Hocus

“Cassidy?”

“Hmm.”

“Should I wait here? This is where they left the message for me. Does that mean they’ll call here?”

“I’ve thought about that. I don’t think they’ll have any trouble finding you.”

“But our home phone number is unlisted….”

“I’ll bet you thought your bank account number was private, too.”

“Oh.” I looked over at the Volvo.

“You okay to drive?” he asked. “I’ll take you home if you’d like.”

I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’ll make it.”

“Sure,” he said, and sauntered off toward his sedan.

As I drove home I thought of the other information I had gathered on Hocus. The murder of the animal shelter officer had generated a hue and cry for their arrests, but Hocus received less criticism over its next set of targets.

The Express received an anonymous call, a male voice saying that Hocus was going to clean up a few neighborhoods. Within a twenty-four-hour period, four houses exploded, killing twenty-one people — a total that was not finalized for several days, because it’s hard to count bodies when they’re in pieces the size of stew meat. Fifteen of them were at one address, a party cut short.

Normally this kind of terrorism would have resulted in outrage, but this time Hocus actually gained some supporters. It seemed a long list of neighbor complaints had been filed about each of the doomed houses — complaints about drug dealing, noise, and the constant stream of unsavory visitors in and out at all hours. In general, the neighbors of the victims figured that Hocus had done them a favor. If they had any objections, they were only to the occasional peripheral damage done by the explosions — broken windows, pictures falling from walls. Asked about the loss of human life, one man had shrugged and said, “Pest control.”

The police, for all their problems with the dealers, weren’t so happy with Hocus’s solution. Frank had been assigned to what became known as “the party house,” the site with the highest body count. He wasn’t in good shape when he got home from that one. Sometime after playing with Deke and Dunk, a long run on the beach, and a Macallan on the rocks, he started talking about it. “Going to take a team of forensic anthropologists to figure out how many people were in there, let alone who they were. I’d bet money we end up with half a dozen John and Jane Does. Explosives guys say it was C-4, something in the living room, where most of the people were. Some of the bodies in the outer rooms weren’t so badly damaged. There was one that reminded me—” He halted, shook his head. “Just a young girl, high school age. The others were all in their twenties.”

My curiosity had been piqued, but I didn’t question him. Frank is, on the whole, a quiet man. I get him to lose his temper now and then, but this wasn’t one of those situations. It had taken him a while to work up to talking about that day at all, and experience had taught me that what he needed in these times was a listener, not an interrogator. I set aside any impulse to hound him for information.

Later, when the paper ran a photo of the young girl — a soft, gauzy shot from her high school yearbook — I thought I knew why this girl’s death bothered him more than others. I had seen the high school graduation photo of his sister, Cassie; if you had dyed her hair blond and updated her makeup, she would have, in many ways, resembled the victim. Cassie was alive and well and married with kids; the woman at the party house might never have made much of her life, but she had been denied the opportunity to try.

While other detectives interviewed the neighbors, Frank and Pete sought the victims’ friends and fellow addicts. Fear made some of the small-time dealers a little more talkative. “Any strangers looking to make a buy this past week?” Frank and Pete would ask. “Anyone new come around here trying to score?” They were able to get help in identifying a couple of John Does who had been killed in the party house, but not much more.

I learned details of some of these interviews from dramatic presentations offered free of charge by one of the most natural mimics I know: Pete Baird. Pete loves to gather a small audience and tell stories, gesturing and taking on the parts of all the players. More than once, Rachel and I heard the day’s events replayed in this way.

The tenant of record at the party house was a man known as Early — he got his nickname for his ability to score new smoking materials before his competitors, which might have accounted for the number of people at his house on the day it exploded. Early’s pals provided a lot of material for Pete’s act. Frank served as an instant reviewer. If Pete got it wrong, Frank would grumble or silently shake his head. (“Oh, so you come up here and tell it, then,” Pete would say, an offer Frank was too smart to take.) If it was fairly accurate, Frank would smile or laugh. A good way to relieve some of the day’s tensions.

After studying the rubble that had once been Early’s home, the county’s bomb experts were able to determine that the plastic explosives used to demolish the house had probably been packed into a television set. That knowledge, and a discussion Frank had with a space cowboy by the name of Fawkes, led to the first real break in the case.

I recalled Pete’s portrayal of that interview:

“So picture this guy. Tall, pale dude, but he hunches his shoulders. Has long, stringy brown hair, parts it in the middle. Pointy beard with a mustard stain in it.” That Pete is clean shaven, short, olive-skinned, and bald made no impact on our ability to visualize Fawkes.

“Skinny guy,” Pete went on. “Wearin’ a black T-shirt and jeans that smell like he’s got toadstools growin’ in his underwear.”

Frank shook his head.

“You couldn’t smell that guy? You must have a cold,” Pete said. “Irene, reach over an’ feel his forehead. Running a fever?… No? Hmm. Well, okay, so the jeans don’t smell that bad. Bad, but not that bad.”

Frank didn’t object. The play proceeded. When Pete delivered Frank’s lines, his back was straight, his voice low. When he became Fawkes he rocked a little as he spoke, curling imaginary hair along a pair of fingers, gazing off into space. He began with Fawkes.

“ ‘It’s weird, man, I don’t know about all those other people who were at Early’s party, that’s bad. But Early, whoa — I think it was Early’s karma, because of the TV set he stole from my relatives.’

“ ‘What relatives?’ Frank asks him.