John Lescroart - Hard Evidence

‘Maybe it’s what he says – awareness of mortality. That can stop you.’

Jane scratched at the tablecloth with a perfect coral fingernail. She and Hardy didn’t need reminders of the lessons of mortality. Every time she thought of their son, Michael, who’d died in a crib accident ten years before, it stopped her again, as it had stopped her life, and Hardy’s, back then. A tear came from one eye and she turned away.

Seeing it, or simply knowing, he reached over and covered her hand. ‘Let’s leave it for now, Jane. Come back to it later,’ he said. ‘We’ll think of something.’

He missed the stud the first time and figured it must have been the wine.

After lunch, he’d stopped at a sporting goods store on Market and picked up the dart board he’d promised himself. Back at his office, he’d banged on the wall opposite his desk, listening for the hollow sound to give way to solid wood, locating the stud, or thinking he had.

The first stroke of the hammer drove the nail through drywall clear up to its head. Hardy was a good carpenter. Wood was one of his hobbies. It wasn’t like him to miss a stud. He banged on the wall, thought he’d found the stud again, and this time was right.

Measuring off eight feet with a ruler from his desk, he put some tape down on the floor just under where his chair would normally be. Then he moved the chair back up, took out his leather case and fitted the blue flights onto the shafts of his darts. He stood up at his tape line and threw two bull’s-eyes and a 20. Leaving the darts in place, he picked up his phone.

Judge Fowler had called in sick. That was odd. Judges never called in sick – their dockets were too full. A sick day inconvenienced too many people. Hardy tried his home, but no one was there either, not even an answering machine. He was tempted to call Jane again but why worry her?

Maybe Andy was simply taking a mental-health day. God knew, he worked hard enough to deserve it. Maybe after seeing Jane last night, he’d gotten drunk again and was hung over. In any case, if Andy Fowler wanted to take a day off, Hardy would not disturb him.

He looked at the still-large pile of case folders on the corner of his desk, wondering what unknown thrills lay in store for him in that mountain of paper. He considered going around to his darts and throwing a solo game of 301 to keep his eye up. He wondered if Jeff Elliot was back from the Marina or wherever he’d gone. He should call Frannie and see how Rebecca was doing.

Anything, he thought, but…

It wasn’t a big enough room to pace in. He pulled his chair up to the desk and sat down, feeling lethargic and heavy. The wine. Blame it on the wine.

Elizabeth Pullios was still wearing the gold chain with the ruby, but that was all she was wearing. Christopher Locke, the district attorney, was lying with his hands crossed behind his head. He had a barrel chest covered with curls of black hair. His stomach was beginning to bulge, but it was a hard bulge. He had a pretty good body for an older guy, she thought. And as long as he let her be on top, his mobility wasn’t much of an issue – she could control things, which was how she liked it.

She moved forward a little, adjusting her position. The D.A. moaned with pleasure. His black, broad-featured face broke into a grin. ‘My, don’t we look smug,’ Pullios said. She tightened herself a little around him and he closed his eyes with the feel of it.

‘I feel smug,’ Locke said. ‘Come down here.’

She leaned down over him. He took one breast in each hand and pulled her face up to his. She took his tongue into her mouth and bit down on it gently, then pulled away.

‘You are such a bitch,’ he said. Still smiling. She moved her hips again. He tried to come up to meet her face, but her hands were on his shoulders, forcing him down, grinning at him.

‘I know, and you love it.’ She came down and licked the bottom of his ear, staying there, beginning to rock rhythmically.

‘God, Pullios…’

She pulled away, halfway up. Her face now was set. She had found her angle, concentrating. Her hands cupped his head, tighter. He rose to meet her, feeling it build.

‘Not yet, not yet…’ She was breathing hard, her teeth clenched. ‘Okay, okay.’ She pounded down against him, now straightening up, arching, her head thrown back. ‘Now. Now. Now .’ Grinding down into him as he let himself go, collapsing against his big chest, a low chuckle escaping from deep in her throat.

Turning south on Highway 1, Hardy was thinking that fate could be a beautiful thing.

The dunes with their sedge grasses obscured the view of the ocean, but with the top down on the Suzuki, Hardy could hear and smell it. The afternoon, now well along, was still warm. Dwarf cypresses on the east side of the road attested to the near-constant wind off the ocean, the evergreen branches flattened where they faced the beach, as though giants walked the land, stomping them to one side.

Where the highway turned inland at Fort Funston near the Olympic Club golf course, hang-gliders filled the sky. Even on a windless, cloudless day, thermals up the cliffs at the shoreline provided decent lift. Hardy thought he might like to get into hang-gliding sometime. Take the wife and kids. Soar.

The fate that had saved him from his files had come in the guise of a call from Abe Glitsky, who’d been called down to Pacifica to view a body that had washed ashore. Calls from the SFPD to other local jurisdictions over the past few days had gotten the word out, and when the call came in, Abe had been in the office and volunteered to go down and have a look. He’d called Hardy from his squawk box, patched in.

The turnoff was just north of Devil’s Slide, a two-mile stretch of Highway 1 where the curving roadway’s shoulder disappeared at the edge of a three-hundred-foot cliff. Most of the time, the area was shrouded in fog, and it was the rare year that didn’t see another verification of the fact that automobiles could not fly.

Hardy wound back on a rutted and unpaved roadway toward the city. Glitsky’s car was parked in the dirt area at the bottom, along with a couple of Pacifica police cars. As Hardy was getting out of his car, an ambulance appeared on the road he’d just used.

The tide was out. Getting on four o’clock, there was still no wind at all, no fog. Maybe, Hardy thought, we’re going to have our three days of summer.

He nodded to the ambulance guys, but was too anxious to wait for them. Crossing the soft sand, he got to harder ground and broke into a trot. The officials were knotted around a still green form about twenty yards from the line of surf.

Hardy nodded to Glitsky, who introduced him around. ‘Here’s your victim,’ he said.

The body lay covered with a tarp, on its back. Hardy asked permission to look, and one of the Pacifica cops said go ahead. He pulled the tarp away and involuntarily stepped back.

Sand flies buzzed around the half-open mouth, the nose, the empty eye sockets, the thinning head of gray hair. Hardy was momentarily startled by the fact that the body wore jogging sweats identical to the pair he owned -except that the body’s green sweatsuit had a large crescent-shaped tear in the right torso. There was also a ragged break in the lower left leg, with flesh showing beneath it. Two small clean holes – one in the chest and one just over the crotch – spoke for themselves. Forcing himself to take it all in, Hardy noticed the wedding band on the left hand. But, by far, the most arresting detail was the end of the right arm, a jagged and torn mess of tendon, bone and sickly greenish white flesh. Hardy knew what had happened to the hand.

The ambulance men had made their way across the beach with a stretcher. Hardy stepped away and let them move in.