John Lescroart - Hard Evidence

Street parking was often a problem. With no garage, driveway, or back alley, you either got your spot by six o’clock or you had to walk. Now, at ten-fifteen, they couldn’t find a space within three blocks. It was a mild, still night with no fog, and they strolled east on Clement, under the trees of Lincoln Park, back toward their house. Frannie leaned into her husband, her arm around his waist.

‘Pinch me,’ she said.

‘I know.’ Hardy tightened his arm across her shoulders.

‘Would you have thought this?’

‘I guess so. It’s why I thought we ought to be married. But still…’

She stopped. Hardy took the cue and leaned over and kissed her. ‘What is it?’ Frannie asked.

‘Nothing. A little shiver. How often do you notice when everything is perfect? It’s a little scary. I used to believe that’s when things were most likely to go wrong.’

‘I think that’s why I was so upset tonight. I’m just getting so I can accept that all this is happening, that it’s not some dream I’m going to wake up from.’ She looked up into Hardy’s face and pulled herself close against him. ‘I don’t want to wake up from this,’ she said. ‘I want this to keep going on.’

‘It’s going to, Frannie. I’m not going to let anything get in the way of this, promise.’

Frannie nudged him with her hip. ‘Let’s get home.’

They paid the sitter, looked in on the slumbering baby. Hardy fed his fish while Frannie got ready for bed. In his office, his answering machine had calls from Jane and from Pico Morales, both of whom he could call in the morning.

He could hear the shower running in their bathroom. He picked up his telephone and hit the numbers he’d memorized earlier that night – May Shinn’s. The phone rang four times, then picked up.

‘Just leave a number, please, and I’ll get right back to you.’ That was the whole message. No trace of a Japanese accent. A deep, cultured voice. Hardy hung up after the beep.

His desk was cleared. The green-shaded banker’s lamp threw a soft pool of light around the room. The dried blowfish pouted on the mantel of the office fireplace. Absently, Hardy crossed from the desk to the mantel, straightened out the pipe rack – unused for over a year -and grabbed three darts from the bull’s-eye of the dart-board, where he’d left them. Back at the line near his desk, he began throwing.

His dart game was off. In his first round, none of the three darts landed in the 20, where he was aiming. A year before, that couldn’t have happened. If anyone had asked him, he would have said he was semi-serious about darts. He still carried his custom set of twenty-gram tungstens with him every day in his suit jacket’s inside pocket.

But the reality was that new priorities had taken over. As he retrieved his first round, he heard the water shut off in the bathroom. He was back at the line near his desk now: 20, 19, 18. There you go.

Then Frannie was in the doorway, barefoot, wearing the purple silk baby-dolls Hardy had bought her for Christmas, the ones she hadn’t been able to wear until after Rebecca was born. A tiny dark spot marked where a drop of her milk had leaked from her nipple.

Hardy crossed to her, went to his knees and lifted the hem of the pyjamas, burying his face against her.

FINANCIER MISSING IN ‘MYSTERY HAND’ CASE

by Jeffrey Elliot

Chronicle Staff Writer

The case of the mystery hand found Sunday in the stomach of a great white shark at the Steinhart Aquarium took on a new dimension today as Bay Area financier Owen Nash was reported missing by Ken Farris, counsel and chief operating officer of Owen Industries of South San Francisco.

Mr Farris reported that Nash was last seen Thursday evening by members of his personal staff at his mansion in Seacliff. On Friday, Mr Nash failed to appear at a luncheon appointment. On Saturday, Nash reportedly was scheduled to go sailing with May Shinn, a friend. Neither Nash or Shinn has been heard from since then, although Nash’s sailboat, the Eloise , remains at its berth in the Marina. It is unclear at this writing whether or not the boat was taken out over the weekend.

The police will not speculate on the possibility of foul play, although yesterday a representative of the district attorney’s office gave strong credence to that possibility.

Farris reported that Nash’s life had been threatened ‘half a dozen’ times in the past five years over his mostly hostile takeover efforts of several Silicon Valley companies.

Strengthening the bond between Nash and the mystery hand is the fact that Nash was a black belt in karate. The hand has several unusual characteristics that can be associated with karate, among them calcium deposits and a somewhat overdeveloped ‘heel,’ or pad, at the side of the hand. San Francisco coroner John Strout, however, had no comment on the likelihood of the hand being that of Owen Nash and dismissed any possible identification at this time as ‘decidedly premature.’

‘The boy bushwacked me,’ Farris said. ‘He was waiting at my houseboat when I got home, had already charmed the skirts off of my Betty.’

Hardy, in his office at home, was beginning to admire Jeff Elliot’s spunk. The reporter was nobody’s little lost boy. Hardy had thought he’d scared him into some controllable space yesterday, but evidently he’d read that wrong. Hardy wasn’t going to get Jeff Elliot off his story. It didn’t look like anybody was.

‘You never told me about the death threats.’

‘I never took them seriously anyway. People say things when they lose negotiations, you know.’

‘But you thought enough to mention them to Jeff.’

‘Not really.’ Hardy heard a rustling noise. ‘I’ve got the paper here in front of me, and I must admit it reads pretty dramatically, but all I did was answer a straight question -had anybody ever threatened Owen? I said, “Sure, half a dozen times,” but it wasn’t anything. At least, until I saw it here in print.’

‘You don’t think it could be related?’

‘I guess anything’s possible. But as I said, this was all settled a long time ago. I think the last man who got bitter – Owen took him and his wife to Hawaii for a couple of weeks, wined and dined them, bought her a Mercedes, made him president of some division somewhere. The man made out like a bandit. ’Course, Owen made out better.‘

‘Who was that?’

‘It wasn’t any real threat. I’ve told Owen I was gonna kill him twenty times myself, and half those times I meant it.’

‘Okay, but if Mr Nash turns up dead, somebody’s going to want that name.’

‘I still pray to God he’s not dead.’

Hardy sat still a moment, drumming his fingers on his desk, trying to decide whether or not to tell Farris what he knew. Hell, the man had been forthcoming with him. He said. ‘The Eloise did go out on Saturday.’ He told him about his visit to the Marina, his tour of the boat.

‘But if the boat went out, and now is back, and the hand is Owen’s…’

‘Those are big ifs…’

‘But you see what that means? It means May -’

‘No… May or someone else. Maybe not May at all. Or May and some third party.’

Farris was collecting himself. ‘You’re right.’

‘A boat like that, it’s not unknown to get used once for drugs, then abandoned.’

‘Drugs?’

‘It’s more common in Florida, or down south in San Diego, but it’s happened here. Smugglers board the ship, kill whoever’s on it, throw them overboard, load up their cargo, deliver it, dump the boat.’

‘Back at its own slip?’

‘I’m not saying it’s likely, but the boat being back doesn’t say much about anything.’