Disclaimer: These characters are not mine and I make no profit from them.
Rated: T
Author's Note: Liz produced a list of existing H&McC fics garnered from a multitude of sources. Upon it appeared the title 'Hellbound' and it was attributed to me. I figured this was a suggestion from a higher authority that the story needed to be written.
Cliff Notes, Jacuzzi, and Tupperware are all registered trademarks which will be encountered in the course of this tale.
Many thanks to Cheri and Owl.
'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'
Hellbound
By L. M. Lewis
Prologue
The officer on the scene took one look at things and called his sergeant, who took a longer look and notified Lieutenant Harper. Frank, hearing the victim's name and the circumstances of the death, halted what would have been a fairly perfunctory processing of a suicide and advised the assigned officers to keep a more open mind.
Then he called Milt.
Chapter 1
Mark drove and Hardcastle seemed to be pondering. The younger man hadn't heard him say more than twenty words since the call had come in. Harry Bainbridge's file had already been on the judge's desk. McCormick had seen him perusing it, on and off for a week now: phone calls, inquiries, that sort of thing. There'd been nothing that required the services of a Tonto up till this point, so Mark had just been catching up on the yard work.
Now Bainbridge was dead, an apparent suicide. Frank had mentioned a note. Mark cast one long sideward look at the man sitting silently beside him in the car. Frank must've said a few other things, as well, but Hardcastle hadn't seen fit to share any of it. After almost a year in the man's employ, McCormick occasionally felt a twinge of irritation at the casual way in which he was left uniformed, but, in truth, if Bainbridge was dead, then the thing was over.
He pulled into the drive at the address he'd been given and parked the Coyote a little ways back from the official vehicles. Mark climbed halfway out and propped himself there, surveying the home and grounds. It was something in a league with Gull's Way—Tudor, not flashy, but very nice.
"Crime pays," Mark said dryly.
"Ya think so?" Hardcastle shot back.
McCormick wasn't much in a mood to argue. He shrugged and added, "Either that, or somebody was giving this guy a lot of credit."
Hardcastle just shook his head, then climbed out and stood next to the car. Frank must've spotted them from inside. He strolled out, hands in his pockets, looking his usual rumpled and laconic self.
"Cyanide," he said tersely.
Hardcastle let an eyebrow rise.
"Well, that's what we found on the scene—a jar of the stuff, labeled. Ought to be a cinch to trace where he got it. Don't know for a fact if that's what killed him, but there's no other obvious cause of death."
The judge gave that a considering nod.
"And then there's the note—" Frank broke off, then turned and jerked his chin back toward the house, indicating for them to follow. Mark fell in behind the other two.
The front hallway was hardwood-floored, and the place echoed with the sounds of the technicians at work—hollow, tomblike, with a sense of emptiness. They stepped aside for the passing of the police photographer, then Frank led them through into what might have been a study, or a very plush office. Some of the furniture was sheet-draped.
"He was in the process of selling. Maybe some financial trouble?" Frank supposed.
"Not that I'd found out so far, not that that's the sort of thing a guy in his position would want getting out." Hardcastle was staring at the one uncovered piece in the room, a handsome cherry-wood desk.
Half-sprawled across the top was Bainbridge himself, dead enough to not have required any attention from the paramedics. Now that he had a source to attach it to, Mark was vaguely aware of the odor, nothing strong, just there. He swallowed once.
"When?" he asked, almost involuntarily.
"Probably the day before yesterday." Frank shrugged. "He'd made an appointment with a real estate agent last week. They were supposed to meet this morning. The guy shows; he knocks and gives a holler. He sees the door's open a little. Maybe he's kinda eager; so he steps in and looks around, then sees the body. Bet he'll be talking about this one for a while."
Hardcastle was nodding this over. Then he stepped closer to the desk. "The note?" he asked.
"Ah . . ." Frank pointed to the small side table, to the right of the desk.
It had also apparently been uncovered. A white sheet lay crumpled on the floor nearby. The table supported a typewriter—an old and sturdy manual one.
"The note was still on the roller. We bagged it. Hey, Stevens," Harper grabbed a passing technician. "You got the note?"
The man nodded, stepped out into the hallway again, then returned a moment later and passed over a Lucite bag containing a single sheet. Frank handed it to Hardcastle.
The judge studied the words, his expression deepening to a frown. McCormick leaned in unobtrusively.
The first few lines were farewells to people that Mark hadn't heard of. He wasn't the one who had been poring over the file, though. From there the tone changed, and the bitter hopelessness was more apparent. 'And tell Hardcase he can finally close the book on me. He probably wouldn't have gotten me any other way, but he hounded me into the ground. At least one person will get some satisfaction out of this.'
Mark stepped back, took a deep breath, on the verge of saying something, though he hadn't decided quite what yet.
"Like I said," Frank sounded almost apologetic, "still in the machine. No signature."
"Yeah," Hardcastle grunted. "Handy, huh?" He passed the bag back, after giving it one more quick, almost dismissive glance. "It's his style, though," he finally added grudgingly.
"We're doing it right," Frank assured him. "If it wasn't what it appears to be, we'll sort it out."
Hardcastle waved that away, too. "A guy like Harry, never sure which side he was really on, the idea that he was wrong, and that other people would find out—that would've set real hard with him. Wouldn't surprise me he'd take this way out, if he thought we were going to finally nail him."
Frank looked around him and then nodded once. "Yeah, I suppose." Then there was a pause before he added, "And were you going to nail him?"
"Who knows?" Hardcastle exhaled something close to a sigh. "It probably wouldn't have been for much. He wasn't as dirty as the guys he dealt with, that's for sure. Then he goes and does a damn fool thing like this."
"Or somebody does it for him," Frank said, "one of the guys who was dirtier."
"And writes him a note that names me? What, you think they wanted to wave this under my nose? That'd be stupid, Frank—like daring me." The judge shook his head. "Nah, you've kicked the machine into gear. Somebody'll run down that cyanide. It'll turn out that Harry bought it, and his prints are going to be all over that typewriter."
"Yeah," Harper said glumly, "probably."
00000
On the way home it was Mark's turn to be pensive, and he figured it must've been obvious because even before they hit the PCH, Hardcastle half-turned in his seat and said, "Okay, out with it."
"Out with what?" McCormick replied. He most certainly wasn't going to say what he'd been thinking.
"You figure maybe I really did push this guy kinda hard, and maybe what he did wasn't all that surprising, if it was a choice between that and prison."
Mark blanched. This was way beyond deduction, into the realm of mind-reading. Dammit. He took a deep breath. It wasn't as if he'd actually signed a confession yet.
"Well," he said consideringly, "how much time was Bainbridge looking at?"
Hardcastle shrugged. "A couple of years, tops. Witness tampering, maybe a charge of obstruction. You didn't look at his file, huh?"
Mark shook his head, glad for the segue into the specifics.
"What'd he do?" He left off the 'allegedly'; this wasn't polite company and he'd never known Hardcastle to wander into the gray zone. "I mean, he must've felt pretty guilty about something."
The judge snorted. "Only about the chance that he might get caught." He shook his head. "Guys like him, I dunno . . . there he was, trained in the law, and damn good at it, too."
Mark frowned; he hadn't heard that part. The judge's determined pursuit now seemed more explicable. He cast a quick glance aside.
"Yeah," Hardcastle admitted, "and even the bad guys need lawyers. I'm not denying that. It's an adversarial system. But those lawyers have to operate within the law, within the ethics of the profession. You get what I'm saying?"
Mark nodded once. There was something in the judge's tone that made it sound like a fundamental truth.
"Bainbridge," Hardcastle sighed, "he did a couple of things that were pretty close to the line, stuff that resulted in cases having to be dismissed. I didn't have any choice."
McCormick heard the slight emphasis on the 'I'. It was obviously personal.
"But then there was a case—this was about two years ago—a mob guy named Sylvester Romney was being held on suspicion of murder."
"You told me about that one. He had one of his lieutenants killed, thought he was fooling around with his girlfriend."
"That's the one." Hardcastle nodded his grim approval. "And here I thought you never paid attention," he added dryly.
Mark shrugged. "That one was interesting. Kinda like 'The Godfather' meets 'Days of Our Lives'."
"Yeah, well, it made it all the way to seating a jury. Then the woman—she was the main witness—clammed up. It was pretty obvious that someone had gotten to her, and since she was being kept in a safe house, and the only one who had access was her lawyer—"
"Harry."
"Exactly." Hardcastle said. "Well, the case unraveled, the charges were dropped, and the woman went back to being Sylvester's main squeeze. Harry started getting a little more action from the crooked-nose trade. Got the fancy house, like you saw."
McCormick risked it. "So, sometimes crime does pay."
"Not if I have anything to say about it," the judge said grimly. "Here's Bainbridge, spitting on the code of ethics, and Romney, he got away with murder. But stuff like that doesn't take place in a vacuum; the girlfriend knows what had happened, so must a bunch of other people. Sometimes all you have to do is stir the pot."
"And you were stirring." Mark squelched his smile. "Okay, what about Bainbridge's money troubles?"
"There were rumors that Harry was getting kind of nervous; that he might break if we could bring enough pressure to bear." Hardcastle shrugged. "I guess I was the one applying the pressure. Romney started moving back; couldn't risk any ties with him. And once you've stepped over the line a few times like that, you get a reputation. Other people don't necessarily want to hire a guy who might be seen as a mob lawyer."
"It was his own doing. Sounds like he painted himself into a corner," McCormick said decisively, as though there'd never been a moment's doubt in his mind. "And, hell, he wasn't even any good at being a bad guy."
The judge looked sideways at him, as if he thought maybe the moral of the story had been lost in the translation.
"Not that it would have been good to be better at being a bad guy," Mark added with a half-apologetic grin.
Hardcastle shook his head. "I dunno, kiddo, you may know the words, but you can't always carry the tune."
00000
The Bainbridge file stayed out for a few days, as though Hardcastle wanted one last look at it, to settle his mind on things. In all other regards he seemed unperturbed by the turn of events, and whatever his role in it might have been.
As for Mark, he thought, on the whole, he preferred being Tonto.
That appeared to be the end of it, especially after Frank relayed the preliminary findings. At least half of Hardcastle's suppositions had been borne out—the typewriter was only marked by Bainbridge's prints. As for the potassium cyanide, it had been traced as far as a chemical supply house in Mexico, and Bainbridge had made several vacation trips there. The medical examiner was satisfied, and ready to rule it a suicide.
"Handy, I'd say," Mark leaned over the pot of chili and did a little stirring of his own. "I mean, him having the foresight to pick up a bottle of the stuff, what?—a couple of months ago at least."
"Might have been on his mind for a while."
Mark nodded and stirred. "Yeah, might have even been before you started poking. Who knows?"
Hardcastle's look was sharp. "Would it matter if it hadn't?" he asked flatly.
"Nope, absolutely not." Mark shook his head. "Not supposed to hang out in the kitchen if you can't stand heat, right?" One last stir and then he snapped off the control on the stove and carried the pot to the table. There he finally caught the judge's mildly aggravated expression. "What?" he said. "Not enough pinto beans?"
Hardcastle's annoyance faded into something like disappointment. "You still think this is about him not being a good enough bad guy, huh?"
"I didn't say that," Mark insisted with a tone of righteousness.
"It's not what you say. I'll grant you're a pretty quick study in that department." The judge pointed out quietly. "It's what you think."
Mark froze, ladle over the pot. Then he put it back down again, and studied the older man for a moment.
"Look," he finally said, "you're preaching to the choir more often than you realize, but, I dunno, I can't help it, maybe I think being loyal to something is better than no loyalty at all. You stick it out; you stay the course."
"Even if the guy you're supposed to be loyal to is a racketeer and a murderer?"
Mark frowned over that one and finally said, "Okay, when you put it that way." He sighed and added, "Never been much honor among thieves, anyway, at least not that I ever saw."
The judge gave that a nod and a grin of ready approval as he pushed his bowl over. "Now you're cookin'."
"Yeah, " McCormick sighed. "Most of the time. Nearly always," he muttered, and went back to the dishing up.
00000
Mark was drying the last bowl when the phone rang. He had the receiver in his hand and heard Frank give the judge a terse hello before, with equal brevity, the lieutenant said there'd been another death.
"Shelia Storm. Out the window of her penthouse in Marina del Rey."
"Jumped, or pushed?" he heard Hardcastle say with an ineffable weariness that he hadn't noticed in the conversation before dinner.
"Jumped, probably There's a note."
McCormick had hung up soundlessly on the judge's sigh. By the time he was in the den, having strolled in no particular hurry, Hardcastle was already off the phone himself, staring down at a piece of paper that bore a quickly scribbled address.
Mark said nothing, just raised an eyebrow in question.
"Frank," the older man said, with no hint of weariness, all grim business again. "It's Romney's girlfriend, dead."
"We're going?"
"Yeah, Frank said there's something we oughta see."
Mark frowned. "Is it typed?" he finally asked, point blank.
The judge's gaze was piercing.
"Yeah, well," the younger man shrugged, "the phone rings in the kitchen, too. You okay?"
"Sure," Hardcastle hmmphed. "Why shouldn't I be? This one, though, they better take a good, long look at it. Way too convenient for Romney, if you ask me."
00000
Another upper-class crime scene—Mark supposed it was technically a crime, even if was a suicide. Self-murder. He remembered reading the term somewhere along the way, very old-fashioned, very quaint.
There was nothing at all quaint about what had happened to the late Ms. Storm, though. McCormick had harbored some faint hopes that the body might already have been removed by the coroner's crew. No such luck. The photo session was still underway and their path took them past the sedan, its roof crumpled in by the force of what had fallen on it. The body was sprawled limply, a few feet away, at the point of second impact.
He looked up at the column of balconies—more flashes from up there, the one at the top. He swallowed, kept his eyes in the middle ground, and followed Frank and Hardcastle.
A brief wait for the elevator. There were other people in the lobby—obviously residents—looking put out, nervous, or merely curious. Gawking.
Well, but what are you here for?
For him. He watched the judge step onto the elevator. He and Frank hadn't exchanged more than a few words since they'd arrived. It was all not that much different than the visit to Bainbridge's house, but now McCormick could see the slight hunch to the older man's shoulders, the forcibly blank expression his face had held as they'd passed Shelia's body.
The hallway on the penthouse floor was crowded. They eased past a couple of plainclothes guys and a uniformed officer, and through the open door of the apartment. Inside were two more detectives, one Mark recognized as a guy named Parks from the Mob Task Force. To McCormick, the third man in that group had the unmistakable look of a perpetrator, rather than a cop.
Hired muscle. Though in this case, the muscle had a layer of fat over it. The guy must've topped 280, though it was balanced on a good-sized frame and he could probably pack a punch. His face was above-standard for mean, with enough scars to make the point that he wouldn't back down from a fight.
Mark saw Hardcastle smile for the first time since before dinner. Granted, it wasn't a pleasant smile, but there was some animation to his voice when he said, "Well, if it isn't Piggy Harleson." Now that McCormick heard the nickname, he caught the resemblance immediately. "How ya doing? You working for Sly these days?"
Harleson, who'd looked like he wasn't planning on saying anything to anybody, gritted his teeth. Mark tried for Hardcastle's elbow, ready to inflict a little détente on the situation if necessary.
But before he could intervene, he heard the bigger man mutter, in a surprising show of self-control, "The hell you'd know about it, Hardcase."
Parks was looking at a notebook. He cast an impatient glance at Harleson and then turned his head toward the judge. "He found the body." A quick jerk of his chin to the hulk. "Says he was 'visiting' tonight, went out to run some errands." He pointed to a coffee table, where a bag with a donut shop logo on the side sat unopened. "Gone, what, twenty minutes?" Parks asked.
Harleson nodded glumly.
Parks went on, briskly. "He came back, found her out there on his way in. Called the cops."
The little group stood there for a moment, in mutual near-astonishment for even that much cooperation with authority from an unexpected quarter.
"He called from a payphone at the corner. It was," the detective checked his notes again, "the second call, logged less than a minute after one of the neighbors phoned it in. She'd heard a thump and looked out the window, second floor, and says she called immediately."
Hardcastle glanced back over his shoulder at the hallway and the elevator. Then back at Harleson for a long second look.
"I guess that takes you off the hook for this one," he said. "Couldn't have gotten from that balcony to the corner phone in much under five minutes."
"I was coming up the street. I saw her fall," Harleson said. "There was nothin' I could do."
Though he hadn't been expecting it, Mark heard something underlying that low rumble that held a note of deep remorse.
"Visiting, huh?" Hardcastle said speculatively. "You visit often?"
Mark swore if he got the guy out of there with his jaw in one piece, they were going to have the talk about 'not baiting goons' one more time. But Harleson's anger seemed to be ebbing. He merely shrugged at the question and muttered, "Some."
"He's here every day," Parks added. "According to the neighbors."
"Sly know about that?" Hardcastle asked Harleson dryly.
"I thought you figured I worked for him."
"You were her bodyguard? Or maybe just her guard." The judge let that one hang.
Harleson said nothing. He finally turned to Parks. "You saw the note. And even Hardcase says I couldn't have been up here and down by that phone at the same time. You bustin' me for something or can I go?"
The detective cast one last look down at his notebook. "Notify us if you aren't going to be available at the address you gave. We may have some more questions."
Harleson gave this one sharp nod. Then he moved past Hardcastle, with surprising agility, and was out the door.
The judge just stared after him. He finally turned back to Parks and said, "Nothing? Not even a weapons violation?"
"All he was packing was donuts," the detective said with a shrug. "Word is that Sly assigned him full-time to keep an eye on her. Word is that maybe he liked his job too much."
"Him?" the judge said.
Parks shrugged again. "Beauty and the beast, opposites attract, who the hell knows?"
"Well," Hardcastle said with a grimace, "if Romney knew, it would've been a short trip down for Harleson, too. Maybe he just stepped out at the right time."
"There's a note," Frank reminded gently. He pointed through the doorway, into the bedroom.
The judge cast a brief look around before he stepped through. It was all very luxurious, no sign of any office work being done here. "Typed?" he asked flatly.
"Handwritten," Harper replied. "We'll get the pros to look it over, but on first pass it looks a lot like the writing on her grocery list."
Mark looked down at the Lucite envelope that had been left on the makeup table. The writing was upright, unhurried, and careful, like something done by someone who didn't write very often.
No farewells this time. The addressee seemed to be understood. Her fear was palpable, though. 'They're sniffing around some more. I don't think this is ever going to end. Maybe there's only one way for it to be over.'
Hardcastle hadn't bothered to pick it up. Mark watched his shoulders slump almost imperceptibly and then straighten again.
"But we've been sitting on our duffs since Bainbridge," Mark blurted.
"She didn't name any names," Frank pointed out.
"You got anybody else who was looking into all of this?" Hardcastle said with a sigh. "You said the coroner ruled Bainbridge a suicide, right? No one came around and questioned her, did they?"
Frank shook his head.
"Then all this," he gestured vaguely from the note, to the balcony doors, still standing open with a stiff breeze stirring the curtains, "was just her coming to a boil from before that. Sometimes it takes a while. Either that or somebody held a gun to her head and made her write a suicide note, then pitched her out the window, all in under twenty minutes."
"Harleson says she seemed in okay spirits when he left," Parks offered.
"Doesn't matter." The judge waved that away. "Might have been an impulse. Might've been she finally just worked up the courage." He turned from the table and the note and started walking slowly toward the door.
"I'll let you know if we find anything else," Frank called out after him.
Mark had been standing there, frozen in thought. Now he hustled, finally catching up in the hallway by the elevator. Hardcastle seemed lost in his own thoughts, as well.
"Awfully convenient," McCormick said quietly, "for Romney, I mean. If Shelia was starting to fall for the goon, then the two of them might have wanted to turn him in, just to protect themselves. He could have had her killed."
"The note. It'll be her handwriting, I'll bet," the judge added with dull finality.
"Well . . . maybe, "Mark conceded. "But then it was her own doing. Her corner, her paint," he added staunchly. "And you'd even stopped stirring the pot." He frowned. "Did you do that because—?"
"Nah," Hardcastle said hastily. "Just ran out of leads, with Bainbridge gone. Everybody always clams up after something like that. No one wants to speak ill—you know." Another shrug. "It needed to sit a while."
"Right," Mark said as they stepped off the elevator.
They crossed the now less-crowded lobby and stepped out into the night. He saw the hunched figure of Piggy Harleson standing a ways off, still obviously absorbed with the scene by the car, which was now in the removal phase. As the doors of the coroner's wagon banged shut, McCormick watched him start, very slightly, then turn and move off, his gait heavy and his shoulders still slumped.
McCormick turned; the judge was standing, still staring at the damaged car, the point of impact.
"She was a looker. Nice figure, too. A show girl, back in Vegas. That's what it was with the name." Hardcastle wrinkled his forehead slightly. "The Shelia part was hers, though. Shelia Macintyre? Yeah, that was it. From Dubuque, or maybe it was Cedar Rapids. Somewhere in Iowa."
Mark let the musing wind down. It was as much eulogy as the woman was likely to get.
"Come on," he finally said to the older man, "let's go home."
00000
He wandered up to the main house the next morning and let himself in the front door. It was past eight o'clock but there were no signs of activity. The reason for that might have been the file open on the judge's desk. It was a thick one, and belonged to Sylvester Romney. Even a casual perusal might have taken well into the wee hours.
Mark closed it, scooped it up, and carried it off to the kitchen. If the pot was going to get stirred again, he wanted to know what might boil over.
He was sitting there, with a cup of coffee and a bowl of cornflakes, studying a photo of the late Ms. Storm, aka Macintyre, when heard the judge come down the stairs. He closed the file and pushed it aside, though he made no effort to hide it.
Hardcastle's 'good morning' consisted mostly of a grunt. He watched the older man negotiate with the coffeemaker, and sit down at the table, still squinting slightly. McCormick smiled at him benignly, with the moral authority of the earlier riser.
"You looked at that yet?" Hardcastle spared one finger to point at the file.
"A little," McCormick admitted.
"Figures," the judge grunted again. "The ones with the nice pictures in 'em, those are your speed."
"Not much point to that, now," Mark said soberly. "She's not available."
"Yeah." Hardcastle took another sip of his coffee but looked not much inclined to make any further moves toward breakfast.
"So," Mark finally interrupted the silence, "we going mobster hunting?"
Hardcastle lifted his gaze off the coffee cup. "I dunno yet, might be."
"I thought you said she was a suicide. You change your mind?"
"That?" The judge appeared to shake off whatever he'd been dwelling on. "Irrelevant. Romney was dirty before, even if he had nothing to do with this. Giving up now is like . . ."
The thought had drifted off, unspoken. Mark didn't try to fill it in because it might involve something along the lines of 'admitting I caused those deaths, that I was wrong,' and he by no means believed Hardcastle was, this time around.
"Okay," he finally said, "just gimme a day or two to get up to speed, will ya?"
Hardcastle's eyebrows rose slightly. "You're not gonna tell me this guy is too scary, puts his pants on two legs at a time blindfolded, all that?"
"Nah," Mark sat back, pondering it. "This one can't even keep his girlfriend from falling into bed with every other guy she meets. How scary can he be? Hell, I bet she even made time with Bainbridge."
The judge cocked his head. "You think?"
"Yeah, probably got kinda lonely in that safe house."
Hardcastle frowned in momentary thought and then said. "Might've been why she took the jump, Bainbridge dying and all."
Mark heard the faint element of hope in that, the one that belied all the judge's protests that none of this disturbed him in the slightest. He let it be.
The older man seemed to realize where the silence was coming from. He pulled himself up out of the chair and cast a parting, "Just read the file, will ya? You'll see what we're dealing with here. The guy's all business when it comes to getting what he wants." Then he was through the doorway and gone.
00000
It did take him the better part of the next three days to get through it, though it wasn't so much the thickness that made it heavy going. The lack of admissible evidence against Sylvester Romney tended to be related to the sudden and bloody deaths of witnesses and, aside from Shelia's photograph, the rest of the illustrative material gave an entirely different meaning to the term 'head shot'.
As for Shelia's first inamorato, an up-and-coming mob kid named Nick Bonhavey, his remains had never been fully recovered. But, according to the file, one small but significant portion had been sent through the U.S. Mail, addressed to Ms. Storm herself. Mark was beginning to understand why Hardcastle had been so peeved by his casual defense of loyalty. Anyone who would do Romney's bidding had made a deal with the devil.
It was after he'd finally gotten through that story that McCormick had put the whole file back on the judge's desk, gone outside, and mowed the lawn. That's where he was, an hour later, when he saw Frank's non-descript sedan pull up the drive.
He stopped the motor and wiped his hands on his pants. It was probably news from the autopsy, and now he found himself taking a more personal interest in it. He waved at Harper, getting not much more than a nod and a grim look in return.
"He's inside?"
"Yeah," Mark frowned as he met him at the bottom of the front steps. "What now, Frank?"
"Another body," Harper said glumly. "I'd give you three guesses but you'd probably get it in one."
"Piggy Harleson?" Mark paused at Frank's brief nod. "How?"
"Well," Frank sighed, "not suicide unless he figured out some way of using a roll of duct tape on himself and then winding up under four feet of garbage at the top of a landfill in San Bernardino."
Mark grimaced.
"The report is that he wasn't dead when he went in—not even unconscious, looks like."
"Romney." It was Hardcastle, standing in the front doorway and speaking with finality.
From what he now knew, Mark would have had to second the motion. Frank didn't seem inclined to disagree, either, but he also didn't look like a man who was anticipating an open-and-shut case.
"The evidence may be a little sketchy, Milt. The county guys called in some state manpower, but it's a big dump and he's probably been in it since the night Shelia died."
Hardcastle had stepped outside. Now he joined them at the bottom of the stairs. He took a deep breath. "How the hell did they find him at all?"
"We knew he was missing. We'd sent someone around to ask him some follow-up questions the next morning. Just routine. He wasn't home and Parks thought he was probably in the wind, at least. Even if the rumors about him and Shelia weren't true, he musta figured he'd be in trouble with his boss for letting the woman do a header."
"But the dump?"
"Yeah, well, that was a mystery call to the San Bernardino authorities—got the jurisdiction right and everything—made from a public phone."
Hardcastle frowned and Mark asked, "Who's left to rat on the guy?"
Frank shrugged. "Might even be Romney himself. Might've figured there isn't any evidence and once the body was found, we'd stop looking and he could get on with doing his business."
"If he figured that, he made a big mistake," the judge muttered.
Harper looked worried. "Let 'em do the investigation, Milt. You haven't got anything solid on Romney on this one. You go poking around and—"
"I'm not gonna go 'poking'," Hardcastle said indignantly.
Frank looked at him with some doubt, then cast a quick side glance at Mark, who shrugged and said, "Well, don't look at me; I'm not the one with the silver bullets and the 'Hi-yo, Silver.' I'm just in charge of the lawnmower."
"You know how to drop a dime, don't you?" the lieutenant asked with some asperity.
Mark shot a nervous look at Hardcastle and then made an almost imperceptible nod.
The judge harrumphed. "You were giving me the lecture on loyalty. Hah." Then he turned back to Frank. "And don't go trying to corrupt him, okay?"
Harper shook his head reluctantly. "All I'm asking is that you let the thing play out a bit. We might get lucky. We might find some evidence linking him to this death, maybe to all three. It's possible."
Hardcastle nodded in a way that didn't look too convincing, as he saw Frank off to his car. Mark watched the sedan pull away slowly, and the judge return.
Perhaps his step was a little lighter. Maybe there was a glimmer of fire back in his eye that the younger man hadn't even realized had been gone the past week. Either way he had a suspicion that they were done with mere stirring and ready to start with the poking. Mark pinched the bridge of his nose and half-hid a smile that was completely unwarranted by the circumstances.
"You're gonna get me in trouble with Frank, aren't you?"
"Nah, nothing like that." There was a hint of a smile on the judge's face, too. "I'm just gonna pay a visit to Mr. Romney."
McCormick looked at him questioningly. "What makes you think he'll even see you?"
Hardcastle shrugged. "He's one of those macho hoods, ya know, angry all the time, the kind of guy that doesn't think too straight, like Terry Harlow. You remember how he was?"
"How could I forget?" Mark said dryly. He'd stolen a car from the man and then, on Hardcastle's instruction, called him up and insulted him about it. "I hope you don't want me to get Romney on the horn and rag him about his employee retention problems."
"Nah," Hardcastle gave him a pat on the arm, "I figure I'll do it this time, and I'll bet you twenty he'll agree to a meet, if only to spit in my eye."
Mark waved the bet off. He'd seen Hardcastle bait hoods before.
