José was next to him as he greeted a team at the gate to the slips, and the six men walked out in the glaring sun to the end of Dock Two. José opened the cabin for them, then Glitsky dismissed him.

Abe went below, taking a moment to let his eyes adjust to the relative darkness. As the room became visible, one of the forensic team on the ladder behind him whistled at the layout. They went to work.

It was a tough call because they were looking for anything and nothing. Two men were on deck above, starting at the bow and coming back. Glitsky and two other guys were below, but there wasn’t much evident there either. No sign of any struggle.

Glitsky started in the main cabin, just poking around, looking. He wasn’t a forensics man. He would let them go over the fabrics and rugs and smooth surfaces. Whatever he was looking for would have to be obvious. But not too obvious, he thought, or Hardy would have seen it.

All of the cabinets were secured, both in the main cabin and in the adjoining galley. He opened each one, moved a few things around, closed it back up. Moseying back to the master suite, he noted the made bed. He considered calling back to remind his guys to bring the sheets in, but thought better of it. They would do that automatically.

To the right of the bed there was a wooden desk, shaped to the bulkhead, its surface cleared. He tried one of the side drawers and found it locked. The center drawer, however, slid open easily, and, with it open, the other drawers came free.

But it was slim pickings. The gutter to the center drawer contained pens and paper clips, several books of matches from various restaurants, a couple of keys on a ring that Abe assumed fitted this desk, rubberbands and a handball from the Olympic club. The flat back part of the drawer appeared to be completely empty, but reaching his hand back, Glitsky found two stale, crumbling cigars. The top side drawer, the slimmer one, was filled with lots of different colored sweatbands, which seemed to go with the exercycle and dumbbells on the other side of the bed. The bottom side drawer was empty.

On the other side of the bed was a rolltop desk, its cover down. He rolled back the oak top. There were probably twenty-five cubbyholes above the desk’s surface, most of them containing pieces of paper, some of them rolled up, some folded over. A general catchall. Glitsky pulled out a piece at random and found a shopping list. Eggs, cheese, spinach, orange juice. Sunday brunch, he decided. Another paper, also at random, read ‘W. re Taos/reschedule.’ That was all. Glitsky put the two pages back where he’d gotten them. Forensics would take them back downtown if they found any other evidence that Nash had been killed here.

The center drawer looked much like the other one -matches, cigars, pens and pencils, junk.

He pulled open the upper right drawer, expecting to find more headbands. At first glance this looked to be another functional drawer, but when Glitsky pulled the drawer out a little further, he saw a nickel-plated.25 Beretta 950 lying on top of what looked like a collection of folded-up navigational charts.

Just then one of the forensics men on deck called below. ‘Sergeant, you want to get up here? I think we got us some blood.’

It was close to noon on what was already the hottest day of the year and, naturally, the air conditioners were on the blink. There were no windows in the courtrooms in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. Fans were set up on either side of the bench in Judge Andy Fowler’s courtroom, Department 27, and they did move the air around. Unfortunately the temperature of the air getting moved was ninety-one degrees.

The whir of the fan blades also upped the decibel level. Nearly uniform in size, twenty-five by forty feet, with high ceilings and no soft surfaces except the minimal padding on the seats of jurors, judges and witnesses, courtrooms were, under the best conditions, loud and uncomfortable.

And today, under far less than optimal conditions, Andy Fowler was once again being forced, reluctantly, by the luck of the draw, into a role he hated – protector of suspect’s rights.

He’d been a young man at the time of his appointment to the bench. He’d worked on Pat Brown’s second gubernatorial campaign against Richard Nixon – more because he hated Nixon than loved Brown – and persuaded a goodly amount of his Olympic Club confreres, some of them Republicans, to donate to the cause. At the time, though not yet thirty, he’d already made partner in his firm, and he had put the word out that he would accept a judgeship if one came around, which, in due course, it did.

Though his politics rarely came up and hadn’t radically changed in thirty years, this was the 1990s in San Francisco. Anywhere but in the Hall of Justice, a Kennedy-style liberal Democrat was considered right-wing. Actual conservatives, again excluding the Hall, were as rare in the city as a warm day.

Political San Francisco was a Balkanized unit of special interests, many on the so-called left – homosexuals, people of color, middle-class white radicals… so political survival in the city was in large part a matter of pleasing enough of these groups to form a majority coalition on whatever issue happened to be the day’s hot topic.

In reaction, the denizens of the Hall of Justice – the police department, the D.A.‘s office, judges – had become a little Balkan republic of their own. It was tough, they said, to be for law and order, to serve blind justice, when first you had to take into account the trauma and/or discrimination that had been visited on you and yours on account of skin color, gender, sexual preference, religious orientation, poor potty training, whatever.

And in this climate, until three years ago, Andy Fowler had been a popular judge. He knew it was true, because prosecutors went out of their way to tell him they loved getting cases in his department. Why? Well, he tried to be fair. He wasn’t a wiseguy. He didn’t throw things -erasers, pencils, paper clips – from the bench at attorneys, bailiffs or suspects. If someone needed waking up in the courtroom, he would politely ask the bailiff to shake that person. He had a sly humor and no political axe to grind. He was knowledgeable about the law. He was, in short, a good judge.

The first sign of change came in the case of The People v. Randy Blakemore. It seemed Mr Blakemore was hanging out on Eddy Street one evening and saw an apparently drunk tourist stumbling along in a nice suit. Randy noticed a Rolex, a fat bulge in the tourist’s back pocket, the gold chain around his neck. When the man fell into a doorway to rest, Randy moved in and had his hands on the Rolex when two other ‘homeless people’ appeared with badges and guns. The tourist opened his eyes and uttered an extremely sober, ‘Boo, you’re it,’ and Randy was taken downtown – one of seventeen arrests in a police program to get the word out on the street that tourists were a valued business in San Francisco and were not to be hassled.

Six other cases had already come up for PXs – preliminary hearings – in other departments when Blakemore came up in Andy Fowler’s courtroom. Four of those men were awaiting trial and two had already been convicted and sent to jail. Andy Fowler took a look at Randy standing in the docket in his orange prison togs and told him it was his lucky day – this was as clear a case of entrapment as Judge Fowler had ever seen and though he had no doubt that Randy was a bad person who shouldn’t be on the streets, on this particular charge he was going to walk.

Other judges reconsidered. Three of the four remaining prelims resulted the same way. Both of the felons already convicted were released on appeal. The last suspect had also mugged the ‘tourist’ and fought the arresting officers, so he did go to trial, although the jury didn’t convict. The other dozen or so arrestees had their charges dropped by an angry District Attorney Christopher Locke.