Donnally himself didn’t know. And the fact that he didn’t worried him.

“The judge and I will both give you cover,” Goldhagen said.

“I don’t see how that’s possible. You’ll be too busy trying to give yourself cover. I’ll look tainted from the get-go and it’ll slop back on you and the investigation.”

Goldhagen gestured toward the enclosure. “Without you jumping in now, we may not be able to get to the heart of this investigation for days and days.” She glanced at Navarro as if anticipating his disagreement with what she would say next. “I don’t believe in the so-called forty-eight-hour rule. I think it’s bullshit. Especially in this case, with Hamlin’s history and the number of enemies he’s made over the years. But I do believe it’s foolish to give a killer time to wipe away his tracks.”

“Nice try,” Donnally said, “but you’ll have to find someone else. Ask the attorney general to send somebody from Sacramento. I’m not indispensable.”

“No, you’re not,” Goldhagen said. “You’re convenient. His assistant said he left a letter in his desk drawer authorizing you to look at his files. And the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It would be idiotic to go the long way.”

“Look, man,” Navarro said, turning to face Donnally. “The one thing we know is that Hamlin brought this on himself.”

“That’s a helluva leap,” Donnally said.

Navarro ignored him. “And evidence about how he did it is probably in his office.”

“Probably,” Goldhagen said. “That’s the operative word. And ‘probably’ is not probable cause, and without probable cause there’s material relating to his death in there, we don’t have the basis for a search warrant. Sounds to me like Hamlin trusted you to develop that basis in a way that protects his clients.”

Donnally glanced over at Goldhagen. “You’ve got me confused with somebody else. I have no interest in protecting his clients.”

“Maybe you don’t, but I have to and so does the court—at least until I can get them convicted. Unless we do it by the book, some of them will walk. And the public will rightfully crucify me.”

Navarro made a show of peering at his watch by the diffused light of the cloud-curtained daybreak showing itself behind the East Bay hills.

“The clock is ticking.”

But Donnally knew that’s not what he meant.

The fact was that like Goldhagen, Navarro understood that from this moment, in the small town that was San Francisco, his name would be forever connected to Hamlin’s. And the detective dreaded heading into an investigation into the death of a man he despised while straitjacketed by rules that man had abused in life.

Chapter 2

Dr. Youssef Haddad pointed down at Mark Hamlin’s naked body lying covered by a plastic sheet on the stainless steel gurney in the medical examiner’s autopsy lab.

The two gangsters whose overnight murders had delayed the forensic team’s arrival at Fort Point flanked him. Neither the humming exhaust fan nor the odor of disinfectant could suppress the stench of excrement and urine released from the bodies in death.

“O propheta, certe penis tuus cælum versus erectus est.”

“Sorry?” Donnally glanced over at the pathologist.

“O prophet, thy penis is erect unto the sky.”

“A prophet or the Prophet.”

“The. According to the historian Abulfeda, the Imam Ali proclaimed it upon seeing the corpse of the Prophet Mohammed.”

Donnally had never heard the quote before, but he’d seen the condition a few times while he was with SFPD and the name came back to him. Priapism. In homicide investigation training it had been described as a persistent erection. He couldn’t watch Viagra television commercials without thinking of its other names. When produced after execution by hanging or by strangling, it was called a death erection or angel lust.

Although the Latin words were spoken in neither irony nor sarcasm, Donnally was surprised a Muslim doctor would even mention Mohammed in this context. Maybe he was only trying to say it was so natural even the Prophet was subject to it.

The doctor pursed his lips and said, “Saints and sinners alike can be humiliated, even after death.”

Haddad was one of the few pathologists Donnally had ever met who hadn’t lost or repressed his tragic sense, neither fearing it nor wearing it like a hair shirt.

Donnally nodded toward Hamlin’s body, the sheet tented by his erection. “Premortem or post?”

“The fact that it may be post doesn’t exclude the possibility it began before he died. He might’ve taken an erectile dysfunction medication. The tox results will tell.”

Haddad exposed Hamlin’s head and shoulders.

“But that’s not why I asked you to follow the body over here.”

The swishing double doors announced the arrival of Detective Navarro, now dressed in surgical scrubs. His protective goggles and respirator mask, hanging by elastic straps around his neck, bounced against his chest as he crossed the room.

Navarro nodded at Donnally as he walked up, and then grinned and said to Haddad, “Nothing like a little slice and dice in the morning.”

The detective hadn’t rubbed his hands together, but had nonetheless sounded to Donnally as though he was about to sit down in front of a Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast.

Haddad looked over at Navarro. The doctor wasn’t smiling. His tight mouth communicated his disapproval of those who chose to escape from the horror of violent death into macabre linguistic dances of irony or burlesque.

“That line is getting old,” Haddad said.

In Navarro’s continuing grin, Donnally saw Navarro hadn’t grasped the comment wasn’t directed at the line as much as at Navarro himself.

Haddad gestured with his scalpel toward two ligature marks around Hamlin’s neck. One ran just above his Adam’s apple and circled his neck like a collar. The other looped under his chin and angled upward behind his ears and disappeared into his black hair.

Haddad pointed from one to the other.

“You can tell from the lack of blood in the abrasions in this diagonal one that it occurred after death.”

“You think he was strangled from behind?” Donnally asked. “Then strung up?”

Haddad nodded. “That’s my theory, but we’ll only know for certain after I shave off his hair to look for bruising and after I open him up and examine the back of his head and neck.”

Donnally leaned down to inspect the marks. An undercurrent of lavender flowed beneath the churning stench of cleaning fluid. He glanced at Navarro.

“Smell that.”

Navarro bent over and took a sniff.

“Soap. Some kind of scented soap.” Navarro looked at Donnally as he straightened up and said without a smile, “Smells like somebody washed him off before they hung him out to dry.”

Donnally considered that crack to be Navarro’s second strike. He’d never met a competent homicide detective who made a habit of gallows humor. He’d always found it was the outward expression of a counterproductive kind of imagination, one that tended to take the detective off course, diverting him away from a mental cause-and-effect re-creation of the events that led to the death.

He’d been willing to give Navarro a break because, at least for the moment, sarcasm had been better than his expressing outright the hatred cops felt toward Hamlin, something that might be quoted later and would cast doubt on the integrity of the investigation.

But twice was enough, and he didn’t want to fight Navarro all the way through the case.

Donnally glared at Navarro while holding up two fingers and shaking his head. The detective spread his arms as he raised his eyes toward the ceiling, then looked back and nodded in surrender.