I closed my eyes tightly, because that was as close as I could get to being left alone. “Don’t make me sort this out right now, John. Please.”
“No need to pressure Ms. Kelly,” Cassidy said, causing me to look up again as he came back into the room. He handed me the cup of coffee, glanced over at John, and sighed. “I expected more of you, Mr. Walters.”
John rubbed a hand over his face. “I’ll talk to you later, Kelly.” He started up the stairs, then paused. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked again.
“Yes, don’t worry. I’ll be upstairs in a few minutes.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have let you see the car,” Cassidy said when John was out of earshot. “Bredloe will probably have my butt for that. I just figured it was easier to let you see the car now — otherwise I might find you breaking into the impound yard trying to get a look at it.”
“You were right,” I said. I sat up a little straighter, tried to make my voice steady when I asked, “What do you think that bloodstain means?”
“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
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,
“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
