“You got some latex gloves?” Donnally asked Navarro.

Navarro reached into his inside suit jacket pocket and gave him a pair and slipped ones on his own hands. He lowered himself to one knee, pulled out a digital camera, and took a couple of photos of the inside of the safe.

Donnally began moving the safe’s contents onto the conference table. Financial records, checkbooks, file folders, and notes. On the third reach, he pulled out a rubber-banded stack of hundred-dollar bills, almost five inches high. He looked over at Jackson.

She shrugged.

“Does that mean you know where this money came from?” Donnally asked.

“There’s always cash in there. Usually about a hundred thousand. Sometimes less. Sometimes more.”

“And . . .”

“No, I don’t know where that particular money came from.”

Donnally reached in again and removed another stack and laid it next to the other. He estimated that each held between forty and fifty thousand dollars.

After emptying all the paper out of the safe, he felt around and discovered a small metal box against the back wall. He held it by the edges, pulled it out, and set it on the table. He used the end of a pen to open the latch. Inside he found diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and old gold coins.

Donnally suspected it might be stolen property Hamlin had taken in legal fees.

He glanced over at Jackson. Her teeth were clenched. He wondered about her psychological makeup since her only ways of expressing emotion seemed to be tapping her finger or clenching her teeth.

He took this clench to be anger.

“He told me he’d never do that,” Jackson said, speaking through an unmoving jaw.

“You sure he didn’t get this stuff from a relative’s estate?” Navarro asked.

“He would’ve made me look at it. He was a showoff about money and shit.”

“At least he had the good sense to keep this a secret from you,” Donnally said. “It shows he was at least embarrassed.”

She stared at the box for a few moments. “I don’t think so. I don’t think it was that at all,” and then she turned away and left the room.

Chapter 11

Fuck that bitch,” Rudy Rusch told Donnally from behind the bar in the grimy and shadowed Hideaway Lounge just off Mission Street, a few miles southwest of the Hall of Justice. Rusch stopped toweling the dark oak surface and leaned his hairy-armed, six-four frame down toward Donnally and lowered his voice. “If Madison hadn’t killed her, I would’ve done it myself.”

Rusch’s delivery had a practiced tone, almost rhythmic. Donnally wondered how many times he’d repeated those phrases since the night of his wife’s murder.

“He’s saying you did do it,” Donnally said, “and you paid off Mark Hamlin to get him to plead to the sheet.”

“Sure I gave Hamlin some money. I don’t deny it. A lot of money. He came to me and said he could make the case go away, and fast.”

“Why the hurry?”

“Shit, man.” Rusch surveyed the crowd, bikers hunched over tables and talking low, and skinny girlfriends with tangled hair and windblown faces sipping beers and wine coolers in the booths and waiting for the men’s business to get done. “Hamlin was gonna try to frame me, expose the stuff that goes on in here to make me look like the kind of guy who’d kill his wife for cheating on him.”

Donnally smiled. So far, his story made as much sense as Madison’s.

“But you are the kind of guy who would kill his wife for cheating on him,” Donnally said. “And I take it she was.”

“Yeah. With some asshole in the office she was working in. Some fucking stockbroker. We were short on cash and she got herself hired on as a temp. It started out with her being his drug connection.” He glanced toward one of the biker tables as though her source was sitting there now. “Then they started hooking up after work. Every fucking time I turned my back.”

What he meant to say was that every time he turned his back they were fucking. Donnally wondered why he didn’t just come out and say it. Maybe he wasn’t as tough as he pretended.

Rusch reached down, filled a glass with beer from the tap, and slid it to Donnally.

“On the house.”

Donnally nodded thanks and took a sip.

Rusch cocked his head toward the front window and pointed up the block toward Mission Street.

“I’d just bought this place when you got shot out there. At least ten years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday. People are still talking about it. You’re a legend . . . a leg-end.” Rusch smiled and made a trigger motion with his thumb. “Like at the O.K. Corral. Bam-bam, bam-bam-bam.” He laughed. “All my customers go running out the back door like they didn’t want to be anywhere near the Mission District when the cops showed up and started patting people down. Then sirens coming from everywhere. Whoop—whoop—whoop.”

Donnally had gotten caught in a crossfire between Sureño and Norteño gangsters after he climbed out of his car to meet an informant at Morelia Taqueria. He put fatal slugs into both of them, and the Norteño put the one into him that ended his career.

“I ran out there. I could see by the way them EMTs were working on you that your cop days were done.” Rusch pointed down at Donnally’s hip. “All the blood coming out of there told me that’s where you got shot. I didn’t figure that you’d be doing much running and gunning after that.”

Rusch rubbed his side as though in sympathy. “That joint back to working okay?”

In fact it wasn’t. Donnally woke up to the stabbing memory of that day every morning and went to sleep with it every night.

But that was none of Rusch’s business.

Donnally nodded and changed the subject. “I found some cash in Hamlin’s safe.”

“Not from me. I gave him thirty grand altogether. It’s got to be gone by now. Long gone.”

“Madison seemed to think that the deal was for life with a hundred grand always on deposit.”

Rusch smiled again. “He should’ve taken up that little misunderstanding with Hamlin.”

“He tried.”

Rusch paused and pursed his lips, then squinted at Donnally and asked, “What kind of bills did Hamlin have?”

“Hundreds.”

“You won’t find my fingerprints on that money.” Rusch gestured toward the cash register. “Biggest bills I get coming through here are fifties and most are twenties.”

Rusch didn’t need to say that the denomination of choice in the biker drug trade was the twenty.

“Then why the attempted hit on Madison in prison?” Donnally asked.

Rusch’s brows furrowed and he drummed his fingers on the bar. “Where’s this information going?”

“You see me taking notes?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“In my head unless you’re lying to me.”

Rusch stared out into the bar until he got the attention of a biker wearing a black vest and a green T-shirt with a shamrock printed on the front, then he nodded at the stool next to Donnally.

Donnally recognized the shamrock as an Aryan Brotherhood emblem. One of the first homicides he investigated was an execution of a Hell’s Angel named Irish by an Aryan Brotherhood member wearing a similar T-shirt, except with the words “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” printed below it. He now wondered if this gang connection was the reason Rusch remembered his name and the day he was shot down. Donnally was known throughout the Aryan Brotherhood because he’d chased down scores of members, their wives, girlfriends, hangers-on, and associates and until he’d gathered enough leads to identify the killer.

The biker walked over and slipped onto the stool. He had a windburned, middle-aged face that had seen a lot of sun and grit, and teeth that had met a lot of cigarette smoke.

“You know anything about a stabbing in CMF Vacaville? Guy named Madison.” Rusch looked at Donnally. “When?”