then added, 'Maybe that's the problem. Maybe you're just getting jumpy, Raymond.'

Firestone began to shake with anger. His face now turned bright vermilion. He started to speak, but the words stuck in his throat.

'Tell you what,' Vail went on. 'You throw Eckling out on his ass where he belongs and put a police chief instead of a pimp in the job and you won't have a problem.'

'Goddamn you!' Firestone screamed, and stomped out of the office.

Yancey watched him leave. He blew a breath out. A line of sweat formed on his forehead. 'Jesus, Marty, you gotta be such a hard-ass?' he said.

'You and I have a deal, Jack. I run the prosecutor's office and you do the politicking. I don't ask for your help, don't ask for mine, okay?'

 'He throws a lot of weight in the party.' Yancey had, within his grasp, the thing he had yearned for all his life, an appointment to the bench. But he needed the support of every Democrat in the county, so at this moment his chief concern was keeping peace in the family. Vail knew the scenario.

'So throw just as much weight round as Firestone does. Stop acting like the Pillsbury Doughboy and kick his ass back.'

'I didn't mean for you to—'

'Sure you did. We've been through this song and dance before. You don't need Firestone anyway, his whole district's union and blue collar. Solid Democrats. They wouldn't go Republican if Jimmy Hoffa rose up from the dead and ran on the GOP ticket.'

'I just hate to look for trouble.'

'You know, the trouble with you, Jack, is you want everybody to love you. Life ain't like that, as Huckleberry Finn would say. Hell, when you're a judge you can piss everybody off and they'll smile and thank you.'

Vail started out the door.

'Marty?'

'Yeah?'

'Uh… are you gonna wear that suit to the luncheon?'

'Sweet Jesus,' Vail said, and left the office.

St Claire and Meyer were scatter-shooting, feeding information into the computer and looking for links, bits of information that St Claire eventually would try to connect together into patterns. Meyer was caught up in the game. It was like Dungeons and Dragons, where the players are lured through a maze of puzzles to the eventual solution.

Some of the unsolved homicides that HITS turned up were interesting, but nothing seemed to relate to the city landfill case and Meyer was getting tired. He and St Claire had been at this cross-matching game for three hours and his stomach was telling him it was lunchtime. The office was empty except for the two of them. They had developed a list of seventy-six missing persons and nineteen unsolved homicides throughout the state, but neither of the figures appeared to correlate.

'What're you after, Harvey?' Meyer asked. 'None of these cases could possibly relate to the landfill.'

'The three bodies have to be connected in some way. They were almost side by side, so they had to have been dumped at the same time, don't you agree?'

'That makes sense.'

'Well, think about it. Three people show up in the same area of the city landfill. If they were dropped at the same time, in all probability they knew each other. They had something in common.'

 'Yeah, they're all dead,' Meyer said.

'Also they've been in there awhile. What I'm gettin' at, son, is that if the three of them knew each other and were involved with each other in some way, and they all disappeared at the same time, don't you think somebody would have reported that? First thing I did this morning, I called Missing Persons and asked them one question. 'You looking for three people who knew each other and were reported missing at the same time?' The answer was no.'

 'Maybe - '

'Folks who are missing friends or relatives will come forward to see if they can identify these bodies. Hell, if your kid was missing, and you picked up the paper and read that three unidentified bodies were found in the city landfill, wouldn't you be curious to see if he might be one of those three? There's a lotta missing persons out there, cowboy. And at least one person looking for every one that's missing.'

'What the hell's your point, Harve?'

 'Let's say we don't get an ID on these people - at least for a while. Doesn't that raise the possibility that maybe they're from someplace else?'

Meyer looked away from the screen for a moment. 'You think they're out-of-towners?'

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