“His assistant opened up the place and let them do a sweep.” Navarro looked up at Donnally. “You would’ve done the same thing when you had my job.” Then at the judge. “Until you issue the order making him special master, it’s my case and I’m responsible. I didn’t want it on my conscience if somebody died on Hamlin’s kitchen floor waiting for that to happen.”
“Consider the order issued.”
“Don’t I have anything to say about it?” Donnally asked, knowing he had a choice, but also now understanding that he probably wasn’t going to exercise it.
When he left police work, he’d taken some unanswered questions with him. Some had come to him while he was on the job, but the more fundamental ones he’d brought with him from a nightmarish childhood in Hollywood, ones he’d hoped a career in the world of brute fact and rough justice would answer.
And he wasn’t going to deceive himself about it. He understood the reason he’d accept the appointment wasn’t because he cared all that much about who killed Hamlin, except in the abstract sense that killers must be caught. It was more that he’d never understood lawyers like Hamlin, and maybe this was his chance to get an understanding of what was satisfied in them by corrupting the criminal justice process. To understand why the kind of deceit that would’ve outraged Hamlin, if he had been a victim, was just a harmless game when he inflicted it on others. To understand why his deceptions seemed to justify all other deceptions, by judges, by police, and by prosecutors.
Or maybe he’d get an answer to another question, one that asked whether Hamlin was a product of a system he’d joined or one of its creators. A chicken-both-before-and-after-the-egg scheme of organized deception that already had Navarro lying to him about searching Hamlin’s apartment.
McMullin pointed at Donnally’s chair. “Sit down. It’s no harm, no foul.”
“You sure?”
They all looked at Navarro, who hesitated a beat, then said, “I’m sure.”
“I think we need a rule number four,” McMullin said. “Just to make sure there is no harm in the future and we risk no more fouls.” He looked at Donnally. “No dipping into Hamlin’s attorney-client privileged materials unless you have very strong reason-”
“Probable cause?” Donnally asked.
“That’s too high a standard. Just a strong reason to believe one of his clients or other people involved in his cases are connected to his death and that evidence relevant to that reason might be contained in his files.”
The judge looked from face to face.
“Can we all live with that?”
Chapter 4
Mark Hamlin’s assistant gazed dead-eyed across the conference table at Donnally and Navarro in Hamlin’s tenth floor office near San Francisco City Hall. Takiyah Jackson held her fifty-year-old face firm, fortresslike. Only her forefinger tapping the legal pad in front of her betrayed emotion. To Donnally, she looked like Angela Bassett in the Tina Turner movie, facing Ike at the divorce trial, ready to take what would come and prepared to walk away with nothing.
A dozen framed courtroom sketches hung on the plaster wall behind her, all depicting Hamlin in action. More were spaced on the other walls. With Hamlin dead, the room seemed to Donnally to be more like a makeshift shrine than a meeting place.
In one drawing, his arm was raised in a frozen jab at a witness.
In another, fists braced against his hips, Hamlin glared at a prosecutor standing with his palms pressed against his chest in a plea to the judge.
Donnally tensed when he recognized two scenes from his days at SFPD. The chalk one on the left showed Hamlin standing in front of a jury and pointing at Donnally sitting in the witness box.
People v. Darnell Simpson.
A twenty-year leader of the Black Guerilla Family, Simpson had murdered a Mexican Mafia member in the county jail where they were both awaiting trial. It was a dead-bang-caught-on-video-slash-the-victim’s-throat-from-behind-willful-premeditated-just-like-the-penal-code-says-first-degree-murder-except that Hamlin had paid off a psychologist to say that due to Simpson’s history of childhood abuse, confirmed during trial testimony by his guilt-ridden, weeping mother, he mistakenly thought he was about to be attacked and therefore struck first.
Under California law, a jury’s factual conclusion of mistaken self-defense requires a verdict of voluntary manslaughter, not murder, because there can be no malice involved. And that was the jurors’ factual conclusion. Simpson received a sentence with a parole date, seventeen years, instead of life with no possibility of release that he deserved.
A year later, Donnally learned the weeping mother had actually been Simpson’s aunt, recruited to play the role by a private investigator working for Hamlin. By that time, she’d been murdered in a drug deal gone bad. The PI then pled the Fifth during the grand jury investigation, Hamlin professed innocence, and the law of double jeopardy meant the defendant couldn’t be tried again.
That was the last time Donnally handed a case off to the DA’s office and walked away. From then on, he stayed with them all the way through trial and checked out every defense witness himself.
Donnally watched Jackson’s red-painted nail pound the legal pad as Navarro did the preliminaries and showed her Judge McMullin’s written order appointing Donnally the special master.
“The ground rule is any information that might bear on attorney-client privilege goes through Donnally,” Navarro said. “If he’s uncertain in any way, he’ll run it by the judge, and he’ll decide whether it should be shared with me.”
Jackson’s gaze moved from Navarro toward a row of file cabinets behind him, and then to Donnally.
“But we may not even have to go down that road,” Donnally said, “depending on where the investigation leads us.”
Jackson nodded. Her finger stopped moving, but the agitation seemed to vibrate up her arm and into her blinking eyelids.
If the eyes are the window to the soul, Donnally thought, hers are a view into a troubled one. And he suspected that over the years it had become a repository of Hamlin’s crimes and secrets, and was now occupied by a chaos of motions and emotions, of anticipated attacks and defenses, of alternating currents of grief and fear. Her fidgeting made him wonder whether she was there in Hamlin’s office twelve years earlier, as Hamlin pretried Simpson’s aunt and taught her the script for the role she would play in the trial.
“Do you know where Mark was last night?” Donnally asked.
Jackson averted her eyes for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t know for certain.”
Donnally recognized it was a lawyer’s answer, an evasion. He imagined an opposing attorney’s objection to the form of his question and Judge McMullin ruling, “Lack of foundation.”
He dropped back a step. “Did Mark tell you whether he was going somewhere other than to his home last night?”
She nodded. “He said he had an appointment to meet a new client.” Jackson half smiled, more of a smirk. “And no, he didn’t say who he was.”
“He?”
“He.”
“Where?”
Another shrug.
“Did he get any calls that you can connect with the appointment?”
“They could’ve come in on his cell phone.”
“Which means no?”
“Which means no.”
Donnally looked at Navarro, who dipped his head, acknowledging he’d get a court order from Judge McMullin to obtain Hamlin’s cell phone records for the last few weeks.
It had been a long time since Donnally had worked with someone who was as good at investigating crimes as Navarro, and realized he’d missed it. There was a fluidity of movement and unspoken cooperation up at his cafe in Mount Shasta, but hamburgers and omelets didn’t carry the moral weight of life and death and justice.