“Go down to the station and make sure Hamlin’s car stays sealed until I get there.” Donnally tilted his head toward the conference room. “I’ve got to work out some kind of deal with her.”
Navarro headed toward the hallway and the elevators beyond.
Donnally opened the door. He spotted Jackson standing next to an open file cabinet drawer, her hand under her suit jacket. He jabbed a forefinger at her.
“Put it back.”
Chapter 5
I got nothing,” Donnally said to Navarro as he walked up to Hamlin’s Porsche in the police garage. “Jackson claims Hamlin didn’t tell her who he was afraid of, or why.”
“You have to give up anything to get her talking?” Navarro asked.
“She wanted immunity, but I explained to her why that wasn’t a possibility.” He smiled. “I caught her trying to sneak off with a file. It showed Hamlin had been paying part of her salary under the table out of cash retainers he’d received from clients. He wasn’t reporting the fees to the IRS and she wasn’t reporting the income.”
“Tax fraud and money laundering.” Navarro smiled back. “I see why you took immunity off the table. There’s no way of knowing all the crimes she’s committed. What about the other two in the office?”
“No immunity demands, but no one will admit to knowing what Hamlin was worried about or where he went last night-if they even know. They’re little ferrets. Neither one has the guts to do anything more dangerous than steal Post-it notes from the office. I sent them home and told them to stay there until we need them again.”
Navarro nodded toward two evidence technicians, who then opened the doors of the car and began dusting for prints.
“The cell phone records?” Donnally asked.
“In an hour. They’ll e-mail them to me and I’ll get printouts to you.”
Donnally shielded his eyes and looked through the back window.
“Man, what a mess. Who spends a hundred and twenty thousand dollars on a car like this and treats it like a garbage dump.”
Navarro bit his lower lip as he stared at the passenger seat and floor. On both were scattered court filings, fast-food wrappers, sheets torn from legal pads, balled-up clothing.
“This’ll take hours.”
Donnally thought for a moment. Anything that Hamlin had left in plain view in his car couldn’t be considered confidential. Whatever attorney-client privilege he might have claimed for any document had been waived as soon as he let the sunshine fall on it, at least as far as Hamlin’s part of the privilege was concerned.
If his clients had a beef on their end with him leaving case documents where anyone could see them, they could sue Hamlin’s estate. But it wasn’t Donnally’s problem. Preserving Hamlin’s money for his heirs wasn’t part of his job.
Donnally waited until the evidence techs finished dusting for prints, did a quick check of the glove compartment, console, and trunk without finding additional case files or notes. He pointed at the two techs, and said to Navarro, “Have these guys bag up everything. Let’s go check out Hamlin’s apartment.”
Navarro gave the instruction and then led Donnally to his car, parked in a lot under the freeway behind the Hall of Justice.
“You’re a little more flexible than I remembered,” Navarro said, as he turned the ignition.
“Not really, I’ve just learned to draw finer lines. I’m not going to do any more to protect Hamlin than he deserves and the law requires.”
Navarro drove out from the thin shadows next to the police department into the late morning sun. He skirted downtown as he worked his way toward the Panhandle, a narrow arm of Golden Gate Park running along the north side of the Haight-Ashbury District.
Donnally’s cell phone rang as they passed the steep-sided Buena Vista Park, trees rising up from the otherwise house- and apartment-covered heights.
“I came home to pick up a file for work and found a television satellite truck driving away.”
The caller was Janie Nguyen, Donnally’s girlfriend, a psychiatrist at the Fort Miley Veterans Hospital. Donnally had come down from Mount Shasta a few days earlier to visit her and replace the roof gutters on the house they shared a few blocks from the ocean. He drove down two or three times a month, usually for three or four days. He always brought his tool chest in the bed of his truck to repair damage to the shingled bungalow inflicted by salt air driven hard by onshore winds.
“One of the neighbors told me they knocked on the door, then took a video of the house. You up to something?”
“The call that got me out of bed this morning and put that grumpy look on your face was about Mark Hamlin.”
Donnally felt Navarro’s eyes on him. He covered the phone and said, “Janie.”
Navarro raised his eyebrows. “Still?”
Donnally nodded.
Navarro reached up and tapped the wedding ring on his left hand, gripping the steering wheel.
Donnally shook his head, and then said into the phone, “I’m helping out Ramon Navarro on the Hamlin investigation.”
“I saw it on the news,” Janie said, “and the first word that comes to mind is ‘byzantine.’ ”
“And the second?”
“Whichever one means you should have your head examined. Any route that took Mark Hamlin from wherever he started last night to the end of a rope at Fort Point this morning had to have been very unpleasant, and it will be unpleasant to relive it.”
Donnally understood what she was saying. The only other investigative work he’d done since he left SFPD, looking into the thirty-year-old murder of the sister of a deceased friend, had devolved into weeks of agonized confusion that had enveloped her, too, and almost shredded their relationship.
But he wasn’t sure how to respond with Navarro listening.
Before he found an answer, Janie said, “I know why you’re doing this.”
“It’s because Hamlin asked for me and Judge McMullin appointed me to be the special master.”
“You could’ve turned it down. I suspect you’re less interested in who murdered Mark Hamlin than in how a guy like Mark Hamlin became a guy like Mark Hamlin, lived the life he lived. For you, it’s kind of like a physics problem, what bent Hamlin toward corruption and how he bent other people whose life trajectories brought them near him, and this is your chance to find out.”
He felt himself cringe. She’d already gotten inside his head and figured out what he’d been thinking earlier, even repeating his own half-spoken words to him.
He now wondered whether his puzzlement was less a carryover from his own past, and more just residue from the resignation he’d felt, that every San Francisco cop felt, after they’d spent a few years in the investigations bureau, especially in homicide, where he had been assigned when he first met Janie.
Early in their careers, anger defined cops’ attitudes toward the Hamlins of the world. Later it transformed into outrage that neither the judges nor the DAs were willing to take them on. Finally, they just got beaten down and felt themselves reduced to note takers, surrendering their role as law enforcement officers after coming to accept that the enforcement of the law was out of their hands.
Donnally had sometimes felt queasy when he looked at the words “Hall of Justice” as he walked up the wide steps and into the building, for it seemed to proclaim a fact when those inside had yet to prove it up, and never would since they had allowed lawyers like Hamlin to corrupt the process.
“You’re right,” Donnally said. “I’ve never understood these guys. Maybe I’ll learn something.”
And maybe I’ll learn why I’m doing this. And why I couldn’t walk away.
He knew it wasn’t just curiosity. There were lots of things in the world to be curious about.
It was-
He felt his body push back against the seat as Navarro began a twisting ascent up the hill on which Hamlin’s house sat. Then again as the car downshifted.