“You sure this was a first time?”

“At least in terms of MO. I’ve never seen anything like it in San Francisco before.” Navarro took a sip of tea. “It’s so bizarre the loonies are all coming out. A couple of them called the tip line. Apparently a conspiracy of Martians and Scientologists did Hamlin in.”

Navarro reached into his briefcase again. Donnally expected him to take out the legitimate leads from the calls. Instead, it was his department-issued iPad. He turned it on, tapped an icon, and handed it to Donnally. It displayed a story about Hamlin’s murder on the home page of the San Francisco Chronicle.

“You’ll love this,” Navarro said, pointing at a second paragraph.

Donnally read it to himself.

“It is a monumental loss to the legal community of San Francisco,” District Attorney Hannah Goldhagen said late this morning. “We’ll miss his intelligence, his aggressive advocacy, and his humor that informed as much as it entertained. I can guarantee the people of San Francisco we will find and prosecute whoever murdered him to the fullest extent of the law.”

Donnally passed it back. “She had to say something other than good riddance. It’s Bay Area politics in its most perfect state.”

Navarro’s fists tightened on the table. “That bitch has never prosecuted anyone to the fullest extent of the law. She’s spent her whole career oiling the hinges on the revolving door.”

“And somehow I get the feeling you’re hoping whoever did Hamlin in is one of those who slipped through.”

“Yeah. With him holding it open.”

Chapter 13

Donnally noticed the letter-sized envelope protruding from under the doormat as he reached into his pocket to dig out his house keys. He bent down and rolled back the corner of the rubber pad, then squeezed the envelope by opposite edges and picked it up. The words printed on the paper inside showed through when he raised it up toward the porch light: “Follow the Money.”

What do you think I’m doing? was his first thought. His second was Who gave you the right to come to my house?

He unlocked the door of the two-story bungalow and followed the distant light through the living room and into the kitchen where Janie was working on her laptop at the table. Handwritten case notes from her psychotherapy sessions at Fort Miley lay next to it. He set the envelope on top of the newspaper lying on his side of the table, then kissed her on the forehead.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the envelope.

“A love letter from somebody who’s one step behind me, but who thinks they’re one step ahead.”

“Better for you than the other way around.”

Donnally made a point of scratching his head. “I’m not sure I understand that one.”

Janie smiled. “Ever since Freud and Jung, shrinks are allowed to be cryptic and nonsensical. It adds to our aura of enlightenment.” She pointed at the chair across from her and closed the laptop lid. “Tell me about your day. All I know is what’s been on TV.” Her smile transformed into a grin. “I kind of like the title special master, especially since in San Francisco it sounds kind of sexual. Dungeons. Dominatrices. And special masters.” She raised her eyebrows. “Did they give you a little whip?”

Donnally smiled back, holding up his empty hands, and then filled her in on what had happened since he’d climbed out of their bed at 4 A.M.

“I’ve got to handle Takiyah Jackson carefully,” Donnally said when he came to the end of the story and began to think about next steps. “I’m convinced that folie à deux really does capture her relationship with Hamlin.”

“Or maybe a folie à plusieurs,” Janie said. “A madness of many. He had lots of people willing to work for him and lots of attorneys willing to work with him, like Sheldon Galen.”

Donnally narrowed his eyes at her. “How do you know about Galen?”

“He was on the news. And not easily forgotten. He has a New York accent and a face like a greyhound.”

Janie paused in thought for a moment, then said, “ ‘Madness’ may be too strong a word, but I see why you’d latch on to it.”

Donnally felt himself stiffen and his stomach tighten. The problem with having a shrink as a girlfriend is the continuing risk of getting shrunk.

Janie stared at him. He knew she was waiting for permission to say what was on her mind. He nodded.

“It’s because you can’t accept that people like Hamlin feel morally justified in what they do.”

He knew she was right.

“I think that’s why you never really understood narcotics officers who planted drugs on gangsters and then committed perjury to make the cases stick. You always believed their motives were more basic, like it was only about power. Cons playing the part of cops. Same with Hamlin, you always thought attorneys like him were motivated by greed alone and they merely disguised their motives in moral language.”

Donnally always thought one of his strengths as a detective was that he never believed either cops’ or crooks’ justifications for their criminal offenses. Rather, he saw the crimes graphically and abstractly, like moves in a game, or as forms of self-deception or as attempts to justify the unjustifiable.

Janie hadn’t known him during those years. He had been referred to her after he was shot. It wasn’t that the department thought he’d gone nuts and needed treatment. It was just a requirement of the general orders that an officer who killed a suspect in the line of duty undergo a psych evaluation. He considered it a sign of his sanity that at the first meeting he decided he’d rather date her than get shrunk by her.

She ended up doing both, starting with the dating.

“I think that’s why you sometimes sound like you operate on a kind of mechanistic and reductionist theory of homicide and view them as motivated only by drugs, sex, or money.”

It was like she’d been sitting at the next table in the Golden Phoenix listening in, but in truth it was that she’d paid close enough attention over the years to be able to tell him how he saw the world, and why he did so.

“But I’m not sure you really believe that. It’s just that thinking in terms of power, of brute causes and effects, seems more honest to you than the way your father thinks about the world.”

Donnally felt himself tense. Every time Janie started down this kind of analytic road, his past washed over him like a flash flood, the storm triggered by the mention of his father. It made him feel like he’d spent too many years circling in an eddy.

He’d become a cop as a form of rebellion, and he recognized it at the time. It had been against his filmmaker father, a man who treated fiction as more real than fact because it made possible the evasion from responsibility he’d sought for most of his life. For his father, justice had been no more than a kind of fictive irony, a subversion of cause and consequence, of effect and responsibility, because real-world justice would’ve meant facing up to what he’d done to his older son. Donnally’s older brother had believed the propaganda his father had created as a press officer in Saigon during the Vietnam War. His father had falsely claimed that North Vietnamese regulars had massacred a group of Buddhist monks near the DMZ, and the lie not only provoked worldwide outrage, but persuaded his brother to enlist. He learned the truth—that the killers had been Korean mercenaries working for the U.S.—just days before he was killed in an ambush.

Years later, his father became a movie director, playing out his evasions on film, and liked to say that Hollywood wasn’t a place, but an idea, while Donnally had always thought of it as no more than a patch of concrete and viewed the motives of those who worked there as more base than artistic—and his father was proof of that. After all, what was post-Vietnam Hollywood, the years in which his father first achieved fame, but an escape from reality into drugs, sex, and money.