Free The Hunt Club by John Lescroart

San Franciscan, but he’d moved up from the Peninsula for college at San Francisco State and had stayed. He had always loved Clay Street, especially this stretch of it. The gas lamp–style antique streetlights. The elegant gingerbread houses were set back a civilized distance from the sidewalk, usually with a low wall or discreet fence marking the property boundary. And then the landscaping, each house as though it were watching over its own small private park—no bigger than an average front lawn in suburbia—making a totally different statement about taste, urban life, civility.
    Judge Palmer’s place was in the mold. The house was a three-story Victorian, immaculately kept up. A low, tan stucco wall with a wrought-iron fence ran along the sidewalk. Then behind the wall, a circular driveway swept up to the steps of the porch. In the semicircular garden carved out by the brick drive, a three-tiered stone fountain splashed down into a small lily pond surrounded by flowering shrubs, seemingly every one of which somehow contrived to be in bloom.
    The two inspectors had gotten to the scene so quickly that the sergeant from the nearest station, who was supposed to superintend at these types of scenes, hadn’t made it yet, but Officer Sanchez, a field-training officer, met them at the front door and told them they could find Mrs. Palmer, apparently in shock, with his rookie partner in the living room, off to their right. The office, with the bodies, was to the left. “Nobody’s touched anything in there,” he said, “and the wife says she didn’t either, except the phone on the desk to call nine one one.”
    Juhle and Shiu, partnered in homicide now for two months, knew that within minutes they’d be joined by the assistant coroner and the crime scene investigation unit, who would quantify and memorialize, videotape, photograph, examine, fingerprint, and/or book into evidence everything in the room. Depending on how fast the word flew, they could expect a team of field agents from the FBI, since killing a federal judge could be a federal crime. Homeland Security might even want to explore whether there might be a terrorist angle to the judge’s murder, and Juhle had to admit that this might not, in fact, be out of the question.
    Meanwhile, this was Juhle’s chance to get some impressions without interruption, and he wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity.

    The bodies lay, as advertised, on the floor, mostly hidden from the door behind the desk. The judge was dressed in pale brown slacks, a white dress shirt, and darker brown pullover sweater. The chair, a big, comfortable-looking leather swivel, lay on its side next to the body. There was a small hole in the judge’s right cheek and a congealed pool of black blood coming out from under the judge’s head onto the clear plastic that protected his rug from the wheels of his chair. The room’s lights were on overhead, as was a reading lamp on the desk, which looked pretty much undisturbed.
    The woman was much younger than the judge—early twenties max. She wore stonewashed jeans, an undershirt of some kind, and a black sweater that left her midriff exposed. A diamond stud was visible in her navel. She lay flat on her back, her neck skewed a bit where her head had hit the wall behind her as she fell. There was no evident entry wound and no blood under her, although a thin thread of black came from her mouth and ended in a dark puddle on the floor beneath her. A large diamond glittered on a necklace chain out over the sweater.
    â€œWell, it wasn’t a robbery,” Juhle said.
    â€œNo, and it happened fast,” Shiu said. “She was standing next to him, the shooter whips it out, and it’s bam bam over.”
    â€œMaybe.” Juhle stood over to the side of the desk where he could see both bodies. But he wasn’t looking at the bodies. He was looking at the bookshelves behind the