Steven Gore - A Criminal Defense

And he was certain Hancock’s wouldn’t end with his.

“What’s the truth?” Goldhagen asked. “Did Hancock have anything to do with Little Bud?”

“Specifically,” Donnally said, “I don’t know. But generally, yes. He was part of Hamlin’s world, what made up his world. There was nothing he could say that would’ve saved him from Ryvver. As crazy as she was, she understood everything.”

Donnally closed his eyes, remembering Ryvver going over the railing, realizing now that she hadn’t screamed as she fell, and in those empty moments he’d felt the presence of her mothers. He’d called out Janie’s name, fearing a stray bullet had found her, wrenched by guilt until her voice reached out to him from the wind and rain.

Then came the scream. Jackson’s. And her sobbing that continued even into the ambulance that had taken her away.

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.”