working on.”
“You have the combination,” Navarro said. The sentence came out as a statement, not a question.
“Mark gave it to me only for emergencies.”
Donnally understood her to be saying she wasn’t responsible for what they would find inside.
“I’d say this was an emergency.”
Donnally followed her over to the safe, where she kneeled and spun the combination right, left, right, and then pushed the handle down and pulled the door open. She then raised her hands and backed away as though trying to break her connection with whatever they would find inside.
“You got some latex gloves?” Donnally asked Navarro.
Navarro reached into his inside suit jacket pocket and gave him a pair and slipped ones on his own hands. He lowered himself to one knee, pulled out a digital camera, and took a couple of photos of the inside of the safe.
Donnally began moving the safe’s contents onto the conference table. Financial records, checkbooks, file folders, and notes. On the third reach, he pulled out a rubber-banded stack of hundred-dollar bills, almost five inches high. He looked over at Jackson.
She shrugged.
“Does that mean you know where this money came from?” Donnally asked.
“There’s always cash in there. Usually about a hundred thousand. Sometimes less. Sometimes more.”
“And. .”
“No, I don’t know where that particular money came from.”
Donnally reached in again and removed another stack and laid it next to the other. He estimated that each held between forty and fifty thousand dollars.
After emptying all the paper out of the safe, he felt around and discovered a small metal box against the back wall. He held it by the edges, pulled it out, and set it on the table. He used the end of a pen to open the latch. Inside he found diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and old gold coins.
Donnally suspected it might be stolen property Hamlin had taken in legal fees.
He glanced over at Jackson. Her teeth were clenched. He wondered about her psychological makeup since her only ways of expressing emotion seemed to be tapping her finger or clenching her teeth.
He took this clench to be anger.
“He told me he’d never do that,” Jackson said, speaking through an unmoving jaw.
“You sure he didn’t get this stuff from a relative’s estate?” Navarro asked.
“He would’ve made me look at it. He was a showoff about money and shit.”
“At least he had the good sense to keep this a secret from you,” Donnally said. “It shows he was at least embarrassed.”
She stared at the box for a few moments. “I don’t think so. I don’t think it was that at all,” and then she turned away and left the room.
Chapter 11
Fuck that bitch,” Rudy Rusch told Donnally from behind the bar in the grimy and shadowed Hideaway Lounge just off Mission Street, a few miles southwest of the Hall of Justice. Rusch stopped toweling the dark oak surface and leaned his hairy-armed, six-four frame down toward Donnally and lowered his voice. “If Madison hadn’t killed her, I would’ve done it myself.”
Rusch’s delivery had a practiced tone, almost rhythmic. Donnally wondered how many times he’d repeated those phrases since the night of his wife’s murder.
“He’s saying you did do it,” Donnally said, “and you paid off Mark Hamlin to get him to plead to the sheet.”
“Sure I gave Hamlin some money. I don’t deny it. A lot of money. He came to me and said he could make the case go away, and fast.”
“Why the hurry?”
“Shit, man.” Rusch surveyed the crowd, bikers hunched over tables and talking low, and skinny girlfriends with tangled hair and windblown faces sipping beers and wine coolers in the booths and waiting for the men’s business to get done. “Hamlin was gonna try to frame me, expose the stuff that goes on in here to make me look like the kind of guy who’d kill his wife for cheating on him.”
Donnally smiled. So far, his story made as much sense as Madison’s.
“But you are the kind of guy who would kill his wife for cheating on him,” Donnally said. “And I take it she was.”
“Yeah. With some asshole in the office she was working in. Some fucking stockbroker. We were short on cash and she got herself hired on as a temp. It started out with her being his drug connection.” He glanced toward one of the biker tables as though her source was sitting there now. “Then they started hooking up after work. Every fucking time I turned my back.”
What he meant to say was that every time he turned his back they were fucking. Donnally wondered why he didn’t just come out and say it. Maybe he wasn’t as tough as he pretended.
Rusch reached down, filled a glass with beer from the tap, and slid it to Donnally.