John Lescroart - Hard Evidence

‘You get an ID?’ he asked Glitsky. Glitsky had a scar that ran through his lips, top to bottom; when he got thoughtful or tense, it seemed sometimes to almost glow white in his dark face. It was glowing now. He wasn’t saying anything.

‘Looks about the right age for Owen Nash,’ Hardy said.

Glitsky nodded, still thinking, looking off into the horizon. ‘That’s why you’re here,’ he said.

‘Shot twice?’ Hardy asked.

Glitsky nodded again. ‘Before the sharks got him. Small caliber, one exit wound out of two.’ Like a dog shaking off water, he came back to where they were. ‘Once in the heart, and whoever it was tried to shoot his dick off.’ He thought another moment. ‘Probably not in that order.’

Hardy felt his balls tighten. Suddenly Glitsky spoke to the ambulance attendants who had opened the stretcher and were preparing to lift the body. ‘Excuse me a minute.’ He went over to the body, got down on one knee and picked up the left hand. ‘I’m going to take off this ring,’ he told the Pacifica cops.

He looked at it briefly, showed it to them, then brought it over to Hardy. ‘You see anything?’ he asked.

It was a plain gold band. On the flat inside surface, there was a tiny stamp in the gold that said IOK . Nothing else at first glance. Hardy faced away from the sun and held the ring up to catch the light, turning it slowly. ‘Here you go,’ he said. He brought it closer to his face. Worn down flush to the gold, invisible except at one angle, Hardy could make out some initials. ‘ E.N . and some numbers – something looks like fifty-one.’

‘What was Nash’s wife’s name?’

Hardy remembered mostly because of the boat. ‘Eloise. And fifty-one – sounds like a wedding date, doesn’t it?’

Glitsky uttered an insincere ‘Absolutely brilliant’ and held out his hand. Hardy dropped the ring in it. He put the ring in a zip-loc evidence bag and stuck it in his pocket. ‘So I can either check the prints, have Strout do some DNA testing this month at a cost of ten grand or call his attorney again. How do you vote?’

The body was on the stretcher, and the ambulance attendants began carrying it over the beach. Hardy, Glitsky and the other men fell into a rough line behind them, and the caravan trudged over the sand. Nobody said a word.

‘The Eloise was out all day Saturday!’ Jeff Elliot was excited.

‘I knew that,’ Hardy said. He was at home, talking on the kitchen extension. He lived fifteen blocks from the beach, just north of Geary, and he’d seen no point in going downtown for ten minutes so that he could turn around and drive back home.

Twenty minutes after leaving Devil’s Slide, he was cutting up some onions in his kitchen. When the spaghetti sauce was made, bubbling on the stove, he opened himself a beer and called Jeff Elliot.

‘I thought you were keeping me up on the breaks in the case,’ Elliot said. ‘If you knew the boat had gone out -’

‘We didn’t even know it was Owen Nash, so what difference could his boat make? In fact, I would tend to agree with our good Dr Strout,’ Hardy drawled, ‘that yo’ conclusions were de-sahded-ly prematuah. All we knew was that a man was missing and the hand might show that it was used in karate. That’s a long stretch for hard news.‘

There was silence on the other end. Then, ‘You got something, don’t you?’

‘Turns out,’ Hardy said laconically, ‘odds on you were right.’

He told him about the body, which was on its way, or had just arrived at, the morgue – the hand bitten off, and where the shots had gone.

‘He was shot? Somebody killed him you mean?’

Hardy thought of where Glitsky thought the first bullet had gone. He felt he could rule out suicide. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Somebody killed him.’

‘God, that’s great!’ Elliot nearly shouted. ‘That is just great!’

‘The guy’s dead,’ Hardy reminded him. He took a sip of his beer. ‘That’s not so great.’

‘The story, I meant the story.’

‘I know what you meant. Listen, if you’ve got a file picture on Nash, you might bring it down with you, remove any doubt in case no one’s identified him yet.’

‘Good idea!’

‘Oh, and Jeff, if Mr Farris or Celine Nash – Owen’s daughter – is down at the morgue, try to rein in the enthusiasm a little, would you? I don’t think they’re going to be as happy about it as you are.’

‘No, I understand that. Of course.’

Hardy rang off. ‘Of course,’ he said.

It was going to the front page in tomorrow’s edition, Jeffs first front-page story. Not the main headline, but lower right, three columns, his byline – not too shabby.

Not only that, but the lead graphs had already gone out on the wire that night, and Jeff had received a followup call from the L.A. Times , la-di-da, and from Drew Bates over at KRON-TV, who wondered if he – Jeff – had anything more to give out on the Owen Nash murder. Imagine, TV coming to him! The L.A. Timesl

He had left his forwarding number at night reception and now sat in the bowels of the building where he worked, checking the Nexis listing on Owen Nash. It was nine-thirty at night, and he’d been up since six, but he felt completely fresh. Parker Whitelaw, his editor – Christ, THE EDITOR – said he’d give him a sidebar on Nash, they’d run with the pickup on the back page of the first section, but he had to have it done by eleven-thirty. Did Jeff think he could do it?

Jeff thought for a lead story and a sidebar he could stand on his head and spit nickels, dance with Nureyev, run a ten-flat hundred. He looked at the mute reminder, his crutches, leaning on his right against the table. Well, the hell with them. He could get this done. He had the raw data – now it was just putting it together. Piece of cake, though there was more than he would have thought – and he had to get it down to three hundred words maximum. Well, hit the high spots.

Jeff had started the Nexis search at quarter to seven after getting back from the morgue. Almost three hours, close to two hundred articles – some merely a mention at a society event, a few substantial interviews, a cover story in ‘87 in Business Week . Owen Nash, from the evidence here, had been a very major player. He’d been mentioned in one U.S. publication or another on an average of once every six weeks or so for what seemed like the past twenty years.

Jeff looked away from the orange-tinted screen. He was having a problem reconciling the Owen Nash in these articles to the body he’d witnessed at the morgue.

He’d gotten there as a limo had been pulling up. Ken Farris and his wife had recognized him immediately from the previous night, and while they didn’t seem all that happy to see Jeff, they were also too distracted to make any real objection when the hawk-faced black inspector with the scar through his lips admitted them.

The other woman in the limo was Celine Nash, Owen’s daughter. She was much older than Jeff, probably near forty, but something about her, even in grief, made him react. He didn’t know if it was posture, attitude or the shape of her, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Stupid really. A cripple like him stood no chance with most women, much less a beauty of her class and caliber -if that powerful a sexual draw could be called beauty – but he thought there couldn’t be any harm in letting it wash over him.

Until, of course, they saw Owen Nash. At the sight of him, everything else vanished. The assistant coroner had pulled back enough of the sheet to show the face, and there was no question of identification. Celine sobbed once. Farris hung his head and pulled his wife closer to him.

The inspector – Glitsky – had asked the formal question and the assistant was pushing the body back, when Celine told him to stop. She wanted to see her father one last time.