Hocus (6 page)

“Hmm. If I sit here and speculate, I’m taking up a fool’s hobby. We don’t know if it’s human blood, for starters. Could be blood from a steak, just put there to scare you.”

“If it’s human….”

“Then we have to figure out how many humans left it there. If it came from one human, then we have to figure out which one it most likely belonged to. When you’re worried and thinking that it’s your husband’s blood, a few drops would seem like a lot of blood. We need to try to measure it, learn how long it’s been there, and so on. Lots of questions, Irene, and I’m anxious for the answers, too — but they have to come from the lab guys. Let’s you and I concentrate on other questions.”

I soon learned that he meant I would concentrate and he would ask questions. Most were similar to the ones Reed had asked me at the house, but the process of being questioned seemed much different with Cassidy. He spoke slowly, softly, and acted as if he were concerned rather than suspicious. He didn’t ask for details about my argument with Frank. He wanted to know what credit cards Frank had with him, in case Frank’s missing wallet was being used to finance an escape. Most of all, though, he was interested in conversations about Hocus.

“Frank make any comments to you about these people he arrested?”

“Not much. He said he thought they were young, probably in their late teens or twenties. He thought they were from fairly affluent families — said something about demographic studies showing that bombers are often young white males from upper-middle-income households, as I recall, although I might not have that right. He thought they were a bad combination of intelligent and spoiled. And angry, but he wasn’t sure why. He was pleased about the arrests, mainly because he hoped Hocus would slow down, maybe even come to a halt.”

“He figured Lang was the key man.” It wasn’t quite a question, but it wasn’t a statement, either. Richard Lang and Jeffrey Colson were the two members of Hocus who were jailed.

I hesitated, then said, “No. That conclusion wasn’t his, no matter what the story in the
Express
said. Frank didn’t deny that Lang could be the ringleader, but he had doubts. Lots of doubts.”

Cassidy rubbed his lower jaw, then stared off into space.

I waited for the next question, then realized there wasn’t going to be one for a while. “I’m going to go upstairs,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, still lost in thought.

The newsroom was empty. John was in his office. Mark Baker was still outside. In a couple of hours more of the staff would arrive. I hurried to my desk and logged on to the computer. I asked for all the files on Hocus. Although I had followed the stories about it as closely as anyone else in the city, I wanted a refresher course. I needed to fight the feeling of helplessness that threatened to overwhelm me, and one weapon I had at my disposal was information.

I opened the earliest file and thought back to Hocus’s first trick.

We should have seen trouble coming when almost everyone in town got a pleasant surprise on their bank statements. It wasn’t the kind of surprise you’d dream about or even specifically hope for — no one had a million dollars irreversibly transferred into their account from a Swiss bank; nothing like the $100 “bank error in your favor” card in Monopoly. Then again, it wasn’t the kind of surprise that would give you nightmares. Not one to make you cross your fingers, hoping the payees on your last fifty checks liked just looking at them and wouldn’t try to cash them any time soon. No, for the customers of the Bank of Las Piernas, it averaged out to be about an eight-buck windfall.

The message appeared at the bottom of each statement, politely informing the BLP customers that all service charges for that month were waived.

Assuming themselves to be the beneficiaries of an advertising promotion of some sort, the depositors were pleased and looked upon the bank with new regard. “They really have a heart,” people were heard to say. Publicly the bank’s personnel nodded and accepted their customers’ gratitude. Privately there was a panic.

If I hadn’t known Guy St. Germain, a vice president at the bank, I wouldn’t have been aware that BLP had not sanctioned the fee waiver. He told me what had happened only after I swore six or seven times that I would never write anything about it for the newspaper or tell anyone else. The electronic break-in was a great secret at BLP. In the beginning the bank was unwilling to let its depositors know that hackers had found their way into the bank’s computer system.

“You can’t follow some sort of electronic trail?” I asked.

“No,
mon amie,”
Guy said in his soft French Canadian accent. “It’s not as if they took money. It wasn’t transferred from the depositors’ accounts into some other place. The hackers just managed to cancel the command that levies the charges on the accounts. Our computer security people have figured out how they got in; they attached a line to one of our executives’ computers and listened in on his modem. They were able to record high-level access codes. They used the codes to break in on their own.”

“You’re sure the executive’s not involved?” I asked.

Guy nodded. “This man is not a computer whiz. He has a top level of access because of his position, not his abilities. He wouldn’t have known how to change the program.”

“But still—”

“He’s also a real outdoorsman,” Guy continued. “Likes to go rafting, hiking, do all of those things where a person can’t be reached by phone. I understand — he has a high-pressure job, and this allowed him to be free for a few days. He was rafting on the Green River in Utah on the days of the electronic break-in, and the calls were definitely local, not long distance.”

“Hmm. Perfect timing.”

“Yes. Someone was very good at homework, don’t you think?”

“No chance that this fellow had a grudge? Maybe hired someone else to do the programming?”

Guy shook his head. “He had nothing to gain. We think it was just a prank.”

“A costly one.”

“Yes. That is the shame, although few people would see that. No one has much sympathy for bankers.”

I understood his point. Most people wouldn’t stop to think that the bank counted on those fees for its operations expenses. It wouldn’t go broke from this prank, but somewhere the bottom line would be affected; fees would go up, or there would be less money to lend.

“It could have been worse,” Guy said. “Much worse. And our security is better now.” He paused and smiled. “Who knows? Perhaps we will gain something from the good publicity about waiving the fees.”

The second prank was not hidden from the public eye. A few weeks after the bank incident, all street-sweeping ticket records were deleted from the municipal computers. When the city’s computer department reached for a separately stored backup file, it was found to be blank, with the exception of one text file: “All street-sweeping fines are forgiven. We are Hocus.”

“That’s an odd name,” Lydia Ames observed when I came into the office with the story. She’s the assistant city editor at the
Express
and has been a friend of mine since childhood.

“A perfect name,” said John Walters.

“They think of themselves as magicians?” she asked.

“You’re thinking of hocus-pocus,” I replied. “I made the same mistake, until I looked the word up in the dictionary. Hocus is a verb. It means to play a trick on, to dupe. It may be where the word ‘hoax’ comes from.”

“The cheering will be heard citywide,” John said with a scowl. “No one likes parking tickets. But I like tricksters even less.”

“I had the same reaction,” I said, “right after I decided what I was going to do with the money Hocus saved me on tickets.”

The next action came about a week later. All outstanding library fines were eliminated from the city library’s computer system. The message “All fines are forgiven, courtesy of Hocus” appeared briefly on the screens one Monday morning. As the city investigated this new breach of security, the bank — given the promise that the information would remain confidential — let the Las Piernas Police Department know that Hocus had taken credit for the fee waiver at the bank.

At first, citizens cheered the news about the library fines as heartily as they had cheered the earlier announcements. No one liked fines. But the library was more forthcoming than the bank or the municipal court — already strapped by budget cutbacks, it couldn’t afford the loss of revenue. Libraries would be closed on weekends until further notice.

Parents of kids with homework projects were the first to howl, and others quickly joined in. A fund-raiser was held, and the library reopened on Saturdays. Now the local citizenry seemed to understand that damage could be done.

The people of Las Piernas began to ask the same questions that computer security personnel had asked all along. Who were these people? How many of them were there? What was Hocus trying to prove? How had they managed to break into these computer systems? And perhaps most important, what would they do next?

In those days all the actions Hocus took had fit with its name. Pranks. No one was taking revenues, they were just preventing the collection of revenues.

Computer experts were called in, and any organization using computers did its best to heighten security. We waited for the next trick.

When it came, we were taken completely by surprise.

An animal rights group was blamed at first. In the immediate chaos that followed the release of every creature in the city animal shelter, the body of the night manager lay undiscovered for over three hours.

If you open a birdcage or two, even let out a couple of snakes, not much is going to happen. Set twenty or thirty cats loose and then release just over two hundred dogs not long afterward, and you’re going to see some action. Let a horse be the grand finale, and people will definitely notice.

The birds flew off, and the snakes were never found again. The horse was old and skinny and didn’t go much farther than the first open field he came across. The cats apparently had enough lead time to climb trees or make themselves scarce. The dogs were another story.

Social beings that they are, the dogs must have decided these adventures were more fun when shared, and most of them gathered into packs as they set off through the streets. Some packs announced their freedom as they ran.

Most of the police activity in those early hours centered on rounding up animals, especially those dogs that had been quarantined for viciousness.

Two men were on duty that night: the night shift manager and an animal control officer. The animal control officer had gone out on an emergency call that turned out to be bogus. Before he could return, the police were contacting him by radio about the calls they were getting.

For all the pandemonium on the streets nearest the shelter, the shelter itself was eerily quiet. The night manager didn’t seem to be on the premises, and a second truck was gone. At first, everyone thought he was out catching dogs. The truck was found much later, abandoned under a freeway overpass.

The shelter actually ended up with more dogs than it started out with — if not necessarily the same dogs — since the previous inmates had picked up some sympathizers along the way. It was only after the dogs had been caught that anyone could spend much time at the shelter itself, trying to figure out what had happened.

A woman LPPD officer saw drops of blood on the ground and followed the trail they made to a building at the back of the shelter. They led to the area where the dogs were put to sleep. The door to one of the chambers used for large dogs was open, but as she stepped closer she saw that the chamber had been recently used. The body of the night manager was inside, along with a note:

HOCUS SET THE CAPTIVES FREE.

Hocus’s first murder.

T
HE DREAM HAD BEEN PLEASANT
. He could still see her face, feel the whiskey warmth of her skin, her softness. He had already forgotten what had happened in the dream, was not sure if they had made love, but drowsily he thought perhaps they had, as his awakening was the slow, reluctant awakening of the sated.

Moments passed, and still sleep beckoned. He was not without pain, nor was he immune to disturbing thoughts. His head hurt. He was bruised. She was not with him. He didn’t know where he was, or with whom, or why he had been taken. He recalled, in fleeting images, a struggle, shots fired.

But in each case — from the aching where the first blow had been struck to the sensation of being lost — no sooner was any discomfort a part of his awareness than a billowing tide of lassitude swept over him, languor robbed him of his ability to react as anything more than a distant observer. Too tired, he thought, closing his eyes — too tired. He smiled to himself. Easier to dream….

Some long-practiced ability to sense trouble urged him awake again, and for a brief moment he opened his eyes. The room caromed wildly above him. He closed them again.

“God, I hate the smell of blood,” a voice was saying.

Other words drifted by.

“Pale.”

“Not yet….”

“…make it?”

“Nothing to worry about,” someone said.

He thought perhaps there were things to worry about, but they slipped the grasp of his mind and swam away from him.

The conversation between the others went on, but he couldn’t concentrate on it long enough to understand what they were saying.

The dreaming began again.

He was standing on the gravel drive, looking at the house.

He remembered coming out this way with his father, back in the late 1950s, in the old blue Buick sedan they had owned then — the one with a metal dash and fierce, toothy grille. From the passenger seat he watched the blur of dark green leaves and smooth, gray trunks of orange and lemon and grapefruit trees go by.

He had been in the area many times since then, of course, but today, standing on the drive, he was remembering a time when his father had needed to bring some papers to Riverside. The girls had had to stay home. “Just boys, this time,” his father had said.