“You don’t need to tell them about the cooperation agreement,” Donnally said, “just that he was helping us find out who killed Mark Hamlin.” He glanced toward the window into Galen’s room. “We don’t know yet whether this was an attempted suicide-”
“Or maybe one that will still be successful.”
“Or an attempted murder. But the agreement couldn’t have been a motive for someone to kill him because no one knew about it.”
“Unless there was a leak from the DA’s office,” Navarro said. “Galen’s not a popular guy.”
One of the detectives stopped at the nurses’ station, while the other continued toward them.
“I almost dropped my cell phone when dispatch said a Harlan Donnally had kicked in the door,” Detective Dan Edwards said, as he shook Donnally’s hand.
Edwards and Donnally had hit it off at a California Homicide Investigators Association meeting fifteen years earlier and they had fished for steelhead together on the Klamath River a few times after that.
Donnally introduced Navarro, then said, “You’re probably wondering how I happened to be at Galen’s house.”
“It crossed my mind,” Edwards said, looking through the window at Galen. “Then I remembered reading about the special master business in the Hamlin case.”
“Galen was helping me figure out who Hamlin’s latest enemies were.”
Edwards pointed over his shoulder at his partner. “You can put both of us down as suspects.” He wasn’t smiling. “I don’t mind a lawyer attacking the evidence. I don’t even mind him attacking me, trying to make me out to be incompetent. I can defend myself. But that asshole had a way of trivializing victims and how much they suffered. There’s no excuse for that.”
One of the things Donnally appreciated about Edwards was that he never did that himself. No defensive sarcasm. No sick humor at crime scenes. No minimizing the value of a life, no matter how its owner had wasted it with drugs or devoted it to crime.
Edwards’s partner walked up and nodded at Donnally and Navarro. “The doctor will be out in a minute. They don’t have a tox result yet, but”-he looked at Donnally-“they think it’s more than just sleeping pills from the bottle you found.”
“That’s probably right. The prescription was for thirty and there were still twenty-five left.” Donnally tilted his head toward Galen, lying fifteen feet away, comatose and hooked up to a ventilator, with IVs spreading upward from both forearms to infusion pumps. “I don’t think five would’ve done that.”
“I don’t know what it would be,” Edwards said. “I had a patrol officer who used to be a paramedic go through the house. He found lots of medications, which means lots of interactions. He’s on his way over here with a list so the doc can run them through the pharmacy database to see if it might be a combination of drugs that did put him out.”
Donnally looked at Edwards’s partner. “The doctor think Galen will wake up?”
“He didn’t say.”
They turned at the squeak of rubber soles on the linoleum floor and widened their circle to give the doctor a place. He didn’t introduce himself, letting the name “S. Sugarman, M.D.,” stitched on his lab coat, do it for him.
“It’s watch and wait,” Sugarman said. “We were too late to pump anything out of his stomach. Whatever it was had already been absorbed.”
Edwards asked, “Any idea what-”
“His mother called saying that he’d started taking an antidepressant a day or two ago. She thinks it was an MAO inhibitor.” He shook his head. “It can work like a blasting cap if he was using any of a hundred other things. Legal or illegal.” He looked back and forth between Navarro and Donnally. “People in Berkeley take all kinds of idiotic concoctions without telling their doctors. Take enough St. John’s wort, and an MAO will kill you.”
Donnally felt Navarro’s eyes on him and knew they were thinking the same thing. That Galen had run from his collapsing legal practice to a psychiatrist’s office in order to find himself a chemical place to hide.
“Did you find an MAO card on him?” Donnally asked.
He knew, from Janie’s expression of worry about prescribing the drug to veterans for whom nothing else worked, that some users carried special ID cards because of those interactions.
“No,” Sugarman said. “Nothing.”
“You find any bruising or other injuries that would suggest he was forcibly given whatever it was?” Edwards asked.
“Just the normal kind of redness on his arms and legs that’s associated with the EMTs lifting him onto a gurney and the orderlies moving him to a bed. But feel free to check yourself. I could’ve missed something.”
The tone of Sugarman’s last words was not that of an admission, but an exit line. He turned and walked away.
“You want to do it?” Edwards asked Donnally.
Donnally extended his open palm toward Galen. “It’s your case.”
Chapter 43
Hector Ignacio Camacho-Fernandez, aka Nacho-and if Ramon Navarro had come to the right conclusion from his analysis of Mark Hamlin’s cell phone traffic-aka Raton. A rat. A snitch.
And Navarro was right. The file lay on Hamlin’s kitchen table in front of Donnally. He and Jackson had searched Hamlin’s office cabinets, desk, and storage room, but hadn’t been able to locate it. Donnally had then driven to Hamlin’s house and pawed through the mass of papers on his living room floor and dining table, until he found what he hoped was all of it. But he couldn’t be certain. Hamlin’s filing system seemed geographical, with related pages sharing a general area of the house, rather than specific, with everything fitted into a particular folder.
Scribblings on a page torn from a legal pad told most of the tale.
At the top were Hamlin’s notes of meeting with Camacho.
Camacho knows he’s under surveillance. Thinks his calls are being tapped. A fifty-kilo load of cocaine from Mexico was seized from a shed in Salinas. The spot had been mentioned only in a single call from his Mission Street taqueria to Juarez.
That was followed by notes of a call to Hamlin from an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California.
DEA is agreeable to considering a cooperation agreement with Camacho as long as he doesn’t get a complete walk on the case.
Conditions: He names his sources in Michoacan and in Long Beach, identifies everyone in his organization, agrees to a full debriefing, surrenders drug profits including the house in Daly City and his cars. Can keep his taqueria. Will consider a reward of up to $250,000, based on assets seized from targets he IDs.
Then notes of a call between Hamlin and Reggie Hancock.
Deal possible. Camacho willing to roll on Rafa.
Split 40/60 from Guillermo, 60/40 from Nacho, and 40/60 from Rafa.
The flurry of calls ended with notes from Hamlin’s meeting with Camacho.
Agreed. Debriefing in a week. Lange will sit in.
Even as he searched for other notes, a phrase kept repeating itself in Donnally’s mind like a tune he couldn’t get out of his head.
Can keep his taqueria.
The last time Donnally walked toward a taqueria on Mission Street to meet an informant was also his last day on the job as a police officer.
Can keep his taqueria.
Donnally pushed the notes aside and thought back on that day, then winced at the clash of past and future in his present memory, and closed his eyes. He saw himself getting out of his car on the west side of Mission Street, looking over his hood toward the restaurant door.
A laugh from his left. A young couple, maybe Salvadorean or Guatemalan, compact bodies, Mayan faces, sitting at a wrought-iron table in front of a coffee shop. Magazines spread on top. A woman posing in a wedding dress smiling from the cover of one.