Taylor met him on the other side and walked with him into the main building and up to his second floor office. A middle-aged prisoner with scraggly white hair sat handcuffed to a chair, a soiled manila envelope lying on his lap, a cane leaning against the wall next to him. A guard wearing a protective vest and a shielded riot helmet stood across from him.

Taylor introduced Donnally to Madison, then uncuffed him and led them inside.

“You guys can talk in here,” Taylor said, then directed Donnally to his chair behind the desk and Madison to the one in the front. He pointed at the phone. “Call the operator and they’ll page me when you’re done. Just hit zero.” Taylor then nodded toward a red alarm button on the wall next to the desk. Donnally got the message and nodded back.

Donnally waited until Taylor closed the office door behind him, then said, “I know who you are and you know who I am, so let’s skip the preliminaries.”

Madison smiled. “You’re just as advertised.” He tilted his head toward the window overlooking the rows of cell blocks. “Some guys remembered you from your cop days.”

Donnally didn’t respond, just stared at him.

Madison nodded. “Oh, yeah. That’s right. No preliminaries.” He hunched forward, resting his forearms on his thighs, looking up from under his eyebrows. “I’ll start with the punch line. Hamlin hired me to ride the beef.”

Donnally didn’t know what to make of the claim. The problem with the truth and nothing but the truth is it sometimes sounded like a big lie.

And this sounded like a big lie.

“Why would you take the job?” Donnally asked. “Twenty-five to life would pretty much take you past retirement age, maybe even to an eternity in a pine box.”

Madison leaned back, turned the side of his head toward Donnally, then separated the hair above his ear.

Donnally could make out a four-inch scar.

“Brain tumor. The doctors at the county hospital took it out and I did radiation and chemo, but it came back again. They said I had no more than a year to live. I figured, why not? I’d get better medical treatment in here than on the outside and Hamlin said he’d keep me happy. Money every month. Nice TV in my cell. Any kind of drugs I want, prescription”—he flashed a grin—“or otherwise. Hamlin has a lot of old clients in here, guys with connections. They can smuggle in anything. Anything at all. It’s just like being on the outside.”

“But you’re still alive.”

Madison made a smacking sound with his lips, then said, “I hadn’t counted on that. The law changed and the government started letting prisoners be in clinical trials. I hit a home run doing one of them and went into remission.”

This was the only thing Madison had said so far that seemed credible. After accusations of reckless experimentation, the Department of Corrections had barred prisoners from participating in trials. The legislature had reversed the ban a few years earlier.

Madison slid the manila envelope across the desk.

“The report of my last PET-CT is in there. Clean as clean could be.”

Donnally read it and handed it back.

“If you didn’t do the crime, who did?”

Donnally guessed what Madison’s answer would be, true or not, assuming that Madison knew the homicide statistics as well as he did.

“The woman’s husband,” Madison said. “She was cheating on him. And he’s a hard guy. Real hard. Story was he grabbed her as she was getting cash out of the ATM to buy her boyfriend something. It was the boyfriend’s birthday and she didn’t want the payment for his present to show up on her credit card.”

“What about your confession to the jailhouse informant?”

“He’s the guy who recruited me and sold the deal to Hamlin. He got five grand out of it.”

“And the knife?”

Madison smiled again. “You studied up. Hamlin’s PI got it from her husband and hid it in my sleeping bag for the police to find.”

The fact that the story sounded like something Hamlin would do, didn’t mean to Donnally that he’d done it.

“How long have you been in remission?”

“A year and a half, but I didn’t want to make a move until I was sure it was gonna stick.” Madison’s face darkened and he slapped the edge of the desk. “But then that asshole Hamlin tried to fuck me. He stopped putting the money on my books like he was supposed to.”

“And so you sent him a letter threatening to file a motion to withdraw your plea.”

Madison nodded. “A little sooner than I’d planned. I was hoping to wait until after my next scan. But I’d gotten used to the finer things in prison life, and doing without was pissing me off, so I made my move.”

“How do you know it wasn’t the husband who stopped paying Hamlin, so he had to stop paying you?”

“Because the deal was there would always be a hundred grand on account, in cash. I could draw out as much as I needed every month. The husband would add to it if it went under. Even if the guy stopped paying, it would’ve taken a couple of more years for the money to run out.”

“I guess they didn’t expect you to live so long.”

“So what? That’s not my problem. A deal’s a deal.”

“And you figure the husband killed Hamlin.”

“Has to be. Only way for a surefire cover-up.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to take you out?”

“They tried.” Madison pointed out the window toward the prison blocks. “I’ve been in isolation for the last month, after an Aryan Brotherhood guy tried to shank me. Since then, if hubby was gonna break the chain, he was gonna have to do it at the Hamlin link. Ain’t no way they’re getting to me again.”

Madison pointed toward the door. “That guard outside? He ain’t standing there to protect you from me, but me from them.”

Chapter 10

Takiyah Jackson was sitting at her desk when Donnally arrived at Hamlin’s office.

Donnally had called Navarro while he was driving back from Vacaville and got confirmation his earlier theory had been right. Navarro knew the players in town. He’d recognized the name of the victim’s husband, not because he’d worked on the Bennie Madison case, but because the husband owned a well-known biker bar in the mostly Hispanic Mission District. It now made sense that the husband could’ve sicced an imprisoned gang member on Madison.

Navarro walked in a few minutes after Donnally had taken Jackson into the conference room.

Donnally glanced over at Navarro, pointed at the two-foot-square safe in the corner, and said to Jackson, “I have reason to believe there is evidence related to Mark’s death in that thing and I wanted a witness when we opened it up.”

Jackson swallowed and twisted her hands together on top of the conference table. Her daunted gaze shifted between Navarro and Donnally.

“Why do you need a witness?”

“There may be money in there and I don’t want anybody accusing me of stealing any.”

She tilted her head toward the row of filing cabinets. “You tell him about the file?”

Donnally shook his head, hoping Navarro wouldn’t react and give him away.

“It wasn’t relevant to any of the leads we’re working on.”

“You have the combination,” Navarro said. The sentence came out as a statement, not a question.

“Mark gave it to me only for emergencies.”

Donnally understood her to be saying she wasn’t responsible for what they would find inside.

“I’d say this was an emergency.”

Donnally followed her over to the safe, where she kneeled and spun the combination right, left, right, and then pushed the handle down and pulled the door open. She then raised her hands and backed away as though trying to break her connection with whatever they would find inside.