The Haring case was off my desk and out of my hair for about a week, but I had plenty more work to do. So did Anup—though we did, finally, find time for each other on Veterans Day. The Court of Appeal was closed and so was the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, so we spent one whole Wednesday together as tourists in our own town. We went to eat chowder and visit the sea lions at Fisherman’s Wharf, then climbed the stairs to Coit Tower, stopping midway to watch the wild parrots. We bought ridiculously expensive Italian groceries in North Beach. We went back to Mahoney Brothers #45 and made love and then made a late dinner out of the groceries and fell asleep drinking wine and watching some stupid show on his laptop. We woke up, walked the dog, ate breakfast, had a kiss, and each went off to work.
It was just like we were a regular couple. It was brief, but it was bliss.
I managed to hide the sari and the bangles from him. Sparkle and I had gone on a shopping excursion over the weekend. Neither of us knows the first thing about Indian fashion, but at least Sparkle has an eye for style. She and an energetic saleswoman in a Desi shop got me properly outfitted for the festival of Diwali.
Diwali week was coming up fast. The highlight would be the third night, Lakshmi puja, when you get decked out in your finest to gather with friends and family. Each community is different, and celebrates in different ways, but buying new clothes for the festival is one of the common themes.
So says Wikipedia, anyhow. I wanted to make sure I was preparing in the correct way to attend a Lakshmi puja, but had been left to do my own research; Anup seemed to consider the whole festival a colossal pain in the neck, and brushed me off whenever I asked him about it. Anup’s parents and two sisters all lived an hour away on the Peninsula, and I’d never met them. I planned to be ready to wow the Banerjees when we drove down there together for the big night—but I also wanted my outfit to be a surprise to Anup until then, and so I’d hidden the special Lakshmi puja sari and the jewelry that went with it under my makeup table in a plastic tub with a sticker reading BIOHAZARD HUMAN REMAINS.
Professional perk.
Ted Nguyen and I found ourselves facing a full slate of autopsies on Thursday after the midweek holiday, but on Friday there was only one new autopsy. Ted took it, leaving me a paper day. I had a ton of old cases to close, so that came as a relief.
A relief—until I checked my cubbyhole mailbox and found the subpoena. It was from an assistant district attorney in People v. Samuel Urias, and it was directing me to appear at a preliminary hearing—on November 16.
“That’s Monday!” I yelled. “Bzdura! They couldn’t give me more notice?”
“The famous dead architect, right?” said a 2578.
“Yeah.”
“We’ve been fielding a lot of press calls on that one. I mean, a lot. Good luck.”
I stomped off to my office, leaving a fresh wake of curses in the Ops Shop. With that subpoena, the Haring case had pushed itself back onto the front burner. I started by calling Samuel Urias’s public defender, a woman named Eva Yung.
“My client has not waived time,” she told me. “He’s been in the city jail going on ten days, and I want to get him out of there. Can we meet to prep for the preliminary hearing?”
“Good idea, but I haven’t finished my report.”
“What’s holding it up?”
I scanned through the file. “Toxicology results and histology slides. No surprise.”
“Why’s that?”
“Tox and histo take forever. Our lab’s overburdened.”
“Tell me about it.”
I admire the San Francisco public defenders. They do thankless, heroic work for bad pay and worse press. Each one of them I’d worked with had been juggling bunches of cases in varying stages of crisis. Eva Yung seemed no different.
She said, “By toxicology, you mean tests of the decedent’s blood?”
“Right.”
“Are you expecting to find anything?”
“You never know.”
“Would it change the cause of death, though?”
“Maybe.”
Heavy sigh from Eva Yung. Then she asked the same question about histology.
“Again—it depends. Sometimes I see things under the microscope that can inform me about the age of an injury—and establishing a timeline for Leopold Haring’s injuries is going to be important in the case against your client.”
I held the line through Eva Yung’s thoughtful silence, waiting for her to ask what I knew she would ask.
“Any chance you could get your lab to put a hurry on it...?”
Chief Toxicologist Carlo San Pietro answered the lab doorbell. He was short and round and wore tortoiseshell glasses, and his outfits never failed to dazzle. That day San Pietro was decked out in classic blue pinstripe with a brick-red bow tie, an apricot-yellow shirt, and tritone wingtips.
I pitched my request. San Pietro rolled his head back and around in theatrical fashion, and he made the expected rejoinder.
“Dr. Teska, you must know this is not possible. Not possible! We have so many, many important needs here, and I cannot take yours out of the line.”
I put on my sympathy face and nodded along. “You have a challenging workload, no doubt. But, you see, there’s a working man, a construction laborer, stuck in jail over this case, and his lawyer is on me night and day to look at the slides—five slides, that’s all. So I was hoping you might have my five slides...?”
San Pietro pointed past rows of lab benches and boxy machines under fume hoods, to a technician in a Tyvek clean suit.
“We are cover-slipping right now,” San Pietro said. “Perhaps yours is in this batch. If so, we will give them to you as soon—”
“Ooh!” I declared, and brushed right past him in feigned excitement. “Lemme see.”
“Wait!”
He was too late. I stretched my hips in great strides to cross the room.
“What’s the case number on those?” I said to the technician before I’d even reached her.
“Um...” she said, and peered at a computer screen. “Fifteen eighty-four.”
“Perfect! That’s what I’m looking for.” I grabbed an empty cardboard flat from a pile and scooped the five slides off the lab table.
San Pietro was apoplectic. “They are wet still! They will glue to each other... You must wait...!” I ignored him, and kept my attention on the lab tech.
“Email me the tox on this case right now, okay?”
The tech, the poor flustered dear, made a jerky nod and returned to the computer. I plastered up a grateful smile and breezed past Carlo San Pietro with a song and dance thanking his team for helping to advance the swift administration of justice.
Back in my office, I fired up the microscope and read the toxicology report in my email. It was completely negative—no drugs of abuse, no alcohol, not so much as a Tylenol in Leopold Haring’s system when he died. One more thing I could check off my list, anyhow.
I found neutrophils in the nasal tissue when I put that slide under the microscope. Neutrophils are immune system repair cells, and their presence meant that Haring had got clocked in the face more than four hours before his heart stopped beating. I couldn’t time the trauma more precisely than that, but I could tell all the interested parties that he certainly hadn’t suffered that bloody nose at the same time that he died.
Next I examined the tissues from inside the fatal wound track. The first thing that caught my eye in the scattered mess of blood cells was a clutch of jagged, ruddy-bronze foreign bodies. Near them I saw something else that didn’t belong—the dark corkscrew of a strand of wool. I moved the visual field around the slide and found more. I also came across long, light-colored plant fibers. Those were cotton, no mistake. Leopold Haring had been wearing a dark blue business suit and white dress shirt. The weapon that killed him had gone through his clothes and carried traces of the fabrics into the wound track.
I zoomed the magnification in and out over the red-brown things, sharp and flaky and distinctly alien in the landscape of human tissue on those glass slides. Then I packed the slides into their cardboard tray and went down the hall to Ted Nguyen’s office. Ted had a few years’ seniority on me, and I figured he might be willing to offer a quick consult.
“I don’t know,” he said, after considering the slide under his microscope. “The color reminds me of hemosiderin. Did you get an iron stain?”
“I didn’t. I figured they were foreign bodies.”
“Training in Chicago, we used to do iron stains to diagnose siderosis in mill workers,” Nguyen said. “Metal filings in lung tissue look just like this, but way smaller. These things are huge.”
“Microscopically speaking.”
Nguyen pushed his chair away from the scope. “Interesting case you’ve got.” That’s the highest degree of enthusiasm the man ever showed.
I typed up the histology and toxicology findings in my autopsy report, then called public defender Eva Yung to tell her it was almost finalized.
“Would you sit down to talk to me about your findings?”
“Sure. When?”
“How ’bout now?”
“Right now?”
“No better time,” said Eva Yung.
I looked at the email inbox on my monitor, and the IRL inbox on my desk. Both were overloaded enough to inspire panic and despair.
I printed the report and said, “Oh, hell, why not.”
My cell rang through the BMW’s console while I was inching off the freeway. The screen read No caller ID. That would be Anup, from his office landline at the Court of Appeal on McAllister Street.
“Hiya, hotness,” I said.
“Dr. Teska? Jessie Teska?”
It was a woman. Whether or not she was the hotness, I couldn’t tell.
“Oh! I, uh...”
“I’m trying to reach Dr. Jessie Teska?”
“Yes, yes—that’s me...sorry, I... I thought you were someone else...”
“Dr. Teska, this is Amber Bishop at KnowNowSF, I’m putting together a story about the death of Leopold Haring and the police say the cause of death is homicide and I’d like to know more about that—I’ve got witnesses telling me he was crushed under a bunch of pipes, so does that mean someone dropped the pipes on him, and if so do you know...”
Zajebiście. A journalist. One who didn’t pause for breath. I cut in.
“This is my cell phone. How did you get my—”
“An eyewitness at the death scene said that Jeffrey Symond was asked to come down there and identify his friend’s mangled body, was it you who made that decision?”
“No! I mean, that’s not what happened...”
“Did Jeffrey Symond positively identify Haring’s body at the death scene?”
“Yes—well, it was a preliminary ID—but nobody... Wait, who did you talk to at the PD?”
“Is it true the cause of death is now homicide?”
“Manner of death. The cause is... It’s not the same thing.”
“Okay, what’s Haring’s cause of death?”
“I can’t talk about...” I reached the end of the off-ramp and swerved to a stop in a beaten building’s loading dock to get my head together. “You didn’t answer me. How did you get my personal cell phone number?”
“I’ve been talking to several people who worked closely with Leopold Haring and said that he was a volatile man, hard to work with, some are calling him toxic. Since you’re now saying he was murdered—”
“I didn’t say that. I ruled the manner of death as homicide. Murder is up to the DA.”
“So this isn’t a murder? Jeffrey Symond is on record saying he saw the body and it was clearly an accident, crushed underneath pipes that fell off a truck. Since you’ve ruled this death a homicide, aren’t you saying someone intentionally dropped those pipes on him?”
“Listen to me. Ms....?”
“Bishop, Amber Bishop, KnowNowSF—”
“Yeah, okay. I’m going to answer you. Are you writing this down?”
“Yes.”
I spoke slowly and deliberately. “The death certificate for Leopold Haring has been filed with the San Francisco Department of Vital Statistics. It’s a public record now.” I paused. “Did you get all that?”
“But did you—”
“The death certificate is on file. You can go request it. It’ll cost you, like, twenty bucks, I think, and should arrive within two business days. Got it?”
“Oh, yes, Doctor,” Amber Bishop said, with acid. “And before I let you go, I’m going to give you an opportunity to comment on another angle of the story I’m writing.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. She went on.
“Before you were raised to the position of deputy chief medical examiner, you were involved in the RICO action against Hector Marroquin, and I’ve spoken to people who say that you—”
An air horn blared, drowning her out. A truck, flashing his headlights, wanted me and my coupe out of his loading bay.
“Hello, Dr. Teska...?” said the voice through my dashboard speakers. “Can I get your reaction to the allegation that you—”
I hung up the phone. I put the car in Drive. I scooted out of the truck’s way.
The cell rang again. I bumped it to voice mail.
Eva Yung shared a shabby, cluttered office with another public defender. He wasn’t there, which was just as well; it would’ve been intimate for a party of three. The office had big windows and plenty of sunlight, and Eva’s half was overflowing with potted plants and Hawaiiana, including a framed photograph of a house on stilts in a jungle. I asked her about it while we were exchanging pleasantries.
“That was my place on the Big Island, in Kapoho. I was going to retire there someday. But the volcano took it.”
“Oh.” I’d never met anyone whose house was taken by a volcano, and couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Yung smiled. “It’s all right. I keep the picture to remind me that nothing is for keeps.”
Yung was in her midfifties, tall and slender, with long arms, long fingers, long silver-gray hair, and enviable long legs under her business slacks. Her face was long, too, tanned and freckled, with Chinese features. She perched reading glasses on the end of her nose while she flipped through my autopsy report, and dropped them to dangle on a classic silver-and-pearl librarian’s lanyard when she finished.
“So, wait. This stab wound. Couldn’t it be from a knife?”
“No. Knife wounds look completely different, and leave a different type of track. This penetrating wound was made by something round and relatively blunt.”
“How do you know that?”
“Abrasions on the edge of the entrance.”
“It was made by something blunt?”
“Relatively blunt. Compared to an edged blade like a knife’s.”
“If we presented you with a specific weapon, could you match it to this wound?”
“Possibly.”
“Could you rule it out?”
“Also, possibly.”
Eva Yung rummaged through one of the several neat piles of documents on her desk and came out with a stack of glossy photos. “Inspector Jones gave me these after he ran the search warrant on my client.”
The first photo showed a screwdriver. It was awful gory—dried blood all the way up the shaft, right to the handle, which was plastic and garish orange in color.
“This is a cheap piece of chain-store off-brand junk,” she said. “My client swears up and down it isn’t his, and he’s never laid eyes on it before. He’s a professional, and only uses professional grade tools.”
I spread the other pictures across Yung’s desk. One showed the bed of a pickup truck, followed by a series with the bloody screwdriver in it, revealed under a pile of old drop cloths.
“Sam is meticulous about his tools. He’s certain that the screwdriver was planted.”
“It’s your theory that your client is being framed?”
“That would explain this tool that doesn’t belong to him being found by the police in the open and accessible bed of his pickup.”
“Who would want to frame him?”
“Plenty of people. Sam is the union steward. He says the SoMa Centre project is way behind schedule, which is causing the developer to bleed money. Sam is getting heat for the delays—but he’s not going to sacrifice the safety of his crew to protect a greedy developer’s bottom line.”
“So if your client says he didn’t do it, does he have any idea who did?”
“No, but Leopold Haring was certainly not a popular man at that job site. He liked to show up unannounced, bullying and micromanaging everyone. That’s not his role. The architect is supposed to hand off the plans and go work on a new project, and leave the building to the builders. Leopold Haring didn’t operate that way, and he was getting under the skin of plenty of the contractors and subcontractors and engineers and managers on the site, trying to tell them how to do their jobs. All of them.”
It sounded to me like Samuel Urias’s defense lawyer was blaming the conveniently dead victim. Then again, I had to admit I’d heard the same complaints about the decedent, even from his own business partner.
“Plus,” Yung continued, “Haring had a hell of a temper. Sam says he could see somebody stabbing him just to shut him the hell up. But it wasn’t him that did it.”
“Okay, but did your client ever cross swords with the victim?”
“Yes. He acknowledges that he and the deceased got into an argument the last time Haring came by the job site. Haring came barging through, didn’t even bother to sign in like everyone is supposed to for safety’s sake, and went straight to some corner of the site where he demanded to inspect something. Sam found him and reamed him out for being in a hazardous area with no hard hat.”
“Okay. The detectives told me your client has priors. Violent priors. Is that true?”
“That’s not at all accurate. Sam has one DUI on his record, and an arrest for defending himself against an aggressor during an altercation in a bar. He pled no contest to the DUI and was never even held to answer in the bar fight—the other combatant didn’t press charges.”
Yung leaned across her desk. “My client is on a green card, working his butt off and supporting his entire family here and half the village back home in Mexico. There’s no way he would jeopardize that. Trouble with the law is the last thing Sam wants.”
Public defenders juggle a lot of cases. Few go to trial. They’re dealmakers—they try to limit the harm their clients face. Sometimes, though, a public defender gets a client who really makes her want to go to the mat. I could see that Samuel Urias was exactly that client for Eva Yung.
“Sam has been dry for two years. He’s never been violent against anyone except that one time in the bar, when he was provoked. He has no reason to want to kill Leopold Haring. He thinks it’s a setup. I think he’s right.”
I sat back. “Whew. That’s your pitch, huh?”
“That’s my theory of the case.”
“So, here I am. You have my report. What do you want to know?”
“First things first.” Yung held up the picture of the screwdriver. “Could this be the weapon? Does it match the wound?”
“No ruler in the photo,” I grumbled. “Typical. Do you know its length?”
“No. These are all the DA gave me.”
“Well—where is this thing right now?”
“The screwdriver?”
“Yeah.”
“In police evidence, over at the Hall.”
“Can I examine it?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Yung said. She picked up her phone and dialed the DA’s office.
“Bring a ruler,” I said.
When we reached the police evidence lockup in the B-level bowels of the Hall of Justice, Homicide Inspector Keith Jones was already waiting, scrolling through his phone and looking grumpy. So was the case prosecutor, an assistant district attorney named Jason Bevner. Bevner looked like a high school football captain gone to pot, squeezed into a conservative suit and sporting the sort of short, bland haircut that never goes out of fashion for meat-and-potatoes white guys. We made a round of cordial introductions.
ADA Bevner’s first question for me, before the evidence clerk had even retrieved the screwdriver, was what I was doing there with the public defender.
“Ms. Yung called me to discuss the case,” I replied. “I had some questions about the physical evidence that the photos you gave her couldn’t answer, so I suggested we should get a look at it in person.”
Bevner kept eye contact with me and cocked his head at Eva Yung. “But you aren’t her witness.”
“Of course not. I’m—”
“You’re my witness. I am the one who is calling you. You work for me.”
“What...?” Yung said. “No, she does not.”
“No, I do not,” I concurred.
“Sure you do,” said the ADA. “You’re on the law enforcement team.”
“I’m a medical examiner, Counselor. We don’t work for the police, or for you.”
“Then what’s that badge for?” The ADA turned to Inspector Jones and bumped shoulders with him. “Look at that thing. Her badge is bigger than yours, Keith.”
Keith Jones managed a miserable masculine chuckle, then stared at his shoes and tried hard to melt into the wall behind him.
“Hey,” I said to ADA Bevner. I was tempted to grab him by his stupid yellow power tie. “Are you kidding? Honestly—is this a bad joke, or are you serious?”
The poor thick bastard looked genuinely puzzled. “You’re a peace officer. That’s law enforcement, and that means you’re a prosecution witness. Why are you even meeting with the defense? You’re going to screw up my case.”
“I am a scientific expert from an independent agency. I’m not a prosecution witness any more than I am a defense witness. I offer my professional opinion to the court, in matters pertaining to the cause and manner of death, the death investigation, and evidence from that investigation.” I pulled out my cell phone. “Do you understand my role here, Counselor, or do I need to interrupt Chief Howe’s afternoon to have him explain it to you?”
Bevner didn’t know it, but I was bluffing. Sort of. Would Dr. Howe have my back in a spat with an assistant district attorney? I wasn’t sure. Dr. Emil Kashiman, my mentor back in Los Angeles, surely would have—but I wasn’t so confident about Howe. I’d seen the respect he garnered from the DA and police, but I’d also seen him fold under pressure from city hall.
Lucky for me, the ADA, who had gone all hot and puffy over his undersized tab collar, didn’t have an opportunity to call my bluff. We were interrupted by the evidence clerk, who appeared at his window.
“Here ya go,” he said, and held up a slender cardboard box.
The glass door next to the window buzzed, and Keith Jones sprang off the wall to push it open. We all filed through, into a brightly lit room with a long white counter marked out in a centimeter grid. The clerk came through a door on the other side and handed the box to Jones, along with a roll of evidence tape, a utility knife, and a Sharpie pen. He offered us black latex gloves from a box labeled XL. Jones took a pair.
“I carry my own,” I said, and pulled surgical gloves, size small, out of a pocket. I had learned the hard and clumsy way that the San Francisco Police Department still seemed to assume that all police were men, and that all policemen had hams for hands.
The table had a butcher paper dispenser on one end. Jones pulled a long piece off the roll and laid it out, then sliced the box open and produced out of it an ordinary Phillips-head screwdriver. He placed it carefully on the paper. It was covered in dry, flaky, black blood.
All eyes turned to me.
I asked Eva for her ruler and laid it down. “The length of the shaft is four inches. With the handle, the entire tool is seven and a half.” I documented the evidence with my cell phone camera. From another pocket I produced my magnifying glass—a true antique, hand-ground Austrian crystal set with brass in an antler handle. It had been a gift from Dr. Kashiman when I’d joined his team in Los Angeles. Jones chuckled at it and made a Sherlock joke. I ignored him. That tool was the finest low-magnification lens for the naked eye ever devised.
I leaned over the screwdriver and said, “You’ve tested this?”
The assistant district attorney answered. “Presumptive positive for blood. We’re waiting on DNA. They say they’ll have it for us by Monday for the preliminary hearing.”
Under the magnifier, I could see, sticking out here and there in the dark dried blood, bright blue flakes. I paused to take more pictures.
“What is it?” asked the ADA.
“Fibers.”
They weren’t what I was expecting to find. These were the wrong color—a pale baby blue. The ones I’d seen under the microscope, sampled from Haring’s wound track, were much darker. And these fibers weren’t wool, or cotton. They came from a woody plant material, most likely dyed paper.
“Any fingerprints?”
“None,” Keith Jones said.
“What do you think,” said Eva Yung, “is it consistent with the wound on the body, or not?”
I flipped through my own report to review the findings. At autopsy I had measured the depth of penetration as five inches, and the wound diameter as a quarter inch.
“I’m skeptical.”
“Wait a minute,” the ADA said.
“How come?” pressed Eva.
“The shaft of this screwdriver is too short for the length of the wound.” I stood the screwdriver on end and eyeballed its diameter with the ruler. It barely cleared an eighth of an inch. “And it’s too slender.”
“Wait a minute,” Jason Bevner said again. “You’re the one who told us it’s a screwdriver that made the wound! Isn’t that right, Keith?”
The detective agreed it was.
“Maybe it was a screwdriver,” I said. “But this particular screwdriver is shorter and skinnier than whatever caused the fatal injury.”
“You said you saw fibers on it. Those are from the victim’s clothing. The clothing wraps around the weapon as it’s going into the wound, and gets pushed along there. Then, when it comes out of the wound, it leaves a hole that’s bigger than the weapon. That’s what’s happening here.”
The ADA wasn’t as dumb as he looked. That was a pretty good theory. It didn’t fit this case, though.
“That’s possible,” I replied. “It could explain the mismatch between the girth of the weapon you’re presenting as evidence, and the diameter of the wound—but it still wouldn’t explain the discrepancy between the length of the shaft and the depth of penetration, and that metric is much more important. A wound made with this weapon would be too short to reach the heart, and the lethal weapon went fully through the muscle wall of Mr. Haring’s left ventricle. You’ll see that in my report. Plus there’s still the fact that the fibers I’m seeing here are the wrong color and type. They aren’t the dark wool and white cotton fibers I found in microscopic evaluation of tissue from the wound. That’s in my report, too.”
Eva Yung didn’t let the ADA catch his breath before she said, “You have to release my client.”
“Not so fast,” said Bevner. “Your client has priors, and he’s on a green card.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Connection to a foreign country. He has family in Mexico, right? He’s a flight risk. On Monday we will show that he has motive. This weapon was at the scene of the crime, in his possession, and has blood on it.”
“You don’t know whose blood.”
“The DNA is going to show it’s Leopold Haring’s.”
“Says you. If it doesn’t, or if it’s inconclusive, then you’ve got to let my guy go.”
Keith Jones couldn’t stop himself piping up. “It’s a bloody screwdriver collected with a warrant from the back of your guy’s truck!”
Eva Yung glared at the detective, and he withered. Then she turned back to the ADA. “Don’t forget that my client is stuck in jail, the sole breadwinner for his family, boss of the crew on a vitally important construction project...”
“Okay, okay,” Bevner said, throwing up his hands. “We’ve got the DNA expedited already. You’ll have it in your hands at the prelim, if not before. If the results don’t match Haring—then we’ll talk.”
The screwdriver went back into the evidence box, signed and sealed by Jones, and we all shared an elevator out of the B level of the Hall of Justice together. Jason Bevner, God bless him, turned out to be a happy warrior. It was just about quitting time on a Friday, and he asked us all, in a chummy way, what we had planned. Jones grumbled that he was on call. Eva Yung was going out to dinner with friends.
“How about you, Doctor?” said Bevner.
“I’ve got to go home and get to bed early.”
“How come?”
“Big day tomorrow.”
“Oh yeah? What’s up?”
“Lakshmi puja,” I said.