started bleeding. Bret had passed out. He said Sam was fine — Francine took him to an emergency room and got him stitched up. Bret turned so white telling me about it, I was worried he was going to faint again. He kept saying it made him think of the basement. I didn’t need to ask which one. He calmed down, but just before he left he said, ‘I haven’t forgotten anything about that day. Not one single thing.’ I asked him if he wanted to talk about it, and he said, ‘You should be grateful we never did.’ ”
We sat in silence for a moment, then I asked, “Did they resent Frank Harriman for not visiting?”
“I don’t think so. He didn’t just cut them off, he just gradually stopped seeing them. They seemed pretty understanding about it. And they were spending more time with Bernard by then.”
I looked up into the sky, tried to quiet my sense of despair. The Szals were good-hearted people, an active, intelligent couple with wide-ranging interests — people I would have liked to form a friendship with under other circumstances. But that night I felt as though I had wasted my time talking to them. For all I had learned about Sam and Bret, I could see nothing in it that would help me gain Frank’s freedom.
“What’s your connection to Bret and Sam?” Regina asked.
“Frank Harriman is my husband,” I began.
They both exclaimed happily over this but quickly noticed I was having a hard time responding appropriately.
“How is Frank?” Bernard asked cautiously.
At another time I might have faked an answer. I couldn’t. “Not well,” I said. “He’s a hostage.”
At their looks of utter astonishment, I realized that anything else I might say would destroy their memories of two young boys they had helped. I set my untasted beer on the deck and said, “I should leave.”
“No,” Bernard said. “You can’t just say something like that and leave! Please tell us — Frank’s our friend.
We haven’t seen much of him since he moved to Las Piernas, but my God — a hostage?”
“Sam and Bret’s hostage.”
Regina sat stunned in wide-eyed disbelief, but Bernard moved over to my side, caught my attention by taking my hand. “Tell us what happened,” he said.
“Maybe we can help.”
“Yes,” Regina said, recovering quickly. When I hesitated she added with unerring insight, “I care very much about Sam and Bret, but I’m not blind to the fact that they were troubled. I won’t protect them at Frank’s expense. Bernard’s right. Frank’s our friend — a good man. Let us help. Please.”
So I began to talk, and they did all they could to make the telling easier. There was no point, I realized, in hiding anything from them. If they knew how to help, they would need to know about the policeman.
Regina sat silently. When I was finished she said, “It makes me so angry that they are using all of us like pawns!”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m angry about that, too.”
“Tell Detective Cassidy what I’ve told you,” she said. “And tell him to call us if he wants to talk to us about the boys. If he ends up negotiating with them, maybe it will be of use.”
“Do you know how to get in touch with Francine?”
“Francine died a year ago,” Regina said.
“Unless something drastically changed her financial circumstances,” Bernard said, “Bret has come into a lot of money. Maybe Sam, too, depending on her will. That’s what’s financing them — the Neukirk fortune.”
“Sam will know medicine, and he’s probably the one who recruited the fellows who knew about the explosives,” Regina said. “He was much more interested in that sort of thing than Bret. Bret could never stand any sort of violence — which is why it’s hard to understand how Sam might have convinced him to go along with this.”
“You think Sam came up with the idea?” I asked.
“Certain portions of it would be Sam’s way of doing things — the blood vial — Bret wouldn’t go near blood if he could help it,” Regina said.
“Sam’s always been the more dominant of the two,” Bernard said.
“Yes, but Bret’s not without a will of his own,” Regina said. “And the computer security breaches — that’s Bret. He did an internship at a company that supplied computer security systems.”
“Any idea who the woman might be?”
“Sam’s girlfriend,” Bernard said without hesitation. “Bret is more of a loner.”
“That’s true,” Regina said. “Sam can be very charming when he wants to be. Bret’s charm is more genuine, more a part of who he is. Sam can turn it on and off.”
“The last time we saw Bret,” Bernard said, “he complained about Sam’s attitude toward women. Said Sam didn’t really care about the women he dated, that he just wanted sex.”
“Do you think Bret was jealous of them?” I asked.
“No,” Bernard said. “I don’t think he has a romantic attachment to Sam. He talks about Sam the way one brother talks about another. And they knew we would have accepted them, gay or straight. That’s not an issue with us.”
“Any idea who Sam was dating lately?”
They considered, then Bernard said, “Didn’t he send us a picture from a ski trip?”
“Yes!” Regina said. “Wait here!”
