A Certain Justice

So – methodically, doggedly – he started cross-working a map and a telephone book, phoning every private doctor's office within a two-mile radius of the Cavern Tavern, identifying himself as a homicide inspector and asking if any of the doctors had seen anything remotely resembling a knife wound during the last three days.

Doctors' records were not protected by the evidence code in criminal investigations. In fact, in some cases – such as incidents with gunshot wounds or sexual assaults – doctors were mandated to report to authorities.

It was at the tail end of an eggplant parmesan submarine sandwich. Griffin had parked his beefy frame at his desk in the homicide detail. Leaning back, the heels of his black brogues on the pitted desk, he balefully contemplated the new jail, the slice of clouds and blue above. He was on 'E.' Flipping the pages labelled 'Physicians,' he realized he had another five pages to go.

This was Carl Griffin's brand of police work – you did it by the numbers, you were not inspired, you slogged it out, and eventually, if you covered everything, once in a while you hit it. He considered going to the end of the listings and started backward from 'Z.' But then, he knew, the one he'd left off on at 'E' would turn out to be the jackpot. So he dialed the number for 'Epps.'

Miss Ma

'Hello, doctor's office,' the voice repeated.

He swallowed again – saved – and cleared his throat. It turned out that Dr Epps was having her own lunch in the coffee room and she listened without speaking while he gave his spiel. 'Since when was this?' she asked when he had finished.

'Tuesday night.'

'Just a minute.'

Griffin was suddenly elated he hadn't jumped to 'Z.' She was back on the line. 'I had a rather severe Achilles tendon slash that I sewed up on Wednesday morning. The patient was a young man who said he'd gotten tripped up, then fallen over a shovel in his backyard, one of those freak accidents, but I don't think it was a shovel – '

Griffin waited.

'The wound looked like a suture cut – clean and straight.'

'I see. And did you mention this to him?'

'I asked about it, yes. But he said, no, it was a shovel. Brand new, never used, edge like a knife. He didn't blink and I guessed it was possible. I sewed it up.'

'How old was the man?'

'Just a second. Colin Devlin. Twenty-four. Do you want his address?'

41

The waiting area of the bowels of the San Francisco morgue, on the other side of the heavy door that leads to the examination room, was drab and windowless. Plastic yellow chairs, sagging with age and perhaps the accumulation of grief, hugged the shiny light green walls. The two plastic rubber trees no longer looked remotely real, but no one had removed them, no one had noticed. The people in this room were thinking of other matters.

As the assistant district attorney handling the Arthur Wade homicide, Elaine Wager had been called down to the morgue by John Strout, San Francisco's coroner, to go over the forensic report, which, due to the crushing workload over the recent days, had been a little slower coming than usual.

Knees pressed together, hands clasped in her lap, Elaine waited in the anteroom. Strout had told her when he had called upstairs that it would be at least an hour, but she had picked up her folders and gone down immediately, content to be in hiding.

She had spent a good deal of time in the morning fighting herself, keeping busy doing background work on her suspect – his friends, workplace, history. Anything to avoid thinking of Chris, of what had happened… The police had forwarded to her the name of the woman who had provided Kevin Shea's name in the first place – Cynthia Taylor – and, while she had picked up very little in the way of evidence that would be useful in court, the picture of the man had begun to emerge.

According to Ms Taylor, Shea was a half-step up from white trash. He came from a broken family somewhere down south (which fitted perfectly with what he'd done, she thought). He was one of those hangers-on at SESU, drifting from class to class, drunk a lot of the time. Though Ms Taylor believed he worked part-time in some kind of telemarketing ('no way he could hold a real job'), he also bragged about using the GI bill to buy his booze, didn't have any friends to speak of, although he'd had a relationship with one of Ms Taylor's friends for a couple of months, and now appeared to have hoodwinked that hapless victim into becoming his accomplice in escaping. Ms Taylor had ended the interview with the statement that she thought he was 'really dangerous, unstable. You never know what he's going to do.'

And then the coroner had called, and Elaine realized that she had had enough. The walls were closing in. She needed time to let her emotions flow, to be alone. The room outside Strout's lab gave her that opportunity.

Suddenly – any movement in the dead room appeared sudden – the big door swung open and Strout's lanky form was pulling up a chair next to hers. Strout had a strong deep-south accent and no enemies on the police force or in the DA's office. A true professional, he lived for his forensics. He also had a sly humor and a skeptical eye that had many times discovered a homicide in what at first appeared, even to the police, to be an accidental or benign death.

'I'm gettin' real tired of lookin' at dead people,' he drawled. He had his latest ME forms on a clipboard that he held on his lap. 'Couple a day seems to be my limit. Get up to four, five, gives me a sour stomach.'

Elaine didn't react. This was how Strout always was. It wasn't personal. 'Is that Arthur Wade?' she asked, motioning to the clipboard.

He nodded, enough with amenities. 'No surprises, not that I expected any. Cause of death was asphyxiation, which you'd expect gettin' pulled up – must have taken some minutes. Poor man. Long time to hang. Hey, let me get you some water.'

'No, I'm all right.'

But she found herself resting her head back against the wall, closing her eyes. This was too much. She couldn't sit and listen to someone talk about Arthur Wade hanging for a long time like this – at Boalt, Arthur had seemed one of those wonderful people, not that she'd known him all that well. And now, four years later, his future was the past and that was all.

And Chris Locke… no, don't start, she told herself. Don't open that up.

More time had gone by. Strout was back with lukewarm water in a paper cup. 'Y'all want to lay down a minute, there's a couch in my office?'

But she couldn't help herself. 'Chris Locke is in there, isn't he?'

'Yes, ma'am.' Strout sucked some air between his front teeth. 'Sometimes…' His voice, with a sudden guttural quality, trailed off.

She put a hand on his knee, took it away. 'I know.'

Back in her office – ancient desk, stacks of files, smell of paper and dust – she closed the door behind her. Since an hour ago when she 'd left to go to the morgue, someone had come by and dropped a large yellow envelope in the center of the desk. She sat, dropped her Arthur Wade files on the floor by her feet and opened the envelope.

It was another copy of the original Paul Westberg photo that was in the newspapers and everywhere else. But then, about to slip it back into the envelope and throw the whole thing into the file folder, she stopped. Something had caught her eye and she pulled the photo all the way out.

With everything that had happened since then, she had forgotten that she'd asked the photographer – a request, not a demand – to send her the other picture that he had developed. Which he had now done.