Hocus (16 page)

“Exactly.”

“I see where this is going. You don’t play fair with me, I don’t feel obliged to obey your rules.”

“Right again.”

“Okay, but the problem is, I have to have something to sweeten the offer I’m going to make to the
Express.”

“You’re going to make an offer to your own newspaper?”

“Yes. An exclusive, in exchange for staying off my back.”

“An exclusive. Hmm. On what aspects of this situation?”

“I think you can guess.”

“Your personal point of view as the wife of a hostage.”

I swallowed hard, feeling as though I had just read my own price tag and found myself “marked down.”

“It’s a story someone else might benefit from,” he said. A mind reader.

“Yeah, sure. The marketing department at the
Express,
for one.”

“Well….”

“That won’t be enough for them, and I know it. So I’ll want to write about the CIT, too.”

“I’m not sure I’d care to have every barricaded suspect sittin’ there with a good idea of what’s coming next, thanks to a story in the
Express.”

“Doesn’t have to work that way. We can make it specific to this case. I imagine each case is different to some degree, anyway.”

“When would this exclusive run?”

“Not until after I write it. Which will be when everything is… over,” I said, not liking some of the implications of that word.

“You’ll live with our media restrictions until then?” he asked.

I hesitated.

“This isn’t bargaining,” he said, “unless we each give a little.”

“It isn’t bargaining if I only end up with exactly what I would have had before we bargained. Or less.”

“Beyond the exclusive, what could you offer the
Express
?”

I mulled this over. “Riverside.”

“That’s the Riverside PD’s call, not ours.”

“Listen, with Mark Baker’s sources in your department, the
Express
probably has more details about what went on there than I do.”

“Maybe so.” Cassidy hesitated, then said, “Just so you know, I never did believe Frank leaked that story last week.”

“That puts you in a group that’s just about the same size as the one that didn’t like the Hopalong joke.”

“No, larger than that, although it might not have felt that way to Frank. Frank’s problems with Lieutenant Carlson aren’t exactly a secret, you know. Give the others some credit for figuring out that some of the crap Frank got about that story was just political.”

I looked away. “That all seems so ridiculously petty now.”

“Yeah, I suppose it does.”

We ate in silence for a moment. I should say Cassidy ate while I stirred my soup.

“Let’s go back to what you want us to do for your newspaper,” he said.

“If Mark doesn’t know about the Riverside connection yet, let me at least tell them they need to look around out there.”

“No problem.”

“Second, let them publish any photos we can find of Neukirk and Ryan, any that show what they look like today. Ask for the public’s help in learning their whereabouts. Maybe someone saw them driving to Frank’s Volvo, or saw them after they left the parking lot of the
Express.
Maybe someone has seen them out shopping for groceries. You never know. This could end up helping you.”

“We will most likely be handing the photos out in a press conference anyway — this evening, if I don’t miss my guess.”

“Okay, but let me give the
Express
just a little more. The other media will assume that the
Express
is going to have some advantage with the great good fortune of having a reporter on the inside.”

“All hell is going to break loose out here, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “They’ll catch wind of this any time now anyway. Brandon’s probably calling an editor at the
Californian
while we sit here. But we still don’t know what Hocus wants, and I’m not likely to tell anyone other than the
Express
— unless it’s to Frank’s benefit to do so.”

“Why, Ms. Kelly, you surprise me.”

He didn’t look so surprised. “Do you have any problem with what I’ve proposed?”

He shook his head. “No, not really.”

I realized what I had been sensing in him for the last few moments. “You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you? You’re asking yourself how I could be thinking of writing a story about my own husband’s abduction.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Well, I don’t want to write about it. I wish I could just leave the reporting to somebody else. I wish I could believe for a minute that all of the media coverage will only be helpful, that none of my colleagues will do anything that will bring harm to Frank. But that’s not the way it works.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“John Walters won’t give up. I’ve worked with the man for years. He didn’t get to where he is today by backing down. He’ll be after me every ten minutes if I don’t beat him to the punch. I don’t need that distraction. I need to stay focused on Frank. The only way I can buy a little breathing room is to make John an offer.”

After a moment he said, “Ever hear of the Hickman case?”

I shook my head.

“Took place in L.A. in the late 1920s. One of California’s most notorious kidnapping cases, up until Patty Hearst was taken. Hickman abducted a banker’s daughter, Marian Parker. When he collected the ransom from the banker, Hickman was in a car, and Marian — she was twelve — seemed to be asleep on the seat next to him. Hickman told the girl’s father that he was just going to drive down the street a ways, and then he’d release the girl. He did. But when Marian’s father unwrapped the blanket she was in, he discovered she was dead, and that Hickman had amputated her legs.”

“This is not the kind of story I need to hear right now.”

“I’ve already told you that we don’t always have happy endings in this kind of situation — you need to accept that anything can happen. But that’s not my point. There’s more to the story.”

“Please—”

“Needless to say, there was a great hue and cry, and when Hickman was arrested in Oregon and brought back to Los Angeles, thousands of angry citizens were waiting at the train. For one week at a vaudeville stage in L.A., you could pay to hear the Oregon detectives tell the story of Hickman’s arrest. Every paper in the country sent a reporter to cover the trial.

“But one writer who was asked to cover the trial didn’t accept the invitation. Will Rogers. He wrote a letter to the
New York Times.
He said he wanted to die claiming only one distinction — that of being the only writer to refuse newspaper offers to cover the Hickman trial. He thought each town ought to be ashamed of the crimes that were committed there. Instead, he said, ‘Every town tries to make their murder the biggest one of the year….’ ”

I looked away from him, then said, “Yeah? Well, I can’t do rope tricks worth a shit, either.”

He laughed. “I don’t know many myself.”

I stirred my soup again. “Tell me what’s being done — I’m not asking this as a reporter, I’m asking as Frank’s wife.”

“What’s being done? You mean, aside from what you and I are doing?”

“Yes.”

“There are several teams involved in this case, some specialized, some doing basic police work — basic, but essential. You only see me and Hank, but there are dozens of other folks working on it. For example, some are working on pinning down Hocus’s location, trying to figure out where they may be keeping Frank.”

“You haven’t been able to trace the calls. How can they be found?”

“They’ve got an injured person with them — Frank, or maybe a member of Hocus. We should know more about the bloodwork soon. In any case, we’re checking hospitals and clinics. We’ve got some time frames to study — the amount of time that passed from the last time anyone saw Frank until we found the car back in Las Piernas, and so on. We know they’ve been active in Riverside and Las Piernas, so we’ll keep looking for someone who might have seen them in one place or another, maybe sold them something — the tape recorder they left in the phone booth, the tape itself, anything like that.”

“Where would they get the morphine?”

“We aren’t assuming they’ve been truthful when they’ve told us that morphine is what they’re using to sedate him — but we’ve got people checking into every report of stolen Versed and morphine in Southern California. There’s another angle we’re working on — maybe someone saw a couple of fellows who had a ‘drunken’ friend with them. A man as big as Frank isn’t easy to cart around. He’s six four, right?”

“Yes. Do you know the heights of all the LPPD detectives?”

“No, ma’am. Starting about ten minutes after the captain handed the case to me, whenever I’ve had a chance, I’ve been reading about your husband. Certain questions arose, and even before you were asked to come out here to Bakersfield, it looked like Frank was a specifically chosen target, not just a man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Because the informant was his, right?”

“Right. Dana Ross. So whatever we learn about Frank helps us to know more about why he was taken. Now, given what we’ve just read, we have more to go on, even if their motives aren’t very clear. We’ll be able to look these two up in DMV files and other records, and — as you guessed we would want to do — circulate their photos. We’ll have all sorts of folks studying their histories, profiling them, helping us to anticipate how they may react in various circumstances, and so on.”

“I can see the advantages of knowing who they are,” I said, “but if we don’t know where they are—”

“Knowing who they are will help us with that. We can look at their past patterns. People have habits. We won’t stop there. The lab guys in Riverside and Las Piernas are going to be turning the car and the Riverside house inside out — soil samples, fiber evidence, all kinds of things.”

“That still might make a pretty large circle.”

“But a circle all the same. We’ll keep tightening it as we go along. We have two people in custody, and we are going to be leaning on them as hard and as long as the law allows. We have psychologists with specialized backgrounds in criminal behavior looking at their profiles, too. We’ve got people working on building the criminal cases we will bring against Hocus — talking to people who knew the late Mr. Ross, to try to find out who asked him to lure Frank out to Riverside. Maybe Ross talked to someone about his deal with Hocus. And so on.”

“What about the police in Bakersfield?”

“We’ve had total cooperation from them. They’ve been very helpful — Frank was with this department for more years than he’s been with ours. They are just as concerned as we are. They’ve already got research going on the Ryan-Neukirk case. They will be working on setting up a trace on the call to your mother-in-law’s house. The newspaper is a little trickier, but the Bakersfield police will try to subpoena phone company records for Brandon North’s phone and fax machine for the calls from Hocus.”

After a moment he said, “I should also mention that the department may send more people out here, including another negotiator.”

“Why?”

“Relief, for one thing; I may need to catch a little sleep somewhere along the way. Perspective, for another — no one should do this job alone. But also because there are those who think I’ve already allowed you to be too active in this case.”

I didn’t want to think about dealing with anyone other than Cassidy as a negotiator. He had irritated me at times, but he was starting to grow on me. “I don’t want to work with anyone else,” I said.

“I’m flattered. But it may not be your decision.”

Conversation dropped off again after that. Cassidy seemed to be lost in his own thoughts, and I was glad for the silence. I tried to go over what I had learned from the articles in the
Californian.

I took my notebook out of my purse. It was opened to a set of notes I had made while working on two political stories the day before — a millennium or two ago, it seemed now. How mundane the notes were. A quote from a member of the city council on the redhot issue of permit-only parking for a residential area near a nightclub in his district. A series of questions I planned to ask a restaurant owner who wanted to expand his beachfront patio dining area — over the objections of his neighbors.

This is what you spent your time working on, I told myself, while he was being captured. While Frank bled in the trunk of the car. While someone shot him full of morphine.

Where are you?

I called to Frank from that place within myself where fear and hope were wrestling one another, each fighting dirty. I was willing to become a firm believer in psychic phenomena or a more devout Catholic or whatever it was that God might want in exchange for some timely miracle. (“Cassidy, I’ve just had a vision. He’s in the cellar of a small farmhouse with purple curtains on the kitchen windows. Wait, I also see — yes — they grow okra there.”) I’ve known for a couple of decades that God is not really into these kinds of bargains. I doubted even Cassidy could strike the deal. I didn’t really expect an answer, but I silently called to Frank anyway.

I turned to a clean page in my notebook and began writing, using a private form of shorthand I had been taught by O’Connor, my late mentor at the
Express.
To anyone else the notes wouldn’t mean much as written, but I could read them as quickly as my native tongue. Samuel and Bret weren’t the only ones who had developed a secret language.

Roughly translated, mine read:

Hocus:
Motives — Anarchists? Political? Revenge?
Computer expertise — Hacked into several different systems. Common thread in any?
Medical expertise — Used morphine, Versed. Robbery of hospital pharmacy?
Lang and Colson — Any Bakersfield connections?
Woman seen at Lang’s house — Any real connection to Hocus? Is she now with Bret and Samuel?
Contact:
Mothers — still in Bakersfield?
Regina Szal — speech therapist

Another name occurred to me, but Cassidy said it before I could write it down.

“Who’s Cecilia Parker?” he asked.