“The clock is ticking.”
But Donnally knew that’s not what he meant.
The fact was that like Goldhagen, Navarro understood that from this moment, in the small town that was San Francisco, his name would be forever connected to Hamlin’s. And the detective dreaded heading into an investigation into the death of a man he despised while straitjacketed by rules that man had abused in life.
Chapter 2
Dr. Youssef Haddad pointed down at Mark Hamlin’s naked body lying covered by a plastic sheet on the stainless steel gurney in the medical examiner’s autopsy lab.
The two gangsters whose overnight murders had delayed the forensic team’s arrival at Fort Point flanked him. Neither the humming exhaust fan nor the odor of disinfectant could suppress the stench of excrement and urine released from the bodies in death.
“O propheta, certe penis tuus c?lum versus erectus est.”
“Sorry?” Donnally glanced over at the pathologist.
“O prophet, thy penis is erect unto the sky.”
“A prophet or the Prophet.”
“The. According to the historian Abulfeda, the Imam Ali proclaimed it upon seeing the corpse of the Prophet Mohammed.”
Donnally had never heard the quote before, but he’d seen the condition a few times while he was with SFPD and the name came back to him. Priapism. In homicide investigation training it had been described as a persistent erection. He couldn’t watch Viagra television commercials without thinking of its other names. When produced after execution by hanging or by strangling, it was called a death erection or angel lust.
Although the Latin words were spoken in neither irony nor sarcasm, Donnally was surprised a Muslim doctor would even mention Mohammed in this context. Maybe he was only trying to say it was so natural even the Prophet was subject to it.
The doctor pursed his lips and said, “Saints and sinners alike can be humiliated, even after death.”
Haddad was one of the few pathologists Donnally had ever met who hadn’t lost or repressed his tragic sense, neither fearing it nor wearing it like a hair shirt.
Donnally nodded toward Hamlin’s body, the sheet tented by his erection. “Premortem or post?”
“The fact that it may be post doesn’t exclude the possibility it began before he died. He might’ve taken an erectile dysfunction medication. The tox results will tell.”
Haddad exposed Hamlin’s head and shoulders.
“But that’s not why I asked you to follow the body over here.”
The swishing double doors announced the arrival of Detective Navarro, now dressed in surgical scrubs. His protective goggles and respirator mask, hanging by elastic straps around his neck, bounced against his chest as he crossed the room.
Navarro nodded at Donnally as he walked up, and then grinned and said to Haddad, “Nothing like a little slice and dice in the morning.”
The detective hadn’t rubbed his hands together, but had nonetheless sounded to Donnally as though he was about to sit down in front of a Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast.
Haddad looked over at Navarro. The doctor wasn’t smiling. His tight mouth communicated his disapproval of those who chose to escape from the horror of violent death into macabre linguistic dances of irony or burlesque.
“That line is getting old,” Haddad said.
In Navarro’s continuing grin, Donnally saw Navarro hadn’t grasped the comment wasn’t directed at the line as much as at Navarro himself.
Haddad gestured with his scalpel toward two ligature marks around Hamlin’s neck. One ran just above his Adam’s apple and circled his neck like a collar. The other looped under his chin and angled upward behind his ears and disappeared into his black hair.
Haddad pointed from one to the other.
“You can tell from the lack of blood in the abrasions in this diagonal one that it occurred after death.”
“You think he was strangled from behind?” Donnally asked. “Then strung up?”
Haddad nodded. “That’s my theory, but we’ll only know for certain after I shave off his hair to look for bruising and after I open him up and examine the back of his head and neck.”
Donnally leaned down to inspect the marks. An undercurrent of lavender flowed beneath the churning stench of cleaning fluid. He glanced at Navarro.
“Smell that.”
Navarro bent over and took a sniff.
“Soap. Some kind of scented soap.” Navarro looked at Donnally as he straightened up and said without a smile, “Smells like somebody washed him off before they hung him out to dry.”
Donnally considered that crack to be Navarro’s second strike. He’d never met a competent homicide detective who made a habit of gallows humor. He’d always found it was the outward expression of a counterproductive kind of imagination, one that tended to take the detective off course, diverting him away from a mental cause-and-effect re-creation of the events that led to the death.
He’d been willing to give Navarro a break because, at least for the moment, sarcasm had been better than his expressing outright the hatred cops felt toward Hamlin, something that might be quoted later and would cast doubt on the integrity of the investigation.
But twice was enough, and he didn’t want to fight Navarro all the way through the case.
Donnally glared at Navarro while holding up two fingers and shaking his head. The detective spread his arms as he raised his eyes toward the ceiling, then looked back and nodded in surrender.
At the same time, Donnally was grateful for that hate, even though it had been sublimated into humor, for it seemed better than the brute reductionism of the medical examiner’s office by which still-warm humans devolved into mere fields of evidence.
Now conscious of the war between the odors of the lab and the aroma of lavender surrounding the body, Donnally realized something didn’t make sense.
“There seems to be a contradiction,” Donnally said. “Someone was rational and methodical enough to destroy evidence by washing him off, but irrational enough to think that the dead could be humiliated by being left hanging half naked in a public place.”
Donnally tensed, ready to be annoyed when Navarro took another sarcastic swing, but he didn’t.
“Unless the humiliation was directed at someone else,” Navarro said. “Maybe as a warning.”
There was a new seriousness in Navarro’s voice, as though he worked his way past the filter of how he’d despised Hamlin in life in order to analyze the manner in which he had died and had been left to be discovered.
“His being dead ought to have been warning enough,” Haddad said. “But then again, my part in the process has less to do with the psychology of homicide and more to do with the pathology of death.” He gestured toward the body. “I only interrogate the dead.”
Donnally looked from Hamlin to Haddad. “And you’re sure it’s saying homicide?”
Haddad pulled off the sheet and pointed at abrasions on Hamlin’s right wrist.
“It certainly crossed my mind that he tied his own hands to keep himself from changing his mind,” Haddad said. “But at least one factor mitigates against that.” He cocked his head toward pieces of a mountain climber’s rope bagged up on top of a utility table. “The knot was in a spot where he couldn’t have tied it.”
“You mean, by himself?”
“Exactly. By himself.”
“So there’s no way it’s suicide?” Navarro asked.
“Not based on this.”
The following silence told Donnally their minds were leading them to the last possibility, that Hamlin’s death might have been a sexual homicide, an unintentional erotic asphyxiation at the hands of a partner.
And when Donnally finally said, “Either he had an enemy or he had a helper,” they all knew what he meant.
As they stood looking at the body, Donnally felt as though Hamlin’s history, outside of just the mechanics of how he’d come to this place, was now catching up to him and was verging on a future that lay in their hands.