Which didn’t mean he hadn’t followed her here. He might have already found out what he wanted – where she lived and played. On the other hand, she told herself, his own explanation made sense. He’d been in jail all day and the city possibly wouldn’t have a nicer night for the rest of the nineties.
She opened her car door and grabbed her equipment bag. Pulling a light warm-up jacket on over her jersey, she crossed the dark space between the parking lot and the stands.
She stood awhile longer, watching him. He was sitting forward, hunched over, his elbows on his knees, his hands dwarfing the can of beer he held between them. His T-shirt stretched itself tightly over the muscles of his back.
The DA had let him go. He wasn’t charged with anything. She could go down and sit with him and there would be no grounds for any professional complaint. She rationalized another half-lie for herself – that he might make a verbal slip with some beer inside him and say something incriminating. She was still in cop mode, working. That’s why she was staying around, why it was defensible to go talk with him.
On the field a young man hit a ball well over three hundred feet, outside the circle of the diamond’s lights. Graham was on his feet, following the trajectory, his face alight with excitement, lost in the moment. It was a child’s look – unguarded, simple, innocent, pure. A doubt flashed briefly in her consciousness: could someone who had committed a murder summon such an expression? She didn’t think so.
She’d changed out of her cleats and now wore running shoes, which made no noise as she walked down the benches. She sat down next to him.
‘Okay, I’ll have that beer.’
He glanced over, his face showing nothing. Casually, he reached under him and pulled up a can, popping the top, handing it to her. ‘You see that hit?’ he asked.
She tipped the can. ‘That letter from your dad,’ she said, ‘you were playing pro baseball?’
He didn’t answer right away. On the field the shortstop went deep into the hole for a ground ball, flipped it back to second, then on to first for a double play. It ended the half inning.
Graham finished up his beer. ‘I thought I could hook on as a replacement during the strike. I couldn’t.’ He risked a look at her. ‘I really didn’t follow you,’ he said. ‘This is where I come sometimes, that’s all. Then I saw you, watched you play a little. I figured, what the hell, we’re both here, I might as well say hello. It didn’t occur to me you’d think I’d followed you.’
‘But I arrested you.’
Graham nodded, a smile tugging at his lips. ‘I did notice that.’
‘Most people,’ she said, ‘you arrest them, they don’t like you anymore.’
‘But then they let me go. They’re not charging me. So you and me, we’re both citizens.’
‘I don’t think so, not exactly. I’m still a cop. You’re still a suspect.’
He chewed on that for a beat, then shrugged it off. ‘Well, guess what? I myself am an officer of the court. And P.S., I didn’t kill my father.’ He indicated the field. ‘You play pretty good, Sergeant. I saw your triple.’
She found herself loosening up. ‘Most exciting offensive play in the game.’
‘So my dad said.’
‘You still think so?’
‘Sure.’
‘Me too.’
‘Well, there.’ Graham pulled another beer from underneath his seat, popped the top. ‘Something else we’ve got in common. You want another one?’
She’d nearly finished the first. Sarah had never been much of a drinker, and she was already feeling the slow warmth of even so little alcohol beginning to spread. ‘I’d better not,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to be going. Work starts early.’
‘I remember,’ he said.
She hesitated another couple of seconds, taken aback by his ready acquiescence, surprised at the act of will it took for her to stand. ‘Thanks for the beer,’ she said.
He nodded. She’d gone off a couple of steps when he stopped her. ‘Sergeant Evans?’
She turned.
‘What’s your first name?’
Her face clouded, then suddenly cleared! She shook her head, laughing at herself, then met his eyes. ‘Sarah.’
‘Sarah,’ he repeated. His smile seemed completely genuine. Endearing. ‘I love that name.’
Back in her car, she checked her face in the rearview mirror. She felt absurdly pleased with herself and wondered if it showed. So what? Graham Russo liked her name. Big deal.
The warmth had spread. She told herself it was the alcohol. She’d better be careful driving home.
PART TWO
8
Great rivers may begin with a tiny trickle, but the creation of an avalanche does not occur in the same way, where one snowflake adheres to another and the growing mass slowly coalesces until it simply begins to fall over itself. No, an avalanche just happens - all at once the side of a mountain gives way, coming loose with explosive force, unstoppable and indiscriminate, rearranging the landscape of everything in the path of its inanimate will.
By two A.M. on Thursday morning, less than eight hours after Graham Russo’s release from jail, the momentum of the avalanche had pushed every other issue in San Francisco off the political map. By that hour the early-morning edition of the San Francisco Chronicle was coming off the press with the banner headline: ‘Mercy Killing Debate Rips City, State Offices.’ The long story merely scratched at the surface of the many fronts on which the battle had erupted simultaneously.
The mayor supported the district attorney. San Francisco had always been in the forefront of social awareness. Sharron Pratt had done the right thing. People shouldn’t be forced to live in unrelenting pain. Where was the quality in a life like that? If a person chose to take his or her own life to end their suffering, they had the right to do so, and the people who helped them were not murderers. They were heroes.
Dan Rigby, the city’s chief of police, was outraged. This was the latest and most serious example of the DA’s utter disdain for the police who kept the city safe. His officers had acted correctly in arresting a homicide suspect. There was no evidence that the death of Sal Russo had been anything but a murder in the course of a robbery.
But even if it had been an assisted suicide, ‘The DA is elected to enforce the laws, not make them. I shudder to wonder what other kinds of homicides Ms Pratt is going to decide are not crimes.’
Dean Powell, the state attorney general, was studying the case, refusing to disclose, or foreclose, any of his options. Art Drysdale, formerly of the DA’s office (and fired by Pratt) and now with the state attorney general, would only comment that ‘as a matter of law it’s unambiguous that we have jurisdictional responsibility. We’re not going to let murders go unpunished in San Francisco.’
The Board of Supervisors called an emergency session for late in the evening, and declared by a 9 to 2 majority that San Francisco should be a ‘right-to-die’ haven – the country needed a humanitarian city that would become a mecca for the terminally ill and hopelessly suffering.
The Catholics and the Protestants wasted no time squaring off. Archbishop James Flaherty reiterated the stand of the Catholic Church on any form of euthanasia. God took His children when it was His time. Jesus himself had suffered horribly, Flaherty said, and that he had allowed himself to do so was meant clearly to serve as an example to all of humanity: suffering was part of life. It had a purpose. It ennobled and strengthened the spirit, especially when offered up to the glory of God.