Disclaimer: These characters are not mine and I make no profit from them. This story and all the characters in it are fictional.
Thanks, Owl and Cheri.
Author's Note: For those who haven't had recent access to the original episodes, this piece is rife with references to the plot of the second season episode, "The Birthday Present", in which Hardcastle is recalled to the bench to hear the case of Weed Randall, a soon to be paroled murderer, on a new charge of murder. Acting as his own counsel, Randall pays for a gun to be smuggled into court and, at the outset of the trial, shoots the judge in the chest.
Anarchy
by L.M. Lewis
"You gotta uphold the law. You bend it just a little, try and look the other way just once, and you have the beginnings of anarchy."
The Black Widow, scene 18
Chapter One—A Librarian At Large
It was his first week off since starting law school full time. After a summer semester of compressed classes, Mark was half-hoping that the judge would continue his moratorium on riding the high plains in search of bad guys. It looked that way, with no files in sight on that hot August morning, only a copy of the LA Times out on the patio table.
The sports section had obviously already had a going-over. It was lying on the seat of an unoccupied chair. Hardcastle had proceeded on to the front section and had it folded back to a manageable size, still reading while he buttered his toast.
Mark grabbed for the Dodgers' headlines and set his cereal bowl down on the table in front of him. He heard Hardcastle grunt.
"They're extraditing him, Arthur Loki." He sat back a bit and shook his head.
"The bomb guy," Mark asked casually, slipping his spoon out of the hip pocket where he'd stowed it, and reaching for the pitcher of orange juice.
"Yeah," Hardcastle cocked a pondering eye upward, "wonder if they'll want my notes—"
"You were in on that?"
"Uh-huh. The presiding judge after the first trial went up for grabs."
Mark frowned in puzzlement. "I didn't know there'd been a second trial."
"'Course not. 'Cause I didn't let 'em turn it into a three-ring media circus that time. And all the rest of the bunch were tried, found guilty, and sentenced. All except for Loki, who beat feet out of state."
"Took a while for them to find him."
Hardcastle tilted his head back, eyes briefly closed, as if he were doing some calculations. He brought his chin back down, sharply, after a moment. "Sixteen years—it was 1970. Looks like he spent most of it up in Oregon. Just lucky someone finally recognized him there."
"Not lucky for him," Mark mused, turning to the box scores. "Musta been lying pretty low—they say he was working as a librarian, right? Probably thought he was out of the woods after all that time."
He'd immersed himself further in the previous evening's late-season pitchers' duel. The silence went unnoticed by him at first, but eventually it became a little more . . . penetrating. He glanced up and saw the stare Hardcastle was giving him.
Mark frowned. "I missed something here, huh?"
The judge shook his head, a gesture that might have indicated a situation past salvaging.
"What?" Mark insisted with slight exasperation. "You know, I was in juvie that year; we didn't get no regular newspaper deliveries."
He'd layered the accent on a bit heavier than usual, along with his best Dead End Kid double negative. He'd pried a small smile from the older man, but it was transmuted quickly into something grimmer.
"You've at least got an excuse. For most folks, even the ones who are old enough and lived here then, it's just yesterday's news. There was even some talk about not bothering with the extradition."
"It did sound like he'd cleaned up his act."
"Yeah," Hardcastle grunted, "that's what they're saying."
"But . . .?"
There was another silence, and then Hardcastle shook his head again slowly, and said, "Nobody came to the funeral. Well, hardly anyone. Me and one of the detectives from the investigation. There wasn't even anyone from the university." He shrugged. "The man didn't have any kids, and his ex-wife had moved away."
"Whose funeral?" Mark asked cautiously.
"The guy who wasn't supposed to be killed by that last bomb. He was a security guard over at the university. They'd been pretty careful up till then, I'll grant you. Lots of showy stuff—red paint on the walls of the ROTC headquarters, smoke bombs in the administration building—but this time they decided they'd use a real one to blow up a chemistry lab—they said it was because one of the professors in the department had taken grant money from the Defense Department."
"And the guy . . . ?"
"Was supposed to be on the other side of campus, responding to a fake call about a possible fire. Only his radio malfunctioned and he never got the call—that's what they think. He was inside the building when the bomb exploded."
Mark swallowed hard. "Killed, huh?"
"Uh-uh. Just burned: face, hands. Cut up pretty bad, too. Deaf in one ear—they couldn't fix that. And his head was never right after that—that's what I heard. He got some money from the university—enough to live on, not enough to get his life back. There's never enough for that." Hardcastle's eyes went a little darker and more distant. "Then about four years later he died."
"From his injuries?" Mark asked.
"From not wanting to live anymore," the judge said soberly.
Mark said nothing to that. There didn't seem to be anything to say.
Hardcastle heaved a sigh and got to his feet. "I should go rustle up my notes."
00000
It was two days later, Monday morning, and Hardcastle's appointment with the DA in charge of the Loki indictments was looking like it might be a problem.
"An hour and a half ought to have been plenty of time," Mark said, lifting his hands from the steering wheel and running them through his hair in a gesture of frustration. Keeping them on the wheel was pointless, since they weren't moving at all. The Santa Monica Freeway was at a dead standstill.
"Maybe the side streets," he muttered, but even getting to the next ramp wasn't going to happen very soon. They'd already listened to two cycles of the radio traffic reports and aside from stating the obvious—nothing was moving—the announcers didn't have any useful advice.
Hardcastle was looking out his side of the Coyote. On the shoulder was yet another stalled car though, unlike the usual cause of a slowdown, there was no relief from the crunch after they'd edged past it.
"Did you see that?" he glanced over at McCormick, who was closing the infinitesimally small gap between them and the car ahead, taking some satisfaction in having moved three feet.
There was nothing but a questioning grunt from the younger man's direction and then finally, "See what?"
"The tires on that thing."
Mark shook his head.
"Two of 'em," the judge looked back toward the sidelined vehicle, "flat."
Mark shrugged and cast his own quick look. "Happens. Might be a spilled load along here. Something sharp. That'd explain all this," he gestured impatiently.
"Yeah," Hardcastle said, then shook his head and turned forward again, "makes sense, I suppose . . . maybe." He checked his watch again. "It's hopeless. Just get off at La Brea."
"But—"
"We can call 'em from Frank's office." He thumbed impatiently through his file. "I wanna check a couple things."
00000
Mark's foreboding had been right. The freeway mess had oozed out onto the secondary roads and the remainder of their drive cut deep into the morning. Everything was up for grabs at the station house too, with the usual borderline confusion taxed to the point of chaos.
Frank was on the phone, a precinct map spread in front of him on his desk. He barely acknowledged the arrival of his visitors with a duck of his chin. They found their own seats, though Hardcastle was up on his feet a moment later, wandering restlessly.
A quick good-bye and Frank had cradled the receiver. To them he was equally curt.
"Bad timing, guys, got a lot on my plate this morning."
"What the hell is going on out there?" Mark asked.
"What isn't?" The lieutenant shook his head and leaned back over his map. He was reaching for the phone again when Hardcastle interrupted him.
"The freeways," he murmured, "it's all of them?"
"Looks like it," Frank nodded.
"A fluke?" The judge asked grimly. "Or has somebody noticed some kind of M.O.?"
Frank looked up from his pondering of the map. "Not sure about the noticing part, but they're sure as hell worried about it. So far, though, it's got fluke written on it. More then the usual number of flats, I'll grant you, and somebody down on the 405 reported a road hazard took down an 18-wheeler—that was when it all went to hell in a hand basket."
"A two-by-four about six feet long with spikes driven through it in both directions," Hardcastle said in a quiet measured way, as though he were quoting from somewhere.
"You heard?" Frank frowned. "I thought they were gonna try and keep that out of the news reports."
Hardcastle shook his head. "Not heard, just guessed."
Harper's frown deepened. "Who?" he asked.
"Exhibit fifteen," Hardcastle said, leafing through the thick folder he had carried up from the car. "The Red Fist Trial. It was in one of the documents found in Peter Solanger's apartment. The experts testified it was Arthur Loki's handwriting." He'd fished it out and was holding it at a reading distance. "'Ways and Means of Bringing About the Revolution'." Hardcastle sighed wearily and added, "It's handy when they're pithy like that."
He handed the paper-clipped sheaf over to Frank.
"It was a blueprint, of sorts. During the first trial, Loki argued that it was all theory—strictly academic stuff—but Solanger was more up-front about it. Of course he was the one whose fingerprints were found on the bomb materials in the basement storage area."
Frank was flipping through the pages slowly. "And the two-by-fours?"
"Page five, I think. There's a whole section in there about ways of immobilizing cities. They never got around to doing any of that stuff."
"You think—?"
"The others are all out now and who knows how many fellow-believers they had that never even got caught."
"Nobody's claiming any responsibility—"
"Oh," Hardcastle glanced up at the wall clock, "they still have plenty of time to make the evening news . . . if that's what they want."
Frank had only opened his mouth before he was interrupted by the phone. He reached for it, still glaring down at the papers he'd been handed. A hello and a yes that was little more than a grunt and he capped the mouthpiece with his palm.
"For you. How the hell—?"
"The DA?" Hardcastle shrugged. "Called 'em from the sergeant's desk." He reached for the phone and the conversation went monosyllabic.
Mark slid over closer to the desk and silently negotiated his share of the manifesto from Harper. They were both still poring over it when the judge cradled the receiver.
"Like I thought," he laid the rest of the file down on the desk and gathered in the pieces of exhibit fifteen, "no press conference on this one."
"Huh?" Mark clung to his pages for a moment but gave in after only a brief tug.
"It's now the Red Fist in the velvet glove, looks like. Someone called the mayor's office—the offer is that the DA elects not to prosecute and what happened this morning gets to stay just a convergence of bad luck, never to be seen again."
"And if not?" Mark asked.
"No specific threats. I guess we're supposed to consult the guide book." He glanced down at the papers he was tucking back into the file. "There's plenty to choose from."
Frank grimaced. "This could get a whole lot worse."
"It might," Hardcastle acknowledged, "but I'm guessing the DA is already having second thoughts about the logistics of prosecuting a sixteen-year-old case."
"It was murder," Mark said quietly, almost to himself. Then, almost sheepishly, he added, "Well, it might have been. Under the provisions of section 194 . . ."
Harper shot a quick glance at Hardcastle. "Now you got him buying into it, too, huh?"
"Can't help it if the kid knows his way around the penal code. They teach 'em that stuff in law school, you know."
"Well," Frank said reluctantly, "there was no question it was aggravated battery, but you know the burden of proof starts to pile up pretty high when the victim dies that far out. Juries don't like that kind of stuff, and you'll notice nobody hauled the rest of them back into court for a new trial twelve years ago."
"'Course not," Hardcastle said with a hint of anger. "They were already in prison. The prosecutors didn't want it to look like overkill. But now they're out, and if Solanger and his cadre are still in the revolution business, we've got that one last charge all ready to go. No statute of limitations on murder, and none at all for Loki, even on the old charges, not with him taking off in mid-trial." He slapped his hands together, looking like a man who was anticipating a good fight.
He gathered up the file and tucked it under his arm again. "But we gotta run." There was a quick nod toward McCormick and then he jerked his chin toward the door. "The appointment's still on."