A Criminal Defense

A Harlan Donnally Novel

Steven Gore

Dedication

For my dear cousins, Julie Quater, Bruce Kaplan, and Bobbie Chinsky:

kind hearts, great minds, and doers of good deeds

Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Note to the Reader

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By Steven Gore

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

S ince matter is neither created nor destroyed, in one way or another the world isn’t done with Mark Hamlin.

The words had come to Harlan Donnally as he disconnected the call that wrenched him from sleep at four in the morning. And others had followed as he walked from his bungalow near San Francisco’s Ocean Beach through whorls of fog and mist toward his street-lit truck.

Under ideal conditions, bodies in motion remain in motion and bodies at rest remain at rest.

But it was only now, gazing at the criminal defense attorney hanging by his neck from the Fort Point lighthouse, that Donnally realized these thoughts were reverberations from the last case he’d cleared as a homicide detective a decade earlier. They’d echoed not only in his unease about the uncertainties and entanglements awaiting him in the shadow of the south anchorage of the Golden Gate Bridge, but in his musings about the mechanics of life and death that had accompanied him on the drive through the wooded Presidio to the redbrick garrison and during his three-story climb to the top.

Except the conditions weren’t ideal and Hamlin wasn’t at rest.

Although the fifty-five-year-old lawyer hung just fifteen feet away, Donnally had to squint hard into the darkness to make him out, his mind registering the parts, but not the whole, as an onshore gust spun and rocked the body.

Head tilted down.

Hair matted.

Mouth twisted.

Shirttails fluttering.

Slacks and underwear collected around his ankles, shoe tips scraping the concrete.

Footsteps approaching Donnally from behind emerged out of the rush of swirling salt air. He glanced over at Ramon Navarro as he came to a stop. The homicide detective was cinched inside a trench coat, his head covered by a sheepskin crown cap, his brush-cut hair and rough-cut features familiar enough to Donnally that they didn’t need to be seen to be perceived.

Navarro turned on a flashlight. Donnally grabbed for it, keeping the beam focused down. “Turn it off.”

Navarro waved his free arm toward the diffused and haloed headlights of a patrol car parked a hundred yards away, sealing off Marine Drive and blocking access into the parking lot. “Why’s everybody grinning and telling me to keep the—”

A foghorn blast obliterated his final words.

“You’ll see it in a minute,” Donnally said. “Just wait until your eyes adjust.”

The light died. The wind let up. The duck-squawk of car tires hitting the bridge’s ribbed expansion joints grew louder and a distant siren yelped on the Marin County end of the span.

Navarro looked over at Donnally. “What else did his assistant say other than that he was hanging out here?”

“Just that the call she got was anonymous and muffled.”

“And she reached out to you because . . .”

“Hamlin told her to if something happened to him.”

“Such as . . .” Navarro lifted his chin toward the dead lawyer.

Donnally shrugged. “He didn’t say. She said he was a secretive guy, even with her, so she hadn’t pressed him.”

“And maybe because it would’ve been too long a list since he had so many things to be afraid of.”

“And people.”

“Yeah. Lots and lots of them.”

Navarro glanced over at a fog-shrouded container ship sliding from ocean to bay, then surveyed the thirty-foot lighthouse, from its skeletal legs up to the squat iron tower, then to the dark lantern room, the whole an iron and glass palette of predawn grays.

“Nobody’s paid attention to this thing since the bridge was built,” Navarro said, “except to keep it from turning to rust.” His eyes settled again on Hamlin’s body. “I don’t think this is what they were preserving it for.”

Donnally looked down at the news crews stationed along the rock seawall and then up at a television truck descending Battery East Road, heading toward a spot on the hillside under the anchorage, overlooking the fort.

“What about some crime scene screens to block the view?” Donnally said, and then pointed up at the early morning walkers and joggers gathering along the railing, backlit by the yellow bridge lights and peering down into the shadows. “It’ll be bright enough in a half hour for them to get a good look at him.”

Donnally’s concern was less that they would recognize Hamlin, for they’d watched him over twenty years of nightly news programs and sidewalk commentaries during media-frenzied trials, and more that they and the press would fixate on just one thing and that thing would live forever in Internet videos and in jokes told over cubicle walls and inside police squad rooms.

The wind rose again and rotated Hamlin’s body toward them.

“Son . . . of . . . a . . . bitch.”

Navarro had just spotted it: the dead man’s erection.

“I’ll get the forensic people here as fast as I can,” Navarro said, reaching for his cell phone, “but they’ve been tied up on two gang murders. And I can’t have anybody walking up close or wrapping up the body until we can record whatever is there.”

Navarro made the call and again turned on his flashlight, pointing it down and away from Hamlin. He directed the beam at the feet of a uniformed officer five yards away and then at the television truck, now coming to a stop.

The officer spoke into his radio, and a minute later a patrol car appeared on Battery East, red and blue flashes reflecting off the low clouds and headlights jittering over dips and potholes. It swung in next to the truck and herded it back out.

“He have a wife?” Donnally asked.

“As far as I know he was never married and didn’t have any kids. He had kind of a Boston accent, so his family probably lives back East. I’ve got somebody trying to track them down to let them know before the media does.”