Hocus

Silence.

We waited.

“Perhaps we will be flexible, Tom. Perhaps not. You’ll just have to see how we feel on Tuesday.”

“I just figured you’d want her to be sure she had identified the right man.”

“How would you know what we want, Tom?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Cassidy asked, but we could already hear the drone of the dial tone.

16

“YOU DID FINE,” Cassidy said. “You let him get your goat a couple of times, but that’s what he was aiming to do.” He paused, then said, “They’re a little unusual. They’ve studied the Las Piernas Police Department.”

“What do you mean?”

His cellular phone rang before he could reply. He answered the call, listened for a moment, and said, “Well, it will be helpful whenever it does come through. Thank you…. Yes, we may be receiving other calls here.”

He hung up and said, “That was Bakersfield PD. The phone company says it’s going to be at least a couple of hours before they can get back to us with the trace. The call came from out of the local area. That’s no surprise. He talked too long — he was probably fairly sure it would take us a while to trace it.”

He explained that a telephone call made within a local area could be traced fairly rapidly; but a call made from outside areas, or one that crossed phone company service areas, might take much longer to trap — two days or more.

“So at least one of them — Samuel — isn’t in Bakersfield.”

“Right.”

“And they don’t seem to have anyone following us around, or he would have picked up on your lie about getting lost.”

He smiled. “Right again.”

“You took a chance there, didn’t you?”

“Not much of one. I was more worried that you’d get angry and deny it than I was that he’d make a fuss over it.”

“Now you’re trying to make me angry. What were you saying before — about Hocus studying the department?”

“They’ve got all kinds of information that takers don’t usually have. They were expecting me to be here with you. They’ve done some research on how our department handles these situations, who they send out for crisis negotiation.”

“You don’t like that, do you?”

He shrugged. “Not the way I’d prefer it to be, but not the end of the world.”

I looked toward the door. “I guess I’d better let the others know what’s happening before we go to pick up that fax.”

“Hold up a minute,” he said. “I’d like you to listen to the tape while I play it for Hank. Sometimes, the second time through, you learn things, pick up on things you missed while you were feeling the pressure. Just let me make a couple of quick calls, then we can go and talk to the family together.”

He called Captain Bredloe, gave him a synopsis of the call, mentioned I was still in the room with him. After a brief pause he said, “Yes, sir. I’ll call back a little later.” He then called Henry Freeman, told him he would have a modem set up soon and would be sending a report for Freeman to distribute. He played the tape, and I tried to learn from his part of the conversation while wincing over my own mistakes. He was right about the second time through, though.

“I noticed something,” I said when he finished his call. “They wanted to call us by our first names, but they keep calling Frank ‘Detective Harriman.’ They aren’t — what do you call that? When the hostages and hostage takers bond with one another, start to worry about each other—”

“Stockholming,” he said. “Or Stockholm syndrome. Gets its name from an incident in Sweden. Some hostages were held for six days in a bank vault by two escaped convicts. When they were released and the takers were arrested, police there noticed something kind of odd — both the takers and the hostages had developed a kind of sympathy and affection for one another.

“Hard to say why it happens,” he went on. “Maybe it’s because of the dependency of the hostages on the takers; others say that under stressful conditions, as time passes, the hostages and the takers are more likely to begin to see each other as individual human beings.”

“So you’re saying it’s too soon for Samuel and Bret to form that kind of bond with Frank, then?”

“It may not happen at all. I’d warn you not to count on it happening here.”

“Why not?”

“There’s been a lot of publicity about Stockholming, especially since the Hearst case, so people mistakenly believe the Stockholm syndrome is a given. It’s not.”

“But you seem especially doubtful about it in this case,” I pressed.

He sighed. “Like I said before, these takers know who goes out on a crisis call in Las Piernas. They know how long it takes to trace a phone call. We have many examples that show they are intelligent and that they plan ahead. My guess is they know all about the Stockholm syndrome. They’ll do their best not to succumb to it — you can see signs of it already. Calling him ‘Detective Harriman’ instead of ‘Frank’ — that will help them keep some emotional distance.”