The 7th Canon (5 page)

“I’ve been doing this job for better than twenty-five years. I got a dead body in a building,
not
a private residence; that makes the whole operation subject to search.”

Begley continued to direct his comments to O’Malley. “The crime took place in the recreation room across the hall. The priest keeps a bed in his office.”

“We don’t know where the crime took place,” Connor countered. “We found the body in the recreation room, but we also found drops of blood.”

“Not in the office, we didn’t,” Begley said.

Connor shifted in the chair. The thin fabric cushion offered little comfort for the deteriorating disc in his back, the pain a lingering reminder of a bullet still lodged near his spine. His back bothered him when he sat too long, lay too long, or stood too long. It always bothered him. Some mornings he couldn’t open his eyes without feeling as if someone had jolted him with five thousand volts of electricity. The Vicodin helped, but not enough. The Vicodin and Jameson’s, a lot of it, usually did the trick.

O’Malley rubbed her forehead as if fighting a headache. Dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked more like a Pacific Heights PTA mom than a cop. Thanks to a husband pulling in several hundred grand as an investment banker, that’s exactly the role she played. She spoke to Connor. “Were you concerned there was an imminent chance of evidence being destroyed?”

She sounded like a goddamn police manual. “When I enter a building and find a dead body,
everything
is possible evidence, and everyone present a suspect, a witness, or a problem. Who knows what they could have destroyed while we were getting a warrant?”

“Is that why you busted that kid’s jaw?” Begley said.

Connor glared at him. “He isn’t a kid. He’s eighteen. And he attacked a police officer.”

“Rambo here hit one of the residents with a nightstick. The kid’s at SF General.”

Connor shook his head. “I thought he was going for the gun. And he isn’t a resident. He works there.”

O’Malley put up a hand and nodded to the door. “You can go, John. Get started on the paperwork. Keep me apprised. The press is already calling. So is the brass.”

Begley left the office without looking back.

“Where’s the priest now?” O’Malley asked.

Connor fingered his father’s Marine Corps ring, spinning it on his finger. “Bryant Street,” he said, referring to the jail.

“Why’d they take him in to General?”

“He broke his wrist.”

“How?”

“Unknown.”

“Who was the first officer on scene?” she asked.

“Cameron.”

“Scott? How’d the call come in?”

“Anonymous source. Likely a pay phone on Polk. Don’t have the tape yet, but the operator said it was short. ‘There’s a dead body in the shelter.’ Something like that.”

O’Malley paused. “I take it the kid in the hospital isn’t talking?”

Connor shrugged. “Ain’t a kid.”

“Is he talking, or isn’t he?”

“His jaw’s busted, and they won’t let us near him.”

“Any other witnesses?”

He couldn’t hide a smile. She really didn’t know shit. “They scatter like ghosts, those kids; I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

O’Malley shook her head. “You’ve testified a hundred times.”

“Seventy-eight.”

“Then tell me why you would go in a locked office if we had a secure building? Why give the defense attorney something to argue? Why not wait for the warrant?”

“I told you why.”

She pushed back her chair and stood. “I’m trying to work with you here. If the door was locked, you should have waited for a warrant. I don’t need to tell you that.”

“No . . . you don’t.”

O’Malley stared at him. “Internal Affairs needs to look into the kid with the broken jaw and sort this out.”

“Are you suspending me, Aileen?”

“Enjoy the holiday.”

“I’m not using my personal days. You want me gone, suspend me.”

“Fine,” she said. “Leave your badge and gun on your desk.”

Connor stood. His back ached like it was on fire. He thought of a number of things to say, but none were as good as what he wanted to do. He wanted to grab Aileen O’Malley right between the legs. The look on her face would be the final Kodak moment in a scrapbook spanning twenty-five years, but he wasn’t going to make it that easy for them. She’d suspended him, his prelude to retirement, and that little bullet would be his gold mine. A full pension and disability, unlike his father, whom they’d kicked to the curb. That was the only reason he didn’t grab her. His father.

“You have a Merry Christmas, Lieutenant,” he said.

Donley stepped from the cab onto Bryant Street and looked up at the heavy gray clouds cloaking the city. The chilled morning air seeped through his suit jacket. “Here we go again,” he said.

For the past three years, Donley had felt like he’d stepped onto a treadmill operating at high speed. It had started the day he’d taken the oath to be a lawyer at city hall. Lou shook his hand, handed him a file, and told him he had his first trial in municipal court. It had been only a traffic-crash dispute, and the trial lasted all of an hour, but Donley had not had a clue what he was doing. Still, he’d managed to get through it and prevail. When he’d returned to the office that afternoon, Lou had family and friends waiting and a spread of food.

“That trial was your baptism by fire,” Lou had said. “You’ll never be less prepared, but you did it. Now, you know you can handle anything. There’s nothing like standing in front of twelve people with your ass hanging in the wind.”

When the pace in the office seemed out of control, Lou just worked harder. “You’ll have time to rest when you’re at Crosby-N. Gray,” he’d say, referring to a well-known local funeral parlor. Donley just hoped he didn’t get there sooner than he wanted. The long hours were killing him, especially with Benny now old enough to do more than eat and poop. Benny and Kim were the reasons Donley had kept Max Seager’s business card, and why it was now burning a hole in his pocket. He intended to call Seager’s assistant and set up a meeting for after the holidays. He owed it to his family. They needed the money. They could buy a home on the peninsula, and Benny could go to a better school.

Donley hurried up the steps of the Hall of Justice, a concrete monolith as long as a city block and as gray as the sky, with small cubed windows and absolutely no architecturally redeeming qualities. The building housed the offices of the San Francisco Chief of Police, the Homicide Division, the District Attorney’s Office, the County Medical Examiner, and the criminal courts.

According to the article in the
Chronicle
Donley had read on the cab ride from the office, Father Thomas Martin had opened a shelter for teenage prostitutes and runaways who sold themselves in an area of the Tenderloin referred to as The Polk Gulch. Police had not released details of Father Martin’s arrest, but the reporter cited anonymous sources and reported that the body of a young, white male had been found in a bloodied manger at the shelter.

Donley had shuddered at the image that description conjured, and thinking about it made him shiver again as he entered the building.
Just get the five
w
’s. Get in and get out,
he told himself.

Ruth-Bell instructed Donley to ride the elevator to the sixth floor and cross a catwalk connecting the Hall of Justice to the county jail. She explained that once jailed, a suspect never left the building prior to being arraigned and making bail. Father Martin wouldn’t be given that option. No judge in San Francisco who wanted to be reelected would grant bail to someone suspected of the brutal slaying of a youth.

After finding the right department and identifying himself, Donley followed a beefy sheriff’s deputy, everything coordinated so no two doors remained open at the same time. A sterile corridor led to an interior catwalk above an open pavilion. Below, men walked about freely in bright-orange jumpsuits, the noise echoing up at Donley like engines humming inside a metal drum. With it came an odor that reminded him of the smell he’d once endured wedged up against a homeless man on a crammed Muni bus.

As they approached the end of the hall, another deputy stood from a plastic chair and peered inside a narrow, wire-mesh window, then scribbled a note on a log posted to the door.

“What’s that for?” Donley asked.

“Suicide watch,” the deputy said. “Your boy is out of it; hasn’t said a word since he was brought in.”

The officer put a hand on the doorknob and signaled a guard in the tower to disengage the lock. The deputy who’d escorted Donley said, “I need to go through your briefcase.”

Donley handed over his briefcase. His mouth had become dry, and he felt nauseated and light-headed, likely from too much coffee on an empty stomach. The officer removed all of his pens, except one.

“Make sure you come out with it,” he said, without the need to elaborate.

The door lock buzzed. The deputy pulled it open and slid the blue plastic chair into the room. Donley stepped in but abruptly stopped. The man sitting with his feet folded beneath him on a thin mattress of a metal-framed bed didn’t look like any priest he’d ever seen. He looked like a comic-book villain. He had his head tilted back against the cinder-block wall, eyes closed, and he’d lowered the orange, jail-issued coveralls to his waist, revealing a white tank top. A fresh cast on his left arm extended to his elbow, stopping inches below the tattoo of a bird of prey.

Donley looked back to the door, thinking this had been some sort of mistake, but he did not see the deputies through the glass. He slid the chair across the floor, hoping the noise would get a response, but the priest’s eyes remained closed. Donley didn’t know if the man was sleeping, sedated, deliberately ignoring him, or preparing to jump off the bed and rip his throat out.

“Father Martin?”

Donley heard the hush of the ventilation system circulating air through a ceiling grate, though the air in the room felt stifling. He wiped trickles of sweat from his temples. “Father Martin, can you hear me?”

Father Martin opened his eyes, two black pools of ink, but it was brief. He closed them again.

A tiny movement caught Donley’s attention. Father Martin had pressed the index finger of his right hand to his thumb. After several moments, the thumb moved to the ring finger. Donley reconsidered the priest’s face and noticed his lips moving, ever so slightly. Had Donley not seen his mother’s lips do the same thing for so many years, he might not have recognized the act. The priest was praying the rosary, keeping track of the prayers on his fingers: one Our Father, ten Hail Mary’s, one Glory Be. Five decades.

Donley knew each prayer by heart. His mother had recited those prayers every night, her voice drifting down the hall to his room as a faint whisper.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus . . .”

A chill ran down his spine. He hadn’t thought of that in years.

He shook the recollection. “Father Martin, I’m Peter Donley.” His voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere outside his body.

The priest moved his thumb to the next finger.

The car engine sputtered and died at the curb. Donley, still a child, heard it and slid quickly from the mattress and scurried beneath his bed. His mother’s voice grew louder, the rhythm of her prayers intensifying.

“Hail Mary, full of grace
 
. . .”

Donley tried again to shake the recollection. “Father Martin, I need to ask you a few questions.”

“The Lord is with thee . . .”

The front door to the house opened and slammed shut.

A bad night.

Just get the five
w
’s.
“Father Martin?”

“Blessed art thou among women . . .”

His father’s heavy work boots thundered up the stairs. Donley slid to the farthest corner, pressing his palms tight against his ears.

“And blessed is the fruit of thy womb . . .”

The first hit sounded like a sharp snap, the crack of a whip.

His mother cried out in pain, pleading.

Sweat trickled down Donley’s face. The scar on his cheek, the one the plastic surgeons had turned into a thin white line, burned numb. His chest heaved, but it brought no air. He couldn’t catch his breath. Couldn’t breathe. The walls began to close in. The floor tilted and turned.

Panic attack.

Donley stood, toppling the plastic chair.

The priest’s eyes opened—dark, inhuman.

Donley moved unsteadily to the door, pounding on the glass. When the door didn’t immediately open, he felt his face flush and his legs weaken. About to knock again, Donley pulled back his hand when the guard appeared and motioned to the tower. Donley heard the lock disengage. The door swung open. He stepped past the guard into the hall, sucking in air, ripping loose the knot of his tie, and undoing the button of his collar.

The deputy looked confused. “You done already?”