The 7th Canon Read Online Free PDF Page B

five w ’s,” he said, meaning who , what , when , where , and why . “Then get down there and talk to him.”
    “The archbishop.”
    “The priest. He’s at the county jail, Hall of Justice, sixth floor. Ruth-Bell can help. And have her cancel everything on my calendar for the rest of the week. What she can’t cancel, you’ll have to handle.”
    Donley saw his Christmas break evaporating.
    Lou tapped the razor on the porcelain sink, making a metallic clinking. He started on the other cheek. “Your aunt isn’t going to like this; she had her heart set on Christmas in Florida with her sister. Me? I’d just as soon do without the heat and her sister, but you know your aunt.”
    Donley rushed to get in a sentence when Lou ran the blade under the stream of water. “What happened? What did the priest do?”
    “Read the paper, and you’ll know as much as I do at this point. Can you handle it? Good.” Lou grabbed the white towel hanging on the bar inside the door and wiped the remaining foam from his face. Then he unrolled his shirtsleeves, buttoned his cuffs, and grabbed his brown blazer. “I’ll be back sometime after five. We can go over it then. I’ll try to call during a break, but I cross Dr. Kinzerman today, and I’ll be lucky to get one straight answer out of that SOB.”
    “OK, I’ll—” Donley started, but Lou had already picked up his briefcase and stepped into the lobby, nearly colliding with Ruth-Bell.
    “Talk to Peter. He knows everything.”
    Ruth-Bell stepped in. The office door slammed shut, the fogged glass with the stenciled letters rattling. Ruth-Bell turned to Donley. “You don’t know anything, do you?”
    “Not a damn thing,” Donley said.

    “Everything was in plain sight,” Dixon Connor said, not surprised his partner was not supporting him.
    “Then you must have X-ray vision,” John Begley said. “You must be Superman, Connor.” Begley turned to Lieutenant Aileen O’Malley and continued to stab Connor in the back. “The office was across a hall. That door was locked. I know. I checked it when I came up the stairs. He should not have gone in there without a warrant.”
    “It was a fucking crime scene,” Connor said.
    “We came upon a crime scene after the crime was committed. We needed a warrant to search that office.”
    Connor wanted to bust the black son of a bitch in the mouth, and just being in O’Malley’s cramped, glass-enclosed office made him want to puke. There had been a time when room 450 of the Hall of Justice had felt like his living room. San Francisco’s homicide detectives, men like him who’d spent years paying their dues, sat at cramped desks amid battered file cabinets solving San Francisco’s murders. Now Connor felt like an unwanted guest, and Begley and O’Malley represented the poster children for what had gone wrong with the department: quotas. Blacks like Begley and women like O’Malley got promoted so the department could meet its quotas while more-deserving white male candidates got early retirement packages or the pleasure of humping their asses on the street, knowing they were entitled to the next promotion but wouldn’t get it.
    “I’ve been doing this job for better than twenty-five years. I got a dead body in a building, not a private residence; that makes the whole operation subject to search.”
    Begley continued to direct his comments to O’Malley. “The crime took place in the recreation room across the hall. The priest keeps a bed in his office.”
    “We don’t know where the crime took place,” Connor countered. “We found the body in the recreation room, but we also found drops of blood.”
    “Not in the office, we didn’t,” Begley said.
    Connor shifted in the chair. The thin fabric cushion offered little comfort for the deteriorating disc in his back, the pain a lingering reminder of a bullet still lodged near his spine. His back bothered him when he sat too long, lay too long, or stood too long. It always