Hocus ik-5 Read online
Page 18
When Frank didn’t reply, Bret added, “I don’t really like the idea myself — but as an alternative to being tied to the bed?”
“Yes, you’re right.”
A silence stretched between them. Frank said, “So Samuel has a girlfriend?”
Bret nodded.
“It’s hard for me to realize that you’re both men now. It’s been a long time.”
“Yes.”
“What’s the girlfriend like?”
Bret shrugged. “He doesn’t love her. She’s just someone to have sex with.”
“You don’t like her?”
“I don’t like or dislike her. She doesn’t really matter. I feel a little sorry for her, if anything, because I think she really cares about Samuel.”
“Are you sure he doesn’t care about her?”
“Oh, he cares, but only because he likes having sex with her.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No. But it doesn’t matter. I mean, I think I would have pursued it before now if it did. I’ve been attracted to women, but I didn’t want a relationship to just be something… passing. Do you understand?”
“I think so. But why would it have to be passing? Maybe it would last longer.”
“No, it couldn’t. But let’s not talk about that now.” He looked at his watch. “We only have another hour before I have to start the drip again.”
“Please — I don’t need the drugs—”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
Frank was silent, trying to fight a sense of panic. Awake, he stood some sort of chance. With the drugs….
“Tell me about your life,” Bret was saying. When Frank hesitated Bret said, “I mean, what’s happened to you since we last saw you?”
“You seem to know a lot about me already,” Frank said, hearing the anger, the resentment, over his captivity come to the surface. He knew he should not show it. But it was there.
Bret shook his head. “No, those are just facts.”
“You want lies?”
“No,” Bret said, turning red. “I mean, facts don’t tell a person anything. I know you moved to Las Piernas. I know you are a homicide detective and that Pete Baird is your partner and that your wife is named Irene and that she’s a reporter. So what? It’s like reading tombstones in a graveyard. ‘Born.’ ‘Died.’ ‘Beloved daughter of…’ So what?” He paused, then said, “Are you thirsty?”
“Yes,” Frank said, surprised by the question.
“I’m sorry, I should have asked earlier.” He moved to a small table near the bed, then brought a water glass and a straw over to the rail, helped Frank to take a drink. It was cool and good.
“Now,” Bret said, setting down the glass. “We aren’t going to have much time together, and when this is over, we’ll never see each other again. I’ve wondered about you, Frank Harriman. Are you happier in Las Piernas than in Bakersfield? Do you like what you do? Does it bother you, working in homicide? Is Pete Baird your favorite partner, or do you wish you worked with someone else? Are you glad you married Irene? Do you miss your father?”
Frank stared at him a moment, then said, “Yes. Yes, I do miss him. I think about him often.”
And he began to talk to Bret about his father and Las Piernas and even about Irene, not noticing when Bret reached over and started the IV again, until he was feeling far too drowsy to fight it. The water, he thought belatedly. The water was drugged.
He was not sure if the voice was within the dream or not. He heard a door close and thought it strange that a tent would have a door that closed just like a metal door. He was thinking about that when the voice said, “What the hell have you done?”
“You’ve been wrong about him,” Bret said.
Everything after that was most definitely within a dream.
19
THE LAST PAGE OF THE FAX contained only a few brief sentences:
As for the contents of the package you received, just remember — there is more where that came from.
It may help you to know that Julian Neukirk was six feet tall; the policeman was taller.
When you learn the identity of the policeman, place an ad in the Las Piernas News Express, in the personals, to read: “John Oakhurst, come home.”
Detective Harriman will receive increasing amounts of morphine over the next few days. He will stop receiving the morphine when we are satisfied that you have correctly identified our enemy. We suggest you hurry.
“Let’s go,” I said to Cassidy. “There’s a lot to be done.”
He started the car. “What do you think of the story?”
“ ‘Father’s Day’?”
“Yes.”
“I think they were trying to tell the truth — at least as they remember it. They didn’t try to apologize for Gene Ryan. Other than that… well, I’d say Bret wrote it.”
“Why Bret?” he asked.
“Even though it’s in third person, everything is from his point of view.”
Cassidy nodded. “Any idea who John Oakhurst is?”
“No, although the name seems familiar.”
“To me, too,” he said. “I just can’t remember where I’ve heard it.”
“Maybe it’s just a made-up name.”
“Not with this group.”
“No. No, I suppose not… I understand why they want me to find this cop. But it’s so hard for me to understand how they feel about Frank.”
“I’m not sure they understand that themselves. Remember the last line? About trust? If nothing else, we can learn a lot about them from this story.”
I went ahead and asked the question I was afraid to hear answered. “How long do you suppose it will be before they’re giving him a fatal level of morphine?”
He shrugged. “They could do it in one injection if they set their minds to it. But if they go slowly enough, he’ll build a tolerance.”
My mind snagged on the words “one injection” as surely as if they had been made of barbed wire.
He picked up his cellular phone and dialed Bea’s number. “Mrs. Harriman? Tom Cassidy. Sorry to keep you waiting so long, ma’am. We’re on our way back to the house now.” He listened, then said, “I’m sorry to hear you were troubled. Yes, ma’am. Couldn’t have handled it better myself.”
He hung up and said, “You guessed right about the Californian. They’ve already sent a reporter out. Your mother-in-law slammed the door in the man’s face. Surprised it took the paper this long. I guess your buddy the librarian must have struggled with his conscience for a while.”
“Conscience? Yeah, right. Brandon just spent the afternoon wondering which would make his boss angrier: his admission that he let us into the library or getting beat by an out-of-town paper on a story he had a jump start on.”
“Did he choose right?”
“I’d say so. Is Bea upset about this?”
“Not really. Greg Bradshaw called one of his friends on the Bakersfield PD, and they’ve got someone watching the house now, making sure the family isn’t disturbed.”
Cassidy’s cellular phone rang. He answered with his name, made a few noncommittal sounds, then said, “That’s great, Hank. Yes, I’ll have the fax set up, too. I’ve got quite a bit of new information to send you.” He told Hank about the Californian’s visit to Bea Harriman’s house. There was a pause, then he frowned. “Sure, put him on.” Another pause. “Yes, sir.” He glanced at his watch, listened for some time. “Yes, I’ll tell her.”
He hung up. “Bret Neukirk — no surprise — is a computer wizard. Something of a wizard in any case — he’s an accomplished magician. And Samuel Ryan is an EMT — emergency medical technician. He’s been working as a paramedic.”
“That explains how he had access to drugs.”
“Made it easier for him to steal them, anyway,” Cassidy said. “One other thing. Captain asked me to tell you that the press conference is set for a little later this evening — eight-thirty. Supposed to give the electronic media time to fi
t it into the late evening news.”
I glanced at my watch. “That’s only a couple of hours from now. I’ve got to call John. What information will the department be releasing?”
“Not much. We’ll announce that Frank was taken hostage. We’ll release descriptions of Bret Neukirk and Samuel Ryan and announce that they are wanted by police. We’ll say we believe they are in Southern California, probably the Las Piernas area, but they could be anywhere. That’s about it.”
I looked at the envelopes on the front seat between us, then stared out the car windows for a few minutes. It was dusk now, the last of the setting sun reflected in the west-facing windows of some of the buildings that lined the street ahead of us. I watched the cars moving alongside ours, in the other lanes of the Stockdale Highway. Families. Couples. Singles. I wished them all a perfectly ordinary, boring evening. Somebody ought to have one.
“I need to find a phone,” I said.
“I don’t suppose you want to use mine?”
“No, thanks.” I told him what I was planning to tell John.
He sighed. “I guess almost all of that will be coming out in the paper here or in Riverside. But — hell, I hope the captain has a good breakfast before he reads the Express tomorrow.”
After a moment he asked, “You covered Bakersfield PD when you were a reporter here?”
“The crime beat. It’s not exactly the same as reporting on the department itself. I was just covering the blotter for the most part.”
“Ever hear any rumors of somebody in the department doing better than they should on a cop’s salary?”
I shook my head. “No. Nothing that reached me. I was here when things were starting to look better after a long history of problems.”
“What kinds of problems?”
“Oh, that goes back even to the city’s early years — one of my favorite stories about Bakersfield is that the early citizens once voted for disincorporation in order to get rid of a local marshal.”
“Disincorporation — you mean they stopped being a city?”
“Officially, yes. Apparently, this marshal considered himself king — had a habit of harassing anybody and everybody. That was back in the 1870s. They reincorporated later on, but there were constant problems between the police and city hall. Frank once told me that not long after his dad joined the department — in the late 1940s — the chief of police was suspended and charged with taking vice payoffs. He was found not guilty. A lot of people will tell you that although there was real corruption back then, the chief was just the victim of politicians.”
“Anything more recent?” Cassidy asked.
“By the time I started working here, the department had a new chief. He once said he had the ‘dubious privilege of arresting more police officers than any other chief.’ ”
“There was some housecleaning going on?”
“Exactly. Complaints had been made against the department, just as there are against almost all police departments — some deserved, some not. But this new chief made a real effort to clean up the Bakersfield PD, and during his years, there weren’t charges of corruption at higher levels, as there had been before.”
He pulled into a gas station and waited while I used the phone. I tried John’s office number, on a hunch that he would still be in. It paid off.
“I wondered if I’d be hearing from you,” he said angrily. “You talk to Mark yet?”
“You know damned well I haven’t. I’ve got an offer to make.”
“Talk to Mark.”
“The paper undoubtedly sent Mark to cover the press conference. Now, we can sit here and play ‘come to the principal’s office’ on the phone, or you can listen to my offer.”
“I do have other options.”
“Yes, you can fire me. Want to fire me right now, John? To be honest, it would probably be a relief. I could stop thinking about Will Rogers.”
“Will Rogers?”
“Never mind. Am I fired?”
I suppose the silence was supposed to make me nervous. It just made me furious.
“No, you aren’t fired. Not yet.”
“Then I’ve got some information for you now, and an exclusive for you later, in exchange for as much breathing room as you can bear to give me.”
“Do I have a choice?” he groused.
“Not really,” I said, “unless we’re back to square one.”
“What’s the information?”
“We have a deal?”
“Yes.”
“This all started in Riverside. That’s where things went bad. No one else has that.”
“Is that where you are now?”
“No.”
Silence, then, “Any possibility of an exchange for Lang and Colson?”
“I can’t answer that, John, but you probably don’t need me to tell you what the policy on hostage exchanges is.”
“I’m sorry, Irene,” he said, his voice low, as if all the anger he had been burning up with a moment before had gone out of him. My own anger abated, replaced by a sense of guilt. I didn’t feel good about withholding information from John; I knew that Lang and Colson seemed to be of no consequence to Hocus, that their interests seemed to lie elsewhere. When I didn’t say anything, he added, “You know… well, you know I like Frank.”
“Yes, I know.” I took a deep breath. “The press conference will tell you a lot, but the radio and TV folks will be able to make use of most of it before the paper comes out tomorrow morning. But you’ve got the information on the car, which is strictly yours at this point. If you get someone out to Riverside, you’ll have an angle that’s all your own. And one other thing—”
He waited.
“One other thing, but when I tell it to you, promise me — I’m begging here, John — promise me you won’t crowd me. If I see a reporter from the Express in my rearview mirror just once, I swear to Jesus I will give this story to someone else.”
“There are times, Kelly, when you sorely try my—”
“A deal, remember?”
“All right, all right.”
“People in Bakersfield are going to recognize the names of the hostage takers.”
“Bakersfield?”
“I’m fairly sure the Californian is going to have someone digging all of this up soon. I was in their library this afternoon, and here’s what I learned.” I told him about the Father’s Day murders — as they were reported in the Californian. I didn’t mention Hocus’s claims about Powell’s accomplice, or the fax, or the vial of blood. I gave him only what I was sure would be revived in the Bakersfield media.
“Whew,” he said. “So what’s the connection? If Frank rescued them….”
I didn’t answer.
“You know more than you’re telling me, Kelly.”
“Breathing room, John.”
“Shit. When do I hear from you again?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not until this is over.”
“Kelly—”
“Gotta go, John. Bye.”
Cassidy didn’t try to talk to me when I got back to the car. I appreciated it. As we made our way to Bea’s house, I wondered if she’d like to slam the door in my face, too.
I tried to remember what orange blossoms smelled like.
I was wrong about Bea. She was fussing over me from the moment I walked in the door. “I hope that reporter parked out front didn’t bother you,” she said, putting an arm around my shoulders as if I were not of the same genus and species as the fellow from the Californian.
“No,” I said, “he didn’t make it out of his car in time to question us.”
“Mike and Cassie went home,” she said. “They’ve got two little ones,” she explained to Cassidy. “I invited Greg to stay for supper.”
I watched Cassidy, who had warned me, just before we got out of the car, to follow his lead where Greg Bradshaw was concerned. Cassidy had his hands full of cases from the trunk of the car, but he nodded toward the Bear.
“Glad we’l
l have a chance to get to know one another better,” he said.
Bradshaw smiled. “Yes, me too. Need help with those cases?”
“Oh, I’ll manage, thanks. Mind if I set up camp in that back room, Mrs. Harriman?”
“Not at all — Oh, that reminds me. Irene, Rachel called. She’s bringing some overnight things up here for you. I told her to plan on staying over, but I think she wants to get back home to Pete.”
“I can understand that,” I said. “Need any help in the kitchen?”
“Oh, it’s just roasted chicken. Won’t be ready for about another forty minutes.”
She sat down next to Greg again, and he took her hand. I wondered briefly about the gesture, then decided not to read too much into it. She was worried, I knew, and I regretted making her wait so long to hear more about what had happened to her son. I asked her to catch me up on news of her grandchildren. It made better than average small talk.
Cassidy came back into the room and wandered over to the mantel, picked up a photograph. Bea had family photographs everywhere, but the one he held was my favorite. Frank’s favorite, too, I remembered. In it Frank stood next to his father, whom he strongly resembled. They were both in uniform. Brian Harriman’s arm was around his son’s shoulders, his pride evident.
My thoughts wandered for a moment to the missing photographs, the ones that might have included his sister Diana.
“The people who have Frank didn’t choose him at random,” Cassidy said, gently replacing the father-son photograph, bringing my attention back to Bea and Greg. “He was deliberately targeted.”
Cassidy did his best to prepare them for the upcoming press conference, although he provided them with only a little more information than I had given John.
When he first mentioned the Ryan-Neukirk murders, only Greg seemed to recognize the case by name. But the moment he said “two young boys in a warehouse basement,” Bea drew a sharp breath.
Although he talked about the Ryan-Neukirk case, Cassidy never mentioned the possibility of a cop’s involvement. Apparently sure of my cooperation, he didn’t try to cue me to keep my mouth shut about that. No quelling glances, no phrases with double meaning, no hand signals.