His dart game was off. In his first round, none of the three darts landed in the 20, where he was aiming. A year before, that couldn’t have happened. If anyone had asked him, he would have said he was semi-serious about darts. He still carried his custom set of twenty-gram tungstens with him every day in his suit jacket’s inside pocket.

But the reality was that new priorities had taken over. As he retrieved his first round, he heard the water shut off in the bathroom. He was back at the line near his desk now: 20, 19, 18. There you go.

Then Frannie was in the doorway, barefoot, wearing the purple silk baby-dolls Hardy had bought her for Christmas, the ones she hadn’t been able to wear until after Rebecca was born. A tiny dark spot marked where a drop of her milk had leaked from her nipple.

Hardy crossed to her, went to his knees and lifted the hem of the pyjamas, burying his face against her.

FINANCIER MISSING IN ‘MYSTERY HAND’ CASE

by Jeffrey Elliot

Chronicle Staff Writer

The case of the mystery hand found Sunday in the stomach of a great white shark at the Steinhart Aquarium took on a new dimension today as Bay Area financier Owen Nash was reported missing by Ken Farris, counsel and chief operating officer of Owen Industries of South San Francisco.

Mr Farris reported that Nash was last seen Thursday evening by members of his personal staff at his mansion in Seacliff. On Friday, Mr Nash failed to appear at a luncheon appointment. On Saturday, Nash reportedly was scheduled to go sailing with May Shinn, a friend. Neither Nash or Shinn has been heard from since then, although Nash’s sailboat, the Eloise, remains at its berth in the Marina. It is unclear at this writing whether or not the boat was taken out over the weekend.

The police will not speculate on the possibility of foul play, although yesterday a representative of the district attorney’s office gave strong credence to that possibility.

Farris reported that Nash’s life had been threatened ‘half a dozen’ times in the past five years over his mostly hostile takeover efforts of several Silicon Valley companies.

Strengthening the bond between Nash and the mystery hand is the fact that Nash was a black belt in karate. The hand has several unusual characteristics that can be associated with karate, among them calcium deposits and a somewhat overdeveloped ‘heel,’ or pad, at the side of the hand. San Francisco coroner John Strout, however, had no comment on the likelihood of the hand being that of Owen Nash and dismissed any possible identification at this time as ‘decidedly premature.’

‘The boy bushwacked me,’ Farris said. ‘He was waiting at my houseboat when I got home, had already charmed the skirts off of my Betty.’

Hardy, in his office at home, was beginning to admire Jeff Elliot’s spunk. The reporter was nobody’s little lost boy. Hardy had thought he’d scared him into some controllable space yesterday, but evidently he’d read that wrong. Hardy wasn’t going to get Jeff Elliot off his story. It didn’t look like anybody was.

‘You never told me about the death threats.’

‘I never took them seriously anyway. People say things when they lose negotiations, you know.’

‘But you thought enough to mention them to Jeff.’

‘Not really.’ Hardy heard a rustling noise. ‘I’ve got the paper here in front of me, and I must admit it reads pretty dramatically, but all I did was answer a straight question -had anybody ever threatened Owen? I said, “Sure, half a dozen times,” but it wasn’t anything. At least, until I saw it here in print.’

‘You don’t think it could be related?’

‘I guess anything’s possible. But as I said, this was all settled a long time ago. I think the last man who got bitter – Owen took him and his wife to Hawaii for a couple of weeks, wined and dined them, bought her a Mercedes, made him president of some division somewhere. The man made out like a bandit. ’Course, Owen made out better.‘

‘Who was that?’

‘It wasn’t any real threat. I’ve told Owen I was gonna kill him twenty times myself, and half those times I meant it.’

‘Okay, but if Mr Nash turns up dead, somebody’s going to want that name.’

‘I still pray to God he’s not dead.’

Hardy sat still a moment, drumming his fingers on his desk, trying to decide whether or not to tell Farris what he knew. Hell, the man had been forthcoming with him. He said. ‘The Eloise did go out on Saturday.’ He told him about his visit to the Marina, his tour of the boat.

‘But if the boat went out, and now is back, and the hand is Owen’s…’

‘Those are big ifs…’

‘But you see what that means? It means May -’

‘No… May or someone else. Maybe not May at all. Or May and some third party.’

Farris was collecting himself. ‘You’re right.’

‘A boat like that, it’s not unknown to get used once for drugs, then abandoned.’

‘Drugs?’

‘It’s more common in Florida, or down south in San Diego, but it’s happened here. Smugglers board the ship, kill whoever’s on it, throw them overboard, load up their cargo, deliver it, dump the boat.’

‘Back at its own slip?’

‘I’m not saying it’s likely, but the boat being back doesn’t say much about anything.’

‘I’ve got to find May,’ Farris said.

‘Why don’t you go by where she lives?’

‘I don’t know where she lives. Owen never told me that. Getting her phone number was a major concession.’

‘How about if they just ran away, like you were saying he might have done yesterday, except that it was Owen and May together, not just him?’

‘I hate to think we’re down to that.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, I really think the running off- it’s something Owen’s outgrown. I just don’t see him doing that anymore. If anything, he was more settled, less spontaneous, since he’s been with May. She really calmed him down. I mean, for Owen, he seemed relatively at peace for the first time in his life. Since Eloise, anyway. Besides, they’ve gone away together before – and told nobody except me. But he did tell me.’

‘And this time he didn’t.’

‘Nothing.’

Hardy looked up as Frannie walked by the door to his office, holding Rebecca, singing quietly to her. He missed Farris’s next sentence.

‘I’m sorry, what was that?’

‘I said it’s getting more unlikely every day anyhow.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Well, I’m Owen’s executor and I’ve also got power of attorney. It’s Thursday now and nobody’s seen him in a week. If he ran away, even with May, he’d need money, right? And he never carried much cash.’

‘So he’d use a credit card, and you’d have found out about that?’

‘Right. I checked all his accounts this morning – so far there’s been no activity.’

Hardy wished he could say something about not giving up hope until they had some more information, something definite.

Farris cut that thought off. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

The answer to that, a line from a comedy routine of the old, now-defunct Committee, a North Beach comedy troupe, was ‘Deader than hell, Bob.’

Hardy wasn’t even tempted.

Officer Patrick Resden was never going to make inspector. He was never going to make sergeant. He was fifty-one years old, a big, wheezy, friendly dog of a cop who was twenty years on the same beat.

Resden had taken the sergeant’s exam five times in the early ‘70s. Hardy had helped Glitsky study for the sergeant’s exam around the same time, but after a review of the first few chapters of the prep book, those ’study sessions’ had become the boys’ night out – Jane and Flo, respectively, staying home while their husbands improved their minds and careers. What they had really improved was their tolerance for alcohol. They knew they’d drunk enough on any given night when a question in the prep book – any question – stumped them.