Hocus (18 page)

My eyes widened. Cassidy held up a hand, motioning me not to talk, obviously aware that I couldn’t speak with anything resembling composure. But in the same tone of voice in which anyone else might have said, “Read the funny papers yet?” Cassidy said, “Last time, Bret did mention that Frank was injured.”

“You didn’t expect him to come along peacefully, did you?” Samuel said defensively. “It’s his own fault. He fought us, and he got hurt. But he has received medical attention.”

“He has?”

“Yes. I stitched up his head myself.”

Visions of infections and fevers and insane medical experiments tumbled through my mind, while the silence stretched. Cassidy had warned me not to be afraid of those silences, but I had not anticipated the course my imagination would take while we waited.

Yet it was Cassidy who broke this silence as he drawled, “You a medical man, Samuel?”

“You’ve probably already got a whole team of people working on my history and credentials,” Samuel said, “so let’s not waste Detective Harriman’s time. I’ve been on this call far too long. Bret will be quite upset with me. Everything else you need to know is waiting at a copy shop near Cal State Bakersfield.” He gave an address on Stockdale Highway, then added, “It’s a twenty-four-hour place. Ask for your fax and mail.”

“Can you give us directions, Samuel?” Cassidy asked. “Irene hasn’t been here for a while, and she’s already managed to get us lost twice.”

“Not my problem. You found your way eventually, didn’t you?” he said. “Now, on to business. The reports in the
Californian
are fairly accurate. Wrong in a few places, though. For example, you know that a young officer — our very own Officer Harriman — rescued us from a warehouse. Now here’s the problem: How did Officer Harriman know to go to that particular warehouse?”

“I’m not sure I understand, Samuel,” Cassidy said.

“Who told Officer Harriman to go to the warehouse?”

“A dispatcher,” I answered.

“Yes, but who told the dispatcher about the warehouse?”

“According to the article, an anonymous tipster,” I said.

“Ah! That’s where the article is wrong. Not the fault of the reporter. That’s what the dispatcher told him.”

“You believe the dispatcher lied?”

“Maybe. But I think it’s far more likely that she knew — well, knew but didn’t know — the caller.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t understand.”

Silence.

“Knew but didn’t know,” I finally repeated. “Didn’t recognize the voice?”

“Exactly.”

“Whose voice was it?” Cassidy asked.

“More fun if you guess,” Samuel said.

Don’t make this into a game!
I wanted to shout, but Cassidy simply said, “All right. Was it a relative?”

“No.”

“Someone she worked with,” I said, trying to follow Cassidy’s lead.

“Getting warmer,” Samuel enthused.

“A cop,” I guessed.

“Yes! I knew you could do this job, Irene.”

“This job?”

“You’ll have until Tuesday.”

“I’ll have until Tuesday to do what?”

“Why, to find that cop.”

“Which cop? What’s his name?” I asked, feeling panic closing in.

“Irene, if we knew that, we wouldn’t have needed to go to so much bother. That’s why we need you.”

“You know the caller was a cop?”

“I’m certain of it.”

“What do you mean? How can you be certain?”

Cassidy pushed a note toward me: “Slow down.”

“We were there, remember?” Samuel said. “But that isn’t much of an explanation, is it? No, you’ll need more details if you’re going to give us his name by Tuesday. Well, read the fax. Now, this really has gone on too long.”

“Wait! Why Tuesday?”

“No special reason,” he said. “But we can’t be expected to take care of Detective Harriman forever.”

“You’ve started all of this over a weekend,” Cassidy said, his tone of voice much more level than mine. “Of course that presents some difficulties.”

“Nothing insurmountable.”

“Folks go out of town on weekends. Offices are closed. And this all goes back a ways.”

“Years,” Samuel said bitterly.

“Yes. You’ve waited a long time to learn this officer’s identity. What difference would a few more days make?”

Silence.

We waited.

“Perhaps we will be flexible, Tom. Perhaps not. You’ll just have to see how we feel on Tuesday.”

“I just figured you’d want her to be sure she had identified the right man.”

“How would you know what we want, Tom?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Cassidy asked, but we could already hear the drone of the dial tone.

“Y
OU DID FINE
,” Cassidy said. “You let him get your goat a couple of times, but that’s what he was aiming to do.” He paused, then said, “They’re a little unusual. They’ve studied the Las Piernas Police Department.”

“What do you mean?”

His cellular phone rang before he could reply. He answered the call, listened for a moment, and said, “Well, it will be helpful whenever it does come through. Thank you…. Yes, we may be receiving other calls here.”

He hung up and said, “That was Bakersfield PD. The phone company says it’s going to be at least a couple of hours before they can get back to us with the trace. The call came from out of the local area. That’s no surprise. He talked too long — he was probably fairly sure it would take us a while to trace it.”

He explained that a telephone call made within a local area could be traced fairly rapidly; but a call made from outside areas, or one that crossed phone company service areas, might take much longer to trap — two days or more.

“So at least one of them — Samuel — isn’t in Bakersfield.”

“Right.”

“And they don’t seem to have anyone following us around, or he would have picked up on your lie about getting lost.”

He smiled. “Right again.”

“You took a chance there, didn’t you?”

“Not much of one. I was more worried that you’d get angry and deny it than I was that he’d make a fuss over it.”

“Now you’re
trying
to make me angry. What were you saying before — about Hocus studying the department?”

“They’ve got all kinds of information that takers don’t usually have. They were expecting me to be here with you. They’ve done some research on how our department handles these situations, who they send out for crisis negotiation.”

“You don’t like that, do you?”

He shrugged. “Not the way I’d prefer it to be, but not the end of the world.”

I looked toward the door. “I guess I’d better let the others know what’s happening before we go to pick up that fax.”

“Hold up a minute,” he said. “I’d like you to listen to the tape while I play it for Hank. Sometimes, the second time through, you learn things, pick up on things you missed while you were feeling the pressure. Just let me make a couple of quick calls, then we can go and talk to the family together.”

He called Captain Bredloe, gave him a synopsis of the call, mentioned I was still in the room with him. After a brief pause he said, “Yes, sir. I’ll call back a little later.” He then called Henry Freeman, told him he would have a modem set up soon and would be sending a report for Freeman to distribute. He played the tape, and I tried to learn from his part of the conversation while wincing over my own mistakes. He was right about the second time through, though.

“I noticed something,” I said when he finished his call. “They wanted to call us by our first names, but they keep calling Frank ‘Detective Harriman.’ They aren’t — what do you call that? When the hostages and hostage takers bond with one another, start to worry about each other—”

“Stockholming,” he said. “Or Stockholm syndrome. Gets its name from an incident in Sweden. Some hostages were held for six days in a bank vault by two escaped convicts. When they were released and the takers were arrested, police there noticed something kind of odd — both the takers and the hostages had developed a kind of sympathy and affection for one another.

“Hard to say why it happens,” he went on. “Maybe it’s because of the dependency of the hostages on the takers; others say that under stressful conditions, as time passes, the hostages and the takers are more likely to begin to see each other as individual human beings.”

“So you’re saying it’s too soon for Samuel and Bret to form that kind of bond with Frank, then?”

“It may not happen at all. I’d warn you not to count on it happening here.”

“Why not?”

“There’s been a lot of publicity about Stockholming, especially since the Hearst case, so people mistakenly believe the Stockholm syndrome is a given. It’s not.”

“But you seem especially doubtful about it in this case,” I pressed.

He sighed. “Like I said before, these takers know who goes out on a crisis call in Las Piernas. They know how long it takes to trace a phone call. We have many examples that show they are intelligent and that they plan ahead. My guess is they know all about the Stockholm syndrome. They’ll do their best not to succumb to it — you can see signs of it already. Calling him ‘Detective Harriman’ instead of ‘Frank’ — that will help them keep some emotional distance.”

“But how can they have emotional distance from the man who saved them from that cellar?”

“How could they injure him?” Cassidy countered.

“How could they put their ‘hero’ in the trunk of a car? Drug him? Use him as a pawn? Do any of the other things they may have done to him?”

“It has something to do with his being a cop, doesn’t it? They have some problem with cops.”

“Maybe.”

“They never once mentioned Lang and Colson. Never once proposed an exchange.”

“No, they didn’t. Odd, isn’t it?”

“Yes. They don’t seem to want an exchange, but they do want me to find a Bakersfield cop who made an anonymous phone call to a dispatcher. Why?”

“It doesn’t make sense to me, either,” Cassidy said.

“If an officer made the call, there was no reason for him not to identify himself to the dispatcher.”

After a moment’s thought I said, “But if a cop
did
make the call to the dispatcher, he had to know that something was going on at the warehouse.”

“Right,” Cassidy said. “Let’s say he drove by and suspected something, then didn’t do anything about it until it was too late. Maybe they resent him for it. Maybe they believe he could have saved their fathers’ lives.”

“No, he had to have done more than drive by the place,” I said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be aware of his existence — how would they know he had seen anything in the first place? They must have seen him or heard him themselves. Samuel said they were
certain
the caller was a cop.”

“So he showed up, left, and didn’t save them—”

“Or was actually involved in the murders,” I said.

Cassidy rubbed a hand over his hair. I could see him resisting that theory, trying to come up with another explanation.

“They were afraid of policemen, remember?” I went on. “What reason would the cop have for fleeing from the scene? Even if he didn’t want to go in on his own, he could have radioed for backup.”

“Let’s go get that fax,” he said.

“I want to talk to Frank’s family. They’ve been waiting out there.” I stood up.

Cassidy stayed seated. “This fellow, Greg Bradshaw — he’s the one you were telling me about earlier, right?”

“Yes. He’s the Bear.”

“Former Bakersfield Police Department?”

“Yes.”

“You going to tell the family everything we talked about just now?”

I thought it over. “No, probably not. It’s just a theory.”

“Even if they ask you to tell them what Samuel said?”

“I don’t know….”

“Better if you don’t,” he said.

“I don’t want to lie to them.”

“I’ll make it easy on you. Let me talk to them.”

“You mentioned Bradshaw,” I said. “Bear’s the problem?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’re starting to believe it, aren’t you? You think a Bakersfield officer was involved in the Ryan-Neukirk murders.”

He shook his head “Not necessarily — but it’s possible. Don’t tell me that just as it’s starting to make sense to me, you’re moving on to some other theory.”

“No, but even if it’s true — not Bear. I know Greg Bradshaw. He was a good cop.”

“You knew him when you were in your early twenties?”

“Yes.”

“Have you grown any less trusting of people since then, Irene?”

“Yes, but I’m willing to bet he was a good cop even by my present cynical standards.”

“Willing to bet Frank’s life on it?”

I bit back the reply I wanted to make, not ready to have my mother-in-law hear that end of my vocabulary under her own roof. But Cassidy must have read it on my face, because he said, “Simmer down.”

“If you want me to simmer down,” I said, “quit turning up the heat.”

He smiled, which doubled my irritation. “Fair enough,” he said.

They were still in the living room, silent and tense. Bea sat next to Bear, her face full of worry. Mike paced with his hands in his pockets. Cassie sat on the couch, elbows on her knees, her forehead resting in one palm. Cassidy was behind me, so I was the first one to walk into the room. They all looked up at me at once, the way people in a hospital waiting room look up when a surgeon comes out to talk to them. I was no surgeon.

“They say Frank’s okay,” I said, “but they’re keeping the calls short. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him this time—”

“Will y’all forgive us if we keep you waiting for another twenty minutes?” Cassidy interrupted as he walked in the room. “I need to borrow Irene for a little while, but I’ll bring her right back. I’d love to explain, but for the moment, I can’t. You know how that goes, don’t you, Officer Bradshaw?”

“Sure, sure do — only I’m retired, so just call me Greg. That’s good enough. Mike, here, now he’s an officer. He works for the highway patrol.”

Cassidy smiled at Mike and said, “Forgive me. Irene neglected to tell me you were in law enforcement.”

“I’m sure she’s had other things on her mind,” Mike said.