The Rule of Law Page 20

  Juhle gave her a baleful eye. “You’re talking Marine Corps Reserve colonel Mike Wendler? The single most tenacious, irreverent, and politically incorrect homicide prosecutor on the planet?”

  “The same,” Ike said. “Twenty years on the job, unbeaten in court, and never made head of the unit because they can’t let him out in public without fear of massive embarrassment.”

  Beth added, “We started to explain how the case was all screwed up by the previous arrest and he said ‘To hell with it, this guy’s guilty of murder and I’m going to charge him.’ ”

  Juhle nodded. “I hope you explained the kind of trouble he was walking into.”

  “We did,” Ike said. “You know what he said? And this is a quote, Dev: ‘Will there be gunfire? Because it’s only trouble if somebody’s shooting at you.’ ”

  “Okay,” Juhle said. “But he could be fired for this.”

  “As if he cares,” Beth said. “Word is he’s going to retire in a few months anyway, and if they fire him first, the severance package with his seniority would be more than a year’s pay. So, bottom line, I’ve got to believe that, since it’s now in the system in front of God and everybody, Jameson’s stuck with it.”

  “Well, one way or the other,” Juhle said, “all I’m saying is you might want to skip the courtroom this morning and lie low for a while, let the political side of this blow over and revert to business as usual. Give Mr. Jameson time to formulate some kind of response to cover himself. Maybe he’ll even apologize or—”

  Beth snorted with derision. “As if.”

  “It’s not impossible. Maybe he’ll learn something from all this.”

  “Maybe,” Ike shot back, “he’ll flap his arms and fly to the moon.”

  Juhle gave them a reluctant but acknowledging nod. “Well, either way, you don’t want to rock his boat too much. If I were either of you, I’d make it a point to stay out of his sight.”

  “Dev, come on,” Beth said, “what’s he going to do to us in the real world?”

  “I don’t think you want to find out.”

  Beth and Ike exchanged a look.

  “What?” Juhle asked.

  Beth shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “You want my opinion,” Juhle said, “that’s a pretty loud nothing.” He sipped some coffee. “How about if I say ‘Pretty please’?”

  The answer seemed to fall to Ike and he spoke up. “We had so much fun with this one, and it turned out so well, we’ve been talking about taking a look at another cold case.”

  “How cold?”

  “Couple of years.”

  “Actually, it’s not really, technically, a cold case. It’s more like this one, where they closed it but we think they got the wrong guy.”

  “We know that they got the wrong guy,” Beth put in. “We—not me personally, but the department—we got the wrong guy.”

  “That would be me you’d be talking about, then.” Juhle’s tone had picked up some asperity.

  “No, it’s all of us who went along,” Beth said.

  “And who’s your new bad guy?” Juhle asked. “And while we’re at it, meanwhile, where is this wrong guy now, in prison? In which case you could just turn it over to the Innocence Project and get him out in a few years.”

  “That would be a good idea,” Beth said, “except in this other case the alleged perp isn’t in prison, because before we could get him he killed himself.”

  “Those pesky damn suicides.” The light finally coming on for Juhle, he squirmed a bit in his chair and lowered his voice. “You’re talking Peter Ash.”

  Beth nodded. “Yes, sir. I am indeed. And Geoff Cooke, since they’re related, if you’re keeping score.”

  “I am, and let me just say for the record that that’s a really awful idea.”

  “We just want to talk again to a few people,” Ike said.

  “Same kind of thing we did in this case,” Beth added. “See where it leads us.”

  “If memory serves, and I believe that it does,” Juhle said, his voice now barely above a whisper even in the nearly empty room, “at one point you were talking about Mr. Jameson himself as a viable suspect in that investigation.”

  “That’s correct.” Beth was leaning in across the table to hear him. “But then Mr. Cooke’s suicide knocked that off the rails. Except that I think there’s still a hell of a lot of doubt about whether it was, in fact, a suicide.”

  “Didn’t Patel”—this was Dr. Amit Patel, the medical examiner—“call it a suicide?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “Suicide/homicide equivocal.” She pressed on. “So to say that there was no doubt is actually not too accurate.”

  “So essentially you’re saying that you want to pursue your investigation into Mr. Jameson regarding Mr. Cooke’s death?”

  “Not exactly.” Beth looked over at her partner, got a nod, and went ahead. “My gut feeling, Devin—and it’s gut but not uninformed—is that Jameson’s wife, Kate, realized that I was on the verge of arresting her husband for Ash’s murder . . .”

  “Really? On the verge?”

  Beth nodded. “This close. I think I can build a convictable case on Kate, who had no alibi for the time Cooke was killed. And once we get her for Cooke, we go after Jameson himself for Ash.”

  “I’ve looked over her file,” Ike said, “and it’s complicated, but the evidence is all there. We think if we get some of Kate’s story on record, she’s going to trip herself up.”

  “Like our witnesses here on Valdez,” Beth added.

  Juhle finally straightened up on his bench, picked up his coffee, then put it back down. “And what, may I ask, is going to induce this woman Kate to talk to you about this again when it’s already closed and ancient history and her husband is the goddamn DA?”

  “She used to be a friend of mine, Devin. We were college roommates. I can get her to talk to me, and I’ll have a wire.”

  “And she’ll just give it up?”

  “Not so much that as she’ll make a mistake, yes. She’s arrogant and competent, but naïve. She’d never believe I’d do something so underhanded as to trick her by wearing a wire. She might even be tempted to actually admit what she did.”

  Juhle nodded. “So let me get this straight: you want to go interview the wife of the city’s district attorney and get her to confess on tape.”

  Beth nodded back at him. “And even if that doesn’t happen, Devin, she’ll contradict something she said earlier and we’ll get to chip away at that until we break her story.”

  “And what about when her husband comes home that night and she says, ‘Hi, honey, guess who came by today for a little chat about the death of Peter Ash?’ Then what do you think happens to you two, aside from probably losing your jobs?”

  “He wouldn’t dare,” Beth said.

  “You’re saying Ron Jameson—our own Ron Jameson—wouldn’t care if you interrogated his wife? I would beg to differ.”

  But Ike was shaking his head. “He can’t fire us without looking like he’s guilty, Dev. So right now, on the heels of Valdez, we’ve got a window where we can go at him.”

  Juhle sulked for a few seconds. “You really think he’s a killer, Beth? Our elected DA is a stone-cold killer?”

  “Absolutely. And so’s his wife.”

  Juhle rubbed his forehead. “Jesus.” Letting out a heavy breath, he held up a hand for a moment, as though trying to stop the onslaught. “If you’ve got a file with righteous evidence,” he said, “the way to proceed is we need to get in touch with the attorney general’s office or the FBI, or both. I contact them, not either of you, and we give them what we’ve got so they can start their own investigation. Good?”

  “No,” Beth said. “I really want this one, Dev. I’ve been dealing with this stuff for the past couple of years and I need some closure on it.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s simply not happening. What’s going to happen is we’ve got to stay completely out of any investigation like this
one. That’s the only way it will work: objective and thorough. And no nonsense at all about you deciding to talk to your old roommate, wire or no wire. That’s just not in the cards. But meanwhile I’ve got to think about the timing on this.”

  Beth nodded but clearly didn’t like it. “Whatever you do, Dev, quicker would be better.”

  “Jesus.” Juhle hung his head and sighed again. Glancing at his watch seemed to galvanize him. “Well,” he said, “time flies and all when you’re having fun. And I still think it’s a lousy idea, but if you’re still going to court, you’ve only got about five minutes. You’d better be jammin’.”

  • • •

  NOT THAT THE coffee was particularly good, but Juhle lingered to finish his tepid cup and pay the check. He wanted to give his inspectors a head start so he wouldn’t have to continue arguing with them about what had already given him a headache.

  He wasn’t any kind of a fan of Ron Jameson, but the idea that the man might in actual fact be a killer had never really crossed his mind. It was true that the “CityTalk” column hadn’t painted him in a very sympathetic light, but on the scale of acceptable behavior among elected officialdom there was a vast difference between bureaucratic incompetence, arrogance—even corruption—and murder.

  To say nothing of what could happen to him personally: not just his job, but—if he was going to go paranoid—his physical safety if he pursued this investigation into the city and county’s chief law enforcement officer.

  Lost in these thoughts and walking outside into the bright and cold morning, he had stepped off the curb and started to jaywalk across Bryant without so much as a glance toward the oncoming traffic on his left, when an earsplitting honking of a horn threw him backward and almost knocked him over a quarter of a second before a black Ford F-250 pickup went whizzing by where he’d just been standing as somebody yelled out the passenger window: “Watch where you’re going, asshole!”

  When he caught his breath, he walked down to the crosswalk and waited for the light to change. He was still shaken when he got to the metal detector station just inside the entrance of the Hall of Justice and the cop there looked him up and down and asked him, “Was that you and that truck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Close one.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah. Maybe a lot older than I was a minute ago.”

  “Jaywalking’s not a good idea.”

  “Never again.” Juhle picked up his gun and his keys from the box where he’d put them.

  By the time he got off the elevator on the interminable rise to the fourth floor, his breath had more or less returned to normal. He said hello to Marta, the receptionist parked out in front of the hallway back to his office, and she gave him an ambiguous look that he took as a warning and prompted him to lean over and ask quietly, “Everything all right?”

  She swallowed. “The chief’s gone on back.”

  “The chief?”

  “Of police,” Marta clarified.

  “Chief Lapeer?” he asked unnecessarily, since there weren’t two chiefs of police.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Walking around the corner to his short hallway, he saw that the door was open even though he—as always—had left it closed when he’d gone out.

  So she’d let herself in.

  A visit from the chief was unusual, to say the least. Vi Lapeer had been to his office no more than four times in his years as lieutenant of Homicide, and every other time she had come, it was not to party.

  He steeled himself and walked through the door.

  Chief Lapeer was an African American woman now in her mid-fifties. She had been an assistant chief in Philadelphia before landing in San Francisco and did not suffer gracefully the passage of the years. She wore a short graying Afro, her dress uniform at all times, and—except for a light touch of lipstick—no makeup to hide her face’s spatter of freckles.

  She had been sitting on the corner of Juhle’s desk and stood as soon as she saw him.

  Stopping his forward motion, he snapped to attention and gave her a quick salute. “Chief,” he said.

  She nodded. “Lieutenant.” Ostentatiously consulting her wristwatch, she added, “Banker’s hours today?”

  At the inauspicious opening, Juhle cleared his throat. “I was with a couple of inspectors over at Lou the Greek’s, ma’am. If I’d have known you were coming by, I would have cut that meeting short. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I’m afraid it’s not good news. Would you like to come in and sit down?”

  Since his legs had gone a little weak under him with the “not good news” disclaimer, he decided to take her up on her offer. Coming abreast of her and then past, he took one of the small fold-up chairs that sat between the whiteboard wall and his desk. Looking up at her where she stood, he adopted a neutral expression. “So what’s up?” he asked.

  “What’s up is the question of how you’ve been running this detail lately, which I’m afraid has been unacceptable. No doubt you’ve read or at least heard about the ‘CityTalk’ column in yesterday’s Chronicle?”

  “Sure.”

  “Perhaps you’ll remember that the column described how inspectors under your supervision decided on their own initiative to continue with an investigation that had already been closed because a suspect had already been indicted by the grand jury and apprehended.”

  “Except that that suspect turned out to be not guilty, ma’am.”

  “I don’t think that’s been established by any means, Lieutenant.”

  “With all respect, ma’am, we have a far more legitimate suspect in custody for the same crime who’s probably being arraigned as we speak.”

  “Who is still presumed innocent, although that’s not the point, either.”

  “My inspectors . . . Excuse me, but if that’s not the point, what is? They have identified and arrested a homicide suspect who very likely killed Mr. Valdez. That’s their job.”

  Lapeer drew a breath and let it out. “Their job, though, is not to undermine the authority of the district attorney and to pursue cases that have taken another tack through the system.”

  “The system, in this case, ma’am, got it wrong.”

  “Possibly, although again not certainly. But in any case, rather than you or your inspectors going to Mr. Jameson and sharing with him your doubts about the indictment, you went ahead and unilaterally gave your inspectors permission to act at cross purposes to the grand jury, the result of which was to embarrass the district attorney and, in fact, to undercut the reputation and credibility of law enforcement as we do it in this city and county. This lack of coordination and cooperation between the departments in this building, Lieutenant, just cannot be tolerated. It’s bad for morale, it’s bad for the public, and it’s bad for the whole system.”

  “But mostly,” Juhle, unable to stop himself, said, “it’s bad for Ron Jameson.”

  “Well, it certainly isn’t good for him. I see you understand that very clearly. Which unfortunately speaks to the political overtones that are part and parcel of this thing.”

  “You’re accusing me of approving my inspectors’ investigation on this case for political reasons?”

  “To discredit Mr. Jameson. I’d have to say that is the general conclusion.”

  “By whom?”

  “Mr. Jameson and Mr. Crawford.” Leland Crawford was the mayor of San Francisco. “And as you know, I serve at the pleasure of the mayor.”

  “So did he send you here for this scolding? I’m duly chagrined.”

  “I’d advise you not to get smart with me. This is not just a scolding, Lieutenant. I’m here to put you on administrative leave effective immediately and pending a disciplinary hearing at a later time to be determined. You absolutely should not have let these inspectors run amok with an ongoing investigation. It’s poor leadership, it’s poor judgment, and it’s something that I cannot condone within my police department.”
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  26

  PHYLLIS HELD HER landline phone tightly in her grip until she heard the busy signal and realized that she’d been standing in her kitchen and had left the message at work that she—again—would not be in.

  She didn’t know why. A day off wasn’t anything she’d particularly been thinking about, even as she’d gone to bed last night. And then this morning she’d had her coffee and a croissant as usual and then suddenly just felt she couldn’t come in and face Dismas and the rest of them.

  They’d arrested Adam over the weekend. It now seemed likely—even to her—that he’d both shot Mr. Valdez and laid the blame on Celia.

  And why now did she feel so guilty?

  Surely it wasn’t her fault, any of it, except for being perhaps nearly terminally naïve. She had thought she was doing some good by being a way station in their so-called underground railroad. And, true, she had helped dozens if not hundreds of desperate people, many of whom now undoubtedly had created new lives for themselves and their families.

  And yet, if she hadn’t stepped in to help Celia . . .

  Would she still be alive?

  She found herself sitting at the kitchen table, her hands clasped in front of her. Her shoulder still throbbed dully where they’d dislocated it. More gratuitous violence that she hadn’t seen coming.

  At least they’d spared her the horror and indignity of having to be an active participant in Adam’s arrest. Of the absurdity of having her wear a wire. Of betraying her only living relative. Although they would now want her to testify against him, recount the story he’d told her about the shooting. Be part of the prosecution team that would send her brother to prison for the rest of his life.

  Is that what he deserved?

  For killing someone in cold blood, of course, she thought. You couldn’t let someone who did that stay on the streets where he could do it again. Even if the victim was a dealer of drugs making more of his living off human trafficking. An evil man keeping Celia in sexual slavery. Should Adam stay in prison forever for taking Valdez out of the gene pool?

  She knew that Adam had never really had a chance. Abandoned by their father, raised by a mother who barely had enough wits and discipline to keep herself alive, much less a rowdy young man without a role model.