The Fall

As always, to Lisa

A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror.

—Ken Keyes, Jr.

T
HE BODY FELL
straight out of the sky.

Those were the words in her original statement, and that was exactly how it had appeared to Robyn Owen. No foreshadowing, no warning. She had just turned right out of the Sutter-Stockton garage and was about to enter the tunnel when all at once the body fell out of the sky and landed on the hood of her brand-new Subaru. The head bounced against the windshield, shattering the safety glass into a spiderweb. Robyn had slammed on her brakes as she screamed. She’d been going fast enough to send the body flying, rag doll–fashion, what seemed an impossibly long distance in front of her.

The time was exactly 11:03
P.M.
on her dashboard clock. She was leaving the parking garage after a nice dinner at Campton Place—and no, she was not drunk!, as she’d told the police officers about a hundred times, blowing into a breathalyzer twice to prove it.

Before turning, she had checked to her left for oncoming traffic in her lane and noted the car about a block down, coming toward her. This turned out to be the BMW that had tried to stop after Robyn had slammed on her own brakes, but still plowed into her after the impact. Robyn hadn’t been speeding. The Beemer had not been speeding, either: It hadn’t forced her to super-accelerate out into her lane; it was a normal safe distance from her when she had turned. Robyn did not lay rubber coming out of the garage. She couldn’t have stopped or slowed to keep from hitting the woman, because she never saw her, never had even a hint of her existence, until she landed on the Subaru’s hood. There hadn’t been anything she could have done that would have led to a different outcome.

And who was going to pay for the repair to her car? Did insurance cover bodies that fell out of the sky? She suspected it did not.

A
T ONE A.M.
on what was now Thursday morning, San Francisco’s police Homicide chief Devin Juhle rolled over in bed and said to Connie, “It’s no use. I’m not going back to sleep. I might as well go down.”

Connie didn’t argue. When her husband felt he had to go to a crime scene, there was no stopping him. Although she wondered why his inspectors lately seemed to feel that they had to contact him as soon as they got a call that someone had been killed. They were the ones doing the initial investigating—Devin’s job was mostly administration and coordination. Determining the basic facts of a case wasn’t usually up to her husband, so she did not understand his need to be there. Back when he’d been an inspector, he’d tried never to call his lieutenant to a crime scene. It had been a matter of pride.

But the department had changed. The city had changed. Hell, their lives had changed, and her man was dressed now, heading out in the middle of the night to see about a dead person.

T
WO AND A
half hours after the incident, traffic in both directions on Stockton Street inside the tunnel remained stopped. Gridlock prevailed downtown to the south and all the way up to North Beach. Devin Juhle knew his way downtown on Bush Street, but it didn’t help him; he wound up having to park on the sidewalk all the way back on Leavenworth, six blocks away.

Yellow crime scene tape blocked off Bush above the tunnel, and Juhle held up his ID as he came up to the small knot of uniformed officers standing around. One of them directed him to take the second set of steps, which led down to the northbound side.

Before he started down, Juhle stopped at about the spot where he reasoned the victim must have gone over. Cars clogged the streets in every direction as far as he could see. Horns blared in staccato down below. Juhle looked down over the low parapet. It seemed to be about thirty feet to the asphalt below, maybe a little less. Although the rule of thumb was that you would survive a fall less than three times your height, it was an inexact formula at best. Juhle looked down again. If you were going to kill yourself by jumping, he thought, you should opt for a longer drop. Unless, of course, you wanted to kill yourself and decided to land on a car coming in this direction on the street below.

With the constant cacophony of car horns in his ears, Juhle followed the slick, steep concrete steps, over the old newspaper pages and the glittering glass shards—the remains of beer or liquor bottles—crackling under his feet. Halfway down, the passage widened and Juhle noted the sign high up on the wall, assuring him that for his protection, this area was under constant video surveillance.

Something to keep in mind, he told himself. He hoped it was actually true.

The second flight of steps, around to his right, brought him down to street level, and he took in the klieg-lit scene with a practiced eye. To his right, sixty or seventy feet away, what he presumed to be the body still lay surrounded by techs—measuring, photographing—on the asphalt in the middle of the lane inside the tunnel. In front of him, a late-model Subaru with a shattered windshield sat sideways, blocking both lanes, at a right angle to a BMW with a smashed front end. On the sidewalk inside the tunnel, a small group huddled around a young woman who sat wrapped in a blanket. The driver of the Subaru?

At Juhle’s appearance at the bottom of the steps, Eric Waverly, the Homicide inspector who, along with his partner, Ken Yamashiro, had drawn the call, looked over and peeled off from the others. Waverly wore black: shoes, slacks, heavy down ski jacket. A boyish face seemed to belie his prematurely gray hair. He might have been any age up to forty-five—in fact, he was thirty-two, young for the Homicide detail.

As Waverly got close to his lieutenant, down in the tunnel, another car horn blared, prompting others to join in as Juhle nodded in greeting. “We’ve got to get some of these cars out of here, Eric. This is insane.”

“I know. But there’s no place to put ’em. The tunnel’s packed. There’s nowhere to turn around. What are you gonna do? At least I hear we’ve got people backing out the other side now. They’re saying it ought to clear in another half hour or so. At least enough to get some tow guys in. But if I was a terrorist and ever wanted to shut down the city, this is where I’d start.”

“Good to know you have a contingency plan,” Juhle said. Shifting gears, he inclined his head up toward the victim. “So what have we got?”

“Young black woman, probably under twenty-five, maybe younger. No ID.”

“Did she jump?”

“Maybe not. We’ve got a witness, one of the waiters at the Tunnel”—a restaurant at the corner up on Bush—“who was cleaning up at one of his front tables. He says he heard a woman’s scream, abruptly cut off, right before the squeal of tires down below, and then the sound of the car crash.” Waverly paused. “If she screamed, she didn’t jump.”

Juhle immediately realized this conclusion—that the woman did not jump but was murdered—was the reason Waverly had thought it wise
to request his lieutenant’s presence at the crime scene early in the process. For the past several months, Juhle’s Homicide department, as well as the city’s district attorney’s office, had been defending themselves—separately and sometimes together—against mounting accusations that the PD was soft-pedaling investigations into, and the DA was mishandling trials of, killers of African-Americans.

In the last eight murders of African-Americans, the police had made no arrests. During the same time period, the district attorney had gone to trial six times to prosecute suspects in the homicides of African-Americans and gotten zero convictions. Logically, there was no connection between these facts—crimes that went to trial had happened years before the eight current murders. But to the public, there seemed to be a pattern.

Juhle did not know the reason for this anomaly, or even if there was one, but the plain fact remained that though the nonwhite-to-white murder rate in the city was nine to one, there had not been one successful murder case involving a black victim in the previous six months. Asian victims, yes; Hispanic victims, yes; Pacific Islanders, several; whites, yes; but African-Americans, no.

A city supervisor with mayoral ambitions named Liam Goodman was riding this political magic carpet for all it was worth, talking about more than just cutting the Homicide budget. Juhle had heard rumors that the board of stupidvisors, at Goodman’s urging, was actually discussing a wholesale reshuffling of the detail, including Juhle’s own job, a complete restructuring of the chain of command.

It was just politics, of course, but with serious implications for Juhle and his Homicide inspectors.

If this woman were a murder victim—and that appeared to be the early interpretation—then bringing her killer to justice would take on a whole new importance.

This would be a high-profile case before they even knew the victim’s name.

A
S IT TURNED
out, four other witnesses came forward before the night was out. Taken together, they painted a very clear picture of a murder, not a suicide.

Zhang Jun was having a cigarette on the sidewalk during a break from his job in the cashier’s office of the Sutter-Stockton garage. He saw Robyn Owen’s Subaru make its turn and then heard the scream and the subsequent crash.

Up on Bush Street, Mercedes Johnson and her husband, Deion, were a block down toward Chinatown when they heard male and female voices raised in anger and saw what they said looked to be a fight of some kind at the top of the tunnel, punctuated by that scream. Immediately afterward, a man running down the opposite side of the street had passed them, although it was too dark to make any further identification.

The fourth witness was a homeless man who had settled down for the night on the midway landing of the stairway. The fighting above had woken him up, and after the scream and the crash, he’d gathered his stuff and found a recessed doorway to a convenience store down beyond the garage’s Bush Street entrance, which was where the initial officers at the scene found him. This man’s identity remained a mystery—he never identified himself, and after he’d told the officers what he’d seen, although instructed to remain there, he had wandered away into the milling crowd of stopped motorists, who were getting restless.

At a little after ten the next morning, Devin Juhle, who had been awake since an hour after midnight, was resting his eyes, his head on his arms. Someone knocked on his door. Straightening up and stifling a yawn, he told whomever it was to come in.

Waverly and Yamashiro, back from the lab where they had taken
the young woman’s fingerprints, were obviously pumped up from their success—the dead woman’s name was Anlya Grace Paulson.

“An-LEE-ah?” Juhle asked. “Another brand-new name I’ve never heard.”

“There you go,” Waverly said. “Keeps you flexible. Anyway, she was seventeen years old, fingerprints in two separate databases—California driver’s license and Child Protective Services.”

“CPS? She’s a foster kid?” Juhle asked.

“Or was,” Yamashiro replied. “Either way, we’ve got a home address. It’s someplace to start.”

“It’s a good place,” Juhle said. “Don’t let me keep you.”

“We just wanted you to know,” Waverly said. “You said you particularly wanted to stay in the loop on this one.”

“And I do,” Juhle said. “I remember.” He brushed some dust off his desk, frustrated with himself. “Don’t mind me. I’m barely awake. But you guys haven’t slept, either, have you?”

“Not much,” Yamashiro replied.

“Well,” Juhle said, “drive carefully.”

When his inspectors had left, closing his office door behind them, Juhle considered putting his head down again but resisted the temptation. Instead, he checked his watch—it should be late enough by now—and picked up his telephone.