Steven Gore - A Criminal Defense

“Check.”

That would mean the two were behind the van.

Mother Two leaned toward the rear and her body tensed like a sprinter.

Donnally grabbed her arm. “Take it easy.”

Navarro turned on the monitor and directed the video camera in the top vent toward the back.

“Cancel that. He’s too tall. She’s too heavy. . and they just separated.”

“Check.”

Mother Two settled back, her eyes moving, seeming to be searching for the trailing end of her last thought.

Finally, she sighed and looked at Navarro. “You know how it was back in those days. You’re old enough. I know you called people up in Guerneville to check up on me. They told me. And they told me you’re queer. What do you think those same shrinks would’ve said about you?”

“I know what they said about me.” Navarro gave her a hard look, like he was fighting off an invasion that had started at his professional life and had now moved into his private life, then his face softened and he said, “They said I could be cured.”

Another click. A different radio voice.

“I just spotted a Toyota Corolla. Dark. Like hers. Two-door heading up South Drive. Two people inside. Can’t make the plate yet.”

“Check.”

“Got the plate. Wrong one.”

“Switch to another channel,” Navarro said, “and run it for lost or stolen.”

The voice came back a minute later. “The plate is clear and matches the car. It’s not hers.”

“Check.”

Donnally thought of Frank Lange. He understood the reason and the mechanism, Ryvver drugging him, then searching his files for proof of the rolling scheme that took the life of Little Bud, then setting his house aflame.

“Did Ryvver have access to Rohypnol?” Donnally asked.

“A generic form. She was prescribed flunitrazepam for insomnia, but it had the reverse effect on her. Made her agitated and aggressive. She went off on my partner the day after Little Bud died. Hitting and scratching. Only after we threw her out did we do some research and figure out it might’ve been the drug.”

Mother Two sighed again.

“You’d think that after all these years, and all the psych drugs she’s been given, that we would’ve checked first.”

She looked at Donnally, her eyes seemed to deepen, then went dead, and she looked away.

He knew she’d just hit on the foundation of her daughter’s insanity defense: The drugs made her do it.

And he had no doubt that for the right price she’d be able to buy a lawyer like Hamlin and one of his hireling shrinks to sell it to a jury.

Three A.M. and Donnally was still staring at his bedroom ceiling and listening to pounding raindrops that had ridden the squalls up from the Pacific three blocks away and then swept down onto the neighborhood. He was hoping his phone would ring with the news that Hancock had been saved from Ryvver and Ryvver had been saved from herself.

His job as special master was over. He’d sat in the van for two hours feeling his court-appointed identity dissolve and watching himself return to who he was before Judge McMullin had signed the order.

Mark Hamlin’s death was solely a law enforcement issue. There was no privilege left to protect, and he and the judge had agreed he should back away. The arrest would be clean, and any admissions Ryvver made would be unimpeachable in court.

And he had realized he was now twice done with San Francisco, each time a decade apart, each time having broken free of the city’s vortex of crime and corruption.

Even now, he felt his stomach tighten with guilt when he thought of his pushing Janie out onto an ethical tightrope, pressuring her to extract information from Jackson. That they succeeded in the end wasn’t justification enough.

Listening to the crash of distant thunder and watching the ceiling strobe with faint lightning, he wondered whether he could convince Janie to move north with him to Mount Shasta and to take a job in the nearby VA clinic. Maybe that way they could narrow the circumference of their lives and free themselves from the kinds of contingencies that had pulled them into Hamlin’s.

Donnally felt a wrenching contraction of the world toward the California Academy of Sciences, then its expansion into the infinity of unknowing. He might be done fugitive hunting, but the fugitive hunter’s nightmare wasn’t done with him.

He thought about Ryvver’s two mothers, now together in the surveillance van praying she’d show up, and then about the girl murdered by Hamlin’s stalker client and his nouveau riche parents humiliated by the prosecution of their son, wanting to get it over with. Keep him off death row, but on the shelf for life. Make him old news as fast as possible and make the world forget.

His mind jumped back.

Humiliated.

Donnally sat up. Janie looked over. She, too, was still awake. He said the word aloud.

“You may be right,” Janie said. “And she now knows how to do it.”

They were in the car in three minutes and pulled into the Fort Point parking lot twelve minutes later. He’d called Navarro on the way. Donnally told Janie what his route up to the lighthouse would be, then left her to meet Navarro. He wanted to make sure Navarro or another officer didn’t shoot him by mistake in the darkness.

Donnally’s eyes adjusted slowly to the shadows under the bridge and his ears took in nothing but the gusts shuddering through the Golden Gate and the raindrops exploding on the water-sheeted pavement and the waves crashing onto the rocks below.

As he ran toward the fort he looked up at the dark lighthouse, backlit by city lights reflecting off the low clouds, a mass of black on top of a skeleton of angled steel.

And the bridge high and behind it, another skeleton, another black mass, headlights and halogens illuminating the surface like a sunset.

The two structures looked like dinosaurs. Mother and child.

Now soaked through his clothes, he made his way around the south end, not using his flashlight for fear of giving away his presence. He slowed, searching for the door through which Camacho had carried Hamlin’s corpse, feeling along the brick wall. His shoe hit something hard, he pitched forward, then caught himself, one hand on the ground, the other braced against brick, his hip once again torn with pain. He looked up as lightning shot across the sky and lit up a man-sized frame of metal ten feet away. He crept over to it and then reached past the edge, encountering the nothingness of the open door. He slid his hand down, and his fingers touched the hasp holes no longer filled by the padlock.

Ryvver had broken in for a second time.

With the premeditation required to trap Hancock and to again buy rope and a bolt cutter, Donnally didn’t see Ryvver-whoever her lawyer was and whatever medication she’d taken-obtaining a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.

There was no madness in her method.

Another burst of lightning bounced off the brick wall and the metal door. He ducked as something swung at him. It thunked against the doorjamb. He rushed the moving shadow behind it, hitting it low and taking the flailing body down. He heard a ringing of metal hitting concrete. He expected to hear Ryvver’s scream; instead it was Jackson swearing and pounding on his back.

“Let me go, you motherfucker. Let me go.”

Donnally got her into a headlock, his arms under hers and his hand braced against her neck.

“It’s me,” Donnally said.

Jackson stopped struggling.

“Why’d you take a swing at me?”

“I thought you were a security guard or a cop.”

Donnally released her and pushed himself up onto his knee.

“Is she inside?” Donnally asked.