The police officers association supported her, but not with enthusiasm, as they weren’t ready to wean themselves from the political cover of always having someone else to blame for their low case-closure percentages and the court’s low conviction rates.

It wasn’t that San Francisco was the murder capital of California, just that it was the city in which murderers were most likely to get away with it.

And for those times when there was neither the district attorney nor the police department to blame, there was always Mark Hamlin and others like him in the defense bar.

“There’s nothing we can do to Hamlin that’s any worse than what was done to him this morning,” Goldhagen said. “But whether or not his death is connected to any of his clients, we’ll kick down any door to get to whoever did it.”

“That’s rule number three,” McMullin said. “You’ll refer any potential cases arising out of this investigation to the state attorney general for prosecution.”

Goldhagen folded her arms across her chest. “You can’t force—”

“Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?” Donnally said. “For all we know, his death has nothing to do with his work and all to do with his private life. I don’t know all the things Hamlin was up to. The condition of his body suggests some possibilities, but no more than that. Maybe we can narrow them when we open up his apartment.”

Donnally saw Navarro look down. He noticed Goldhagen had also spotted the motion. They both turned toward him.

“Don’t tell me you’ve already gone inside?” Donnally said. “You led me to believe your people just checked for forced entry and looked in through the windows.”

“We had to make sure there weren’t other victims in there,” Navarro said, looking first at Donnally, then at the judge. “I promise, Your Honor”—he raised his hand as though swearing an oath—“the officers didn’t touch anything. Just glanced around and sealed up the place.”

The irony of SFPD’s breaking into Hamlin’s apartment rose up before all of them. It was exactly the sort of illegal search Hamlin had exploited a hundred times to force courts to dismiss otherwise provable crimes. And now that same violation might taint the prosecution of Hamlin’s own killer.

Donnally heard Goldhagen mumble a few words.

“What did you say?” Donnally asked.

“I said it’s poetic justice.”

Donnally pushed himself to his feet. “And I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

“Look,” Navarro said, his voice rising, “if we didn’t go inside and there was a victim bleeding out in there, we’d look like idiots for not doing it.”

“By that logic,” McMullin said, “you’d have the right to search every apartment in San Francisco.” He pointed at Donnally, now sliding back his chair in order to make his way to the door. “Hold on.” He then asked Navarro, “Have officers also broken into Hamlin’s office?”

“His assistant opened up the place and let them do a sweep.” Navarro looked up at Donnally. “You would’ve done the same thing when you had my job.” Then at the judge. “Until you issue the order making him special master, it’s my case and I’m responsible. I didn’t want it on my conscience if somebody died on Hamlin’s kitchen floor waiting for that to happen.”

“Consider the order issued.”

“Don’t I have anything to say about it?” Donnally asked, knowing he had a choice, but also now understanding that he probably wasn’t going to exercise it.

When he left police work, he’d taken some unanswered questions with him. Some had come to him while he was on the job, but the more fundamental ones he’d brought with him from a nightmarish childhood in Hollywood, ones he’d hoped a career in the world of brute fact and rough justice would answer.

And he wasn’t going to deceive himself about it. He understood the reason he’d accept the appointment wasn’t because he cared all that much about who killed Hamlin, except in the abstract sense that killers must be caught. It was more that he’d never understood lawyers like Hamlin, and maybe this was his chance to get an understanding of what was satisfied in them by corrupting the criminal justice process. To understand why the kind of deceit that would’ve outraged Hamlin, if he had been a victim, was just a harmless game when he inflicted it on others. To understand why his deceptions seemed to justify all other deceptions, by judges, by police, and by prosecutors.

Or maybe he’d get an answer to another question, one that asked whether Hamlin was a product of a system he’d joined or one of its creators. A chicken-both-before-and-after-the-egg scheme of organized deception that already had Navarro lying to him about searching Hamlin’s apartment.

McMullin pointed at Donnally’s chair. “Sit down. It’s no harm, no foul.”

“You sure?”

They all looked at Navarro, who hesitated a beat, then said, “I’m sure.”

“I think we need a rule number four,” McMullin said. “Just to make sure there is no harm in the future and we risk no more fouls.” He looked at Donnally. “No dipping into Hamlin’s attorney-client privileged materials unless you have very strong reason—”

“Probable cause?” Donnally asked.

“That’s too high a standard. Just a strong reason to believe one of his clients or other people involved in his cases are connected to his death and that evidence relevant to that reason might be contained in his files.”

The judge looked from face to face.

“Can we all live with that?”

Chapter 4

Mark Hamlin’s assistant gazed dead-eyed across the conference table at Donnally and Navarro in Hamlin’s tenth floor office near San Francisco City Hall. Takiyah Jackson held her fifty-year-old face firm, fortresslike. Only her forefinger tapping the legal pad in front of her betrayed emotion. To Donnally, she looked like Angela Bassett in the Tina Turner movie, facing Ike at the divorce trial, ready to take what would come and prepared to walk away with nothing.

A dozen framed courtroom sketches hung on the plaster wall behind her, all depicting Hamlin in action. More were spaced on the other walls. With Hamlin dead, the room seemed to Donnally to be more like a makeshift shrine than a meeting place.

In one drawing, his arm was raised in a frozen jab at a witness.

In another, fists braced against his hips, Hamlin glared at a prosecutor standing with his palms pressed against his chest in a plea to the judge.

Donnally tensed when he recognized two scenes from his days at SFPD. The chalk one on the left showed Hamlin standing in front of a jury and pointing at Donnally sitting in the witness box.

People v. Darnell Simpson.

A twenty-year leader of the Black Guerilla Family, Simpson had murdered a Mexican Mafia member in the county jail where they were both awaiting trial. It was a dead-bang-caught-on-video-slash-the-victim’s-throat-from-behind-willful-premeditated-just-like-the-penal-code-says-first-degree-murder—except that Hamlin had paid off a psychologist to say that due to Simpson’s history of childhood abuse, confirmed during trial testimony by his guilt-ridden, weeping mother, he mistakenly thought he was about to be attacked and therefore struck first.

Under California law, a jury’s factual conclusion of mistaken self-defense requires a verdict of voluntary manslaughter, not murder, because there can be no malice involved. And that was the jurors’ factual conclusion. Simpson received a sentence with a parole date, seventeen years, instead of life with no possibility of release that he deserved.

A year later, Donnally learned the weeping mother had actually been Simpson’s aunt, recruited to play the role by a private investigator working for Hamlin. By that time, she’d been murdered in a drug deal gone bad. The PI then pled the Fifth during the grand jury investigation, Hamlin professed innocence, and the law of double jeopardy meant the defendant couldn’t be tried again.