Hocus

build a tolerance.”

My mind snagged on the words “one injection” as surely as if they had been made of barbed wire.

He picked up his cellular phone and dialed Bea’s number. “Mrs. Harriman? Tom Cassidy. Sorry to keep you waiting so long, ma’am. We’re on our way back to the house now.” He listened, then said, “I’m sorry to hear you were troubled. Yes, ma’am. Couldn’t have handled it better myself.”

He hung up and said, “You guessed right about the Californian. They’ve already sent a reporter out. Your mother-in-law slammed the door in the man’s face. Surprised it took the paper this long. I guess your buddy the librarian must have struggled with his conscience for a while.”

“Conscience? Yeah, right. Brandon just spent the afternoon wondering which would make his boss angrier: his admission that he let us into the library or getting beat by an out-of-town paper on a story he had a jump start on.”

“Did he choose right?”

“I’d say so. Is Bea upset about this?”

“Not really. Greg Bradshaw called one of his friends on the Bakersfield PD, and they’ve got someone watching the house now, making sure the family isn’t disturbed.”

Cassidy’s cellular phone rang. He answered with his name, made a few noncommittal sounds, then said, “That’s great, Hank. Yes, I’ll have the fax set up, too. I’ve got quite a bit of new information to send you.” He told Hank about the Californian’s visit to Bea Harriman’s house. There was a pause, then he frowned. “Sure, put him on.” Another pause. “Yes, sir.” He glanced at his watch, listened for some time. “Yes, I’ll tell her.”

He hung up. “Bret Neukirk — no surprise — is a computer wizard. Something of a wizard in any case — he’s an accomplished magician. And Samuel Ryan is an EMT — emergency medical technician. He’s been working as a paramedic.”

“That explains how he had access to drugs.”

“Made it easier for him to steal them, anyway,” Cassidy said. “One other thing. Captain asked me to tell you that the press conference is set for a little later this evening — eight-thirty. Supposed to give the electronic media time to fit it into the late evening news.”

I glanced at my watch. “That’s only a couple of hours from now. I’ve got to call John. What information will the department be releasing?”

“Not much. We’ll announce that Frank was taken hostage. We’ll release descriptions of Bret Neukirk and Samuel Ryan and announce that they are wanted by police. We’ll say we believe they are in Southern California, probably the Las Piernas area, but they could be anywhere. That’s about it.”

I looked at the envelopes on the front seat between us, then stared out the car windows for a few minutes. It was dusk now, the last of the setting sun reflected in the west-facing windows of some of the buildings that lined the street ahead of us. I watched the cars moving alongside ours, in the other lanes of the Stockdale Highway. Families. Couples. Singles. I wished them all a perfectly ordinary, boring evening. Somebody ought to have one.

“I need to find a phone,” I said.

“I don’t suppose you want to use mine?”

“No, thanks.” I told him what I was planning to tell John.

He sighed. “I guess almost all of that will be coming out in the paper here or in Riverside. But — hell, I hope the captain has a good breakfast before he reads the Express tomorrow.”

After a moment he asked, “You covered Bakersfield PD when you were a reporter here?”

“The crime beat. It’s not exactly the same as reporting on the department itself. I was just covering the blotter for the most part.”

“Ever hear any rumors of somebody in the department doing better than they should on a cop’s salary?”

I shook my head. “No. Nothing that reached me. I was here when things were starting to look better after a long history of problems.”

“What kinds of problems?”

“Oh, that goes back even to the city’s early years — one of my favorite stories about Bakersfield is that the early citizens once voted for disincorporation in order to get rid of a local marshal.”

“Disincorporation — you mean they stopped being a city?”

“Officially, yes. Apparently, this marshal considered himself king — had a habit of harassing anybody and everybody. That was back in the 1870s. They reincorporated later on, but there were constant problems between the police and city hall. Frank once told me that not long after his dad joined the department — in the late 1940s — the chief of police was suspended and charged with taking vice payoffs. He was found not guilty. A lot of people will tell you that although there was real corruption back then, the chief was just the victim of politicians.”

“Anything more recent?” Cassidy asked.

“By the time I started working here, the department had a new chief. He once said he had the ‘dubious privilege of arresting more police officers than any other chief.’ ”

“There was some housecleaning going on?”

“Exactly. Complaints had been made against the department, just as there are against almost all police departments — some deserved, some not. But this new chief made a real effort to clean up the Bakersfield PD, and during his years, there weren’t charges of corruption at higher levels, as there had been before.”

He pulled into a gas station and waited while I used the phone. I tried John’s office number, on a hunch that he would still be in. It paid off.

“I wondered if I’d be hearing from you,” he said angrily. “You talk to Mark yet?”