The Motive (62 page)

So Juhle spent the next three months on administrative leave, under the shadow of a murder charge. He testified four times before different city and police commissions, not including a formal session defending his actions and confronting Diehl in the chamber of the board of supervisors. He was asked to demonstrate his prowess with a handgun on various police ranges in San Francisco, Alameda, and San Mateo counties, where they had pop-up targets that demanded speed as well as accuracy.

Finally, a couple of months ago, he’d been cleared of any wrongdoing. Returning to his place in homicide, though—Manning was of course gone forever—he found himself newly partnered with an obviously political hire, Gumqui
Shiu, whose ten-year career didn’t seem to have included much real police work. He’d been an instructor at the Academy, worked in the photo lab, and been assigned to various other details, where his progress had been rapid but unmarked by any real accomplishment. He clearly had juice somewhere, but nobody seemed to know where it came from.

This morning, Juhle was at his desk. Insult to injury, he still had his right arm in the sling from arthroscopic rotator cuff surgery—three little holes. His doctor had told him it was an in-and-out-in-the-same-day procedure, little more than an office visit. He’d be pitching Little League practice again in no time.

Not.

Like he ever wanted to do that again, anyway. Little League was pretty much the reason he’d thrown out the damn arm in the first place, letting his macho devils con him into a little mano a mano with Doug Malinoff—perfect baseball name—the manager of Devin’s son Eric’s team, the Hornets. Doug was a good guy, really, if maybe slightly more competitive than your typical major-leaguer during the playoffs, talking Assistant Coach Devin into playing a game of “burnout” for the enjoyment of the kids. Give them a taste of what it’s like to
really
want to win.

Burnout’s a simple game for simple adults and pre-adolescent boys: You throw a baseball as hard as you can starting from, say, sixty feet. You use regular gloves, no ex-trapadded catcher’s mitts allowed, and you move a step closer after each round. First one to give up loses. Devin was no slouch as an athlete, having played baseball through college. He still had a pretty good gun of an arm. Nevertheless, he gave up, conceding defeat, after seven rounds, his opponent nearly knocking him down on his last throw from thirty-five feet. Malinoff had played shortstop in minor-league ball, made it to double-A. He could throw a baseball through a plywood fence.

Juhle caught the sixth toss not in the webbing but in the palm of the mitt. He never mentioned to a living soul and never would that on top of ruining his shoulder through his own stupidity on that cold and misty March day, he also allowed
Malinoff’s major-league fastball to break two bones in his
catching hand.

Since then, Juhle had been having confidence issues. He found it hard to convince himself that he was among the most brilliant homicide inspectors on the planet when at the same time he considered himself a certified idiot for going at it with Malinoff.

It was Tuesday morning, May 31, nine fifteen. June, just a day away, is synonymous with fog in San Francisco, and today Juhle couldn’t see the elevated freeway sixty yards to his left out the window. Awaiting the arrival of his partner, he was at his desk in the crowded, cramped, and yet wide-open room without interior walls that was the homicide detail on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. He was sipping his third cup of coffee this morning, his right arm and still untreated opposite hand—damned if he was going to let anybody know—both throbbing in spite of six hundred milligrams of Motrin every four hours for the past ten days. He turned to the second page of the transcription of a witness’s testimony in one of his cases that he was checking against the tape and suddenly took off his headphones, stood up, and made his way past the shoulder-high, battered green-and-gray metal files that served as room dividers, and stopped at the door of his lieutenant, Marcel Lanier, who looked up from his own paperwork.

“What’s up, Dev?”

“We gotta do something about the quality of people they hire, Marcel.”

Lanier, only fifty-some and yet still a hundred years with the department, scratched around his mouth. “That’s a song I’ve been singing for years. What kind of people this time?”

For an answer, Juhle handed him the printout he’d been reading. “You’ll see it,” he said.

Five seconds into his reading, Lanier barked out a one-note toneless laugh, then read aloud. “‘And what is your relationship with Ms. Dorset?’”

Juhle nodded. “That’s it. You don’t see a relationship like that every day.”

“He was her power mower?”

“Must have been, since it’s right there in black and white.”

“Her power mower?”

“Yeah, except maybe instead of
power mower
, what he actually said was that he was her ‘paramour.’” Juhle leaned against the doorpost. “And this is, like, mistake ten on one page, Marcel, not counting the big chunks that she has marked ‘unintelligible’ on the transcript, but that
I
can hear perfectly on the tape. Do they give an IQ test before we start paying these people? Of course, I’ve got to correct the transcript, anyway, but now it’s going to take me two days instead of an hour. It’d be quicker to write the whole goddamn thing out in longhand.”

Shiu floated up behind Juhle into the space left in the doorway. “What’s going to take two days?”

Lanier ignored both the arrival and the question. His phone rang and he picked it up. “Homicide, Lanier.” Frowning, suddenly all serious, he pulled over his yellow pad and started jotting. “Okay, got it. We’re moving.” Looking up at his two inspectors, he said into the phone, “Juhle and Shiu.” When he hung up, there was no sign that he’d ever laughed or thought anything in the world had been funny ever. “Either of you already signed out on a car?”

The inspectors shared a glance. “No, sir. Paperwork day,” Juhle said.

“Not anymore it isn’t. Grab a ride in a black-and-white downstairs,” he said, “and have ’em light it up out to Clay at”—he shot a quick look at his notes—“Lyon. Don’t pass go, guys. I’ll get word to the techs. I want a presence there yesterday. Somebody just killed a federal judge.”