Hocus (15 page)

Irene said he snored sometimes. Should he pretend to snore?

No. He didn’t know what his own snoring sounded like.

The clatter of the curtain rings being pulled back along the rod grated as if they were running along his spine.

“See? Still asleep. You can’t predict this to the minute. He could be asleep for another hour or more.”

“But he has a head injury — what if the drugs are bad for him?”

“If you weren’t so squeamish, you could have seen the wound I stitched up. It’s not a very severe injury.”

“Don’t even talk about it. Please!”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Anyway, the head injury might be making him a little more sleepy. A mild concussion. If he doesn’t wake on his own after a while, we’ll wake him up, okay? I know you’re anxious to talk to him, but he needs to rest. And it will be easier on him if he wakes on his own.”

“Can’t we untie him? It reminds me of… you know.”

“We’ll untie him later,” the other said soothingly. “He’s strong and he thinks we’re strangers. We’ve always known he could be dangerous. Remember what happened in Riverside.”

“I remember,” his friend said, his voice almost a whisper.

The magician, Frank thought. That one’s the magician.

“Are you losing your resolve?” the other asked.

“No,” the magician said. Firm. Without hesitation.

“Good,” the other said. “Don’t become too attached to him.”

They closed the curtains again. Hearing their voices drift away, he finally dared to try to move a little. Moving might help him stay awake.

He wished for many things, big (his escape) and small (that someone would scratch the place that itched on the back of his head). He was not one to despair, yet he was so giddy with relief over deceiving them, he soon realized that he must do exactly what they asked him to do the last time he had awakened: calm down.

“N
EXT CONTACT AT FIVE O’CLOCK
at Bea Harriman’s home,” the fax read. “She’s expecting you.”

“Your mother-in-law?” Cassidy asked as I looked at my watch. It was just after three.

“Yes.”

“Where does she live?”

“Here in Bakersfield.” I gave him the address.

“Brandon, could I use your phone?”

Brandon seemed distracted, but he nodded. Cassidy, in the meantime, started using his cellular phone to call his team back in Las Piernas.

I called Bea Harriman, worried. I could hear several voices in the background, but she said, “Oh, Irene, I’m so glad you’re here in town. Your friend at the paper said you’d be here around five. Are you staying overnight?”

“I’m not sure, Bea. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t mind having company on such short notice.”

“No, no, not at all. Some family friends have stopped by, and Cassie and Mike are over. We should be together.”

“Did my — uh, friend mention that Detective Thomas Cassidy is with me?”

“No,” she said, drawing the word out in a sound of uncertainty but recovering quickly. “It’s good that you have someone protecting you, though. By all means, bring him along.”

As I hung up, I glanced over at Brandon. He was starting to sweat again. Receiving the fax had sent him back into a panic. “Look,” he said, “maybe you shouldn’t be here. Letting you come here, I might have put other people in danger, too. You should go.”

“Brandon—”

“Please! Please just copy the last article and go!”

I looked to Cassidy for help. He was pretending fascination with the index tabs on the front of a file cabinet.

Staying out of it. Fine.

I went back to the microfilm reader, made the copies, rewound the spool. I shut down the machine and took the boxes of film to Brandon. He was seated at his desk, his hands shaking as he tidied papers. He didn’t look up at me.

“Thanks for letting us in here, Brandon,” I said. “And thanks for coming down here on a Saturday and all. Sorry for the trouble. You’re a true friend. When Frank is back home safe and sound, I’ll bring him by to thank you personally.”

“I’d like that,” he said, still not meeting my eyes. “Good luck, Irene.”

When we were back in his car, Cassidy said, “You were mighty gracious to him, considering he was giving you the bum’s rush.”

“No, I wasn’t. He’s up there feeling guilty.”

He grinned and opened the palm of his hand, pretended to write a note to himself. “Lady has a mean streak.”

“Keep that in mind.”

“Where to next?”

I wasn’t quite ready to face Bea, and she wasn’t expecting me until five. “A late lunch?”

“Sounds great.”

The coffee shop was just around the corner from the paper. We were the only customers, having arrived during those hours between lunch and dinner when sugar packets are replenished and ketchup bottles are refilled.

Cassidy ordered the biggest burger they offered, complete with salad and fries. Although it had been a long time since I had eaten, I didn’t have an appetite. I ordered a bowl of chicken soup and left it at that.

I handed Cassidy a copy of the last article and read my own copy while we waited.

According to the article, which quoted only unnamed “sources close to the investigation,” new discoveries had been made in the Ryan-Neukirk case. Dr. Gene Ryan had an addiction — not to drugs, but to gambling.

According to the sources, Ryan often flew to Las Vegas in his private plane but engaged in illegal gambling with local bookies as well. The arrest of one of the locals, coupled with several major drug busts, ultimately led to the new revelations about Ryan.

With Ryan’s addiction came gambling debts. Big ones. The doctor was making good money, but not good enough to keep up with his losing streaks. He also felt pressure to keep up appearances — in addition to the plane, the Ryans had a large home in an upscale neighborhood, a pair of Mercedes, country club memberships, and other costly trappings.

Ryan sought out investments that could give him quick turnaround and high yields — as well as a guarantee that the IRS wouldn’t hear of any profits. Nothing legitimate fit the bill.

Police now linked him to previously unsolved cases of hospital drug thefts, thefts that probably led to Ryan’s involvement with his killer — Christopher Powell.

Powell, it had been learned, had been introduced to Gene Ryan several months before their emergency room encounter. Powell was connected to an as-yet-unidentified supplier, a man who needed help transporting drugs. Ryan and his plane were hired, and soon the doctor was able to pay off his gambling debts. In true addict style, though, Ryan returned to the tables, gambling even more recklessly.

Indications were that Ryan had been active in a large-scale drug transportation operation not long before his death. Neukirk and his trucking business may have been involved as well, although that remained unclear.

The waitress served Cassidy’s salad. “What do you make of these reading assignments they gave you?” he asked once she had walked away.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Assuming Hocus includes Bret Neukirk and Samuel Ryan, I guess this lets us know some of their personal history. But why not just ask the
Californian
to fax the articles to me? Why have us drive all the way out here? They can’t be seeking revenge — the killer is long dead. And how are the other members of Hocus involved — the ones who are in jail? For all I’ve learned about these two today, I can’t understand why they would take Frank hostage. What do they want?”

“That’s what we have to try to get a handle on,” he said, “and as soon as possible. I keep hoping they’ll state some demands — that would give us a starting point. They haven’t even asked us to release their friends.”

“And they’ve let us know their names.”

“Right. No attempt to stay anonymous — unless this has been some sort of snipe hunt.”

“If they just wanted to get me out of town, they could have told me to go to any number of other cities. Nothing else they’ve done makes much sense to me — at least, not yet. But Bakersfield fits. Frank has a history here.”

“So do you.”

“Yes.” I looked around the coffee shop. “We used to come here. New reporters often get the police beat. That’s how I met Frank — he was a rookie, I was a green reporter. He had late shifts, so did I. His training officer was an old guy they used to call ‘the Bear.’ Bear Bradshaw. I don’t even remember what his real name was. Big guy — guess that’s how he got his nickname. Anyway, Bear was one of the few cops I had managed to coax into talking to me. Bear loved to tease Frank. Constantly giving him a hard time.”

“In what way?”

I smiled. “You must have been a rookie once. Maybe every TO tries to find out if the rookie has the sense of humor it will take to survive the job.”

“Sense of humor and thick hide. You need them both.”

“So you live with a little hazing. But to make matters worse in Frank’s case, his dad was a cop on the same force. Frank had grown up around these guys. So they went out of their way to try to rile him.”

“A chance to get to Frank and his old man at the same time?”

“Right. One time, Bear stuffed a plastic bag full of flour down into the driver’s seat of the cruiser — between the bottom and back of the seat. You know how those seats are — made of leather, so every time you sit down on them, air squeezes out. So the seat acted like a bellows, and every time Frank sat down it blew a little flour out.”

Cassidy smiled. “I take it they were wearing dark uniforms?”

“Exactly. So Frank ended up with a nice white stripe on his behind. Bear kept asking him who the hell he was trying to signal with it. At first, Frank couldn’t figure out what had happened. He’d brush the seat off, brush his pants off, sit down, and it would start all over again. The bag was tucked down deep enough that it wasn’t easy to see. One of the other cops took pity on him and showed him what was happening. Bear liked to brag that it was the last time anybody else had to figure something out for Frank.”

“Frank get back at him?”

“Oh, yes. Later on, of course. Not while Bear was still his TO. But I was with Frank the day he bought the crickets.”

“Crickets?”

“You can buy them at a pet store. People feed them to pet lizards. This group of crickets had more of a fighting chance at survival. They were liberated from their container inside Bear’s cruiser. Old Bear learned it was harder than hell to capture all the little suckers. They found their way into all sorts of nooks and crannies. And bred. They sang to Bear for a long time. The other guys learned what happened, and for months, they would see Bear walking down the hall and stop and cock their heads and say, ‘Hey, Bear! Do you hear a cricket in here?’ Drove him nuts.”

Cassidy laughed. “So you met Frank through Bear?”

“Yes. At first Frank was so quiet, I thought he was one of those guys who had vowed never to talk to a reporter. Bear was choosy about who he talked to, but once he decided you were okay, he was quite the conversationalist. Frank would sit there absolutely silent; first two nights he was around me, he didn’t say a word. Lots of looks across the table, though, so I decided he was shy, not hostile. Third night, Bear turned to him every couple of minutes and said, ‘Shut up, Harriman.’ Frank got the hint.”

The waitress brought our meals. Her arrival at the table snapped me out of my nostalgia and back into the present.

I wondered how long it had been since Frank had been given anything to eat.

Cassidy dug into his meal, but I pushed aside my bowl of soup. He paused and said, “You aren’t going on a hunger strike on me, are you?”

“I can’t eat. It was a stupid idea to come here.”

“Why? Because it made you think of Frank?”

I didn’t reply.

“You would have been thinking about him anyway. Come on, eat something — you can’t get by on two hours of sleep and an empty belly.”

“How about you? You must be exhausted.”

“I’m used to this. Besides, I’ll catch up a little later on today. And I’m eating.”

“I’m not—”

“You’ll think more clearly if you take care of yourself. I can’t do this alone. You’ve got to work with me, Irene.”

I picked up the spoon again, then said, “We never finished our earlier conversation about the media.”

He frowned, apparently puzzled that I didn’t consider that issue all settled.

“You’ve got to work with me, too, Cassidy.”

He made a noncommittal sort of sound.

“You’re going to want the public to be watching for these guys, right?” I asked.

He hesitated, then said, “Yes, I suppose the department will want to have some sort of press conference soon. We do try to coordinate things with the media. Ask your buddy Mark Baker — I’ve dealt with him before. The CIT doesn’t have a history of causing problems for the press. But the department isn’t going to give out every detail all at once. That just isn’t smart, Irene.”

“Do you really believe I’d do anything to further endanger Frank?” I asked tightly.

“Not intentionally, no. You have to understand — under ideal circumstances, even if you weren’t a reporter, you wouldn’t be this involved. To have a family member this involved is bad enough; to have a reporter is… well, never mind. I’m not going to list all of the aspects of this situation that make me unhappy.”

“Unhappy. Yes, well, I don’t think I’ll give you my list, either.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Belatedly I realized his usual calm had briefly slipped away from him — by the time I recognized it, he was firmly back in control of himself. And more withdrawn.

“Forgive me,” he said quietly. “What exactly do you want?”

“To bargain.”

One corner of his mouth quirked up, but he said, “Let’s hear what you have to say.”

“The
Express
gets everything first.”

He shook his head. “The department can’t get away with that,” he said. “And it’s not safe.”

“Not safe?”

“For Frank. Put yourself in your competitor’s shoes. The LPPD is denying you access to information that they are spoon-feeding to the
Express.
What do you do?”

“I try to find the information on my own. And, to be honest, I’m going to be angry with the LPPD.”