The Locked Room

by L.M.Lewis

Things are not always as they appear.

1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: The characters are not mine and I make no profit from them. All incidents and characters within are fictional and depict no person, living or dead.

Author's note: This story first appeared as an offering in the STAR for BK auction last year. Many, many thanks to those who donated.

Hardcastle's deceased son was first mentioned in the episode 'Man in a Glass House' by mobster Joe Cadillac, in a plea to Hardcastle for his assistance in saving Cadillac's own son. The judge was obviously affected by the request and helped the mob boss, but he didn't provide Mark, or the viewers, with even so much as the name of his dead child.

Thanks goodness for fan fiction. Liz Tucker named him Tommy, and Tommy he has remained in nearly every mention of the boy across twenty-four years of stories. His fate, and the reverberations thereof, have provided a raft of stories. Every time I sat down to write this one, I'd think, Well, what's the point? But, as you see, I finally threw my two cents in. It's mostly because I love a mystery, and a man who refuses to divulge even the name of one of the most important people in his life is being manifestly mysterious.

This is very AU, also there is a bit of bad language in part three.

The Locked Room

By L. M. Lewis

"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out;

and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in." Virginia Woolfe

Part I--Research

Hardcastle's collection of law books usually sufficed for the majority of things Mark had to look up. Sometimes, if something wasn't in the books, it was the judge himself who was the repository of what he needed. Faster, too, and with enough sharp asides to make the information stick. But occasionally there were things outside the norm; either that, or the guy looked busy.

In this case it was both. Professor Sturgis had asked him to lend a hand with the preparation for a summer colloquium on early California law and Hardcastle was up in Fresno for the weekend. No problem, McCormick thought. He had his shopping list—handed over by the professor—that and an evening to devote to the cause.

Friday nights were quiet in the law library. He set up shop near the computer catalog, and gradually worked his way down the list, filing out his request slips as he went. He was nearly halfway down when he hit a snag.

He frowned. The system was new, and far from foolproof. No listing didn't necessarily mean it wasn't there. He gathered up slips and list and strolled over to the information desk, hoping for one of the less dragon-like guardians of the library.

His luck held. It was Marguerite, and she wasn't even a dragon-in-training. She actually seemed to believe library materials were intended to be used, and didn't classify law students as The Enemy.

"This one," he held out the list with the mystery item circled, "no luck."

She peered at Sturgis' slightly chicken scratchy notations. "Oh, some of the older materials haven't been accessioned into the computer system yet." She turned to her left and reached for a card catalog drawer, opening it and flipping through the contents with practiced ease. "There it is," she glanced over her shoulder. That's the problem—that one's not in the stacks. See, it's marked 'HMR'. That's special collections."

He mouthed the letters to himself and then asked, "This building?"

"Yes," she nodded, "up in the south tower. It's nineteenth-century law texts. Some history and political science. Access by appointment."

Mark looked disappointed.

"Oh," Marguerite smiled, "it's not like you have to ask two weeks in advance ." she looked around at the nearly deserted library, flipped a sign over that said, 'The Librarian Will Return Shortly,' and rattled in her drawer, pulling out a key ring. "Come on, I can show you."

He followed her back into the bowels of the building, down a narrow corridor, and up a flight of stairs. Next followed another corridor, with closed, dark-wood doors on either side—most bearing plaques of dedication. She led him to the end of the hallway, to a double door which was arched at the top but otherwise on generally the same plan as the others. It was only on close approach that he could see the raised lettering on the brass plate affixed next to that door. It stopped him frozen, while his guide continued forward, key in hand, reaching for the lock.

She had the doorknob in hand and was opening the door before she seemed to notice he was no longer at her heel. It must have been the expression on his face; as she turned to look at him she frowned lightly with concern, and said, "Are you all right?"

He nodded, dragging his eyes down from the name on the sign. "'The Hardcastle Memorial Collection'?"

She nodded back, flipping on the light switch and stepping in. He followed, still frowning. The room was small, and obviously intended to be a practical repository. Two walls were lined with cherry-wood barrister's bookshelves. Through the glass fronts Mark could see the contents were old, leather-bound volumes. But what drew his eye was the fourth wall, the one opposite the door. There was a narrow table, and to one side of that a comfortable wingback chair—it might have been the perfect match for the ones in the judge's study. On the wall above the table was another plaque, this one in bronze bas-relief with enough patina to indicate a passage of time since it had been hung.

The woman had set to work, looking for the proper volume. He stepped past her, drawn to the memorial plaque as if by an irresistible force which had overcome an almost equal amount of foreboding.

He saw what he had expected to see from the moment he'd had the meaning of the initials 'HMC' deciphered for him. He had no idea if the depiction was an accurate one; he'd never seen a photo of Milton C. Hardcastle's only son as he'd looked in uniform.

To the right of the portrait, the epitaph was simple and to the point: In Memorium, Thomas C. Hardcastle, 1954-1973. No poetry, not even a pithy quote—no explanation at all but the dates that bracketed his life. To the otherwise uninformed, the rest of the story was deducible only from the military collar and cap. There was a Marine emblem, but even that seemed to be a reluctant afterthought, small, and added below the inscription.

He became aware that Marguerite was saying something to him—that maybe she'd been speaking for a few moments. He blinked and tore his gaze from the plaque.

"Sorry," he fumbled, "what?"

"They're all reference books—because of their age, you know. We ask you to use them here." She nodded at the volume in her hand. "This is the one you were looking for."

He looked down at it, then took it, almost having forgotten why he'd come. He thought Professor Sturgis would understand that. He half-wondered if the man had had a notion about where the book would turn up when he'd added it to the list. But, no, that was a level of suspicion verging on paranoia.

"'Here'," he said, "meaning 'in this room'?"

She nodded. He looked up at the plaque one more time, then shook his head and gently handed the book back. "I think I'll need to come back." He hesitated and then added, "I don't think I have enough time right now. Sorry to have been a nuisance."

"It's no problem." She shrugged. "I don't come up here very much. There's not a lot of call for these older materials." She shelved the book again and closed the glass door on that section, dusting her hands off lightly.

Mark stepped back to let her pass. He looked at the bronze eyes looking back out at him, the all too brief dates alongside them.

"Do you know when this collection was donated?" He'd asked it abruptly, almost surprising himself. "When the room was dedicated?"

She glanced over at the plaque herself, as if to refresh her memory, or maybe she'd never noticed it before. "Oh," she said, "not long after he died, I'd imagine. It's been here since before I came, and I started in '78. She was looking at the name and the dates. "Vietnam, I think," she said pensively. "He was young. It's strange to think of them—the ones who died like that, so young. He'd be, let's see . . . thirty-four now."

Mark nodded.

The librarian was still looking at the plaque. She'd probably never really looked at it closely. "And he must have been one of the last, I mean, if it was Vietnam." She frowned. "It was mostly over in '73. What a pity, to be one of the last."

Mark wasn't sure about that—whether it made any difference to be first, or last, or one of the thousands in between, but now that she'd drawn his attention to it, he remembered that interlude; there'd been some sort of peace. "It was Vietnam," he said quietly.

"I suppose." She ushered him through the door and reached for the light switch. "Maybe he was a student here. No," she corrected herself, "not if he was already in the war. Too young for both. And why a bunch of old law books?"

"His father was a judge."

"Ah, that'd explain it," she said. "Though I can't imagine many nineteen-year-olds who'd want to be remembered with of a roomful of old books." She smiled. "And I like books." She closed the door and turned the key in the lock, then pulled it out and slipped it into her pocket.

She gave it a sharp nod of her chin as she turned. "Now that you know your way around, when you want to use it, just stop off at the desk and we can sign you in."

Mark smiled pensively as she ducked away, in a hurry to get back to her deserted post. He was left standing alone in the corridor. He looked up one more time at the sign over the door. It had been an unexpected encounter, but only one in a series that he had stumbled into, unawares, over the past four years.

From the first time he'd heard of the existence of Hardcastle's son, only a few weeks after he'd moved into the gatehouse at Gulls Way, he'd realized there was a Tom-sized hole in the fabric of the place. He had repeatedly come up to the edges of it, without ever getting a clear notion of what had once been there. Now he had discovered another part of the perimeter—1973—that, and the issue raised by the very observant Marguerite.

Mark plunged his hand into his pocket, encountering the slips he'd laboriously filled out. He supposed he ought to head down to the call desk and hand them over; he might still salvage something from this evening. He retraced his steps down the corridor and stairs, and back to the lobby. He made it as far as the desk. He even stood there for few seconds, hand still in his pocket. The annoying, niggling thought—the year of Tom Hardcastle's death—must've clouded his face. The librarian stationed there gave him an odd look and pointed to the sign that said last requests must be in one hour before the library closed. He glanced up at the clock and realized he'd missed the deadline by five minutes.

He smiled at the keeper of the stacks and turned away. Signs. Signs and portents. And all the way to the library on a Friday night with nothing to show for it. On the other hand, he realized, the periodicals department was still open. The 1973 L. A. Times was there on microfilm. Three hundred and sixty-five days worth of obituaries, though he figured he'd only have to find the Paris Peace Accords, and work his way back from there.

00000

But that was a strike-out. After nearly an hour's searching, he leaned back in frowning puzzlement as he rewound the last spool and lifted it from the spindle. True, he'd been skimming, but surely a judge's son—and a war hero to boot—would have rated more than a few lines of small print. He slipped the reel into the box and set it down next to the others. He blinked, and rubbed his temples. Part of him believed this was a sign, too, leave it alone; it's none of your business. Another annoyingly persistent part, somehow still wanted to take the measurements of that empty space, to at least know the general outline of things.

There were two other possible sources of information. Tapping either of them might be dangerous, but he thought Frank Harper was the safer choice. He had no idea what Frank would say—he'd never raised the issue of Hardcastle's personal life with the man who seemed to know him pretty well.

"The worst he can do is say 'no'," Mark muttered to himself, as he gathered up the rest of the reels and returned them to the shelving cart. Then, feeling edgily guilty about the whole thing, he departed.

00000

It was after ten-thirty by the time he arrived back at Gulls Way. He went to the main house first, letting himself in, putting the day's mail on Hardcastle's desk, and giving the place the once over. There was no blinking light on the answering machine and therefore the judge hadn't tried to reach him.

He was oddly relieved. The idea of talking to him right now was disturbing. He'd never been very good at concealing things, at least not from the judge.

He wondered why Hardcastle hadn't seen fit to mention the place before—a sort of preemptive strike—'There's a room over at the library dedicated to Tom. I don't want to talk about it'—something subtly Hardcastilian like that. Mark shook his head and smiled sadly. He turned off the light in the den and let himself out through the front door.

He wandered across the driveway, hands in pockets, occasionally looking up at the sky. He had a notion he was avoiding more than a call from the judge. He was trying to remember the chronology of it all and recapture his motivations at the time. He thought most of it must have been native caution.

He arrived at the gatehouse door. Home. Most definitely home, and he'd known it to be so from a point in time that really made no sense—a month, at the most, from the night he'd first set foot on the estate. Not even really a month—more like a week or two.

He let himself into the gatehouse and stood in the dimly-lit main room. He tried to picture it as it had been, all the furniture draped in sheets and Sarah stiff and prickly, reciting the list of former tenants.

He'd been bemused, overwhelmed, exhausted. The trial by fire that had followed had given him no chance to sort any of it out. Before he'd even had a chance to think things through, he'd had his socks in a drawer in the loft bedroom and he and Hardcastle were careening off on another adventure—this time in pursuit of an old mob adversary of the judge's.

Then the mobster, Joe Cadillac, had turned everything on its head, asking Hardcastle for a favor—begging him really—using the unlikely lever of Hardcastle's loss to enlist his help in saving Cadillac's kidnapped son.

Mark leaned against the wall and frowned in concentration, trying to remember exactly what the man had said that afternoon in the judge's study. "You lost a son, too, in 'Nam." It must have been that, or something very nearly like it. Mark remembered sitting there, in silent surprise. Part of his shock had been the judge's response—harsh, preemptory, no explanation and no room for discussion.

But Cadillac had obviously struck a nerve. It hadn't taken much insight to realize the judge wouldn't stand by, doing nothing to save the other man's son, even if there was no alternative except breaking and entering and Grand Theft Evidence.

That was it; that was when it had happened, Mark realized. He could remember it clearly—how he'd felt then. He'd gone back to the gatehouse, shagged out of the den by an obviously impatient Hardcastle. He'd stood there, almost exactly where he was standing now, and realized, in an almost blinding flash of insight, that he knew how the judge thought because Hardcastle thought like him.

He might've sat down on the sofa for a moment then, in fact, he was sure he had. After that, though, he'd gone upstairs to the loft and gathered up what he would need: basic black clothing, shoes with a good grip to the soles, thin leather gloves, equally suitable for driving and for even finer motor skills.

There'd been one last item. It was something more personal—his own set of picks. He'd hesitated before opening the desk drawer where he'd stowed them. It wasn't as if Hardcastle didn't suspect he owned them, but it seemed unwise to wave the evidence right in front of him like that. Still, Mark had figured they needed every edge they could get if they were to pull this one off. He'd sat down at the desk chair and begun digging for the well-worn brown leather case.

And it hadn't been there. The first, cursory search had given way to a more detailed examination of the drawer's contents, and from there to a careful item by item removal and inventory. By the time he'd reached the bottom he was verging on panic, uncertain what it all meant—or what it would mean, if Sarah had stumbled across his stash of tools and taken the matter up with the judge.

Then he'd taken a deep breath and had managed to get a grip. It made no sense that she would have been up here, poking around. She'd already made it clear that he was responsible for his own rooms. And if she had come upon the case—and had recognized it for contraband—she was hardly the sort who would have studied the matter before reporting to the judge. Hardcastle hadn't seemed like a guy who would vacillate either.

But nothing had happened.

That had been the moment when logic had finally overcome blind panic. He'd taken another, closer look at the drawer, finally pulling it off its runners, removing it from the desk completely. He'd leaned forward and felt around in the now empty slot where the drawer had been. He'd almost immediately felt something thin—smooth like leather but not quite the dimensions of his case. He'd pulled it out and glanced at it cursorily—a book, small and unlabeled. A journal, he'd realized, when he'd opened it.

What would have been meaningless to him only an hour earlier, now made eerie sense. Thomas C. Hardcastle, USMC, the man whose name was inscribed inside the front cover, was Milton C.'s lost son. How the journal had wound up in the gatehouse was a mystery, but since it wouldn't help him open any locks, it was quickly set aside. Another scrounge in the back of the slot yielded up the missing case, and Mark had sighed with relief over more than one issue.

But the journal hadn't been forgotten, nor had Hardcastle's obviously bristly attitude toward anything abutting on his late son. It was well along the next day—after a burglary, a ransom, a careening high-speed chase, an exploding car, and an aborted confession that might have landed him and Hardcase in adjoining cells—that Mark had finally returned to the gatehouse.

He thought he could hardly blame himself for having had serious doubts about his mercurial employer. Anyway, it hadn't seemed like an appropriate moment to trot over to the main house and announce, "Here, I found something of your son's." He'd figured that moment might never arrive—and he thought he'd never be able to convince the old donkey that he hadn't somehow been prying into his family secrets.

But he hadn't. God knows he hadn't. He'd put the damn book, unexamined, up on a shelf among some others. There it had sat, unremarkable and unnoticed, for nearly four years. It was still there now. He could see it, leaning slightly against a copy of Winston Churchill's War Memoirs. Hidden in plain sight, which was very often the best place to hide.

He considered it again. He decided, for the umpteenth time, that between it and Harper as a source of information, Frank was the safer option. Still, he wondered how he'd managed to ignore it all this time—to have put it almost entirely out of his mind.

Native caution again, he decided. Self-preservation.

00000

He'd finally fallen asleep, not all that many hours before dawn, and awoke at an hour his internal alarm clock associated with basketball. There was no one out under the hoop this morning and the silence was almost more noticeable than the customary racket.

Saturday morning, and he'd been looking forward all week to sleeping in, but now he was awake, pondering how early could still be considered a civilized hour to roust Frank out with a phone call. Nine seemed reasonable. Anything before that would smack of worry. He wanted this to be a mere point of information, though he wasn't sure how he could bring up the topic of Tom Hardcastle and have it sound routine.

He got up, killed some time making breakfast, found he wasn't hungry, stared at the bookshelf for a while, caught himself doing that, and very suddenly decided he'd go out and sink a few baskets. He had turned, and was halfway to the door, when the phone rang. There was only one person it could be at eight-thirty—some people had a different notion of what was civilized on a Saturday. Mark sighed and for once worried that he might sound too awake.

He picked it up on the third ring and tried to mumble his hello.

"Hey, kiddo, Haven't burned the place down?"

"Not yet, but it's early. You having a good time?"

"It's Fresno, whaddaya think?"

"Well," Mark sighed, and this time there was nothing feigned, "don't rush home on my account. I've got a bunch more stuff to do at the library." He winced. He wondered if it would be ever thus from now on when he mentioned the place. He figured he'd have to practice that one a bit, smooth it out some before he could refer to it without any noticeable discomfort,

His delivery had apparently been unremarkable. Hardcastle didn't sound very concerned when he said, "Library, huh? Just make sure there's no beer cans lying around the pool and don't let anyone leave their wet swimsuits on the furniture."

"Finish the beer, no swimsuits. Gotcha." There, easy. Just a matter of staying in character.

"You're okay, aren'tcha?"

Mark winced again and shot back, "'Course I am."

A moment of hesitation from the other end and then, "Good. You had me worried there for a minute, all this talk about libraries. Sounded like you were coming down with something."

"Yeah, huh, a bad case of research," Mark said grimly.

The judge got a quiet chuckle over that one—as though he still found the transformation entertaining. From there it was a brief and easy slide to a few necessary exchanges of information and then good-byes.

Mark hung up, sighed in relief, and checked his watch again—only a few minutes to nine. He sat back, tapped his foot impatiently for what might have been thirty seconds, and then leaned forward and punched the office number in. He thought the odds were slim that Frank was there on a Saturday—but not all that slim.

He was rewarded on the second ring with the sound of Harper's laconically impatient greeting.

"Hey, Frank, it's me," he replied.

He'd thought about this next bit, off and on through the parts of the night when he'd been staring at the ceiling. He'd decided there was no possibility for subterfuge here, at least nothing that would pass muster with Harper, who knew him pretty well and Hardcastle even better.

"Listen," he hurried on, "I know this isn't any of my business, really, but something came up yesterday," he hesitated. Okay, maybe a little subterfuge wouldn't hurt. It'd sound less goofy that way—or less calculated. "It was a question. I thought you might know"

Now he came to a full pause. Frank didn't help him out any. Mark thought he could hear him opening a file drawer, probably pulling out the latest project Hardcastle had consulted him on.

Mark sighed and then plunged ahead. "It's about Tom Hardcastle."

Dead silence from the other end of the line. It was the kind of silence that needed to be filled in with some sort of explanation.

"I was at the library," Mark added hastily. "There's this room there with his name on it."

"Oh, that." There was an exhalation from the other end. "Yeah, I think it was Nancy's idea. Her dad had a nice collection of old law books, stuff like that . . . he was the guy Tom was named after, see?"

"Ah." It was already a freer offering of information than Mark had anticipated, but he recognized it as an attempt at controlling the direction of the conversation. "Well," he said, trying to sound merely casually interested, "I was looking something up, for Professor Sturgis—you remember him? He's a friend of Hardcastle's."

That was a clear-cut attempt of his own at redirection. He heard a grunt of cautious acknowledgment from Harper.

"And, anyway, I was up there, in that room, with the librarian, and saw the plaque and all that . . . It's real nice," he added. "You were there for the dedication?" he asked matter-of-factly.

Harper's 'yeah' had an edge of puzzlement to it.

"In '73, right?"

"'Bout then." Frank answered slowly. There was more obvious reluctance to it.

"I mean, '73 was when he died," Mark probed. "That's what the plaque said . . . but it didn't have the date."

Silence again from the other end. It seemed like a particularly significant silence, as though Frank was working on the next part.

"Been fifteen years, Mark," the lieutenant finally said, with audible reluctance and just a shade of obfuscation.

Mark supposed that was true, but he was also intimately familiar with the technique of stating an irrelevant truth to avoid an unnecessary lie. He didn't comment on this one. There wasn't much more he could say with out explaining his side trip through the back issues of the L.A. Times.

Frank seemed to realize something more was expected, too. There was an audible and unhappy sigh from the other end of the line. Then Harper fell back to a more defensible line.

"Why don't you ask Milt?"

It might have been a suggestion, but it had come out fully inflected as a question.

"He's up in Fresno," Mark said, knowing it sounded pretty weak as excuses went.

Frank said nothing and McCormick realized he wasn't getting anything further, at least not without turning this into more than a casual inquiry, and maybe not even then. He stepped back from it cautiously, finally admitting, still very casually, "He'll be back tomorrow." This time he was the one employing the irrelevant but true fact. He had no intention of asking Hardcastle anything about his son, then or any other day.

"I dunno know, though, Mark, you might not want to—" It had come out hurriedly, and then stopped just as abruptly, as if Frank thought any more warning would need some explanation.

"Not want to what?" McCormick asked quietly.

"Ask him . . . about Tom, I mean." Frank sounded increasingly reluctant. "He doesn't like to talk about him. You knew about him, though, huh?"

"Yeah." Mark tried to make it sound nonchalant.

"Well, then, you can understand, it's not something he wants to dwell on."

Mark heard the words, but listened to the tone. And from them both an inkling of a suspicion arose. It was still nebulous, but already cast a deeper shadow across the conversation. He took a chance, like casting a line into dark water.

"It was investigated, wasn't it?"

"Of course," Frank said.

There'd been no pause. It was stated as though it was a given. For Mark, though, it was like having an answer without having any idea what the real question had been, and Harper wasn't handing out anymore clues.

"Like I said," the lieutenant went on, with a tone of taciturnity, "you might not want to bring it up with him."

"No, I guess not."

There was more truth to the guessing part that Mark was willing to admit. He felt as though talking to Frank had only deepened the mystery. It might have been his imagination, but it seemed as though Harper's good-bye was hasty, maybe even eager. McCormick barely had time to blurt out one last request.

"Maybe you shouldn't mention any of this to him, either."

Frank's quick, ''Course not,' was further grist for the mill of speculation. Mark let the wheels turn for a few minutes after he'd hung up the phone. Frank usually gave good advice, but he was hardly ever cryptic. And, really, all he'd advised him not to do was mention it to Hardcastle. That seemed reasonable enough.

Mark found his eyes drawn back to the slim volume on the shelf beside Churchill. Had it been put out here because the judge couldn't bear even that much reminder of his loss? Surely he couldn't have forgotten he'd left it here. Or maybe Hardcastle's wife had hidden it here, before her death. Maybe the judge didn't even know it existed. It might be after fifteen years he would welcome some contact, however remote, with the ghost of his son.

Maybe you should forget you ever laid eyes on it.

Mark stood, frowning. He reached up for it, reasoning that he couldn't very well hand it over to the man without making sure that whoever put it here hadn't had a very good reason for not wanting the judge to see it. He found himself sitting down, abruptly, and then, after a moment of hesitation, fanning the pages. He'd temporarily mislaid his motivations. Was he trying to determine if there was something in there that the judge shouldn't be forced to confront, or still trying to solve the mystery of the missing obituary?

He opened it at random, looking down at a handwriting that had elements of familiarity, a family likeness. It was nearly as unreadable as the judge's. September, 16th 1972. It might take some deciphering. He thumbed forward a few pages; there were place names at the beginning of each entry, alongside the date. He didn't recognize the names, but they were clearly places in Vietnam. October, and the entries were more widely spaced, and shorter—the handwriting, if anything, more hurried and less readable.

And a short ways into November the entries stopped. Mark flipped through the rest of the pages quickly. Nothing else there, not a single entry that carried it any further forward. He rubbed his temple and then paged back to the last entry. He put more effort into reading it and was rewarded with no particular insight as to why Tom Hardcastle had suddenly given up his notations.

He went back to the beginning, June of '72, and looked at the first few lines. It was a slightly self-conscious commentary from a very young man on his decision to write some things down. Mark eased back on the sofa and smiled to himself. He'd tried keeping a journal once, at the instigation of a prison shrink. He'd felt self-conscious as hell doing it. He sympathized with Tom completely.

The handwriting was becoming more readable with exposure, even as it gradually lost its stiff formality and evolved into more relaxed notes. There were some humorous asides. It was the rough humor of war, but on the whole Tom Hardcastle seemed likeable, affable, once he had shed his earlier air of dutiful authorship.

Mark settled back, slipping into the flow of it. He listened to Tom gradually gain self-confidence. The members of his platoon had become individuals, rather than names—just as they must've for the man himself—with foibles and strengths.

He almost flipped past it, skimming quickly, trying to figure out why the entries stopped only six months after they started—a much shorter entry than the ones that had preceded it, more pensive.

11-3-72

Never thought I'd wish for a chance to talk something through

with dad. Thought I'd had plenty of that before I left home. Thought

I'd have a lifetime's worth of him telling me what was the right thing

to do.

There it ended, and by the next entry whatever the moral dilemma had been, Tom didn't see fit to elaborate. The only clue was a cryptic comment, two days later.

11-5-72

He won't be able to say I didn't try. Lot of good it'll do; I could see

that even while I was telling the Captain. Now I'm in for it. Bad enough

that you can't tell who the enemy is half the time. Now to have to

watch my own back, too.

There were only a handful of further entries. They looked more hastily written, and lacked the sparks of humor that had found their way even into the grimmer of the earlier anecdotes.

The last notation was dated 11-11, and consisted of little more than Tom commenting, ruefully, that he had made it to the half-way mark of his year in-country, and wondering how much longer his luck would hold.

November eleventh, but 1972. There were nearly seven weeks missing. He supposed Tom might have been wounded, or even gone missing in action and the fact of his death not determined until the following year. That news might have come quietly to the family, maybe even as a consequence of the peace—a determination of death by stages, with no clear date to attach to it and only the year having to suffice.

Mark riffled through the rest of the pages, left blank through necessity or choice—it wasn't clear. There was no telltale smear of blood, no final coda written in another hand to explain how or when the end had come.

There was only logic—the book had come back to Gulls Way, so someone here must have known of it's existence, and chosen to put it in that desk drawer. The drawer must have been filled then, too, in order for the book to have migrated over the top, and fallen into space behind. That drawer, and all the others in that desk, had been entirely empty when he'd first moved into the gate house.

None of it made very much sense, but nothing really had, since the moment he'd laid eyes on that plaque in the library. He didn't feel as if he could hand over the diary to its author's father without at least some notion of how it had come to be where it was. He put it back where he'd gotten it from, almost wishing he could wipe his prints from the pages.

He contemplated having a whack at the hedges. He wondered what sort of excuse he could make for that kind of ambition when Hardcastle came home. 'I needed to think.' That would get him one of those penetrating looks from the judge, which would probably be followed by him stammering out a confession. Better to go about his business as usual—any excuse to avoid the yard work.

November the eleventh—another perimeter. Veteran's Day. Mark dwelled on the irony for a moment, and then realized he'd made up his mind. It was almost a reflex movement. He was reaching for his jacket and it wasn't with the hedges in mind. He was going back to the library.

00000

This time his pile of microfilm reels was smaller. He had a clear starting point but, just to be certain, he took all of November, and December as well.

He needn't have bothered. He'd been right about a jurist's son meriting a few column inches, but he would have missed it anyway, if he'd still been limiting himself to the obituaries. It made page three of the local news section on the fourteenth of November: Marine Sgt. Thomas C. Hardcastle wounded in fighting. Extent of injuries not known but his condition was said to be serious. There was a mention of his prominent jurist father, and his mother—long-term community resident and active in civic affairs.

Mark leaned back from the view screen, stunned. He edged forward in his seat again, reeling through the rest of that week—no further mention, and no obituary, of course. The rest of the spool passed between the glass patens and offered up no further clues.

It wasn't a thunderbolt of revelation—more like a slow dawning of light as he sat back again. Serious, but not dead. And not missing in action. He momentarily reconsidered the words he'd heard in Hardcastle's den, ten years after the fact and from someone who wasn't a close personal friend of the judge's—more like a distant enemy. Who knew where Joe Cadillac had gotten his information? And if he'd gotten the facts a little skewed, Hardcastle would hardly have been in the mood to correct them.

One fact seemed more than likely—Tom Hardcastle had survived his injuries for at least seven weeks, if raised letters on bronze were to be believed. More than that—since his obituary hadn't appeared in the first three months of the 1973—he'd survived the war, if only briefly.

And there'd been a drawer full of stuff in the gate house at Gulls Way.

00000

He'd started back in on the 1973 reels with a sense of foreboding. It was as if there were a sign in the path—Turn Back Now—and he had stepped around it. Of course being on this road was the direct consequence of having ignored at least three previous signs, including the one illuminated with high-beam headlights on reflective tape that he'd encountered back in the LA County lock-up in '83 when Hardcastle had first offered him the position of Tonto.

That was really the problem, Mark decided. Since saying yes against his own better judgment in that instance had turned out pretty well, maybe he hadn't completely trusted himself ever since. This was different, though, and he knew it deep in his soul. This was stepping off into a void with no idea how far down the bottom would be, or even whether there was a way back up again.

He ignored all those concerns and began to feed the next spool through the machine, scanning page after page of April 1973. Trepidation gave way gradually to eyestrain and blinking fatigue. His mind wandered off briefly to where he'd been in the spring of that year. Daytona—breathing the heady fumes of stock racing. He'd been with Flip Johnson's crew—the first real family he'd had since his mother's death eight years earlier.

And the judge had been here, working. There was a mention of him presiding over a trial in early May. Nothing else. By the time he'd gotten to the end of that month, Mark had been lulled into a false sense of security, and so the article took him entirely by surprise. It wasn't in the obituaries, though the brief piece was near at hand to them: Malibu Shooting Death Ruled Accidental.

He suddenly understood that the bottom was much further down than he'd imagined.

00000

He supposed it was on account of his expression. When he showed up in Frank's office an hour later the man ushered him in, frowning, but not saying anything else until the door was closed and he was seated.

Even then Harper said nothing right off. He went back around to his own chair and sat down. There he sat, looking grim. Mark found his own mouth had gone dry and the dozen questions had all boiled down to one.

"What the hell happened, Frank? Tom was shot here?"

Harper's expression went flatter, with just an edge of the judgmental to it. "I thought you said he'd told you."

Mark frowned, trying to remember the exact words he'd spoken. "I said I knew about Tom. I didn't say I knew he'd died there, at the estate. And how does a guy get accidentally shot in the head?"

Frank looked away for a moment, as though he was considering that, then he glanced back, his face just as set as before.

"It happens when maybe a guy's already not real good in the head. The hit he took over in 'Nam had done a lot of damage. Nobody even thought he'd survive that one. He wasn't the same when he got back. Hell, he was four months in the hospital. They said he'd never talk again."

"But he came home," Mark said insistently. "He must've been doing better."

"Yeah," Harper admitted, "some. But he wasn't Tom. Not the Tom he'd been before. There was still a helluva lot of damage. That's what the docs said, later on," he added bitterly, "after it happened. That guys get to a point where they know how much they're damaged, and they can do something about it."

"Then they thought it wasn't an accident."

"'Death by misadventure', that's what the M.E. said. Might've been that he was going through his stuff—it had finally gotten shipped back. He found the gun; he was handling it. He had spasms, you know. He didn't have real good motor control." Frank's sentences had gone short and a little choppy.

"He was staying out in the gatehouse?" Mark saw Frank nod, looking relieved at the slight directional change of the conversation. "Why?"

"I dunno," Harper said evasively. "What difference does it make?"

"Had he just moved out there?"

"Not exactly." Frank hesitated. Then he shook his head emphatically. "It was nothing like that. I think he just wanted to be out on his own. Maybe prove that he could take care of himself. He was glad to be home. Might've been a little short tempered. Frustrated sometimes. It was tough. He'd gone through a lot."

Mark was sitting forward slightly. "What happened the first time?"

Another shrug. "On patrol. A grenade. Pretty bad. Some fragments to the head."

McCormick frowned. "That's it? No more details?"

Frank shook his head. "It was a war. Tom didn't even remember it. Like I said, he was missing a lot of pieces."

Mark thought he might get more, if he kept at it, but Frank's cautious shading would make it all of questionable value.

"There was no question, though," he finally muttered in frustration, "about his death—Tom was holding the gun when it went off?"

As soon as he'd said it he realized how it'd sounded. After a moment of stunned surprise, Frank's face flushed with anger.

"Nitrate residue test, right hand positive. Close-range injury to the right temple. There was an investigation. The M.E. ruled on it. You wanna see the reports?"

McCormick knew it was too late to undo the unintentional implication, at least he couldn't without revealing the root of his own suspicions—the damn journal. But none of that really mattered right now, not if Frank was willing to hand over the file.

Feeling his own rising flush—with false pretenses rather than anger as the source—he answered, "Yeah, I would."

Frank was on his feet. Mark thought for a moment that he was going to be summarily thrown out of the office, but anger had apparently given way to cold disgust.

Mark watched him turn to a file cabinet over on his left, reaching down to the bottom drawer and yanking it open. He supposed it made sense that Frank, in some ways also a protégée of Hardcastle's, would have files of his own. That this was one of them belied the rigid certainty he'd presented a few moments ago.

It wasn't all that thick. Frank tossed it onto the desk. Mark stared at it for a moment then realized Harper wasn't sitting back down again. The lieutenant said nothing more as he turned, reaching for the door. A moment later he was gone, the door closed with some emphasis—though not enough to draw any attention from the few people who were staffing the outer office.

Mark looked over his shoulder guiltily then hunched forward, leaning over the desk, pulling the file towards him and opening it. It made no sense not to look now—Harper had left him to it, and would never believe he hadn't.

The file was thin, but appeared almost obsessively complete, everything from the responding officer's report to Frank's own interviews. There hadn't been any witnesses, of course. Hardcastle had been alone in the main house. He said he'd just gotten home. He'd stopped at the hospital to see his wife.

He'd heard shots—two of them—from the direction of the gatehouse. The door was locked when he'd gotten there—the security latch thrown from the inside. He'd had to force it. All that had been confirmed by forensic reports.

Tom had been already dead when the police and paramedics had arrived. The medical examiner's report confirmed Frank's description. The weapon had been Tom's own. His personal effects had just arrived back a few days earlier.

There were more interviews, comments, asides, more speculation than anything else—that Tom had perhaps been depressed. That made sense, of course. He was disabled; his mother was in the hospital. His rest of his unit had just returned from overseas.

It was there, in photocopies all neatly organized. Mark wondered if the judge had his own set—somehow he doubted it. He riffled through the rest of the sheets. There were photos. He turned them over in one group after catching a first glimpse of taped outline in an all too familiar setting. It had been a thorough investigation.

He set the file back down on the desk. Mark heard the door open behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and this time considered his words carefully before he spoke.

"There was a guy coming to visit him—an officer he'd known over there. That's what they think made him do it?"

Frank looked as though all his anger had burnt away, leaving only the ashes. He managed a slow shrug.

"Yeah, they sent a military shrink around to talk to Milt and Nancy. That's what he said. It's hard for someone—especially a young guy—to see everybody else getting on with their lives."

"But he didn't see the guy; it happened before he got there." Mark looked down at the papers briefly; flipping to the one he wanted. "Here, Lieutenant John Chassell, he showed up right after, with this other guy—a Sergeant Tanckowski." There were barely two pages covering the interview with the lieutenant and an even briefer set of notes from the non-com.

"Like the shrink said, I guess maybe Tom thought he couldn't handle it."

"Yeah." Mark frowned. "And what about the second shot Hardcastle heard?"

"Found that in the wall. Not surprising—he had lousy muscle control, lots of spasms." Now Frank was frowning, too. "What are you getting at? You weren't actually thinking Milt had anything to do with it?"

Mark didn't even favor that with a reply. He just shook his head. Frank stepped forward, leaned past him and gathered up the file, neatening it up in a way that appeared almost subconscious. He opened the drawer and had it tucked in, way in the back, a moment later.

Drawer closed, case closed, and Frank looking thin lipped, as if he were still waiting for an answer.

Mark finally sighed. "Looks like he shot himself. That's what all those pieces of paper say, right?"

Harper nodded once.

"What does Hardcastle think?"

Frank looked momentarily startled. There was a pause before he finally said, "I never asked him . . . and I don't think I ever will, either."

"But you kept a copy of the file?"

Frank cast one slightly guilty look down toward the cabinet drawer. "Yeah," he said, "in case he ever wanted to see it."

Mark ran his fingers through his hair wearily, then shook his head once and got to his feet. "He won't, though, not ever."

"No," Harper agreed reluctantly. "Probably not."

00000

There'd been nothing left to say after that except good-bye. Mark hadn't even bothered to ask if Harper would be informing the judge of this meeting. He knew Frank would be as reluctant as he was to bring the subject up with Hardcastle.

He stood on the sidewalk in front of the station pondering all the facts for a moment, weighing them. It wasn't as though the people involved with the investigation hadn't been thorough. It wasn't even as though he couldn't believe things had happened just as they were said to have. Lord knows he's been close to that point himself, with far less provocation than Thomas Hardcastle. Mark shuddered; the pathologist's report had described the previous damage as well. It seemed close to a miracle that Tom hadn't died from his earlier injuries.

There was nothing in the file to dispel the possibility that the man's death had been self-inflicted. Hardcastle, even in a state that must have been close to shock, had been a competent witness and the forensic reports independently confirmed what he'd said—the door had been bolted from the inside, and he had forced it from the outside. All the windows had been intact and latched as well.

Self inflicted, perhaps, but the immediate provocation—the impending visit from his platoon leader—stuck out as the one awkward fact. And John Chassell's arrival on the scene a few moments later, not even a minute after Hardcastle placed the call to the police—

Mark stiffened. He squinted down at the pavement before him trying to remember exactly how that part had read. He finally gave up on his memory and turned sharply, heading back into the station.

Frank looked like he hadn't moved at all since he'd departed. He looked up, surprise written in his expression, at Mark's swift return.

"Where did Hardcastle call the police from?" At Harper's somewhat blank look Mark forged ahead. "'The house' he said; he met Chassell as he was coming out of the house, after he'd called the police. He doesn't call the gatehouse that—that's what he calls the main house. Why'd he go back up to the main house to call?"

Frank frowned and started reaching for the drawer.

"There wasn't any phone hooked up in the gatehouse," Mark said, half to himself. "Tom must've just moved out there, right?"

Frank looked over his shoulder at him, still frowning. He finally nodded.

"Same as when I moved in there. Took me a couple of weeks to get a phone hooked up. Chassell musta called the main house, too, when he got back from 'Nam, to find out how Tom was doing."

"Yeah," Frank looked perplexed, "I suppose. What are you getting at, Mark?"

McCormick reached up, rubbed his temple and then shook his head after a moment of thought. "I dunno. Something."

Frank leaned back from the open drawer, still looking up at him. "There's nothing there that I haven't already looked at a hundred times. Tom was a good kid. He worked hard at recovering from what happened—lots of people would have given up even sooner than he did—but it was pretty obvious that he wasn't ever going to be able to be what he'd been before." He leaned forward and shut the drawer.

Mark started to say it. He got as far as "What if . . .?" but then words failed him. The truth was, those entries in the journal might be just as much evidence in support of Tom's reported depression.

Frank let him stand there, silent for a moment.

"Just leave it alone," he finally said. "It took him a long time to put it behind him. I don't want you raking it all up again."

Harper's expression was set, grim and stern. It was obvious to Mark that he was being dismissed. He went peaceably, his chin down and his hands in his jacket pockets. Frank, as usual, was giving good advice.

00000

It was a good afternoon for driving, so he drove. He hadn't gotten all that far north on the PCH before he realized it wasn't going to work. Frank might be absolutely right about the trouble he'd be dredging up, but it didn't matter. Something was sticking out awkwardly from the puzzle. A piece didn't fit. He pulled over at the next wide, straight spot, and executed a 180 degree turn. What difference did it make? He'd already looked at the journal; he might as well look again, try to get this out of his system.

That impulse got him back to the estate and into the gatehouse. He tried to decide if the place seemed different to him, haunted somehow, now that he knew what had happened there. He could picture the placement of the body—where Tom had been sitting and where he had ended up in grim repose—and Hardcastle battering down the door, desperate to get to him, not realizing it was already too late.

But, no, those were the shades of fifteen years past. The carpet had most likely been changed, the door repaired, and life—for everyone but Tom—had gone on. One could reasonably argue that he was better off, that a life limited by his previous injuries would not have been worth living.

Mark shook his head once in a disbelief he would have been hard pressed to explain and which he realized was not quite rational in its foundation. He didn't know exactly where his faith in Tom Hardcastle had come from, or even where it left off from his reliance on the man's father. And, rational or not, he reached up for the journal again, and then sat down on the sofa.

This time his reading was slower, and less furtive. He'd already recollected encountering John Chassell in the entries—an officer on his second tour.

Now that he was looking for them, the mentions of the man were thick in the early part of the volume, and it was evident that Tom admired his daring. There was a devil-may-care attitude to some of the lieutenant's exploits along with the feeling that the guy was a tenacious survivor. There were occasional comments, though, reflective hesitancies. It was not that Tom seemed the cautious type himself, but there might have been more than daring involved in Chassell's behavior.

Mark slowed as he reached the last month's entries. He only gleaned one new thing from them. On November 2nd Tom mentioned a patrol to reconnoiter a village. And from that date on, to the end of the entries, there was no mention of Chassell.

One might almost think that the man had died but, no, he'd been here, at the estate, on the fateful day a few months later. Small world, and way too full of coincidence for Mark's liking. Could there have been something other than the shame of being seen disabled by his former commanding officer that drove Tom to destroy himself?

He shut the book again but didn't put it back on the shelf. Instead, he placed it on the coffee table in front of him and contemplated its closed and anonymous cover for a few full minutes. Then he was on his feet again, heading up the steps to the desk and opening the lower drawer, the one behind which the diary had once rested. Now it held the phone directory. It was with no particular confidence that he pulled out the volume and thumbed through to the 'c' listings. The Chassells occupied a scant few entries, with only one John. His address was not all that far away in Beverly Hills. But even more interesting, directly below it in the bolder print of a business listing, was 'Chassell Security Services' with a L.A. address and number.

He thumbed forward to the yellow pages and found the ad quickly, a nice quarter-page under 'security systems consultants'. It was obviously a prosperous endeavor. There was a John Chassell in charge and he promised fifteen years of experience. The first name and timeframe were right, and the line of work seemed appropriate for an ex-military officer. Mark jotted down both numbers and addresses.

He sat back and thought it through, weighing the value of a quiet reconnoiter against a direct frontal approach. In the end, the decision was made with a quick check of his watch. It was already going on two in the afternoon. Tomorrow would be Sunday; the business would be closed and Hardcastle would be back the evening. Direct approach it would have to be. He didn't even have time to get more background information from Frank—not that he thought Harper would be much in the mood to offer any.

00000

He'd taken the Coyote and used his own name at the receptionist's desk. This was no storefront, prefab, home-security outlet. The glossy brochure on the receptionist's desk offered a wide range of 'security solutions', up to and including nattily-dressed bodyguards.

"Do you have an appointment?" the receptionist purred politely.

"No, it's something that came up suddenly."

She must have been used to hearing that, in this line of work. She glanced down at her appointment book and then up at him almost immediately. "Mr. Tanckowski is available—he's one of our managers."

Mark gave this what might have appeared to be a long moment's thought. The world was getting smaller by the minute. Though he supposed an ex-officer hiring his ex-sergeant wasn't all that unexpected.

"I suppose that'll do for now," he said with a thin smile.

The receptionist jotted his name down, used the phone to discreetly announce him, and directed him back to the office. He gave a quick glance to the title on the door, which was already opening to him. The man greeting him was an inch or two under six feet, and probably muscular under his well-fitted suit. His hair was a shade past military length and his smile was business-like.

Mark was welcomed in and ushered to a chair with an air of professional solicitude. He glanced around as he sat. There was a photograph on the wall—a group shot, young men in combat fatigues. He turned back to the man taking a seat behind his neatly organized desk.

"You were in 'Nam?" he said casually.

The man nodded with a quick acknowledging glance to the photo. "Marines," he said. "Two tours. You?" he asked politely.

"No." Mark shook his head. "Four F."

"Oh," Mr. Tanckowski kept his eyebrows firmly seated in acceptance, "medical."

"No, felony conviction. Juvenile."

One eyebrow snuck up, but was quickly recaptured and hauled back into line. This was followed by a very brief throat clearing and then, "And how can we help you today, Mr. ah—?"

"McCormick." Mark said. "I live over on an estate in Malibu. It's called Gulls Way."

He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting to see, but it was obvious that the ex-sergeant, though battle hardened, hadn't been ready for that. His smile was gone. There was a little more throat clearing, this time more obviously nervous, and then he half-stammered as he started to speak again,

"A-and you're interested in some security analysis?"

"Not exactly," Mark said, keeping his voice low and not overtly threatening. "I don't own the place. It belongs to an ex-judge—Milton Hardcastle. You know him?"

"No," Tanckowski said abruptly. "Met him once."

"At his son's funeral?" Mark asked pointedly.

The nod was almost imperceptible. The man was getting his footing again. "You're a friend of Judge Hardcastle's?"

"I work for him. I live in the gatehouse."

This time the man's expression had gone grim and his eyes darted one more time to the photo on that wall. Mark still wasn't sure what to make of it all, but he was struck with a lancinating hunch.

He paused for a moment, to give what followed an unspoken significance, even though the words were measured out to be no more than the bare truth.

"I know what happened out there."

The persistent silence was answer enough. It was ill-defined but apparent guilt. Mark wished he could go further, but he was working with perilously thin information. One misstep and the whole thing would cave in.

Tanckowski offered no further clues and silence by itself wasn't useful except in raising Mark's suspicions. The man finally put both hands flat on his desktop, as if to push himself up from his seat. He muttered, "I think you ought to be talking to Mr. Chassell."

He lumbered to his feet, looking suddenly older and more weary, though Mark thought he couldn't have been much older than Tom himself would be now.

"All right, Chassell then," Mark said, wishing he could hold onto this guy for a few minutes more—he didn't want to loose the momentum, or the element of surprise.

But the ex-sergeant was already moving around the desk.

"He's not here today," Tanckowski said. He looked too eager to pass this off to someone else for that to have been a lie. "He's out of town this weekend. I can tell him you stopped by. Leave your number with the secretary." This was obviously an attempt at dismissal.

"Yeah you tell him," Mark paused, getting up slowly as though he were a man with no concerns, absolutely confident. "Tell him I have Tom's journal—the one he kept in 'Nam."

He didn't even look back over his shoulder to see what impact this had had on the other man. He simple strolled out of the office.

His air of casual disregard carried him all the way out to the parking lot, where it dissolved with a slump of his shoulders and a sense that he couldn't quite catch his breath. It was all wadded up with his increasing feeling that there was something deeply wrong about what had happened to Thomas Hardcastle, and that the man he'd just spoken knew something about that.

There was nothing more he could do about it now, though, and the one person whose judgment he was used to relying on was absolutely off limits for this matter. Mark slumped even further. He felt a sudden strange kinship with Hardcastle's son across fifteen years—scribbling his regrets in what was to be one of the last entries he wrote. He understood completely what it was like to have no one to confide in, and no one to watch your back.

00000

It might have been an act of contrition, or maybe a way of avoiding the telephone. He spent most of Sunday catching up on yard maintenance. It was nothing so dramatic that he thought it would excite comment—more the humdrum, tedious, low satisfaction chores that he usually loathed.

In the end, there were a few barely noticeable improvements to the grounds, but he'd killed the afternoon, and he heard the truck in the drive. He strolled round the side, wiping his hands off on his jeans as he went. Hardcastle was already out of the vehicle, and was giving a raised-brow look to Mark's work clothes.

"First the library, then the lawn?" the judge said with a grin that had a puzzled edge to it.

"Things needed doing," Mark muttered. "How was your trip?"

There was a casual shrug to that and then the judge reached back into the cab of the vehicle and pulled out a bag.

"Brought some burgers. You eaten yet?"

He was already turned away, heading back toward the patio with his offerings. Mark stood there for a moment, then trotted after him, catching up as he reached the table and began off-loading the food.

The judge glanced down into the now empty bag and frowned. "You got some napkins in there?" He gestured sharply with his chin toward the glass doors that led back into the gatehouse.

McCormick nodded, lifting his eyes and staring back in through the doors. There was the journal, still on the coffee table where he'd left it the day before. His head was buzzing fiercely. He thought he must be breathing too fast. He felt like one of those characters in an Edgar Allan Poe story. He half expected to see a slowly growing bloodstain inside on the floor--some manifestation of his unspoken guilt.

No stain appeared, and Hardcastle nattered on, something about the trip. Mark could hear him more clearly now as the buzzing diminished. He turned, reached for the door, slid it open, and stepped inside. He trod across the place where Tom's body had one laid and past the coffee-table, pointedly ignoring what was on it, all the time thinking only about it. Exactly why had he left it out there, in plain sight? By the time he'd returned from the kitchenette, napkins in hand, he thought he'd gotten a grip on himself and had mastered whatever internal conspiracy he'd set to trap himself.

Once he'd slipped past the doors again, back out to the patio, he thought he had it licked. He sat down, across from Hardcastle and started to unwrap what had been placed there. He concentrated on what he was doing, keeping his eyes steadily on it, not what was behind the judge, back there in the room. He even took a bite of the burger, though he might just as well have been chewing ash.

"Think maybe you got a couple beers to go with this?" Hardcastle interrupted Mark's determination with a casual frown, having unwrapped his own food. "I know there's some back in the house, but—"

McCormick felt something snap, almost like a bone, with a deep pain and a certain knowledge that he wasn't going to make it through this encounter untouched. At the same time his control was slipping, his eyes were drifting back to the room and what lay within.

"Beer," he said, and heard his voice flatten. He was back on his feet, almost mechanically.

He knew what was going to happen; it was a whiff of weird precognition that was verging on the supernatural. He stepped through the door again, hearing the judge say, 'What the heck's the matter with you?' and mumbling his own half-hearted 'Nothing, long weekend, that's all,' but the man was up and following him into the room. He heard the motion stop behind him, and pictured him standing there, arms crossed, looking mildly peeved, and the fraction of a second more as his gaze drifted down.

It took no imagination at all to know what he was referring to when the man finally said, "What's that?" and there was no answer that would serve except the truth. Any other excuse would cost him even more, though he expected the truth would be expensive enough.

"It's Tom's," he said without turning around. "I found it in a drawer."

He heard the silence and in it some subtle motion—Hardcastle reaching down after a moment's hesitation. "When?" There was an audible tremor to the judge's voice. Mark didn't want to turn around and face the expression that went with it, but that was the only way to deal with the rest of it—head on.

He pivoted slowly, leaning against the edge of the doorway for support. "It was a couple weeks after I came here," he said quietly. "It had fallen behind a drawer. I was . . . looking for something I'd misplaced."

"You—" The judge bit down on something else, whatever else he'd been about to say. It was obvious he'd already looked inside the cover. He was clutching the book with a white-knuckled grip in which anger was indistinguishable from fear. "Four years?" he finally stuttered.

Mark nodded once.

"You've looked at it? Read it?"

"Not till this weekend," Mark said. "Except the first page. I knew it was Tom's. That's all I knew when I found it."

He thought he should explain, but realized the futility of it. Hardcastle was already turning away from him, still clutching the book. "Why?" the man asked, though it was obvious that there was no explanation that was going to satisfy him. He was already through the door, moving slowly but inexorably away.

McCormick wasn't sure if there was any relief in the vacuum of emotion that was left behind. He only knew that he'd never seen Hardcastle more angry, and less capable of giving vent to his wrath. That part would undoubtedly come later, when the judge interrogated Frank, and realized how much further Mark had intruded into his private grief.

He sat down on the sofa, elbows on his knees, hands hanging limply before him. And that's where he was only a moment later when the telephone rang. For one heart stopping second he thought it was Hardcastle, arrived back in the den and resolved to do the banishing from there. He reached for the phone anyway. The unfamiliar voice on the other end was only momentarily reassuring. That was the second it took him to realize that he had John Chassell on the line, and the man was exhibiting a thin layer of control over a deep anger.

"Mr. McCormick?" The title had been emphasized with a certain tone of dismissal. "My manager tells me you were in the office yesterday, behaving in a threatening manner."

Something flipped inside his head, like a switch, or maybe a circuit breaker. All other concerns, interconnected though they might be, were shunted to the side. His response assembled itself, as though it required no conscious act on his part.

"If he felt threatened, that's his problem," Mark replied smoothly.

There was a moment of puzzled-sounding silence from the other end of the line, then Chassell said warily, "You have something of Tom Hardcastle's?"

"His journal, from 'Nam."

"You've read it?"

"All of it," Mark snapped bitterly.

More silence. More wariness. Then, finally, "I might be interested in reading it, too."

"I'll bet."

"How much will it cost me?"

Mark stepped back from the edge of the deal, surveying the conversation thus far with a lawyerly amount of prudence.

"Dunno," he finally replied, "I think I might just hand it over to Hardcase. It'd be worth something to him."

"But he won't necessarily pay you what it's worth," Chassell said, caught up in his own forward momentum.

"And how much would you say that is?" Mark asked coolly.

"Twenty-five grand."

"That's chump change," he shot back.

"How do I know you don't have a copy?"

"A copy would be useless—no way to verify the date and authorship and why would I be able to produce a copy but not what it was copied from? You only need the original."

"All right," Chassell replied, after a moment's consideration, "fifty grand. No more."

Mark figured he'd haggled enough; it was time to nail the thing. "Okay, but it has to be tonight."

"It's Sunday, dammit."

"You have friends, connections, in your line of work. Guys who operate on a cash basis. Borrow it."

To his surprise, there was very little further resistance. Mark had a suspicion of what that meant, but for now he accepted it at face value.

"I'll need a few hours," Chassell said grudgingly.

"Two, that's all you're getting. Just north of the Ventura Freeway on Van Nuys—there's a gas station on the right, going north. There. Eight-thirty. And leave that ex-sergeant of yours at home. I see anyone but you there and I'm gone."

"How the hell will I recognize you?" Chassell snarled.

"A tall guy driving a GMC truck, silver and black. And I'll recognize you," he added dryly. "I know a lot about you," he said, trying to keep it vaguely ominous.

"Eight-thirty."

Mark hung-up first, not waiting to see if there'd be any more objections. He already suspected the quick acquiescence was a signal that the man had no intention of going through with the deal as stated. He reviewed his side of the conversation one more time. He didn't think he'd been set up by an innocent victim of extortion and blackmail. He wished desperately that he knew exactly what Chassell thought he was being threatened with—but that didn't matter either.

What mattered was the man showing up, with money, or a weapon, little difference either way; it would still be the essential culpable act. And the critical thing was to give him as little time as possible to think about that. Two hours might be too long. He would have preferred only one, even if that increased the likelihood of Chassell resorting to a preemptive strike against the man he suddenly felt threatened by.

Mark took a deep breath and pushed himself up to his feet. Even that analysis had cost him five minutes—it had also given Hardcastle five more minutes to dwell on the breech of trust. Even now it might be too late.

He propelled himself through the half-open patio door, around the side of the gate house and across the drive. The light was still on in the den but the shutters were closed. There might have been the hunch of a shadow, the man sitting at his desk, brooding. It was impossible to tell.

Mark knocked and, hearing nothing, tried the knob. The door was locked. He knocked again harder. He needed the book, but more than that he needed Hardcastle.

Five long silent seconds and then the faint sound of someone moving on the other side. Mark held his breath until heard the latch give and the door open inward slowly. He didn't smile; he half-thought he might get slugged, no matter what expression he adopted. That didn't matter now, either, as long as he wasn't knocked unconscious for too long.

But the judge didn't swing on him. He simply stood there, looking old, and tired, and yet somehow still dignified, as though he was drawing on some long sequestered inner resources that had stood him through even worse times than these.

"I have an appointment with a guy named John Chassell. Lieutenant Chassell. You remember him?"

To his credit, Hardcastle said nothing. He simply stared down for a moment, then raised his head and nodded once, still silent.

"I need that book. He wants it." Mark pointed to it, still clutched tightly shut in the judge's right hand. "He wants it bad enough to offer me fifty thousand dollars for it, and I want to know why."

Hardcastle wasn't moving. This was obviously too much to grasp all at one stroke and Mark had neither the time nor the patience to go back to the beginning and lay it all out.

"Do you trust me?" he asked, almost simultaneously wondering why the hell he had chosen that moment to bring it all down to a matter of trust. "Okay," he answered his own question, "probably not. I screwed up on this one but I only know one way I can maybe make it right and to do that I need the book, and you, and the truck."

"What the hell did you read in there?" Hardcastle said, with a sudden, low intensity, holding the book down tightly at his side.

Mark froze for a moment, then forced out a breath and let another one in. "Nothing," he said, "nothing at all except a kid trying to make sense out of a bunch of stuff that nobody should have to make sense out of—and he wished he had his dad around to help him out with that in the end. But nothing anybody should be willing to pay money to cover up." He shook his head sharply and then added, "If I don't get over to Van Nuys inside of an hour and a half, I may never figure that last part out, and all this," he gestured vaguely in the space between him and Hardcastle, "all this'll have been for nothing. I need to know why."

"Why?" Hardcastle echoed with bitter insistence. "The one thing I asked you to stay back from. It was no business of yours. None at all."

Mark stood there, not moving but still aware that he was losing ground. "Then I need to know why I threw this all away. If that's what the hell I've done." The last part had come out nearly as bitter as the judge's own words.

Hardcastle stood face to face with him, neither turning nor backing down. Their mutually belligerent stances held for what seemed an eternity to Mark, till he felt he'd be better off just turning and slinking off into the gatehouse to pack his bag.

But it was the judge who blinked. "This guy," he said gruffly, "Chassell, he made the offer first?"

Mark nodded, not quite willing to hope. The air seemed to go out of the other man so suddenly that McCormick thought he might need to sit him down for a moment, but Hardcastle barely swayed before he pushed past him and toward the truck itself. The younger man turned and scrambled to catch up.

"You believe me?" he asked hopefully.

"You don't even know why he agreed to meet you," the judge huffed. "Maybe he's gonna show up with a bunch of cops and accuse you of blackmail."

It was a start, Mark decided. A shaky one, but a start. And they were talking again, at least as far as dire predictions and accusations went—also a start. That got them all the way to the truck and both into it, McCormick behind the wheel, the judge still holding the journal. This was easier, Mark thought, being able to look out the window, not having to make further eye contact with the man, to see the hate there.

"He runs a security business. I went there yesterday, to try and talk to him—"

"Why?"

They were back to that again. Mark winced. There was no direction to go with the story besides forwards. "Because," he said, briefly begging the question while he searched for an answer that would make some sense. He shook his head once without taking his eyes from the road. "Because the whole thing didn't make any sense. Why they said he'd done it."

He heard a sharp intake of breath from the man alongside him. He knew he was standing on perilously thin ice, but just as suddenly he was tired of it, tired of the tiptoeing around and all the subterfuge, recent and past. There was a difference between not speaking ill of the dead, and not speaking of them at all.

"I was right," he said quietly. "The whole thing stinks to high heaven and Chassell is somehow right in the middle of it. Him and that ex-sergeant of his—Tank. He was there that day, too. Maybe you don't remember. He drove the car." Mark frowned. A stray thought had arced across his otherwise fully-occupied mind, like a shooting star just off his main field of vision, gone before he could direct his attention to it.

They were making steady progress, at least with regards to getting to the Ventura Freeway. Mark looked down at his watch and realized he'd lost another chunk of time. He had the impression of being propelled forward without having a chance to consider the alternatives. He hoped to God it was the same for Chassell, but from everything he'd read in Tom's journal, that was a man who acted on impulse, hazards be damned.

He settled into his driving, glad that for now the interrogation seemed to have stopped. When they were within a few miles of the exit ramp he said, soft but insistent, "I'll need the book. I won't actually give it to him, but I'll need it. He may know what it looks like." He thought he'd seen a small nod from Hardcastle, though the book wasn't being handed over yet. "And I'll need you to stay down, out of sight. I'll pull in pretty close, and you can leave the window down. I'll try and get in close enough so you can hear."

More hesitation, but finally, just as he approached the exit, he heard Hardcastle edging forward, to lower himself sideways below the level of the sill. It would be a tight fit, and therefore less expected. Something nudged his knee. It was the corner of the book, being offered up. He reached down and took it silently.

"He won't get to read it. I did but . . . I had to."

Nothing but a soft grunt from the man now crouched awkwardly down. It might have been disbelief, or disgust, or simply resignation.

"Stay put." Mark pulled into the gas station, and around, toward the back where there were some trees and deeper shadows. "Nobody here yet but us," he said almost under his breath, not risking a look downward. "I'm gonna get out and look conspicuous."

He pulled up alongside some bushes and put the car in park, leaving the key in the ignition. He opened his door, making a pretense of checking front driver's side tire and then popping the hood. He'd already slipped the journal into his pocket.

He took out a pocket flashlight and used it to sweep the engine block with great attention to all the pro forma rites and rituals of a guy who thinks Something is Wrong under there. He jiggled bits in a tentative and experimental way, tugging gently on a wire now and then. He figured he could keep this up for fifteen minutes at least, and he had the patter to go with it, if someone from the station should show up trying to be helpful. It was the equivalent of 'just looking' when approached by a clerk in a retail store.

It didn't take even ten, and no one from within the service station came near him. Instead it was a van, pulling around from the opposite side that he come in from and cruising slowly as though the driver was checking things out. Mark had left no room for anyone to park or pull through on the passenger side, and made sure that the deepest shadows fell on that side of the vehicle, but he didn't want Chassell to approach too closely. He straightened up in order to be clearly seen. He heard some movement from within the truck and hissed a 'shhh' through clenched teeth.

One thing was immediately apparent, Chassell, if that's who it was emerging from the van, was not alone. Mark squinted into the confines and saw another man at the wheel—it was Tanckowski, not an undercover officer. McCormick felt his shoulders slump slightly in relief but was obligated to register a protest.

"I said—"

Chassell brushed the rest of it away with a quick, sharp gesture of his left hand. "He's involved in this, too. He has a right to be here."

Mark was left to ponder the meaning of that. The man behind the wheel looked by no means an eager volunteer.

McCormick dredged up a general purpose sneer. "You two don't trust each other, huh?" He was still pondering; he'd had another one of those brief, peripheral scintillations of thought.

"More than we trust you," Chassell sneered right back.

Mark forced his focus open, away from the man's face, and took in his right hand, plowed deep into a bulging jacket pocket. He supposed a stack of large bills equaling fifty thou would make a wad about that size, but so would a fist wrapped around a snubnosed gun and something about Chassell's demeanor leaned toward the latter option.

"Let's see it," the man said with impatience, and there it was, the slightest unconscious movement of the concealed hand, the gesture of a man who was already commanding obedience at the point of a weapon.

This would be a good time, Mark supposed, to clue Hardcastle in on the subtext but there was no way to do it, short of calling Chassell's attention to his faux pas.

"Let's see what you have in your pocket, first," McCormick said coolly.

Chassell smiled and pulled his hand out, keeping it tucked in tight and revealing a glimmer of blued steel by streetlight.

"That wasn't the deal," Mark said, with enough emphasis to convey to the judge just exactly what the new deal was.

"It's my version. You got it? Hand it over. Like you said, only the original's worth anything. Once I've got that, you can walk away from this."

"I doubt it."

Chassell shrugged. "It's lousy business practice to kill people. I only do it when I have to."

"What if I tell you I didn't bring it with me?"

"Then I will kill you, just because I can't trust you. I'm willing to take my chances that you haven't told anyone else about it. Don't see who you could've gone to with it." The man was getting tense and McCormick felt as though he played it out for as much time as he could.

He reached into his jacket slowly, noticing the bead of Chassell's gun coming up as he did so. He pulled the journal out with two fingers. Tanckowski was already out of the van, coming around to the passenger's side and approaching him at an angle, staying out of Chassell's line of fire.

He must have seen something, some movement from within the truck. He froze momentarily and then his head turned toward Chassell.

"It's a trap," he blurted out, retreating a few steps. Mark heard Hardcastle in the vehicle behind him, obviously opening the door and the familiar voice cold and implacable.

"Hold it right there."

But Tanckowski, propelled by fear, was already back around the far side of the van, scuttling into position as the getaway driver. It became a matter of doubt whether Chassell would follow; he was still pointing his weapon as though he intended to use it.

Impulsive, brash, devil-may-care, McCormick thought. But with fifteen years of maturity must have come a small amount of prudence. Mark could see the shadow of Hardcastle's gun just over his own left shoulder, leveled right back at the man.

Chassell, who looked for a long moment as though he intended to pull the trigger, withdrew in good order. Two steps back to the already open door of the van, still holding them at bay with his weapon. Then Tanckowski floored it. The van shot off with a squeal of rubber against roadway, and metal against centrifugal force, as it took the sharp curve around the building and was gone.

Mark slumped back against the side of the truck and drew a long shuddering breath. It felt like the first one he'd gotten in a minute or so. He wasn't exactly sure what they'd just accomplished, but he'd had the clearest of visions as he'd been staring down the barrel of Chassell's gun. Adrenalin, maybe, or having his face forced down into the cold shock of the obvious. He thought he knew what had happened on that terrible day fifteen years earlier; he just didn't know if he could explain it to anyone else.

"The police?" he asked, realizing Hardcastle hadn't yet said anything.

The older man was still sitting, half-turned in the driver's seat, the barrel of his weapon now lying on the edge of the sill as if it had become too heavy to hold up.

"Why?" Hardcastle rasped. "What have we got 'em on? They pointed guns at us. We pointed guns at them. How we gonna prove they pointed theirs first when we don't even know why they were pointing 'em?"

"I know why," Mark said with quiet certainty.

"Something in the book?"

"No, not there, not exactly." Mark paused on the thought and held the book out.

Hardcastle hesitated for a moment, then put the gun down on the seat inside and reached for it.

"You want me to drive?" McCormick said after a moment more of silence.

The judge had been staring down at it, still closed. He startled slightly and then looked around at the darkened, deserted parking area. "Where we gonna go next?"

"Home?" Mark asked dully, with very little hope.

There was silence again, as if the judge had to think about that one for a bit, too, but finally he uttered a grunt and slid over across the seat, making room.

"Home," he muttered. "Yeah."

00000

Mark didn't test the silence that conducted them back to the estate. He drove diligently, once again keeping his eyes on the road. He thought through the sequence of events that had occurred to him as his life had hung in the balance a short while earlier.

He couldn't quite recapture the pure certainty he'd experienced in that moment, but now he attacked the reasoning that had overtaken him then, applying every hard won tool of logic he'd ever acquired, and found it tight.

He contemplated sharing it with the judge. He wondered if he would be given the chance. Just because the man had said 'home' didn't mean he was necessarily using the possessive plural pronoun. It would still be his home, even after he banished McCormick summarily for an inexcusable breech of privacy and trust. And he supposed even the condemned had the right to pack up a toothbrush and some socks before being shown the door.

But the fact that he could now even think about it, suggested to McCormick that the peril was diminishing. Though that might only be on account of the current mystery—once that was solved to Hardcastle's satisfaction, the other issue might reacquire its thrust.

There was no more chance to think it through, the advantages and disadvantages of full disclosure. It was time. They were pulling into the drive, and if they parted ways as they got out of the truck, Mark thought he might never have the opportunity to set the record straight.

"I have to show you something," he said abruptly as the truck came to a stop. He felt almost as impulsive as the famed Chassell. He felt as if Tom himself was giving guidance from the wings, ready to whisper a prompt if his lines should fail him. "I need to show you something now," he added, countering Hardcastle's expression of gray fatigue. "It won't take long." Though he thought he might have the rest of his life to regret it, if he were wrong.

Hardcastle sighed as he climbed out of the truck. He was still holding the book tucked into his side, but he didn't turn and move away. Not yet. Mark took a deep breath and launched himself into it, knowing full well that the first part would be the hardest.

"You were in the den when you heard the first shot fired. And you said they weren't very far apart, but you made it all the way to the front door and had it open by the time you heard the second." He stood there, waiting for the backlash. He wasn't disappointed. The man's face went slowly from a shadowy gray to a flush of anger, visible even in the limited light from the front porch.

"Who? Frank." Betrayal on betrayal. His lips had gone tight; there was an equally tight shake of his head.

Mark couldn't help it. He couldn't give him time to regroup, time to stomp off and hunker down behind locked doors. He had to get it all out now. "That's what was in the official reports. The interview," he said.

It was now an almost calculated attempt at shocking the man into continued immobility, then plunging him so far into the darkness that he would have to walk toward whatever light there was.

"You came out and headed straight for the gatehouse," he said, a little more gently. "You didn't see anyone else around. No car here?" It was a perfunctory question. He thought he'd heard Hardcastle say it often enough: Never ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to.

"No," the judge muttered fiercely. "There was no one else here when I came out." He was getting himself back together. He was steeling for a fight, without even knowing anymore who to lash out at. Mark figured he would most likely do for a start.

But instead of swinging at him, Hardcastle said, still grudgingly, "I went to the gatehouse door."

"You went straight there and it was locked." Mark was walking in that direction now, fifteen years too late to do any good, but the same tension seemed to be upon the moment as must have been there that day. He let the momentum of it carry him forward. He didn't know if Hardcastle would follow and there was a sense of relief when he heard the other man's footsteps not far behind him. "It was locked—bolted from the inside." He spoke almost to himself. Hardcastle would have to come right up behind him to catch what he was saying.

"You had to force it." He reached out, realizing he hadn't locked up, in his haste earlier that evening. The knob turned and the door opened in undramatic counterpoint to what he was saying. He stepped inside. The lights were still on, and for a moment he thought their relative harshness would break the spell he'd managed to weave.

But, no, it had been broad daylight that first time. He paused on a thought. He asked a question he didn't know the answer to. "Were the lights on or off when you got in?"

"Off," Hardcastle said without hesitation, with the accuracy of memory seared permanently into the mind. He was looking down and a little to his left at what must have been the spot.

"That makes sense," Mark said cryptically. "Not dark though, but dim, after coming in from the full light. You saw him right away?" He realized he'd been wrong earlier—there was no hardest part; it would all be hard.

Hardcastle nodded. He said nothing but he didn't back off or try to retreat from it.

"And as soon as you saw him you went to him."

"Of course," the man rasped. "He was still breathing . . . but it was too late."

Mark didn't know if this was the time to say it, but he was almost certain it had already been too late the instant Hardcastle had heard the first shot, when he'd been back in the den. But for the moment he said nothing. He merely edged back a little, giving the judge his space and some time with his memories. He moved quietly around the perimeter of the room, toward the side away from the front door—the short hallway leading off to the kitchenette. He paused at that doorway, staring back at a window he'd looked at a thousand times without ever before really having considered it.

"Then you went back to the house," he said quietly, "to call for help."

"It was too late. I should have stayed with him."

Mark couldn't argue with that, though he knew it wouldn't have done Tom any good. He'd seen the pathologist's report. But . . .

He stepped back into the hallway, only partway, confirming the sightlines for himself and then saying it out loud. "This is where he was, I'm pretty sure."

Hardcastle tore his gaze from the still-empty spot on the floor and looked over his shoulder. Mark stepped forward again, back into view.

"Who?" the judge said brusquely. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"John Chassell. He was in here, before you even arrived."

Hardcastle stared at him in confusion.

"It fits with the facts—all you have to do is get rid of the impressions. Why did he have Tanckowski drive him that day? Tank barely gets a mention in that journal. Tom hardly knew him. Why did Chassell bring him along? Do Marine officers hang out with their noncoms that much?"

Mark waited in vain for any signal to continue. The judge was frowning now, but made no other acknowledgement. McCormick carried on anyway—too late to turn back.

"He's stayed with him for fifteen years. Tonight Chassell said he had to be there—he had a right to be there. Tank had a stake in the blackmail. Maybe it goes back to whatever happened in 'Nam—"

"What the hell did happen there?" The judge's voice rose in frustration.

"I don't know. Tom didn't say. He never wrote you about anything? He never said when he got back?"

"He couldn't even talk when he first got back," Hardcastle said bitterly. "It was months before he could do anything for himself, and even then he didn't remember anything about what had happened. They told us it was a Viet Cong hand grenade."

"The grenade, most likely, but I'll bet they didn't get any fingerprints off it."

"He was fragged?"

"Not by his own men. I think Chassell, or maybe Tank, or both of them had a hand in it. Tom saw something. He knew something. He went to somebody about it. He said he wished he could talk to you about it. That was early in November. There might be a report somewhere, or maybe the person he talked to just told him he'd look into it—so late in the war, and peace negotiations going on—a bad time for bad publicity. Anyway, Tom said nothing came of it, and after that he sounded worried." Mark pulled up, feeling breathless. He saw the judge thumbing open the book, leafing through to the last pages.

"I suppose the first time might even have been an accident," Mark admitted. "We'll never know for sure, but if it was it was awfully damn convenient. Chassell must've thought his problems were over, at any rate."

"He wrote me, asking about Tom, early on. He sounded concerned. I told him how serious things were."

"Concerned. Yeah. He probably was." Mark shook his head. "Then he gets through his hitch—comes back here, and calls up again to check on Tom, right?"

"I told him how much better he was doing. That he was talking, starting to get things back." Hardcastle had the pallor of a ghost himself. "Oh my God."

"Chassell came over, to see for himself," Mark said soberly. "I can't tell you what he was thinking. Tom said he took risks; he knew how to make the most of an opportunity. But he came prepared—he had Tank drop him off with instructions to stay back, out of sight."

"How the hell did he think he could get away with it?"

"He did, though. He waited until the coast was clear, got Tom to let him in, probably talked to him a few minutes. Maybe that shook something loose for Tom, who knows? Maybe Tom was even the one who took out the gun, if he even realized the danger.

"Anyway, it all worked perfectly for Chassell. He bolted the door from the inside, shot Tom in the head, put the gun in his hand and fired it again once, into the wall. Then he stepped back and got out of sight, while you broke the door in. If you'd seen him he probably would have killed you, too, and arranged it to look like a murder suicide. If you'd stayed put with Tom, he would have gone out the window in the kitchenette, joined up with Tank, and still gotten away clean. It would have been just a little less airtight for a suicide."

"But I ran out—I left him there with Tom."

"Tom was already gone. And all Chassell wanted to do was get out through that door you'd opened and get back to where Tank was driving in, so he could make his timely appearance when you came out of the main house again. Who would suspect him? By the time he was on the scene it was all over."

"No proof," Hardcastle muttered, but it was 'no proof', not 'I don't believe you.'

Mark let out a long, slow breath. "No," he said. "Not much chance of proof at this point, but at least some chance at the truth. For Tom. For you."

He never found out what Hardcastle's opinion of the truth was, because that was the moment when the phone rang.

It jerked them both back out of the haze of reconstruction. Mark was galvanized into movement first and had the phone in his hand before he even gave thought to who it might be.

"Mark?" It was Frank. "I'm trying to reach Milt. He come home yet?"

"Yeah." Mark looked up at the judge, who was sinking down into the chair opposite the sofa. "He's here." He handed the phone over.

Hardcastle took it without fumbling, looking strangely in control of himself and answering in a voice that was only a little strained. Mark couldn't make out Frank's end of things, only that it started up suddenly and went on with no appreciable break for more than a minute. It was only then that the judge interjected his first question.

"And what about the other guy? He's okay?"

It wasn't apparently a yes or no answer. Who it was about, and whether the answer was mostly yes or mostly no, was also not clear.

"Okay, then," the judge finally said wearily, and paused for a moment as if he were having some trouble figuring out where to go from there. He took another breath. "Okay, you keep us posted."

'Us'. Mark focused on that one word. The rest of whatever Frank had seen fit to call about faded into the background. He felt too wrung out to be curious.

Hardcastle must have felt the same way. He put the receiver back and set the phone on the table, then edged back, sitting quietly for a moment, saying nothing.

'Us' might be more like a habit, Mark thought. This could be the long quiet moment right before the drop. Didn't matter—he had nothing left to say, no case left to plead.

"Frank says Chassell's dead."

Mark's head jerked up suddenly. "How'd he—?"

"He's the duty officer tonight, got a call about a homicide. Recognized the name, of course."

Mark blinked. There was something wearily resigned to that 'of course'. Further evidence to the judge of the ongoing conspiracy between his purported friends, McCormick supposed.

"They've already got Tanckowski in custody. He's claiming self-defense." Hardcastle shrugged. "Might be true. It was Chassell's gun. Might be Tank was tired of being an accessory. Chassell probably wanted to finish this with you and me."

"You think he'll tell that version?"

"Not if he has a smart lawyer." Hardcastle sighed. Then he looked up, his gaze going sharper. "Just so long as he doesn't tell the part about him driving his boss to a meeting with you tonight."

It has been added quietly but clearly. The wave of relief caught Mark completely by surprise. It wasn't that he'd been worrying about the consequences of his rendezvous with Chassell, but Hardcastle was, even in the midst of all the rest of this.

Mark felt like he'd clawed his way back up onto slightly thicker ice—still bitterly cold, but above water for the time being.

"So what do we do now?" McCormick said, willing to let the other man take any meaning from it that he wished.

And, understandably, the judge chose the simplest solution—for now.

"We get some sleep." He looked down at his wrist, frowning at his watch. "Been a long day."

Mark noticed he hadn't put the book down, not even while dealing with the phone call from Frank. He suspected that Hardcastle wouldn't be getting much sleep tonight, but there was nothing to be done about that, except to be around in the morning for him.

"Okay," Mark said. "I'll be here." He winced slightly at the awkwardness of that. "I mean, if you need me." Worse and worse. He shook his head slightly.

He looked up, embarrassedly, and noticed the judge was still frowning, though it didn't seem to be in response to what he'd said. It was a slightly detached expression, which held for a moment and then was broken with a slight twitch of the man's chin and a refocusing of his eyes.

"Here," he said, echoing Mark's own word with a hint of puzzlement, as though he couldn't quite place where he'd heard it. Then he looked around. "Doesn't bother you?" he asked with a persistent air of grim bemusement.

It was the most astonishing question, the idea that it would somehow bother him, living in what had once been the scene of a murder. How was he supposed to explain that what had really terrified him was the almost certain notion that he'd have to leave it? That he'd no longer be welcome here.

Mark finally sighed. It wasn't something he could explain, so he just fell back on acceptance. "I don't mind. Maybe he's been here all along. Maybe that's why I found that book."

He saw Hardcastle's brow tighten briefly and thought maybe that'd been a mistake, to mention the circumstances again like that. But the older man's voice was only mildly peeved when he uttered a quick 'hmmph' and then, "Ya always believed in all that stuff—ghosts and signs and mysteries."

"Maybe," Mark said thoughtfully. "Ghosts, yeah, and signs . . . but I've never really liked mysteries. That's the problem."

"No kiddin'," Hardcastle said, and he clearly wasn't.

Mark twitched a little nervously, but nothing more came from the man, not even a request for more explanation—of what he had done, of why. He wondered if that would come, eventually, or if the judge would just go to Frank for the rest of the story, which might be easier on both of them.

"Anyway," he finally said, looking around at the room, at his home, "I don't mind sharing."

The judge came up slowly from what had been apparently another slow submergence into memory.

"No," he said with more quiet certitude that might seem expected from a man who didn't believe in ghosts, "I don't think he would, either."