Hocus

Synopsis:

For reporter Irene Kelly it’s a terrifying investigation — because it’s so personal. Her husband, Detective Frank Harriman, has been kidnapped by terrorists who call themselves Hocus — deadly manipulators who give Irene three days to meet their demands before killing their hostage. But Irene’s biggest shock is yet to come — as she uncovers her husband’s history, and learns of a horrific crime committed a decade earlier. As seconds slip away, Irene willingly steps into a trap set by two madmen with a score to settle. And when she does, someone is going to pay for the sins of the past.

HOCUS

Jan Burke

The fifth book in the Irene Kelly series

Copyright © 1997 by Jan Burke

To Siblings Without Rival

Tonya, Sandra, and John

and

Tommy, Susie, and Michael

Hocus

(H

k

s) vt.

1. To play a trick upon; dupe, hoax.

2. To drug (a person), especially for a criminal purpose.

Origins

EVEN BEFORE HE STARTED KINDERGARTEN, he had figured out that his favorite superhero flew with strings. Now, just over four years later, he wished he had been wrong. They could use a hero with a cape. Escaping into his imagination, he pictured someone with true superhuman powers coming to save them. A soft moan brought him back to the dark room. He hated the way the room smelled: musty and metallic. Whatever form their hero took, he needed to get there quickly. His friend was hurt — a broken arm, maybe. His father would have known.

Best not to think about his father.

Their mothers wouldn’t miss them yet. It was hard to know what day it was, but he didn’t think a week had gone by. And maybe the bad guy knew where their mothers were. Maybe their mothers would never come for them. He almost started crying again.

Don’t be a wussy, he told himself. Don’t.

He thought instead about his friend. If anything happened to his friend, he didn’t want to live. No one else would ever understand him, no one else would know what this had been like.

Intermittently, over the last few hours, his friend had been moaning softly, but now he stopped and held himself silent — they could hear the door opening. Someone was coming down the stairs. The boy trembled, afraid their tormentor had returned. His friend reached out and held his hand.

The voice was not the voice of their captor. This man was calling out something about the police, but that didn’t fool the boys. Not this time.

They stayed silent. The man’s clothes were as dark as the room, and he was carrying a flashlight. He said something about Jesus when he saw the bodies of their fathers, the pools of blood. He kept moving the flashlight, and finally it lit the boys’ faces. The man drew in a sharp breath, then said very gently, “Hi. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid. You’re safe now. I’m a policeman.”

“A real one?” the boy asked.

“Yes,” the man answered, slowly drawing nearer, holding the light up high so they could see him.

“So was the other one,” his friend whispered, but later, neither boy would tell anyone what he meant by that.

1

I TOLD THEM I WAS GOING to try to get some sleep, but I don’t think I fooled anyone. None of us would sleep that night. I hadn’t even tried. I was still wide awake, sitting in a chair across the room from the too wide bed, staring at it as if it were a stranger in my house; thinking too much; repeatedly, relentlessly recalling that the last thing my husband and I had done together was to part in anger. I do not know of any potion as bitter as the realization that one may have lost all opportunity to ask forgiveness.

Hours earlier I had been more complacent about making apologies. Frank didn’t show up for dinner, but I figured work had held him up. After all, a homicide detective’s schedule is not one you can set your watch by. As a reporter, my own hours are fairly irregular. This was not the first night one of us had eaten across from an empty place setting.

I didn’t have much of an appetite. I sat there, wondering how a week that had begun so gloriously had so quickly gone to hell. On Monday Frank had been instrumental in breaking a major case: his work had led to the identification of two members of Hocus, a group that had been on a destructive rampage in Las Piernas for several weeks. On Tuesday he had discovered the whereabouts of the suspected ringleader of the group, one of two men who were then taken into custody.

Wednesday, life made an about-face. A story about the arrests appeared in the Las Piernas News Express, an article that painted homicide detective Frank Harriman as a hero. That might have been cause for celebration, except the article didn’t give much credit to the other cops who had worked on the case, and worse, it included details apparently leaked straight out of classified police reports. It didn’t take long for a department that had been patting Frank on the back to start pointing a finger at him, the only cop married to an Express reporter.

The Hocus story had been written by our crime reporter, Mark Baker, an ace who does his own work and has no need to consult with me. It never would have been my story anyway — because I’m married to a cop, crime