Hocus

“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.