Donnally opened his eyes again and looked up at the bridge, at the spectators gazing down, their cell phone cameras taking pictures and videos.

This time he didn’t care what they saw, what they photographed, what they videoed.

Let the facts be known and the truth be seen.

Wasn’t that why Judge McMullin had appointed him?

And hadn’t the time now come?

Special master.

He did his job and found Hamlin’s killer, but he wasn’t sure what he’d mastered.

Helplessness sank into Donnally as he realized that all he’d discovered in the end were the steps and the path Hamlin had taken in becoming who he was, but not why he’d chosen to take them. And in his weariness, Donnally found himself fearing he’d simply run up against the limits of understanding human beings such as Hamlin and then anguishing over whether those limits were in himself or in the world.

And he sure hadn’t mastered the facts of what had happened soon enough—wasn’t sure even now he’d mastered them all—otherwise there wouldn’t be two dead bodies in front of him.

He thought of the words Goldhagen had spoken when they last stood in this spot. She’d been wrong. The shortest distance hadn’t been a straight line. It had been through a maze that took him not to the heart of the matter, but only back to where he’d started.

“Do you know why Ryvver was so determined to go after Hancock?” Goldhagen asked.

Donnally squinted against the swirling salt wind and looked up at Hancock’s inert body, his suit jacket flapping and his pant legs fluttering, the mountain climber’s rope quivering, and then he thought of Ryvver tightening the noose around Hamlin’s neck and later Hancock’s, and confronting Lange in between, drugging him and searching his files.

He realized his theory had been mistaken. She’d scattered Lange’s papers not because she was trying to destroy them in the fire, but because she’d been searching for something, maybe something she’d seen while she worked for him that had become meaningful when she’d interrogated and tortured Hamlin.

“I suspect she wanted a final confirmation Hancock was somehow responsible for Little Bud’s suicide,” Donnally said. “Either directly because it was one of his clients who rolled on Little Bud, or indirectly because he was Hamlin’s partner in the kind of evil that made Little Bud’s death inevitable.”

“But I don’t get why Hancock would come up to San Francisco,” Goldhagen said. “He must’ve suspected he might be walking into a trap.”

“My guess is something terrified him enough to make it worth the risk.”

Donnally thought of Sheldon Galen and Takiyah Jackson, the surviving links in the chains of wrongdoing, and of the Vietnamese holding a gun at his back in the parking garage, and of victims’ brothers and fathers, sisters and mothers, and of trials twisted by perjury and corrupted by manufactured evidence.

“It might even be the real reason Hamlin told Jackson to reach out to me if something happened to him. Maybe that’s what Ryvver found in Lange’s files and became her leverage against Hancock.”

Donnally sensed Goldhagen’s head turn toward him and felt her eyes lock on him.

His body stiffened. He met her gaze and shook his head.

“Don’t worry,” Goldhagen said. “I’m not even going to ask.”

Note to the Reader

I was surprised one day when an image came to me of Mark Hamlin hanging from the lighthouse on the roof of Fort Point. I had intended to limit him to the part of a role player in Act of Deceit, but that still image developed into a moving scene, and that scene transformed that first Harlan Donnally novel from a standalone into the beginning of a series.

Writers know much more about their characters than appears in the book, and often the depth of a minor character is shown only by implication. A Criminal Defense became an opportunity to put more of Hamlin, and those like him in the legal community, on the page.

Each Donnally book sets its story in a part of the American criminal justice system. Act of Deceit began with a systemic failure relating to how courts deal with defendants found incompetent to stand trial. A Criminal Defense deals with criminality on the defense side. And, after having leaned rather heavily on the defense in this novel, book three will rebalance the scales by looking at a corrupt prosecution.

While the particular events that Donnally discovers in A Criminal Defense are fictional, in the way of fiction they represent, and I hope bring home to my readers, a disturbing reality. One can debate whether truth, in fact, is stranger than fiction, but one of the advantages of the latter is that you get to push certain kinds of truth a little farther down the road it was already headed. In this book, that road was paved by the fictional life of Mark Hamlin and his overdetermined death.

Acknowledgments

I have been fortunate to again have had the benefit of readings of the manuscript by my wife, Liz, whose insights have made me a better writer and Harlan Donnally a deeper character. I owe special thanks to my sister Diane Gore-Uecker and my mother-in-law, Alice Litov, ceaseless supporters of my books, to Dennis Barley, whose thoughts about the first draft went a long way to improve the story, and to Myles Knapp, who was kind enough to read the manuscript far ahead of publication and comment on it in excellent detail. As an investigator, I had the benefit of working with some of the best, including my wife, Dennis, Trevor Patterson, Randy Schmidt, Rick Monge, and Nancie Huntington, whose professional and ethical standards were as high as the character Frank Lange’s were low. Thanks also to Susan Ryan at the River Reader in Guerneville, who let me rename her store and rearrange the fictional furniture for the sake of the plot, and to Gabe Robinson, who was kind enough to help with translations.

Thanks to my editor, Emily Krump at HarperCollins, who spotted gaps in the plot and in character development invisible to me that would have been all too visible and troubling to the reader. Thanks also to my copyeditor, Eleanor Mikucki, for her help in turning the obstacle course of my writing into a smoother run for the reader, my publicist, Katie Steinberg, for her enthusiasm and tireless support of my books, and to artist Alan Ayers and designer Tom Egner for the stunning cover. Finally, I appreciate more than I can say the countless readers who have sent such generous e-mails about both the Graham Gage and the Harlan Donnally books.

About the Author

STEVEN GORE is a former private investigator whose thrillers draw on his investigations of murder, fraud, money laundering, organized crime, political corruption, and drug, sex, and arms trafficking, in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Gore has been featured on 60 Minutes for his work and has been honored for excellence in his field. He is trained in forensic science and has lectured to professional organizations on a wide range of legal and criminal subjects. To find out more, please visit www.stevengore.com.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.