Hocus

21

THE SZAL HOUSE WAS OFF a small rural road, near a vineyard east of the city. It was a modest stucco home on a large lot. Pete pulled into the gravel driveway, took a look at the darkened house, and said, “Looks like they’ve turned in for the night.”

“No, they’re night owls,” I said. “They told me they might be in the backyard.”

“Cassidy said to let you go alone,” Pete said, “but I don’t know….”

“She’ll be fine,” Rachel said.

“This may take a while,” I said, not for the first time.

“We’ll find something to do. Don’t get worried if the windows are steamed up,” Pete said.

Rachel laughed.

“I’ll pound on the hood before I open the car door,” I said. I got out and walked to the front of the house. No one answered the doorbell. I walked to the back gate. Peering over it, I couldn’t see anyone, but softly glowing solar yard lights lit a path between the house and fence. “Hello?” I called.

There was no answer, but the gate was unlatched, so I opened it.

I followed the path, and when I reached the back of the house, I saw a softly glowing pink globe across the yard — a Chinese lantern hanging from a wooden post near a tall, rectangular building. The lantern light did little to illuminate the yard. I could not see the building very well, nor much of what lay between me and it. But the building was the tallest structure nearby — easily two stories tall. This, then, must be the tower Regina Szal spoke of.

I stood still, trying to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. The lantern bobbed gently in the warm breeze. The same breeze carried soft laughter from that direction. Wishing for a flashlight, I walked with uncertain steps along a paved path toward the sound.

As I went farther into the yard and my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the building was an odd wooden structure, about the width of a two-car garage and a little longer. Its roof was pitched like a house’s roof but seemed to cover only half the building. The other half was open and I could hear the murmur of voices through it, a woman’s laugh. There were no windows on the first floor, but the path led to a door. I reached it and knocked.

The conversation above me stopped. “Ms. Kelly?” I heard a woman call from above.

“Yes,” I shouted.

“Oh, darn! We missed the news! I’ll be right down, Irene,” she said. “Bernard, hit the switch so she doesn’t trip and fall.”

I heard the clumping sound of someone hurrying down wooden stairs, her voice calling up, “Well, I don’t want her to think she’s come across vampires out here.”

A light came on at a high window, then at the porch where I stood. I blinked in its sudden brightness. The door was thrown open by a woman wearing a plain white cotton shirt, straight-legged Wranglers, and dusty cowboy boots. She had straight strawberry blond hair cut bluntly just above her shoulders, and long, lean legs. She had eyes the color of brown sugar and a warm smile that carried just a hint of mischief in it. She extended a hand. “Hi, I’m Regina.”

“Irene,” I said, taking it. She had a firm handshake.

“Welcome to the Szal Observatory,” she said, grinning more broadly when a man’s voice complained, “Regina….” She glanced up and said, “Come on in, I’ll show you around.”

I entered a plain room with a concrete floor. There was a large concrete pillar at one end of the room; near us, the wooden stairway. On either side of us were other rooms. “That was going to be the darkroom,” she said, pointing to the room on the left. “But it’s just storage now. Bernard wants to get a CCD system.” Seeing my puzzled look, she said, “He could tell you more, but basically, it’s a way of using computers for astrophotography.” She pointed to the pillar. “The telescope rests on that, to keep it level and still.” She turned and pointed to a small, darkened office area, “That’s where the computers are. Come on upstairs. I’ll let you catch a glimpse of my husband before he makes us turn all the lights out again.”

She hit switches as we passed a landing, darkening the space below.

Waiting patiently above us was a big man holding a ginger-colored cat. The man had an athletic build, one that suggested he didn’t have a desk job. He was wearing loose trousers and a T-shirt that was stretched tight across big shoulders. The shirt had Chinese characters on it.

He wore a close-cropped beard and had tied his straight black hair into a ponytail. He stood on an elevated platform in the open-roof area, next to a large white telescope.

“This is Bernard,” Regina said, introducing her husband. He had gorgeous green eyes and a face that was otherwise made up of imperfect features — a slightly crooked smile, a nose that had been broken at least once in its lifetime, a small scar just below one cheekbone — features that nevertheless made an appealing combination. I decided it was the smile — he didn’t look as though he had to work hard to find it. I smiled back and shook his hand. I glanced down and was amused to see he was barefoot.

“Glad to meet you,” he said. The cat wriggled loose and headed downstairs. “That was Stanley,” Regina said. “Stan for short. We used to have another one named Livingstone. Poor Stan outlived his partner in exploration.”

“Sorry we lost track of the time and missed the news,” Bernard said. “We’ve got great viewing tonight — better than anything you could see on TV, anyway.” He snapped out the lights. “Give your eyes a few minutes to become dark adjusted.”

I let my gaze travel upward and saw a sugar-brushed sky. A city dweller, I had become estranged from this bright and shimmering canopy.

“Have a seat, Irene,” Regina said, turning on a flashlight that gave off a red light. She guided me to a chair along a window-lined wall. Sitting in it, I could see for miles in several directions. The warm night air felt good. I looked back at the half roof.

“It’s a sliding roof,” she said. “It’s sort of a large, rolling skylight. We pull it closed when we aren’t up here.”

“You picked a good night,” Bernard said, keying some numbers into a handheld device that was about the size of a calculator. The telescope moved. He looked through the eyepiece. “Air is nice and dry, so the city lights aren’t reflected up very far from the horizon.”

“She didn’t come out here to see M objects,” Regina said, laughing. She opened an ice chest, reached in, and pulled out a Budweiser. She twisted off the top and handed it to me before I could decide if I wanted it. “One for you, Bernard?” she offered.

“Sure.”

“What’s an ‘M object’?” I asked.

“Messier object,” Bernard answered without looking away from the telescope. “Messier was a French astronomer. He started making a list of unusual blurry objects he saw through his telescope — this was back near the time of the American Revolution. Eventually, he compiled an astronomical catalog of over a hundred objects. He really was a great observer — his list is still used. M one, for example, is the Crab Nebula. M thirty-one is the Andromeda galaxy. Some of the most exquisite objects in the sky are Messier objects.”

Regina was looking at him as if he had recited love sonnets. “Bernard built this telescope,” she said proudly.

“Assembled,” he said, taking the beer she offered. He smiled at her and said, “Builders make the parts — including the lenses.” He bent to the eyepiece again. “This is a Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope,” he said. “It’s a reflector. Not as much resolution as a refractor, but better for deep sky objects.”

Deep sky. Maybe Regina was hearing poetry after all.

He beckoned to me. “Take a look, Irene.”

My eyes now adjusted to the darkness, I moved back to the telescope and bent to look through the L-shaped portion of the eyepiece. I saw what appeared to be a bright mound of light, concentrated at the center, blurring at the edges. Other, single round objects — stars — were nearby.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo. It’s called the Sombrero galaxy.”

I smiled, now seeing its resemblance to a hat.

“Didn’t expect to come out here and get a science lesson, did you?” Regina asked.

“No,” I said, straightening, “but I appreciate it all the same. Thanks, Bernard.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, already back to watching the sky.

I moved back to my chair, picked at the label on the beer. How to begin?

Regina began it for me. “How are Bret and Sam these days?”

“I’m not exactly sure how to answer that question,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me about them — back when you first met them?”

She tilted her head to one side as she studied me, then shrugged, as if deciding I could have things my way.

“Do you know how they came to be my clients?”

“I know what happened to their fathers, yes. And I’ve read the article in the Californian.”

“The one about elective mutism?”

“Yes.”

“So you know that I tried to get them to talk again, with the help of a team of people that were concerned about them. A school psychologist, a doctor, the boys’ teachers, their mothers, and so on.”

“When did they begin speaking again?”

“Not for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Three years.”

“Three years?” I repeated.

“The boys were — are — very bright. We tested their IQs. Sam’s scores were much higher than average — he’s definitely gifted. Bret scored even higher, very gifted. I rarely see scores as high as Bret’s. Kids who are as bright as Sam and Bret can be a handful. Given the severe emotional trauma they had experienced, their intelligence, their closeness as friends, it’s not too hard to see how they could sustain elective mutism over that period of time.”

“So how did they communicate?”

“With others?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Pointing, signs….”

“Formal signing? Like ASL?”

“No, these were very crude by comparison to American Sign Language, which really is a complex language of its own, with its own idioms and so forth. I’m not speaking of signs or language in that sense. But the boys had a secret code, we’ll say. Signs and a spoken secret code they used with one another — words they made up and understood perfectly.”

“Something like pig Latin?”

“Beyond that. Not just rhyming or mixing syllables. Out-and-out new words.”

“Didn’t other people grow frustrated with this?”

“Oh, they drove everyone nuts at first. Eva Ryan had no patience at all with it, and neither did Sam’s stepfather.”

“Stepfather?”

“Yes, didn’t you know? She remarried not long after Gene Ryan’s death. Another doctor. Gene left her with a pile of debts, so I guess she was lucky to land on her feet.”

“Was the stepfather… cruel to Sam?” I asked.

“Not at all. Sam basically left the family, joined the Neukirks.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You might say the boys decided it. They didn’t want to be separated. No one could blame them, especially in the beginning — the boys were so withdrawn and terrified in those early months. The mothers were friends, and had been widowed at the same time, so they stayed close at first.”

“What do you mean, at first?”

“Well, I think friction started arriving with the reversal of their circumstances.”

“The mothers’ circumstances?”

“Yes. Everyone always talked about what a great guy Gene Ryan was. His best friend in grade school was a poor kid. Gene’s family wasn’t the richest one in town, but they were upper middle class. Compared to Julian’s folks — who had moved here during the Dust Bowl migrations — the Ryans lived like kings. Gene was an only child, and he sort of adopted Julian as a brother.”

“But Gene went on to college, right?”

“Yes. Gene’s family could afford it, Julian’s couldn’t. So everyone talked about how kind Gene was, because even when he came back here to set up his practice, he was hanging out with his old buddy Julian.”

“Julian was a trucker?”

“He started out as a driver. To tell you the truth, I think he was the smarter of the two of them. He was making more money than Gene when he died.”

“As a truck driver?”

“He owned his own trucking company by then — and was managing it very well. He didn’t spend the way Gene did. He had a different attitude toward money.”

“So when the men died, Eva found herself poor—”

“And Francine found herself rich. Julian had a huge life insurance policy, all sorts of investments, and she got the trucking company to boot. She ran it for a few years, then cashed out and moved to Las Piernas.”

I sat up straighter. “Las Piernas? Why?”

“The boys wanted to go to school there. They were pretty young — too young to live in a dorm, as far as Francine was concerned, and I think she was right. Bret graduated from high school when he was fifteen. Sam was sixteen. I’m not sure why the boys picked Las Piernas, except that Sam was accepted by the community college and Bret by the university there.”

“The boys,” I repeated. “Let’s go back to that — you said Sam left his family?”

“Yes. Francine — Bret’s mother — was the more nurturing of the two women. Sam started staying overnight at Bret’s house. Soon he was living there. Later, Eva was so embarrassed by the revelations about Gene, and so involved in her courtship with her second husband, I think she was happy not to have Sam around. And Francine loved Sam.”

“But was it good for them to be together so often?”

“I was against it, but Eva and Francine were the ruling parties in that case. They kept saying that the boys had already suffered enough loss and separation. A speech therapist can only exert so much pressure. And the boys proved quite obstinate. Neither one of them would give you any cooperation if they were alone.”

“Did they ever talk to you about what happened to their fathers?”

She shook her head. “No, that was taboo. Even when we got them to talk again, they made it very clear they wouldn’t discuss it. Bret once told me that their fathers’ murders had made them freaks — that even if they hadn’t been mute, the other kids would have looked at them differently. And Sam — until those articles about his father came out, I thought we were making progress. If not for Bret’s loyalty to him, I don’t know what would have happened to him.”

“So Bret was the leader of the two?”

“No, actually, I think Sam was. They had a remarkable lack of discord between them, though, and I wouldn’t say that Sam bullied Bret. Bret can assert himself. They each had different skills, and they weren’t jealous of one another.”

“How did you get them to start talking again?”

“Well, it didn’t just happen all at once. At first, we were just trying to get them not to be so frightened of the world around them. They were so scared. Francine told me that except for their secret language, the only time she heard their voices was when they were having nightmares. They didn’t have as much trouble with women as with men. Bernard stopped by the office one day to take me to lunch, and the boys ran and hid. Bernard felt so bad. Fortunately, the only man they ever allowed near them came by just then, and he was able to coax them out. He even got them to shake Bernard’s hand — you don’t know what a breakthrough that was. But this man was very patient. He was a police officer — the one who found them in the basement.”

I was glad for the darkness. I leaned back into the shadows. “The boys liked him?”

“Oh, yes. His name was Frank Harriman. He came by fairly often at first, until the news about Gene. He busted the guy who gave the police the information on Gene’s gambling problems. Sam — he was pretty upset. He started leaving the room when Frank came over. Bret must have reasoned with him, though, because that passed. Pretty soon Frank was helping him with homework again, playing catch and….” She frowned. “But I don’t know. For some reason, it seems to me that Frank saw less of them after that.”

“You’ve got it all mixed up, Regina,” Bernard said, coming over to us. “It wasn’t the news about Gene that caused the problems, it was that witch he almost married.”

“That’s right! I must have blocked her from my mind.”

“I don’t know how you could have.” He turned to me. “This woman called me at work, said the reason Frank came by to see the boys was to hit on Regina. I told her she was full of crap. I guess she didn’t know I had met Frank. The guy is working with Regina, spending time outside of work trying to get these kids to talk — I mean, I had seen how the kids responded to him. But this woman must have had him by the short hairs, because he stopped coming by not long after that.”

“I had forgotten about her,” Regina said.

“Bernard’s right. It was just after Bret’s tenth birthday. Frank bought Bret a magic kit, and I thought, This is going to be it. Bret loved it. He was such a smart little boy. He didn’t have to talk to perform the tricks, but the other kids started to admire him. He came out of his shell.”

“He started talking because of that?”

“No. Sam wasn’t coming out of his shell yet, and Bret wouldn’t leave him behind.”

“That’s when I came into the picture,” Bernard said. “Regina brought them over to my studio.”

“You’re an artist?” I asked.

“He’s a martial artist,” Regina said, smiling. “He teaches aikido.”

“Sam and Bret became experts in aikido?”

“No, Bret never tried it,” Bernard said, “he just watched. And Sam didn’t stay with it, but he made a start, and it improved his self-confidence.”

“And his trust extended to Bernard,” Regina said.

“That was a giant step forward. A lot of what we tried to do all along was build their trust, to help them feel safe.”

Not an easy task, I thought, given their experiences.

“The next thing we tried was a computer,” she continued. “A friend of mine had an Apple II+. She let the boys play on it. They absolutely loved it. They did their first ‘talking’ by writing things on the computer.”

“They weren’t writing before then?”

“No, they were writing in school — school assignments. Well… unless the teacher assigned anything personal, I should say. But if it was a history lesson, or an essay on another country — whenever they didn’t have to tell about themselves or their families — they completed it. Got A’s, usually.”

“What about answering questions in class?”

“The teachers soon learned that they just wouldn’t do it. In fact, the other kids started to sort of band around the boys, to protect them from adults. They’d learn the boys’ sign language, speak for them. We had to sit them all down and ask them to stop making it easier for the boys to be silent.”

“The boys were well behaved otherwise?”

“Yes,” Regina said. “Sam got in trouble once or twice defending Bret from bullies. But that went on before their fathers were murdered. They were both good students, earning A’s, studying quietly. Teachers didn’t find it hard to cope with that.”

“Were they in the same classroom? I thought Sam was older.”

“Yes, he is, but Bret skipped a grade. When he started talking again, he did even better. They both finished high school early.”

“So they started communicating with a computer, you said.”

“Yes. On the first day they used that old Apple, Bret wrote a note to me: ‘Can we do this again?’ It was the first time he had communicated directly with me in English. I was thrilled. So I typed a message back to him. I asked if Sam wanted to come back, too. I expected Bret to answer for him, but he looked at Sam and motioned to him to come over to the keyboard. Sam typed, ‘Yes, I like it.’ It was all I could do not to start crying.”

“How long before they started speaking?”

“Not too long after that. About three months later, as I recall. Francine bought them computers. They each said, ‘Thank you.’ Aloud. She did start crying. Not that I blamed her.”

“And they just started talking after that?”

“No. It was still very gradual from there. Sam talked to Bernard before he talked to me.”

I looked at Bernard, who had taken a chair nearby.

“He asked me to teach him to dance,” Bernard said. “Regina wouldn’t believe me at first.”

“Oh, only because you tease me about so many other things!”

He smiled. “Once I convinced her that it was the truth, she was mad that he hadn’t talked to her first.”

“You are such a liar,” she said. “I was thrilled. Besides, Bret walked into my office the next day and said, ‘Sam has a girlfriend.’ ”

Bernard laughed. “She’s not telling the whole truth. What Bret said was, ‘Sam has a girlfriend, but she’s not as pretty as you are.’ ”

It was too dark to actually see the blush on her face, but I could hear the embarrassment in her voice when she said, “Don’t you have a comet to discover or something?”

“He had a crush on you?” I asked.

“Not really. Bret was just feeling a little lonely, I think. Sam wanted to start talking to other people — the girl he wanted to dance with. Bret was a little younger, a little more reluctant to step out of this cocoon they had built around themselves. Once he saw that Sam wasn’t just going to abandon him, though, I think he was all right.”

“You still saw them after they started speaking?”

“For a time, yes. And we stayed in touch.”

“Did they ever talk to you about what happened when their fathers died?”

“No,” she said, then frowned. “Well, one day Bret stopped by, just before they moved. He was upset, shaky. I asked him what was wrong. He told me that while they were packing things for the move, Sam had cut his hand, 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!”

She went downstairs, and I heard her go into the office below.

“Sam wrote to us around Thanksgiving,” Bernard said. “He had gone skiing with some friends. Regina kept the photo.”

“How often do you hear from them?”

“Not too often. Once or twice a year they’ll send us a card or a letter. Last time we saw them in person was about four years ago.”

She ran back up the stairs, trailed by Stan the cat, who apparently enjoyed the activity — he continued to run around the loft. Regina handed me a 4 x 6 photograph.

“Turn the lights on,” she said.

Bernard complied, and I found myself staring at a group shot of four young skiers.

“I don’t know who the others are, but that’s Sam,” Regina said, pointing to a young man in a blue ski cap. He looked more relaxed in this shot than he did in the driver’s license photo that was shown on the eleven o’clock news, but he was easily recognizable as the same person. There was a dark-haired woman standing next to him. I didn’t recognize her, but I knew the faces of the other two men in the photo.

“Lang and Colson,” I said.

22

IT WAS AFTER TWO IN THE MORNING when we pulled into Bea’s driveway. The reporters were gone, although once the story broke in the Californian, I expected them to be back before I left to have breakfast with Cecilia. I wasn’t too surprised to see Cassidy sitting on the front porch swing.

He was reading through some papers, apparently the latest faxes from Hank Freeman. Pete and Rachel murmured, “Good night,” and went inside. I sat on the swing and handed the photo to Cassidy.

“I think Lang’s and Colson’s neighbors might recognize her,” I said. “The Szals think she might be Sam’s girlfriend.”

Cassidy studied the photo. “She fits the description the neighbors gave us all right. This is terrific. What else did you learn?”

“What an M number is,” I answered, ignoring his puzzled look as I went on to tell him what the Szals had said about Sam and Bret. Not long after I started, Cassidy took out his notebook and began making notes — lots of them.

“This is great,” he said, far too enthusiastic for the hour. “This is the kind of information we can only get from people who know them. We can predict Bret and Sam a little better because of it — especially the info about how they work with each other. And this photo — these folks you talked to have done us a world of good.” Then he sobered and added, “I suppose it wasn’t too easy on them.”

“No,” I said “But it seems to be in their natures to be helpful. And they care about Frank. Fortunately for us, that prevailed over their loyalty to Bret and Sam.”

“Yes. I’m going to take them up on their offer for a talk.” He stood up and stretched. “Well, I better get this off to Hank while it’s fresh in my mind.”

“Don’t you sleep?”

“Had a short nap while you were working. I’ll be fine. You look like you’re all tuckered out, though.”

“I am,” I said. “I just don’t know if I can sleep.”

“Give it a try,” he said, and we walked in. I said good night as he went into his room, which was across the hall from mine.

I fell asleep almost as soon as I lay down but awakened at four-thirty. I could hear Cassidy talking, and although I couldn’t make out what he was saying, there was an urgency in his voice that was unmistakable. I put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and was reaching for my socks when I heard him fall silent. I listened and decided to forgo footwear when I heard him stumbling down the hallway at a hurried pace. I opened the bedroom door but could not see him. I heard the front door open and rushed to follow. By the time I reached him, he was standing on the front porch, gripping the railing, taking deep breaths.

“Cassidy?”

He whirled to face me, his eyes wild and unseeing, his face covered with sweat. My own eyes widened — Cassidy, frantic? What god-awful news had he received?

In the next moment, though, I understood what was happening. “Wake up, Cassidy,” I said quietly but firmly. “Wake up.”

He looked at me, and I could see the change in his eyes when he focused on me as something more than a voice invading a dream. Those eyes were quickly lowered in shame.

“God damn,” he said with feeling.

“Somebody once told me that you shouldn’t be embarrassed about having nightmares,” I said.

“That guy is more full of horseshit than a rodeo wheelbarrow,” Cassidy said, still not looking at me, sounding none too steady. “Everybody knows that.”

“Yeah, but they like him anyway. Let’s sit on the swing until you get your land legs back.”

He went along with the suggestion, maybe because he wasn’t in any shape to move much farther. It takes a lot of energy to have a really horrific nightmare. They wear you out.

I set the swing in motion, and we rocked back and forth in it for a time.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he finally said, still not making eye contact.

“Who asked you to? You think I give a crap about your problems?”

He looked at me then and abruptly started laughing. Doubling over, wheezing laughter. He did his best not to wake the household, but it looked like the effort was going to give him a hernia.

“What?” I asked, too punchy from sleeplessness to keep myself from laughing in response.

Tears were rolling down his face. “Your hair,” he choked out.

I looked over the back of the swing into a picture window, where I saw my admittedly ridiculous reflection. I had slept on my hair funny, and now, on each side of my face, it spiked out in fantastic angles from my head. I looked like I had hired my hairdresser after a layoff at the circus.

“Glad you like it,” I said, trying to smooth it down. Hopeless. As hopeless as not laughing about it myself.

Eventually we wound down from it. I felt suddenly ashamed.

“You think Frank would resent you for laughing?” he asked, his accuracy annoying the hell out of me once again.

“You’re full of horseshit, remember?”

“Yeah,” he said, starting the swing in motion again.

After a moment he said, “I have this dream sometimes — about an old, old case. An early-morning bank robbery. There were three employees inside, but two got out while this one woman distracted the robbers, told them she was the only one there. They kept her hostage. In real life, they shot and killed her in the bank. In the dream, she’s alive again. Instead of shooting her, they’ve taken her with them to a hiding place. I’ve got another chance to find her, and I’m out looking for her. Sometimes, that’s all there is to it — I just search in vain. Wake up frustrated. Other times, like tonight, I find the hiding place, but no matter what I say, they shoot her.”

We sat in the swing for what seemed like a long time.

“Thanks,” he said at last.

“You’d do the same for one of your friends, right?”

He looked at me and smiled. “Sure would.”

A little later he said, “If we’re friends, then—”

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Here it comes.”

“If we’re friends,” he repeated, “why don’t you tell me what you have planned for the day?”

“Why should I?”

“Why not?”

I thought about it for a moment. “I guess I’ve never been too hot on getting permission. I like to be able to work independently.”

“So you’re feeling hemmed in.”

“But you can see what my concerns are? Not just for your safety, but for Frank’s?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “And I understand — it’s a police investigation.”

“Well, as far as that goes, if a case requires me to get someone outside of the department to work with me, I don’t get too fussy about it if they don’t have a badge. I’ve got bigger problems to solve. But I also have to keep a handle on things, so I can’t just let everyone who wants to help go haring off in any old direction they please.”

“I have a feeling you have a compromise in mind.”

He smiled. “You do, huh? Well, you’re right. How about this — you go on and tell me what your plans are. You tell me what you’re going to do today, and unless I’ve got a reasonable objection, you do it. But you talk to me before you talk to anybody — I mean anybody. That includes friends, family, editors, Pete, Rachel, reporters — you name it.”

“And your part of this bargain?”

“I don’t have you tailed or hound you or force you to stay around here just so I know where you are — all of which I can easily do, you understand. But I prefer it this way. I trust you. You trust me. That’s it. You don’t waste your time trying to sneak around, I don’t waste mine keeping a leash on you.”

I thought about it. “All right,” I said. “I’m meeting Cecilia Parker at seven. Then I’m going to the library.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“Yes, the library, Cassidy. Not as direct as going to the Bakersfield PD, but it won’t set off as many alarm bells if our man has friends in the department.”

“You don’t believe they’ll protect someone like this, do you?”

“No, I don’t believe the department is crooked, if that’s what you’re asking. But if word gets around that you’re asking for personnel files, don’t you think we’ll give this guy a head start?”

“I haven’t asked for any yet.”

“Why not?”

He sighed. “For the reasons you just mentioned.”

“I’m thinking of asking Bea to invite Brian’s old friends over for dinner. They’re the right age group. Maybe we can pick up a few leads from them. I’ll tell Bea that we need to talk to people who were around at the time, who know about the case.”

“Sounds good, but I don’t understand what you’re going to be doing at the library.”

“On a Sunday, it’s probably the fastest way to get a look at photographs of the Bakersfield PD.”

“Photographs of officers in the library?”

“City annuals. They’ll have them in the historical collection at the Beale Library on Truxtun. At the very least, they’ll include a group photograph of the department. And while I’m doing that, there is something you can do for me that might not raise much suspicion.”

“What’s that?”

“Get Powell’s arrest records.”

Cassidy smiled. “The records are in storage, but Bakersfield PD has promised me they’ll have them for me this morning. Along with everything they can find about the Ryan-Neukirk case.”

“Sorry. Of course you would have thought of that already.”

“No, don’t apologize,” he said. “I’m spread pretty thin here, so I might miss something along the way. Keep making suggestions.”

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but right now my best suggestion is to try to catch a little more sleep.”

“Sounds good,” he said, and we walked into the house. Just as I turned to go into my room he whispered, “Irene?”

I looked back at him. “Yes?”

“Careful you don’t muss your do.”

I flipped him the bird and shut the door. I could hear him laughing as he shut his.

I woke up in a good mood, in spite of little sleep and big worries. Maybe it was that I had tamed my hair or that I had Cassidy’s assistance in escaping the encampment in front of Bea’s house. Cecilia Parker, who now sat across from me in a booth at the Hill House Hotel Cafe, did not seem nearly so chipper.

She wore jeans and a yellow T-shirt. Not everyone can wear yellow without looking as though they’ve got liver problems. She looked good in it, I was disappointed to note. She kept her dark sunglasses on until the waitress innocently asked her if we’d like to be seated where the light wasn’t so bright.

Cecilia refused to order more than a cup of coffee. I ordered coffee and a breakfast roll and hoped she was hungry.

“So what’s all this about?” she said, apparently not in the mood for small talk.

I had a copy of the “Father’s Day” fax in my purse, and the easiest thing to do would have been to give it to her to read, but I didn’t know if I could trust her.

“You watched the news?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Have you read the Californian this morning?”

“Yes. Is this a media quiz?”

I ignored that. “So you know that Frank was taken by—”

“The boys he rescued. Some thanks, huh?”

“You remember them?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. They gave me the creeps back then.”

“Why?”

“Don’t misunderstand me. I felt sorry for them, just like everybody else. But even if they had a reason to be messed up, they were still messed up. You know what I mean?” She gave a dramatic shiver. “The silent treatment got to me. They could be in a room and not say a word to each other and communicate with just a look. Almost like they were psychic.”

The coffee and my roll arrived. She looked at it and said, “Maybe I’ll have one of those, too.” The waitress shrugged and brought one. I realized how petty I had been in wanting her to covet my breakfast roll as much as she coveted my husband.

“So, you think the boys were psychic?” I asked.

“No. I don’t believe in any of that crap. They must have given each other very subtle nonverbal cues, that’s all.”

I thought about saying something like, “I hear they had a good-looking speech therapist” but thought better of it. I needed her cooperation.

“They’ve only made one demand,” I said.

“Free their buddies who got caught.” She said it in a bored tone.

“No.” I savored her surprise, then said, “They want me to find someone who was involved in their fathers’ murders.”

“What? They are completely nuts, aren’t they? Everybody who had anything to do with their fathers’ murders is dead.”

“Everybody?”

She gave me a narrow look. “Everybody.”

“Who do you mean?”

“Powell. I mean Powell.”

“Just Powell?”

She hesitated only slightly before saying, “Of course just Powell!”

“But why use the word ‘everybody’?”

She shrugged. “I’ll go home and brush up on my grammar. Right after I get some sleep — which I didn’t get last night, worrying about Frank.”

I studied her for a moment, during which she studied me right back. “You really are worried about him, aren’t you?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, a little less hostile. Then, almost as if she’d caught herself backing off, added, “Maybe more than you are.”

“We can come up with some contest about it later.”

“Doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

“Look, Cecilia, right now, I just want him to live. To do that, I’ve got to try to meet the kidnappers’ demand.”

“Well, best of luck to you.”

“I need your help.”

“I’ve told you—”

“Take me to the place where you found Powell.”

“What?”

“The place where you found Powell.”

“I heard you. I just don’t — What makes you think I remember it?”

“Think of Frank Harriman and answer truthfully—”

“All right, all right, I remember it. Of course I remember it. First time I found a body outside a car — first one that hadn’t gone through a windshield, anyway.”

“Take me there.”

She looked at me for what seemed like a good forty-eight hours before saying, “Oh, what the hell. But let’s get going — I’ve got other things to do with my time.”

She got up and left me to pay the bill. Well, it was my invitation, and the bill wasn’t steep — but a person with manners would have waited before walking outside. As I went back to leave a tip on the table, she honked the horn of her car in impatience. Several times.

Frank, I thought, if we both survive this ordeal, I’ve got some tough questions for you.

She was driving a dark blue T-bird. The sunglasses were back on. She drove with the expertise of a person who lives behind the wheel. It was a warm morning, and we rolled the windows down.

We traveled the first few miles in complete silence, driving north to Highway 178 and then heading east. As we went past the Ant Hill Oil Field, I asked, “Was this your regular patrol area?”

“This highway? One seventy-eight?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t the first time I drove it.”

“But it wasn’t your regular assignment?”

She checked the rearview mirror, adjusted it a little, and said, “No, but I offered to take it that day.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I had my reasons.”

If we hadn’t passed a big citrus grove just then, I might have started to lose my temper. Cassidy’s trick worked like a charm, though, and I stayed silent, if not calm. I looked out the window and saw the Greenhorn Ranger Station, which marked this entrance to the Sequoia National Forest.

“Bakersfield CHP office patrols this highway all the way to the lake?” I asked.

“Bakersfield CHP only has the lower portion of this highway. The upper portion is patrolled by the Kernville office. Ours goes up to where it becomes a divided highway.”

“So you found him on the lower portion, where it’s two-lane?”

“Yes.”

Soon we came to the signs saying “Route 178 to Lake Isabella Open,” “Falling Rock — Road Not Maintained at Night,” and the big death toll sign. The Kern River flows with often brutal force along a rocky canyon; while there are relatively safe places to raft or stick your toes in the water, close to two hundred people had drowned in the Kern since they started the tally in 1968.

We could see and hear it now, its white rapids pounding between steep, boulder-strewn banks. The narrow road climbed in sharp curves, between the river on the left and a steep, sheer cliff to the right. We passed an old Edison plant with a corrugated tin roof and continued to climb.

Cecilia’s continued silence and the barren landscape gradually unraveled any remnants of my good mood.

You’re wasting your time, an inner voice accused. You’re on the wrong track. Frank could be dying while you screw around up here.

“You don’t get carsick, do you?” Cecilia asked.

It snapped me out of thoughts that were as dangerous as the rapids below us.

“If I do,” I said, “it will be a first.” And it will be my pleasure to barf all over your fancy upholstery.

“You don’t look so good,” she said nervously, as if hearing my unspoken thought. “I’ll pull over if you’re going to puke.”

“It’s not car sickness,” I said.

“Pregnant?”

“No,” I said, unable to conceal my irritation. “I’m not sick, I’m not pregnant, and I’m not going to puke!”

Smirking. She was smirking.

I knew damned well we were miles away from any orange blossoms. I took deep breaths anyway. If I so much as clenched my fists, she would notice, and I wasn’t going to give her the pleasure of seeing that she had angered me — not a second time. I looked away from her, pretending fascination with the less scenic side of the road.

To my surprise, she didn’t try to goad me. I did calm down. The road was a little wider, and there was more chaparral. We passed Live Oak Picnic Ground and Upper and Lower Richbar. There were signs warning of cattle crossings, reminding me that there were ranches in the hills to the right. We began to see trees, and the canyon grew deeper and broader.

“Look,” Cecilia said, breaking the silence. She pointed out a pair of eagles circling above the river, looking for breakfast. “Nothing like this in Las Piernas,” she said.

“No, there’s not,” I said, not wanting to quibble so soon after regaining my temper. Besides, she was right. Las Piernas had its own attractions, but no eagles or fifty miles of rapids or other Kern River wonders.

“I didn’t fit in down there,” she said.

When I didn’t comment she added, “People seemed so phony to me down there. I guess I belong out here with roughnecks, rednecks, and the raza. You probably didn’t like it out here.”

Ignoring the implication that I was phony, I said, “It was a big change at first, but I was looking for a change. I didn’t leave Bakersfield because I disliked it. I liked the people and the place just fine.”

“Why, then?”

“My father was ill. I didn’t want to be away from him.”

She focused her attention back on the road. “Not far from here,” she said as we passed a sign for Democrat Hot Springs. The canyon was steep, the river far below. She slowed cautiously, then pulled into a turnout on the right side. She watched for traffic, then made a sharp U-turn, doubling back and pulling into another unpaved turnout, this one on the opposite side of the road.

“This is it,” she said. “Right here between the Democrat Hot Springs and China Garden.”

“This exact turnout? Are you certain?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry as I looked not at the river or cliffs or trees, but at the object that held her gaze.

“Yes. It’s because of that rock. Every time I drive past it, I think of Powell.”

It wouldn’t be difficult to remember the spot. The large, mushroom-shaped rock was quite distinctive.

One Father’s Day weekend a policeman had asked Gene Ryan about that same rock, not realizing that Christopher Powell would remember that part of their conversation or that two young boys would remember it still. No, at that moment he was probably more concerned that Gene Ryan was lying to him.

Ryan hadn’t lied.

I had the feeling that every time a certain Bakersfield cop drove past it, he remembered Christopher Powell, too.

23

I GOT OUT OF THE CAR and walked to the edge of the turnout. Although there was a slope beyond it, the ground was not especially steep for the first few yards. It was flat and fairly open, only a few low shrubs nearby. But beyond that first thirty feet, the earth fell away sharply. If you wandered beyond the first slope, especially in darkness, you could easily take a fast and bumpy fall. Because of trees and boulders and chaparral, your body might not reach the river — far below — but you’d travel quite a ways before the landscape slowed you down.

Off to the right, upriver some distance but in plain view, I saw a footbridge and what seemed to be trails. I could also see a campsite.

Cecilia was leaning against the T-bird, arms folded, watching me.

I turned to her and said, “Tell me what you saw that day.”

“Just the van. I didn’t see the body until later.”

“Any sign of other cars?”

“Of course. It’s a turnout.”

“Goddammit, Cecilia, you know what I meant.”

She smiled. “No, there were no other vehicles parked in the area. It was June. No rain. Very dry conditions. No fresh tire marks in the mud or anything like that. Nothing more stupendous than that brown van, leaking oil.”

I looked up the road again.

“Doesn’t make sense for him to have pulled in here, does it?” I said.

“Why not?”

“He lived in Lake Isabella. Northeast of here, up the road. First, why is he going home? He’s fleeing a double homicide where he’s left two living witnesses. Why head for a known address?”

“The guy was a druggie, and never famous for being brilliant — never.”

“Maybe that’s it. But let’s say he does have a reason to go home. He’s covered with blood — he wants to clean up, change clothes, grab some provisions, and take off again.”

“Sure, why not?” she said impatiently.

“So what the hell is he doing on this side of the road? Why stop at a turnout on the downhill side?”

“Maybe he was headed back to Bakersfield,” she said, standing up straight now, starting to pace.

I shook my head. “When you found him, he still had the bloody clothes on. He hadn’t been home yet.”

She threw up her hands in exasperation. “So he stopped to take a leak! Big deal!”

“Why change directions? Why not relieve himself on the other side of the road?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” she said, half shouting. “You had me drive all the way up here to talk about why Powell crossed the road?”

“No, I already know why.”

She pulled the sunglasses off and gave me a look so fierce, I thought she might hit me. My own anger was all that kept me from cowering.

“You know, too, don’t you?” I said.

“I sure as hell do not,” she said, stepping closer.

“I thought it was a little strange — the woman who happened to find Powell’s body is the girlfriend of the cop who discovered the Ryan-Neukirk murders. That could have been coincidence, but it bothered me.”

She made a sound of derision. “You’re way off base.”

“Then this morning,” I went on, “you tell me that you handpicked this route that day. I’ve got to ask myself what led you to change your routine, to do something different on that day of all days.”

She was silent, still glaring at me, her fists clenched.

“I think someone made a suggestion to you,” I said.

“I don’t have to listen to this,” she said, breaking off her stare.

“I think someone told you to come up here.”

She turned on her heel, started walking toward the car.

“I think that someone was a Bakersfield cop.”

She stopped. She murmured something I couldn’t make out.

“What did you say?”

She turned back to me. The anger was gone; she looked shaken. “I said, ‘Frank will never forgive me.’ ”

“Forgive you for what? Not telling me the name of that cop? Believe me, he’ll thank you. His life, Cecilia. For God’s sake, what do I have to say to convince you that Hocus follows through on its threats?”

As she had from the moment she met me, she studied me. This time with much less hostility than before. “You’re a member of the family now. Is that important to you?”

“Of course—”

“You know how much Frank loved his dad?”

“Yes. Loved and admired him.”

To my complete surprise, she started crying. Not with loud sobs, just with big, silent tears. She looked away from me, down toward the river.

“Cecilia? What has this got to do with—” But at that moment I understood what she was saying. “Oh, no. I don’t believe that for a minute.”

She wiped the heel of her hand against her eyes. “Believe it. It was Brian.”

“I don’t. I don’t believe it.”

“Well, too damn bad! It’s the truth.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, my mind reeling. “Brian Harriman?”

She wiped at the tears again. I rummaged through my purse and found a packet of tissues. “Here,” I said, offering them to her.

She took them, said, “Thanks,” and walked away from me. Toward the river.

Frightened that she might be more despondent than I had guessed, I followed her, but she merely sat on a rock. “If one of the guys in my office sees my car — I don’t want them to see me like this,” she explained, crying harder now.

I sat next to her. “Cecilia, tell me the whole story.”

“I got a call from Bea on Father’s Day — Sunday morning. I hadn’t been seeing Frank for very long.”

She stopped for a moment and said, “Look, I want to get something straight with you. Bea and my mom are friends, and I think half the reason Frank and I started seeing each other was because of them. We were always — on again, off again, you know?”

“Cecilia—”

“I know Bea calls me Frank’s ex-fiancée, but technically that’s not really true. We were never formally engaged. When one of us wanted to get married, the other didn’t. We moved down to Las Piernas to get out from under the pressure our families and friends were putting on us, see if the relationship could stand on its own. We didn’t last long.”

“Look, you don’t have to talk to me about this.”

“Yeah, I do. Frank is — Frank is — just one of the best friends I’ve ever had, that’s all. I — I just can’t talk to anyone else the way I can with Frank. Not anybody. He’s never been anything but good to me. And I know that even if he’s released unharmed, this is going to hurt him… it’s going to hurt him so bad….” She couldn’t talk for a while.

She blew her nose and said, “Shit, I never cry.”

She drew a deep breath and went on. “Father’s Day. It was Father’s Day. Bea called, saying that she was worried about Frank, because she had word from one of Brian’s friends — I don’t remember who — telling her that Frank had found these kids in the basement and all. Brian’s not back from a fishing trip, and she’s worried about Frank, ’cause whoever called her said he was a mess.”

She paused, took another tissue out of the pack. “Well, I go down to the hospital where they’ve got these kids, because everybody at the scene tells me that Frank went with them to the ER. He went with them all right. He didn’t leave those kids for a minute. Unless Frank was with them, they were freaked out. They were giving the doctors fits. The docs wanted to sedate them, but naturally, Bakersfield PD was trying to get some kind of description of the killer out of them before the docs knocked them out.”

“You were there when they were questioning the boys?”

She shook her head. “No, I had to stay in the waiting room. I heard about it from Frank, later. But while I’m sitting there, Brian gets there, and he has to wait in the waiting room, too. We’ve met, but this is the first time we have a chance to talk, to get to know each other. Frank finally comes out, and apologizes to us for the wait. He’s a wreck, but he’s also excited, because the kids have drawn pictures of the killer. Pretty good ones, too, considering their age. Between that and a lot of gesturing and nodding by the boys, they’ve got something to go on.

“That night, I had dinner with the Harrimans. My own dad kicked a long time ago — I don’t even remember him, but I’m supposed to look like him — my stepfather used to refer to him as my mom’s ‘Latin lover.’ Called me her little taco.”

“Your stepfather sounds like a real gem.”

“Ah, nothing worse than schoolkids could dish out. And he wasn’t much smarter than a schoolkid. He was the Parker — that marriage didn’t last too long. So anyway, with the Harrimans that night — this is the first time I’ve ever been to a Father’s Day dinner. It was kind of a late supper, on account of everything else that was going on.

“The Harrimans get a call just as dinner is ending, somebody wanting to talk to Brian — one of his pals from work, I think. Frank says he’s going to turn in for the night, which I understood — he was just completely wrung out by then. But Brian gets off the phone and asks me to stick around. What the hell, it’s Father’s Day, right?”

She looked down at the river again, then back at me. “We go out on the porch, on that swing. Brian is sitting there, and I’m thinking, This is what Frank will look like in thirty years. And Brian says, ‘Every rookie needs a break, and I’m going to give you one. I know who killed those men, and I’d swear to God I saw his van today.’ He goes on to tell me that there’s a scumbag named Chris Powell, not worth the spit it takes to say his name, and that the pictures the little boys drew remind him of this guy.

“Then he tells me that one of his friends just called to say they’re looking for a brown van — and that has absolutely convinced him that the killer is Powell. He tells me he watched the van for a while, drove past it a couple of times, but he thinks Powell abandoned it. He tells me not to be a hero or anything — just to go up and see if the van is still where he saw it earlier. If it is, radio for backup — I’ll make a good impression on my bosses just by finding it.

“I ask him why doesn’t he just report it? He tells me that there’s been a lot of bad blood between him and this guy, and it would be better if someone else called it in. Besides, it’s out of Bakersfield’s jurisdiction, but within CHP’s. He tells me to come right up here. I mean, exactly here.”

“Did he say how he knew Powell?”

“The story he gave me was that Powell was a dealer, but he was slippery. Brian couldn’t figure it, because Powell didn’t strike him as being very bright. He arrested him a couple of times — even got rough with him once. Brian said the guy resisted, but Powell ended up in the emergency room and Brian got in trouble over it. He told me he still kept an eye on Powell after that, but he didn’t dare hassle him too openly.”

We heard a car pull into the turnout and she stopped talking. We were too far down the slope to see the turnout itself. After a moment the car left.

“Probably just letting traffic pass,” she said.

“Did Brian tell you Powell would be dead when you got here?”

“No. He wasn’t even sure that the van would still be here. At least, that’s how he talked it up to me. Brian told me to see if I could switch with the guy who was scheduled to patrol this stretch. That was the easy part. I started out at six in the morning. I tried to keep a straight face when they briefed us on the van before the watch. The truth is, I figured this guy was going to be long gone, but I wanted to make Brian happy — you know, please the boyfriend’s dad.

“So I head up to the spot he mentioned, and lo and behold, here’s the van. I call it in. The dispatcher starts doing handsprings, because the Ryan-Neukirk case was big news — I mean, everybody wanted a piece of this son of a bitch — and the CHP has found the guy’s van.”

“And quickly,” I said. “The CHP must have looked like the most efficient law enforcement agency in Kern County.”

“Yeah, the whole office was pretty proud.” She said it quietly, as it she were anything but proud.

“What made you go looking for Powell himself? Weren’t you afraid?”

“Hell, no. Well, maybe a little. At first, I had my weapon out, and I wasn’t going to approach the van until I had backup, but gradually, I felt less worried — pretty certain that he had just left it here. But then something caught my eye — up in the sky, above the river. Vultures. Turkey vultures. This canyon is full of them in the summer. At first, I just figured they’d found some dead livestock or something. Some of them had already come on down for a closer look — I hear this nasty squawking sound coming from them. I peer over the edge of the slope, and I can see them fighting over some piece of meat. I got my binoculars out, and I could just make out what they were competing for — Powell’s body. Made me sick. I couldn’t reach him, though. I just had to sit and wait for help to arrive. Even the rangers had to rig up special equipment to pull him out of there — what was left of him.”

“Did Brian ever talk to you about it again?”

“No. And I never told Frank how I happened to find the van. He was so wrapped up in those kids, I didn’t see much of him in those first few months anyway.”

“You think Brian killed Powell?”

She hesitated, then said, “No. I know it might look that way, but I don’t. Did you know Brian?”

“No, I’m sorry to say. No, I didn’t.”

“It just wasn’t something he would do. I don’t think he was sorry to see Powell go. Good riddance. But Brian wouldn’t kill someone in cold blood.”

I reached into my purse again.

“I don’t need any more tissues,” she said. “I’m okay now.”

I handed her the folded fax.

She took it warily and opened it.

“I haven’t even shown that to Bea,” I said as she began to read. “So I guess I don’t have to tell you that this is absolutely confidential.”

She nodded. “ ‘Father’s Day’?” she read aloud.

“Yes. I think Bret Neukirk wrote it.”

When she had finished she looked as though she might cry again after all.

“I can’t believe it!”

“There’s nothing to believe,” I said, “except that Brian wasn’t the one responsible for what happened on Father’s Day. But I think he had a friend who was.”

“Don’t you understand? Brian fits the description of this man!”

“Physically, yes. But Brian Harriman would never be involved in drug dealing.”

“He did hate dealers with a passion,” she said, then frowned. “Or said he did. What if that was all for show?”

So Cecilia didn’t know about Diana. If this woman — whose new phone number was on Bea’s autodialer — wasn’t privy to the family secret, Frank’s older sister surely was well hidden. As much as I disliked the notion of helping them continue to hide her, I owed Frank my silence on the subject for now. “It wasn’t for show.”

“How the hell can you be so sure?” she asked.

“You said you never met him.”

“No, but Frank talks about him.”

“Frank hero-worships him,” she said.

“I don’t know if I’d go that far. Look — I can’t say anything that will convince you. Convince yourself. Think about Brian — you knew him for what, about ten years?”

She thought a moment. “Eight. Eight years.”

“Would he have worked with Chris Powell? Would he encourage someone like Powell to take two ten-year-old boys and their fathers to a basement prison?”

“No, but…” She looked back at the fax, then simply said, “No.”

“What are you doing tonight?”

She looked puzzled, then said, “If you want me to chauffeur you all over Kern County—”

“No, I was thinking of asking Bea to extend an invitation to a dinner party to you.” I explained the situation.

“Greg Bradshaw, Nat Cook, Gus Matthews,” she said. “Those were his closest friends all right. There were a few others in that age range, though, and Brian was well liked. You’re smart to check at the county library.”

My God. A compliment. “I could use your help tonight,” I said. “I need someone who has worked around here, who knows these men better than I do, who’s observant. You might be able to pick up on something that will go right past me or Cassidy.”

“Okay, sure. I’ll be there.”

We got in the car and headed back to Bakersfield. We didn’t talk much, but this time the silence was companionable. As she pulled into the parking lot of the Beale Library, she said, “Why are you so sure about Brian?”

“Are you having doubts again?”

“No, not really. But you never met him. How can you know what he would or wouldn’t do?”

“I know his son,” I said. “And while I’ve found the man can be remarkably mule-headed, I’ve never seen any cruelty in Frank. If Frank had been raised by a drug dealer or a murderer, he still might have somehow managed to be a decent fellow. But if he had been raised by a man who knowingly made the call that sent Frank walking into that basement? Forced his own son to be the first one on the scene?” I shook my head. “If Brian Harriman had been a father that coldblooded, Frank wouldn’t have grown up to be the man I know.”

Cecilia sighed. “You’re right.”

I got out of the car and was almost to the sidewalk when she honked and made me jump half out of my skin.

I turned around and glared at her.

She laughed and drove off.

24

MANY OF BAKERSFIELD’S public buildings were constructed after the summer of 1952, when two severe earthquakes struck within a month of each other, changing the look of the town, making it seem younger than it is. Although the older buildings haven’t all disappeared from Bakersfield, the city apparently got used to the idea of changing its look every so often, for Truxtun Avenue is a mix of architectural styles that range over a hundred years — by California standards, a respectable length of time.

On Truxtun at Q Street, next to the Kern Island Canal, the Beale Memorial Library is one of the more contemporary structures in the civic center area: a library of light and open spaces.

The local history collection for Kern County is housed in one corner of the building, enclosed in a room of its own. The materials there are noncirculating; a reference librarian is there to help, but she’s also stationed near the door, not far from a sign-in sheet.

The room has slightly different hours from those of the rest of the library and had just opened for the day, so I was the first one to sign in. I entered my name and wrote only “Las Piernas” under the address heading. For “area of interest,” I put “Bakersfield history” and left it at that.

The librarian gave me a smile as I walked back into the section of the stacks that housed information on the city of Bakersfield. I saw a couple of other people walk in, a middle-aged woman in a floral-print dress and an elderly man who was hunched over, walking with the help of a cane. Each browsed in other rows.

The section I was in covered a wide range of subjects, including stagecoach lines, railroads, ranching, mining, and oil. High school yearbooks and local magazines were on these shelves. Someday, I decided, I’d come back and look up Frank’s senior picture. That thought led to another temptation, to look up Diana’s high school photos. The lady in the floral dress turned down my aisle and seemed to be waiting for me to move along. It served to remind me that there was no time now for high school yearbooks.

The city annuals were lined up together. I discovered the one I was looking for and pulled it out. I took it to one of the round wooden tables that are lined up in front of the librarian’s desk and began to look through it.

The woman patron left. But her perfume seemed to linger. After a moment I realized that I hadn’t smelled any perfume in the aisle. The heavy scent was coming from the table behind me. It was the elderly gentleman; he has apparently doused himself in some sort of after-shave. I turned to look at him; he was bent over the book, his face close to the page, humming to himself as he read — no particular tune, just humming. I turned away and tried to concentrate on the task at hand.

I pulled out a pen and my notebook from my purse and opened the annual; I soon found the section I was looking for. It was two pages long. One page was devoted to the chief of police, half taken up with his portrait and half with a message from him; the latter was pretty standard rah-rah fare. On the page opposite were the ubiquitous K-9 unit photo, crime lab photo, and patrol car (with door decal in the foreground) photo. You could see similar photos in city PR publications just about everywhere; if the city had been working with a bigger budget that year, no doubt it would have included photos of a mounted police unit riding palominos in a parade and a couple of schoolkids smiling up at a public safety puppet show. They had, of course, sprung for the equally ubiquitous put-everyone-in-their-dress-blues-and-line-them-upon-the-front-steps police department photo.

It was this last that I was most interested in.

The good news was that the photo was in color and the men were all standing with their hats off — tucked into their arms military style, but off. The bad news was that the photo was taken from too great a distance — I’d have trouble getting a very close look at any of them.

“Pardon me,” a low, gravelly voice said. I turned to see the old man standing beside me, leaning on his cane. “Perhaps you could make use of this.” He reached into one pocket of his too large suit coat and pulled out a large red handkerchief. He wheezed a little laugh and said, “Oh no, ho! Not that.” He sniffed and reached again and this time produced a magnifier. He set it on the table next to me. “At my age, it’s impossible to get by without one,” he rasped, chuckling and putting away the handkerchief.

“Thank you,” I said, “I’ll only need it for a moment.”

“As long as you like, honey. As long as you like.”

He picked up his book and cane and shuffled back toward the stacks. That, I thought, was what I liked about people out here — their courtesy and friendliness.

Using the old man’s magnifier, I went to work looking over the group photo. I could not resist going to Frank’s photo first. Standing at the end of a row, young and smiling, but not so very different from the Frank I knew now. His posture was no longer so ramrod straight, and over the years his eyes had come to reflect more wisdom, if not cynicism. But the photo made me feel his absence more acutely, and I quickly moved to scan the other faces.

Many were familiar to me; I had met them when I worked the night shift crime beat. But the next one I studied was of a man I often wished I’d met — Brian Harriman. I stared at his image for a long time, just to make sure I wasn’t trying to see something that wasn’t there. When I thought of the picture on the mantel in Bea’s home, I realized that I should have known what to expect. In that photo, taken when Frank graduated from the academy, Brian had a little gray in his hair. He was far from completely gray then, and now, looking at this photo, I could see that he was still a long way from it two years later. He wasn’t the man Bret had described in the fax.

Some of Cecilia’s doubts about Brian must have bothered me more than I had acknowledged to myself, for I felt a sudden relief that could have no other origin than dispelling those doubts.

I found Bear Bradshaw next. Unmistakably gray. The same was true of Gus Matthews and Nathan Cook. I started making a more orderly search of the photo then. There were not all that many older officers. I found two others.

The next feature to consider was height. I knew Frank was six four, his father a little shorter. I put my notebook next to Frank’s photo, marked on the paper the distance from the top of Frank’s head to the step where he stood. Now I had a rough scale and held it up to the photos of Bear and Cookie and Gus. Not easy to judge, but they were all nearly the same height as Frank, Bear being the shortest. The other two silver-haired cops were shorter than Bear, but were they too short to fit Bret’s description? In Bret’s memory the cop had been bigger than Julian — but it was the memory of a terrified child seeing his father attacked.

I wrote down the names of the two older cops, men I hadn’t met when I’d worked in Bakersfield. The caption gave only initials for their first names.

M. Beecham and Q. Wilson.

I sighed and stretched. I looked for the old man but didn’t see him. The room seemed empty, except for the librarian. She saw me looking around and said, “Can I help you find something?”

“Someone, maybe. The elderly gentleman who was in here a moment ago?”

“Oh, he left.”

“Oh, no. He loaned this magnifier to me. He must have forgotten.”

“Well, perhaps we can page him before he leaves the library. Let’s look on the sign-in sheet.” She reached it before I did and started laughing. “Well, I guess he didn’t want us to know his name. This is a character in a short story.”

I stared at the signature in disbelief.

The name on the sign-in sheet was John Oakhurst. He gave his address as Poker Flat.

“I guess he’s a fan of Bret Harte,” she said. “ ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat.’ ”

“Call the police!” I said, running to the door.

“For goodness’ sakes, it’s not that serious,” I heard her say behind me.

I stopped and turned back to her. “That man is wanted by the police. Call them!”

As I entered the open area beyond the local history collection, I heard my name paged. I looked back at the librarian, who was watching me as if my next move would help her decide whether I was a harmless lunatic or a dangerous one. No phone in her hand.

I ran to the main information desk. “Please call the police.”

This librarian was studying me, but not as if I were crazy. “Are you Irene Kelly?” she asked.

“Yes!” I said, starting to run out the door without thinking about how she knew my name.

“Stop!” she called out.

I turned back.

“It’s right here, with me,” she said, and to my amazement she held up my purse.

“How…?”

“An old man found it and turned it in. Didn’t you hear me page you just now?”

“An old man… which way did he go?”

“Are you all right? If you’d like to check it to see if anything is missing….”

“Which way did he go?” I shouted.

Her eyes widened, but she pointed toward the front doors.

“Call the police,” I said again, and ran outside.

I looked for any sign of someone pulling out of the parking lot, frantically scanned the area in front of the building for any sign of him. Not a soul. I ran all the way around the building, to P Street and back. It was on the return trip that I saw something red.

It was the old man’s handkerchief, tied to the canal fence. As I walked toward it, I heard a train whistle, saw a freight train on the tracks behind the library. The rumble of the train blocked out all other sound, even the water flowing swift and sure through the narrow channel below. I touched the handkerchief, saw that something was knotted within it. With shaking hands I loosened the handkerchief, then the knot that held the weighty object.

A folded piece of paper and something made of shiny metal fell out into my hand.

Frank’s watch. An old-fashioned watch — his father’s retirement watch — the kind you have to wind. Unable to stand, I sat on the sidewalk next to the fence. I unfolded the piece of paper.

It was a page from a desk calendar. Next Tuesday. In block letters the words “Time is running out.”

The information desk librarian was outside then and walked over to me. “Here’s your purse,” she said gently. “Are you all right?”

“Did you call the police?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I’m all right.” I held the watch to my ear, listened to it tick, and wept.

25

“WHAT’S THIS?” Cassidy asked.

“A tampon holder,” I answered, then snapped out of my state of numbness as if I’d been slapped. “What the hell are you doing going through my purse?”

The officer driving the police cruiser that was taking us back to Bea’s house was smiling. She caught my attention and rolled her eyes in sympathy.

Cassidy set the holder between us, on the seat, and was already pulling out my wallet. But at my question he looked up and said, “Feeling any better?”

I nodded. “While you’re rummaging through my belongings, see if there are any tissues in there. I’ve used up all the ones the librarians gave me.”

Instead he reached into his shirt pocket and handed me his neatly ironed and folded handkerchief.

“I didn’t think anybody carried these anymore,” I managed to say as I took the soft cloth from him. “Christ, it even has your initials on it.”

“Hell, yes. I want it back.”

“I’ll wash it first.”

He laughed. “I’d appreciate that.”

The first police officers had arrived almost immediately — the Bakersfield Police Department is just down the street from the library. The moment I mentioned “Ryan-Neukurk” they were on the radio.

I went back into the local history room to gather my notebook and put away the annual when Cassidy arrived; the Bakersfield officers were already searching the building and surrounding area. The local history librarian, who had been apologetic, had also done a better job than I of observing the man.

A gray wig and dark clothing, reeking of aftershave but found in a neat bundle, were retrieved from a rest room waste bin. But despite an intensive effort to find him, there was no other sign of the person who had played the part of the old man.

Cassidy convinced the local police that it would be best to let me go home with him while it was still possible to evade the reporters who were waiting outside. My fellow journalists had shouted questions, but I simply let Cassidy silently maneuver me into a waiting patrol car.

“I decided to let Officer Brewitt do the driving when we got the call,” he said as he closed the car door, then got in and asked her to take the long way back to Bea’s house.

The circuitous route had given me time to regain some of my composure, but now I realized it had also given Cassidy time to search my purse.

“Cassidy,” I said more insistently now, “give that back to me.”

“Just making sure there aren’t any new items in here,” he said. “Here, you go through the wallet. Don’t just look for things that might be missing. Look for things that might be added. He took your purse for a reason.”

I was noting that Hocus hadn’t left me any poorer or richer when Cassidy said, “Bingo.”

He handed me a little slip of paper. “I take it this wasn’t already in here?”

It was a note that said “Progress report scheduled for midnight — H.”

“No, no, it wasn’t,” I told him. “So they’re calling at midnight?”

“Looks that way,” Cassidy said. “Officer Brewitt, would you please be so kind as to ask your dispatcher to patch me through to Detective Ellie Sledzik?”

“Ellie?” the driver asked.

“Excuse me. Detective Eleanor C. Sledzik.”

Brewitt smiled and made the call.

When Detective Sledzik came on, Cassidy merely said, “Next one at twenty-four hundred.” She acknowledged the information and they signed off.

Cassidy did a little more rummaging, then handed the purse back and said, “Keep checking for me, Irene. I might have missed something still.”

“Who’s Eleanor Sledzik?”

“She’s our liaison with Bakersfield PD. She’s also been working with the phone company on the tap on your mother-in-law’s phone line. Besides being damned smart and a pleasure to work with, she has a gift for getting judges to see when they ought to hurry up and act on a request for a warrant.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t tried to recruit her down to Las Piernas.”

“She’s considering it,” Cassidy said, making Officer Brewitt laugh. Brewitt hadn’t been around Cassidy long enough to know he wasn’t kidding.

As we climbed the porch steps Cassidy said, “Boy, when old Frank is home safe and sound again, I’ve got to be the first one who gets to talk to him.”

I looked up at him. He was grinning.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m dying to tell him that his wife got into trouble just going to the library.”

“Maybe I won’t wash that handkerchief.”

Once inside the house I was fussed over by Bea and Rachel and Pete.

“If y’all will excuse us,” Cassidy said, “it’s important that I have a few minutes to talk to Irene.”

Reluctantly they allowed me to follow him back to his temporary office. I told him what I had learned from Cecilia and at the library.

“Well,” he said, “I was considering Brian Harriman myself. Powell’s arrest records show that Frank’s dad arrested Powell twice.”

“But Brian couldn’t—”

“Hold your horses, there’s more to it. Both times, Powell was right back out again. First time, the substance they found on him was not illegal — at least, it wasn’t by the time the lab looked at it. Second time, key witness came in and said he was coerced into making false statements. When I looked at it a little closer, either problem could have been caused by Harriman’s partners.”

“Which partners?”

“Different one each time — Bradshaw, then Matthews. But Cook had a connection to Powell, too. He was the first one to arrest Powell. He was assigned to Vice at the time.”

“He was a detective?”

“I asked Ellie Sledzik about it. She looked up Cook’s records and found out that Cook spent three years as a detective — blew something on a big case and ended up back on patrol.” He paused, then added, “I asked for information on all three officers — and Brian Harriman, too.”

“What?”

“I know you wanted a ‘head start,’ but the brass in Las Piernas told me to reconsider; they thought I should be talking to Bakersfield about this, and they were right to get on me about it. But just so you don’t blame the department, I have to say I was having second thoughts anyway — I think I would have asked for Ellie Sledzik’s help even if my boss hadn’t pushed for it. We don’t have a hell of a lot to go on, and we need more information than we can get from a dinner party.”

I was silent. He waited.

“It makes sense, I suppose,” I said. “We don’t really have the luxury of a delay, do we?”

“No. Glad you understand. I’ll have these other two names — Beecham and Wilson — checked out, too.”

“So what did you learn about the original group?”

“Not much yet. It will take her — Detective Sledzik — some time to get all of the records. All three of them were respected, thought of as good cops — although Matthews was something of a maverick. All had been Brian Harriman’s partner at one time or another. All had some contact with Powell. Cook was on the force the longest, then Matthews and Bradshaw.”

I thought for a moment, then said, “I have a favor to ask, Cassidy. It’s about Bea. I want to tell her what’s going on tonight. I mean, what’s really going on.”

“Feeling guilty?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. She’s gone out of her way for us, put people up for the night, even agreed to invite these guys over for dinner. All at a time when her only son is missing. I don’t like the idea of deceiving her. It’s her home, and we’re scheming to snare one of her friends under her own roof.”

“She’s too close to Bradshaw.”

“Her son, Cassidy — her son’s life is at stake. Bradshaw won’t mean anything to her by comparison.”

He hesitated, then shook his head. “We’ll tell her as soon as we can, but not yet.”

I crossed my arms and looked at the toe of my shoe. “Okay.”

“Don’t even think about it,” he said.

“Think about what?”

“Telling her anyway.”

“I said, ‘Okay,’ didn’t I?”

“Yes, but you lied.”

“How the hell can you know that?”

He laughed.

“Shit,” I said. “I need more sleep. What I meant was—”

“Oh, let’s not compound it with another lie.”

“So answer the question.”

“Neurolinguistics,” he said.

“Body language?”

“Basically, yes. But it isn’t as easy as some first-year psych students believe it is.”

“Nothing about human behavior is. So what did you see me do?”

“Why should I tell you? You might just become a better liar.”

“Well, they say imitation is the highest form of flattery, Cassidy, so—”

“For some reason, I doubt teaching you to be a better liar will make my head swell. But, okay, I’ll tell you what you did this time. You folded your arms — mere resistance. Then you avoided my eyes, suddenly looked away. So I took a guess, provoked you, and got an admission of guilt.”

I sighed. “All right, I won’t say anything to Bea. Honest. I’m not giving any hidden signs or gestures now, am I?”

“No, you’re cranky, but truthful.”

“What is it you have against Bradshaw?” I asked.

He moved over to the desk, picked up a file folder, and opened it. He pulled a photograph from it and handed it to me.

It was the photo of Frank holding the boys after their rescue.

“Oh, shit, Cassidy….”

He lifted a brow.

“You stole this from the Californian!”

“Borrowed.”

“Stole!”

“Mr. North handed it to me,” he drawled, “and didn’t ask for it back. They have other copies. And I believe he said the newspaper should have thrown them out long ago, so it’s not as if they would expect to find it still in their files.”

“Not expect it? After Brandon had been showing it to us that afternoon?”

“We can sit here and bicker over that, or you can take a look at the folks in the background — in the part that got cropped out of the newspaper version.”

I scowled at him but did as he suggested. I immediately saw what he wanted me to see. “Bear….”

“Yes.”

I looked up at Cassidy. “He’s not wearing a uniform.”

“No, he’s not.”

“So he couldn’t have been in a patrol car when Frank’s call came in.”

“No.”

“Well, hell.” I handed the photo back to him.

“It doesn’t mean he’s the one,” Cassidy said.

“No, but he lied.”

“Listen, we have a long way to go yet, Irene. I haven’t even had a gander at Cook or Matthews. Let’s see what we can learn tonight.”

I sighed.

“You like him,” Cassidy said.

“Yes.”

“That’s going to make it a rough evening, I suppose. Maybe you should try to get a little sleep,” he said.

I shook my head. “I’m not leaving Bea with all the work. Besides, I haven’t really had a chance to talk to her. Don’t worry, I won’t—”

“I know you won’t. By the way — what you learned from Cecilia Parker this morning is a big help. Thanks. I know that couldn’t have been easy on you. You sure you want her over here tonight?”

“Oh, my God, I forgot to tell Bea that I’ve expanded the guest list. Are we done here, Cassidy?”

“For the moment, anyway.” He yawned. “I may try to catch a little sleep myself.”

I needn’t have worried about Bea as far as dinner arrangements went — Rachel and Pete were in the kitchen with her, having somehow managed to take over the preparations without excluding her. If Cassidy hadn’t said he was going to try to sleep, I would have awakened him for the lesson in negotiating.

Bea wasn’t the only one who was surprised to hear Cecilia was coming to dinner. Rachel sent Pete a quelling glance, or I’m sure we would have been treated to his analysis of the situation.

“You aren’t inviting her because of me, are you?” Bea said.

I wasn’t sure I understood all that was implied by that question, but I said, “No, I enjoyed the time I spent with her today.” I was very careful not to cross my arms or break eye contact.

“Oh, good,” she said.

I kept watching her as we set the table together. While she was brave faced when Pete and Rachel were near, when we were alone, there were moments when she failed to hide her fear — the moment when the dishes rattled because her hands were shaking as she took her good plates from the china cabinet; the moment when she simply stopped in the middle of setting a spoon next to a knife, stood frozen in distraction, her face despondent. She caught me watching her once, and her tears welled up before she could dash them away. I moved over to her and held her, and she made a sound that brought Pete and Rachel hurrying from the kitchen and then — seeing us — hurrying back again.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, but I shushed her and held on.

“You get your turn, too,” I said. “Cecilia and I have had ours today.”

She looked up at me. “Cecilia? Cecilia cried?”

“Not because I said anything mean to her,” I added quickly, wondering if that was strictly true.

“Oh, Irene,” she chided, “I didn’t think you were mean to her. It’s just that I’ve never seen her shed a tear over anything.”

She straightened then and went to wash her face. I finished setting the table, wondering if this dinner party scheme was going to demolish an opportunity to grow closer to her.

26

HE WAS WAKING UP AGAIN. A wonderful thing, waking up. He was starting to appreciate it more than he ever had before. Awareness. Blessed awareness.

Awareness meant that Bret was back. Bret would allow him to awaken.

He stretched, took the inventory that was now a part of every return to consciousness. He was facing the other direction, lying on his left side now. The scrubs were still on. His feet were not restrained. He could move his legs. The IV catheter was still in but capped off; the bottle and tubing were not within sight.

Facing this way, he could not see them. He waited for sounds, sounds that would tell him where they were, if both of them were here. Bret was here, though. Bret preferred him to be awake.

Samuel, on the other hand, preferred control, and the drugs gave him that.

These were the kinds of things he had learned about them over the last few hours — were they hours? he wondered. His watch was gone with everything else. They had left him his wedding ring, at least.

Samuel paid less attention to him than Bret did, was less interested in him. Samuel was worried about other things, things outside this tent.

This lack of attention could prove to be an advantage, of course. Frank knew that if he could clear his mind enough to grasp an opportunity to escape, he was better off being ignored.

Still, he was uneasy about Samuel. It was not just the capacity for violence in the young man that disturbed Frank, it was the sense that the future meant nothing to Samuel — meant nothing, not in the way of the young — of disbelief or lack of ability to imagine it — but in the way of the very old or dying, who have simply accepted that it is not to be theirs.

Bret was the stabilizer. Samuel listened to him. Although he might be angered to some degree by Bret’s suggestions regarding Frank, he generally gave Bret his way.

And Bret was curious about Frank. No, there was something more than curiosity at work here. He was not asking questions just out of idle curiosity.

Indebtedness? For the rescue from the basement all those years ago? Maybe, but that did not explain Bret’s… how to name it? Concern? No, more than that.

It seemed important to him to know this, to name it. But as he considered and rejected word after word, he heard a voice behind him.

“Would you like to sit up?”

Bret’s voice.

“Yes,” he answered.

A different voice said, “All right, but I’ve got a gun pointed at you, Detective Harriman, and I’m quite willing to use it.”

Samuel.

Bret came around to face him, smiled, and unlocked Frank’s left wrist. Frank knew Samuel probably did hold a gun, and that if he did, Samuel was willing — perhaps even hoping — to use it. He knew the drugs would slow his reactions too greatly, knew this was not the opportunity he sought. Still, he found it nearly impossible to resist the urge to try to free himself.

Bret paused, and Frank looked into his face. As clearly as if he had spoken words, Frank knew Bret was telling him not to struggle, not to resist.

He was puzzled, unsure how Bret had conveyed this to him, but Samuel was saying, “He doesn’t have our understanding, you know. You have to speak out loud to him. Go ahead and warn him.”

“I don’t need to warn him,” Bret said, motioning Frank to lie on his back. “You’re the only one who expects the worst of him.”

The simple act of moving to his back sent Frank’s head spinning. He closed his eyes as Bret reattached his wrist to the opposite bed rail, waited for the dizziness to pass. He berated himself silently. Useless. Useless. Useless.

“Are you nauseated?” Bret asked.

“No,” Frank said, opening his eyes, seeing that Sam was indeed holding a gun on him. “Not sick, just a little woozy.”

“He’s thirsty,” Samuel said. “Give him something to drink.”

“No,” Frank said quickly, hearing the rasp in his own voice. “No, I’m all right.”

Samuel laughed, but Bret said, “We’ll give you just plain water this time. But let me move you up first, so that you can sit.”

He heard the whirring of the motor on the bed, felt it angling him up. A little more dizziness, but not as bad as before. Bret brought the glass of water to him, but he turned his head away. Spinning, spinning.

Move more slowly, he told himself.

When he turned his head back, very gradually, he saw that Bret still waited with the water.

He felt a primal rage, a blinding fury building up within him, a fierce, sudden anger that made him want to pull free of the goddamn railings and attack them both. Let them shoot him! Let them! His rage would keep him in motion, like a matinee monster. Bullets couldn’t stop him.

“You see?” Samuel said. “His fists are clenched. I think our hero wants to kill us.”

“Of course he does,” Bret said softly. “Don’t you remember how it feels, Samuel?”

There was silence. Bret said, “Samuel—”

But Samuel was already walking away. “Do what you want. If I come back and find you dead, I’ll kill him, and then myself. I’ll open the valve, then — bang. Right through my own head. Bang. I won’t care about anything then. You hear me? Not anything.”

Frank heard the outer door slam shut.

Bret still stood with the glass of water, but he was not looking at Frank. His face was solemn.

“I’m sorry,” Frank said. “That was my fault.”

“No,” Bret said, coming out of his reverie. “No, none of this is your fault.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean to—”

“Oh, no, Frank. Don’t make that mistake. He meant every word of it.” He offered the glass. “It really is just water.”

What the hell, Frank thought, and took a sip.

“You have a choice,” Bret said. “You can allow me to give you a chance to survive, or you can die with us.”

Better able to control his panic now, he was more cautious. “There’s no reason for you to die.”

Bret smiled. “Ever watch any airplane disaster movies? Some panicked person on the plane always screams, ‘We’re all going to die!’ Well, truer words were never spoken. Most of us don’t know when we will die, and many of us won’t believe there is any reason for our deaths. When and why. Samuel and I have a reasonable approximation of the former and a certainty of the latter. We have that.”

“But still—”

“No, Frank, Samuel and I won’t live through this set of events we’ve set in motion. We are rather good amateurs, but time and experience is on the side of people like Detective Cassidy.”

“Cassidy isn’t a killer,” Frank said. “He’ll do everything he can to end this peacefully.”

“It won’t be up to Cassidy, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t understand—”

“No, I’m sorry. You are still at a great disadvantage. I promised you a story. Now, would you like to get out of this bed and sit at a table and read it yourself?”

Confused, but seeing that — for the moment — Bret would discuss matters only on his own terms, Frank said, “Yes.”

“All right, then first let me explain a few things. Samuel and I went to a great deal of trouble to refit this building to our own needs. Right now, we are in a tent within a room within a room. One door to each, no windows. Soundproof. The tent is similar to tents used for fumigating buildings, made of the same material. There is a security system to which I must respond before anyone can gain entry. Without going into the sort of details that will give you a little too much information, I’ll tell you that opening the valve Samuel referred to starts the flow of a gas into this tent. The gas will asphyxiate anyone in the tent. In other words, if he wanted to, he could open that valve now, and we would be suffocated.”

Frank thought of the mood Samuel had been in when he left and closed his eyes.

“I see you begin to understand. I can free you if I become a prisoner within the room with you. Should I need to leave the room, you will have to return voluntarily to the bed and will be restrained as you are now. Samuel will not come in here unless you are restrained. If you refuse to be restrained, Samuel will receive a signal from me to start the flow of the gas.”

“You’d die with me.”

“If your only goal is to kill me, I’m giving you that opportunity. But if I die, Samuel starts the gas. If you injure me, prevent me from restraining you, or prevent me from giving the proper entry signal to Samuel, then we die together. I suppose I’m counting on the fact that you are probably less reconciled to death than I am.”

“I don’t understand this,” Frank said, knowing he should be calmer, should be trying a different approach, but unable to manage it. “I don’t know why you want to die.”

“I don’t. I’m willing to die. That’s different. I don’t want you to die with me, but I’m willing to allow that to happen, too. I’d prefer you live. I’d prefer we passed our very limited time together with the more pleasant pursuits of meals and conversation. Conversation with you, the opportunity to get to know you….” He smiled again. “It’s a sort of going-away present to myself.”

“We can talk and eat while I’m still in this bed. Why go to all this trouble to let me roam around the room?”

“You know the answer to that.”

After a long silence Frank said, “Because you’ve been chained.”

“Exactly.”

“The drugs—”

“Are a necessity, I’m afraid. I’ll do my best to keep them at a minimum. That’s largely up to you. If you’re uncooperative, you’ll probably spend most of your remaining time with us in a state of unconsciousness. If you prefer that, I can start the IV again now.”

“No—”

“I didn’t think that would be your choice. Shall I untie you now?”

“Yes.”

“I have your word — you’ll accept our conditions?”

Miserable. He felt goddamned miserable and angry with himself for it. He tried not to let any of this show as he said, “Yes.”

“Good,” Bret said, but he was frowning, watching Frank’s face. He lowered his head in concentration as he began to unfasten the restraint he had so recently attached to the rail.

There it was again, Frank thought. Bret, attuned to his moods, watching for little cues.

He would need to be more careful. Yet here was his hope, perhaps his only hope — Bret’s concern for him.

“Bret—”

Bret looked up at him.

“How does Samuel feel about this?”

Bret smiled, now working to take the restraint off the wrist itself. “He dislikes the idea intensely, but we humor one another. He knows this will make me happy, and so he gives in.”

“And what did you give to him in return?”

His hands stilled. “We don’t have a tally sheet.”

Frank made no other comment as Bret finished removing the left wrist restraint. His impatience to be freed was nearly unbearable now, and he immediately reached to remove the one on the right wrist, only to grow dizzy again. But Bret did not try to interfere; he waited, let Frank free himself, first from the rail, then from the restraint itself. He did not say anything when Frank threw the strap hard to the ground like a hated thing.

Frank blew out a breath, tried to control the rush of emotion he felt as the strap made a satisfying slap on the floor.

He rubbed his wrists as Bret lowered the rail, slightly embarrassed now at the display of temper. But that passed with the anticipation of another measure of freedom.

“Careful now,” Bret said, and helped him from the bed.

He was ridiculously wobbly and dizzy as all hell, but he was on his own two feet. He didn’t know how long he had been here or how long he would remain, but at least he wasn’t tied to the damned bed.

“Thank you,” Frank said, and saw that Bret had some idea of how deeply he meant it.

He walked like an old man to the table, leaning on Bret for the first few steps, then on his own. He eased into a chair, rolled and stretched the stiff muscles of his shoulders and back. He looked at the bed.

“Don’t think about being back there,” Bret said, following Frank’s anxious line of thought. “We have time now, and we should make the most of it. Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” Frank said in the tone of one making a discovery. He felt awkward, unsure of how to proceed.

“Just sandwiches this time, I’m afraid,” Bret said, going to an ice chest.

“You said you have something for me to read?” Frank asked as Bret arrived with paper plates wrapped in plastic wrap, a sandwich and fresh fruit on each. He did not doubt that all of his food would be of a kind that could be eaten without utensils. No makeshift weaponry.

“You can read it after we eat,” Bret said. “Do you remember the Szals?”

“Bernard and Regina? Yes, of course.”

They talked of the Szals and telescopes and aikido. Bret politely steered the conversation away from any potentially touchy subjects, such as the years of silence. Still, Frank could not deny that it was a genuinely pleasant exchange. Bret had come alive, had been enthusiastic, was always eager for Frank’s thoughts and opinions.

After eating, Frank stood and walked slowly around the tent, which was roomy but sparsely furnished. Barefoot, he was fairly certain the floor beneath the tent was wooden. There were several locked trunks of various sizes along one side of the tent; he was curious about them but decided against asking about them now.

His head itched. He reached back to scratch it and felt the shaved and slightly tender skin around the stitches.

“God, it feels good to be able to scratch that damned itch,” he said.

Bret’s face fell. “I’m so sorry. I should have thought of that.”

You try hard to anticipate what others are feeling, Frank thought. Aloud he said, “It wasn’t so bad. I probably shouldn’t be touching it, anyway.”

“There shouldn’t be much of a scar,” Bret said.

“Your hair will cover it, I’m sure.”

“You put in the stitches?”

He couldn’t fail to notice Bret’s sudden pallor.

“No,” Bret said. “No, Samuel did.”

“I’ll have to thank him,” Frank said. “I seem to remember bleeding.” He touched the slightly puffy place on his upper lip. “My lip?”

Bret was looking away now. “Your lip, your nose. Your head. It was terrible.” He shuddered. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Sure.”

He made his way back to the table. He was still plagued by dizziness and weakness, but they seemed to be lessening: the drugs clearing from his system, no doubt. He tried to keep from touching the IV device.

“Here,” Bret said, handing him some papers as he was seated. “I think it’s time you read this.”

While the title — “Father’s Day” — came as no real surprise, almost everything that followed did.

27

I DIDN’T EAT MUCH, even though the food was terrific. The cooks didn’t take it personally. Pete, for one, was too busy glaring at Cecilia.

I had forgotten that Pete — for reasons he had never confided in me — disliked her intensely. He did little to disguise that fact at dinner. Rachel kept muttering things to him in Italian, while Cookie — as I was learning to refer to Nat Cook — was doing his best to distract Cecilia. He needn’t have bothered.

Cookie was the oldest of the three. Bear was next, then Gus. Gus was still brawny, while Cookie appeared to be quite frail.

Bea suggested we adjourn to the living room, but Rachel agreed only on the condition that she and Pete would clear the table and do the dishes. I could see Pete’s rebellion forming, but not in time to save himself — she all but grabbed him by the ear. Cassidy took in all of this with amusement.

Before the trio arrived, Cassidy had taken me aside and asked me not to jump in with any questions of my own until he asked one about the Ryan-Neukirk case. From there, he said, I’d be asking most of them, at least in the beginning. “And don’t go convicting Bradshaw just yet,” he added sternly. “You’ve got to act as calm and natural as you can tonight. I’m depending on it. Don’t let me catch you giving him the evil eye or fidgeting like you’ve got a bumblebee in your drawers. You think of him as the man who brought you and Frank together — that guy you talked about when we had lunch the other day.”

I tried to heed his warnings but still felt nervous as we sat down to dinner. Early attention and talk, fortunately, was focused on Greg Bradshaw’s knee surgery. By the time I had calmed myself enough to look up from the first course, I realized Cassidy had somehow taken control of the conversation. He seemed to set some silent ground rule: no one would discuss Frank’s captivity or, by extension, the Ryan-Neukirk murders. He did not announce this; he merely started several discussions that were obviously not about our great concern. Everyone picked up on this cue, probably certain that he was doing this to keep Frank’s mother or wife calm during a meal he called — despite Pete’s constant corrections — our “Eye-talian supper.” I think he was getting back at Pete for harassing Cecilia, since Rachel seemed to be suppressing a laugh every time he said it.

Once Cassidy got the ball rolling in the direction he wanted it to go, he spent most of his time listening to the three older cops argue with one another over who told the true version of whichever war story was under discussion.

The stories began to have similar themes. If they were about Gus, they were wild-man exploits: Gus diving and tackling an armed suspect in an alley after his own gun had jammed; Gus climbing a water tower (while drunk) because he saw a pretty girl on it, only to discover it was a long-haired young man who was contemplating suicide — managing to talk the young man out of it; Gus hearing other cops call him “What’s-your-twenty-Matthews” — a reference to the dispatchers’ frequent efforts to locate him. These were the stories about Gus: often heroic, more often foolish.

It was clear that Gus thought nothing of bucking authority, had put in some drinking years, had paid a price for both by never managing to hold on to a promotion for long. But he seemed untroubled by that fact, and whenever Bear or Cookie alluded to it, he smiled and said, “What the hell? I enjoyed my work. It was a good ride. I never had your finesse, is all. You two were a couple of sneaks.”

He was right; while tales were told in which Bear and Cookie were heroes, these almost always involved outwitting criminals rather than Gus’s brute force or action. Within the department, both were pranksters. Bear’s pranks were on a relatively small scale. They were similar to those he played on Frank as a rookie — putting a penny in a patrol car hubcap to make a maddening rattle, putting shoe polish on the rim of a motorcycle cop’s goggles.

Cookie’s pranks involved more strategy. One summer the sound of church bells was broadcast over all the department radios. Bells ringing at midnight, twelve long tolls. When it was heard every night for three nights in a row, the infuriated chief put detectives on the task of discovering the culprit. They compared bell sounds to recordings of the midnight broadcasts. The bells had a distinctive sound, and their most likely source was a certain church. The minister gave permission for police to search it. Nothing was found. Undeterred, the chief ordered the building surrounded and watched. As on previous nights, bells marked midnight and were heard over the radios, although clearly not being transmitted by anyone present.

“Because,” Bear said, “Cookie is a dozen miles away, parked up on a hill, with a little cassette deck in his car playing a tape of those bells!”

Cassidy also told a few anecdotes from his own law enforcement career, with the same flair for humorous storytelling he had demonstrated during our drive to Bakersfield. They took to him, accepted him as one of their own. That, I began to see, was the point.

Now, as the dinner guests were seated around Bea’s living room, Cassidy gave me a smile that was undoubtedly seen as a gesture of reassurance by the others, but that I knew to be a warning.

Get ready.

He stayed on his feet, leaned against the mantel. “Irene, were these old farts this decrepit when you were working here?”

They smiled good-naturedly. “Come here, Tex,” Gus joked, “and I’ll show you what decrepit can do.”

This was met with cheers by Bea and the other two.

“Well, Cassidy,” I said, “not decrepit, but they were a little gray headed.” I looked pointedly at his hair. “You know how that can be.”

He smiled at their laughter and ran a hand over his hair. “Well, some men just look more handsome in gray hair, right, fellas?”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Bear said. “Looks distinguished. Remember, Cookie, when old Brian went Grecian Formula on us?”

This brought on more laughter, while Bea turned red with embarrassment. “Greg Bradshaw,” she muttered. “Honestly! The things you are liable to say.”

I sat stunned, quickly reminding myself that Brian Harriman’s hair color was only one reason to believe in him. Cecilia caught my eye, smiled at me. It was enough to calm me down again.

Cassidy, meanwhile, reached over and picked up the photo of Frank and his dad. “By golly, I just might try some of that hair-coloring stuff. Looks damned natural to me.”

“He wasn’t using it then,” Cookie said.

“Yep, Cookie’s right,” Gus said. “Having Frank on the force is what turned poor ol’ Brian gray.”

“It is not!” Bea protested. “He was very proud of Frank.”

“Oh, of course! Of course he was,” Bear soothed, shooting Gus a dirty look. “Hell, everyone knows that. We’re all proud of him. Frank is a damned fine cop. He’s never given anyone any reason not to be proud of him.”

The room fell silent.

“As far as I’m concerned,” I said, trying to steer the conversation back on course, “Frank isn’t going to be any less handsome when he turns gray. How old was Brian when his hair changed?”

“It wasn’t long after Frank joined the department,” Bea said, then added pointedly, “But it wasn’t because he was worried about Frank.” Gus didn’t see her glance or seem to notice her tone of voice. He was bent forward, elbows on widespread knees, hands clasped, looking down at the floor. His facial expressions were hidden.

“Aw, Bea,” Bear said, suddenly caught between loyalties, “nobody is knocking Brian. It was just something funny, that’s all. Brian laughed about it himself. He only used it for a little while, until we gave him so much grief over it, he figured it was easier to be gray. Truth is, he looked fine either way. Right, Cookie?”

“Right. We scared everybody else off of trying to color his gray, though.”

“I vaguely remember a couple of other guys who were going gray,” I said. “A Wilson and… Beech, maybe?”

“Beecham,” Cookie said. “Manny Beecham. And if the Wilson you’re thinking of was gray haired, it was Quinn. Wilson and Beecham were motorcycle cops. Boy, I tell you — that was tough duty. Cold in winter. I knew men who would stuff newspapers in their jackets, trying to stay warm.”

“We weren’t much better off in the cars,” Bear said, watching Gus. “Right, Gus?”

Gus looked up. His eyes looked a little red. “Yeah, Bear, the cars were cold, too.”

“Irene, we didn’t get heaters in our cars until 1958,” Bear said, more animated now that Gus had joined in again. “Brian and I used to turn the spotlight on and aim it into the car just to heat ourselves up.”

“Everybody did that,” Cookie said. “We were supposed to ride with our windows down in the winter, so we could hear what was going on outside the car.”

“I reckon that would make things a little chilly,” Cassidy said.

Gus suddenly got to his feet. “I can’t stand this! We’re sitting in here talking about the fucking weather!”

Cookie stood up, too, and said, “Have a seat, Gus.”

Gus didn’t move. “It ain’t even today’s weather, for God’s sake!”

“Have a seat, Gus,” Bear said quietly. “For Bea’s sake.”

Gus sat.

“And watch your mouth,” Cookie added. “This is Bea’s home. You think if Brian were alive, he’d let you talk like that in front of his wife?”

“He didn’t mean anything by it,” Cecilia said, drawing all eyes. “Gus is just upset, worried about Frank, right?”

Gus said nothing, looking down between his feet again.

“Yes,” Bea said, “that’s all it is. Nathan?”

Cookie said, “Of course. I’m sorry, Gus. I guess my nerves are on edge, too.” He sat down.

Cassidy glanced at me, then moved to sit in a chair near Cecilia, across from Gus and Cookie.

“Gus,” he said quietly, “I don’t blame you. We’ve avoided the topic that’s been on everybody’s mind all evening. You’ve always been close to Frank, right?”

He nodded.

“And you know who has him?”

“Those boys,” he said to the floor.

Cassidy glanced at me again, leaned back.

“Do you remember that day?” I asked Gus.

“You mean when the boys were found?” he said, looking up at me now.

“Yes.”

“Sure. Never forget it. I got there last. Cookie and Bear were there. Not Brian, though.”

“Brian had gone fishing that day,” Cecilia said. “He was off that weekend.”

“That’s right!” Bea said. “I had forgotten. That’s why he got back so late. He used to go fishing with some friends of ours in Bodfish.”

“Bodfish?” Cassidy asked. “I never heard of a fish called a bodfish.”

“It isn’t named after a fish, it’s named after a person,” she said. “His name was George Homer Bodfish.”

“I guess he didn’t want to have to live alone with it,” Cassidy said.

“Brian was in Bodfish that weekend?” Cookie asked.

“Just Saturday,” Cecilia answered. “He was back here by Sunday night.”

“How do you know?” Pete asked, coming in from the kitchen.

“It was the first time I’d been to a Father’s Day dinner. The Harrimans invited me. When Frank got the call that day, Brian hadn’t come back from fishing. Our plans got changed a little.”

I gave Pete a look that said “Lay off.” I guess he got the message, because he took a seat and didn’t say anything more. Rachel came in and sat next to him.

“I’m sure anyone who was a friend of the family would remember that Father’s Day,” I said. “All three of you went to the scene?”

“Yeah,” Gus said. “I don’t think anybody who was there could forget those two kids. Or Frank, the way he was that day. Oh, man. I felt so bad for him, you know, because he caught that call.”

“How did you hear about it?”

“I was working…. I had just come on for my shift, soit must have been… let’s see… around six-thirty. That’s right — I was on days for those last few years before I retired. Brian had also been on days, but he had been on them for a long time.” He glanced at Bea and then up at the photos on the mantel. He shook his head sadly.

“Six-thirty?” I said. “You must have been there pretty early on, then.”

“Naw, the call had been in for at least half an hour. I didn’t hear about it until I reported for work. We had started working tens then — ten-hour shifts. Seven A.M. to four P.M., five P.M. to two A.M., eleven P.M. to eight A.M. You’d come in about thirty minutes before and stay about thirty minutes later for the shift changes, but those were the shifts. Frank and Cookie worked graveyard shift. What’d you have then, Bear?”

Bear was frowning. “I must have been mixed up about something yesterday….”

“When I met you, I think you were working afternoon shift,” I said. “Bars would be closed, we’d go to one of the all-night coffee shops — you and Frank and I. We’d talk until everyone wound down, until about four in the morning.”

“That’s right,” he said, but he still looked puzzled.

“Afternoons… I must have been on afternoons.”

“Frank switched to graveyards after you left, Irene,” Bea said. “Cecilia worked days. He’d sleep while she worked, and they’d go out in the evenings.”

Cecilia seemed uneasy with this talk. “It cut every evening short,” she said quickly.

“Well, Frank was lucky to have y’all there for him,” Cassidy said, pulling the conversation back to that day. “I understand he took it pretty hard.”

“Yeah,” Gus said. “Those kids — they just wouldn’t let go of him. Even after their mothers got there. We wanted to talk to Frank, but any man came near ’em, they freaked out.”

“Now I know!” Bear said. “The scanner!”

The rest of us looked puzzled, but Gus started laughing. “Oh, goddamn — excuse me, Bea. Oh, oh — I’d forgotten about that, you were such a—!” He looked at Bea again, couldn’t seem to come up with a clean word, and contented himself with laughing.

Bear was turning red. “Gus, it’s not that funny!”

“Cassidy,” Gus said, “you have never met anybody whose blood is so blue. Blue, blue, blue. The guy works ten-hour shifts, spends all his time off with other cops, and when they can’t stand him anymore and send him home, what does he do? Listens to his scanner. Remember how much sh — uh, what a hard time we used to give him about that, Cookie?”

Cookie, who had been silent for some time, merely said, “I remember.”

“You were there that day, too?” I asked him.

“Yes. I was there. As Gus said, I worked nights. But I wasn’t working that Sunday, the one when Frank found the boys. I had come in on Friday night, and worked until eight on Saturday morning. I was off on Saturday night and Sunday morning.”

“How did you find out about it, then?”

“Bea called me, said Brian was out of town, asked if I could go over to the warehouse.”

It seemed a little odd to me that Bea, who must have heard about the incident from Bear or Gus, would call in additional reinforcements. But this may have been the way their “extended family” operated — all for one, one for all.

“So you were there fairly soon?” I asked Bear.

“Yes. I tried to go down to the basement, to talk to Frank, but by the time I arrived the crime lab was there and not letting anyone near him. Once they came up out of that basement — as Gus said, the boys became very upset around any other man. I thought it was just me, at first. But they reacted that way to any other male.”

“Do you have any idea where they’re holding Frank?” Gus asked.

“Not at present, no,” Cassidy said. “But we believe it’s somewhere in Las Piernas. Folks down there are working hard to locate him.”

“What are you doing out here, then, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Ryan and Neukirk — the boys — contact us here. They tell us they have some task for us to complete before they’ll release Frank. Something to do with the murder of their fathers, I’m sure. Any of you have any idea what it could be? If you did, it could sure help us — help Frank most of all.”

No arms crossed, no nervousness, no eyes averted. Yes — Cassidy was a cool liar.

“Something to do with the old case?” Gus was asking. He grew thoughtful. All three men were silent, seemed to be considering the question.

“I don’t know what it could be,” Bear said. “The boys know the killer is dead, right?”

“Yes,” Cassidy said.

“Cecilia,” Cookie said, “you discovered the body of the killer, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Were there any signs that he might have had a partner, an accomplice?”

“No,” she answered. “Not a thing. Of course, I didn’t get involved in the forensics — just made the call.”

“Wait,” Gus said. “Cookie — man, they never should have kept you out of detectives. You were born to be a suit, I tell you.”

Nathan Cook colored red from his neck to the top of his head. “Really, Gus—”

But Gus was continuing, in a tone that seemed — at least to me — to be slightly sarcastic. “You see how he is, Cassidy? He can think ahead like that—”

“Gus—” Cookie tried again.

“No, I mean it. We used to say it that way, ‘one smart Cookie.’ Remember, Bear?”

“Yeah, he’s right,” Bear said, looking nervously at Cookie. “But I don’t—”

“Gus, Bear. Please,” Cookie said.

“You’re brilliant,” Gus went on. “The rest of us always assumed it was just the one guy doing the killing down in that basement, but Cookie here thinks differently from the average cop. I mean, that’s a hell of a suggestion. Maybe there was more than one person involved—”

“Sorry, Gus,” Cassidy interrupted. “You’re right, ol’ Cookie here is smart. But I’ve read the reports from that case, including the labwork. Other than the victims, there was only one man in that basement. There were several indications that it was only one man, but one piece of evidence was almost undeniable proof.”

He turned to Cookie. “You see, there was quite a bit of blood on the floor, and anybody who went all the way down those stairs couldn’t miss stepping in it. Until Frank went out to his car to make the call, no one had walked in and out of that basement except the killer.”

“Hmm,” Cookie said. “I suppose that rules out an accomplice.”

“As I said,” Cassidy continued, “spatter patterns and other evidence back that up. Those boys were just damned lucky that someone called the department about the suspected robbery. If not, who knows how long they would have been down there?”

“Those boys,” Bear said. “I mean, it isn’t too hard to understand that you might not be quite right after something like that, is it? Sitting down there for hours and hours….”

“Let’s not get morbid,” Cookie said. “I’m sure Bea didn’t want us to come over here just to make her think about such gruesome things.”

“I’m all right, Cookie,” she said. “You know I’m tougher than that.”

“Yes, well, I’m not so tough myself,” Cookie said. “I’m older than the rest of you. If you’ll forgive me, I’ve got to be going.”

Everyone stood, and the good-nights began. Cecilia left right after Cookie. Gus and Bear had driven over together and left soon after her. We waved good-bye from the front porch.

Bea and Rachel and Pete went back into the house, leaving me on the porch with Cassidy.

“I guess we both know who it is, now,” I said.

28

CASSIDY RAISED A brow. “Oh?”

“It’s Cookie, isn’t it?” I said.

“Now, what makes you think so?” he asked, although nothing in his voice indicated he disagreed.

“Bret Neukirk’s version of events that night may or may not be completely accurate, but there are certain parts of the story that he’s unlikely to have invented or misremembered.”

“Such as?”

“Such as what time of day they were traveling to Lake Isabella. He said they left the house at three in the morning and were pulled over by a patrol car. The Bakersfield department wasn’t so big or poorly managed that you could just drive a cruiser off the lot without anyone noticing. So they were probably pulled over by a car that was already in use.”

“Okay, I’ll buy that. We’ll assume it wasn’t a stolen cruiser.”

“Gus worked days,” I said. “He would have finished his shift by four in the afternoon. Bear would have been off by about two-thirty in the morning. Only Cookie would have been in a patrol car after three in the morning.”

“Yes, but if Bret had the time wrong by an hour or two, it could have been Bradshaw.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but he would have been pushing it — he would have been at the very end of the shift, planning to take two men hostage. But Nathan Cook had plenty of time.”

“Powell was there to help him — might not have figured on needing much time. It’s clear the boys were an unexpected complication,” Cassidy said. “I’m not arguing against your notion about Cook, though. He mentioned he had worked that shift.”

“Which is another thing that bothered me about him. This happened a dozen years ago. His memory is almost too good.”

“A dozen years ago for everybody,” Cassidy said.

“Sure. Every one of them seems to remember something about that day. There are reasons for them to remember it — Frank was important to them, for starters. Second, the Ryan-Neukirk case was so disturbing. And they have a memorable date to tie it to — because the bodies were discovered on a holiday. Boys and their fathers on Father’s Day.”

“Okay, so it made an impression that could last a dozen years.”

“Right. Gus can remember working that day,” I went on, “because like most people, he remembers where he was when he received shocking news. He first heard about the murders when he reported for work.”

“And Bradshaw?”

“Bear was a little less sure — when we first talked to him, he thought he was working, but that was because he remembered hearing Frank’s voice on the call. For him, the first memory of that day is an auditory one. It’s not surprising that he connected a call on a scanner with being at work. But even though he was mixed up about where he was, he clearly recalled the part of the memory that made the strongest impression.”

“But you think Cook ‘remembers’ too much?”

“Exactly. He said he was off that Saturday night and Sunday morning. He said he got a call from Bea on Sunday morning. Maybe, maybe not — we may never know. If he had stopped there, no red flags would have gone up. But then he tells us that he remembers coming into work on Friday night and working until about eight on Saturday. Why? Why should he remember that?”

“You think he was lying?”

“No, Mr. Neurolinguistics. I think he was telling the truth about working that graveyard shift. He worked it all those years ago, and remembered it. Do you remember which nights you worked and which ones you had off ten or twelve years ago? No. You remember the nights when something extraordinary happened. So does Cook. That was a night he probably won’t ever forget. He pulled Julian Neukirk’s car over, and set hell in motion. Yeah, I think it was a busy night for him — knocking people unconscious, taping up children’s hands, going treasure hunting. Saturday night was busy for him, too, since that’s probably when he gave Powell a shove.”

“I think he was doing his treasure hunting that night, too,” Cassidy said. “You said you thought that slope was visible from the campground during the day, right?”

“Yes. The campground is on the same side of the canyon, but upriver.”

“This was Father’s Day weekend,” he said. “Mid-June. By the time Cook ended his ten-hour graveyard shift, turned in a car, and drove up to the place where X marked the spot, it would have been midmorning.”

“You’re right. There would have been plenty of sunlight at the turnout by the time he arrived. And he probably took time to change clothes — I don’t picture Nat Cook being the kind of guy who would wear his uniform to do that kind of work.”

“No,” Cassidy agreed, “even if he was willing to get it dirty, he wouldn’t want to attract that kind of attention. So with all those delays — Cook might have been able to take a look at the turnout by Saturday afternoon, but probably couldn’t have done any digging until Saturday night, after traffic settled down. That was just too many hours for Powell.”

“Right,” I said. “Powell got restless, and by the time Cook showed up at the warehouse, Powell had killed the men and left. And my guess is that Cook knew Powell well enough to figure out where he was headed. Cook might have been concerned about the boys, but he would have been out-and-out terrified that Powell would be caught, covered with blood, and raving about his good buddy Nathan Cook.”

“Yes, he’d take care of Powell before making a call to the dispatcher — otherwise, Bakersfield PD might find Powell first. That would explain why there wasn’t a call until Sunday morning.” He thought for a moment, then nodded. “It’s all possible.”

“There were other things that bothered me,” I said.

He smiled. “Namely?”

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, nothing. Just wondering if old ‘smart Cookie’ had any idea of what he was up against.”

“When Gus said that about him — called him ‘smart Cookie’ — did you get the impression it was meant as a dig?”

“Yes, and I think Cookie saw it as one. I’m pretty sure Bradshaw did, too. I’m hoping Gus and your friend the Bear stay out of this now.”

“Hmm. Why do I have the feeling you’re already planning something in connection with Cookie?”

“Surveillance only, at this point.”

“He was followed from here?”

“Yes. Now what were the other things that bothered you?”

“He asked Cecilia if she had found any signs of an accomplice. Why would he mention the area where they found Powell’s body, instead of the warehouse?”

“Probably a slip, but he could always claim that he already knew they hadn’t found signs of an accomplice at the warehouse, and was just confirming information from a scene outside Bakersfield’s jurisdiction.”

“Yeah, right,” I said.

Cassidy smiled.

“It won’t work for him to claim that — tonight he tried to pretend he was hearing the warehouse information for the first time.”

“Anything else?” Cassidy asked.

I hesitated. “The other stuff isn’t so….”

“Isn’t so what?”

“Objective, I guess.”

“Try it out on me anyway. Half of what I have to work with most of the time is impressions. They’re important.”

“Okay, I tried to get an impression of this cop from Bret Neukirk’s fax. He seemed to be an uptight kind of person, rigid. He’s also careful, able to hide things. Gus is a man of action, but he isn’t very careful. Bear — can you picture Bear hiding anything? And he’s just too easygoing. Cook — he’s more cautious. In those stories you got them to tell, Cook was the one who could make long-term plans.”

“I don’t know that I got them to tell—”

“No time for false modesty, Cassidy.”

“What other impressions?”

“The man in Bret’s fax goes ballistic over foul language,” I said. “Did you see Cook’s reaction tonight?”

“You’re probably glad you didn’t say anything to set him off first.”

“Hilarious. Does any of this make sense to you, Cassidy?”

“Absolutely. I think you’re right, by the way.”

“You do? Great!” I started pacing. “I know this isn’t the kind of thing you could take to court. Not that we have anything even remotely resembling admissible evidence at this point, but—”

“Irene,” he said quietly, “I’m afraid I may have misled you.”

I looked up at him.

“I am very rarely interested in the same thing a district attorney is interested in,” he said. “It’s part of why I like my job. I’m almost always trying to help somebody stay alive. I have never had any real hope of seeing this rogue cop convicted for his part in the murders.”

“What?” I said. “I don’t believe this! What have we been trying to do all this time?”

“You want to hear my goals? I want to keep Frank alive. I want him to be located and freed — ideally, unharmed. I want Samuel Ryan and Bret Neukirk and any other members of Hocus to surrender — ideally, peacefully. If they won’t surrender, then I’ve failed, and this becomes a job for the tactical folks on the CIT. The people you know as the SWAT team.”

“But—”

“If I do my job right,” he went on, “and everything goes well, people are alive at the end of the day. That’s it. The DA isn’t saying, ‘Yes, we’ve got enough evidence to go to trial.’ The trial is over. Court is adjourned, one way or the other.”

“Forgive me if I’m missing something,” I gritted out, “but it seems to me that bringing Nathan Cook to justice is going to go a long way toward freeing my husband!”

“Not really.”

I stood there gaping at him for a second before my anger kicked in. “Damn it, Cassidy, what the hell has this been? Busywork? Some project to keep Frank Harriman’s nosy reporter wife out of the way?”

“Now, Irene—”

“Don’t ‘Now, Irene’ me! What have I been running my ass all over Bakersfield for? What would you have done if Tuesday came along and we had no idea who that cop was?”

“I would have lied,” he said.

“Shit.”

“You would prefer that I tell them, ‘Sorry, fellas, Irene can’t figure it out, you win — so feel free to go ahead and kill Frank’?”

I felt a rage so pure, I went deaf, dumb, and blind. I knew my hand hurt before I had calmed down enough to realize what I had done. It was a good, hard slap. My palm and fingers had a thousand needles in them. I was breathing hard, panting, as if I had gone ten rounds with him.

He was rubbing his face with his left hand, but he hadn’t lifted either hand to defend himself. He could have, I realized. He had proven hours ago that he could anticipate my reactions.

“You knew that was coming,” I said, the rage nearly gone, despair ready to step in.

“Yes,” he said, still rubbing his cheek, “but I’ll admit I misjudged your speed and strength. And most women wind up a little — you know — raise their hand up by their shoulder.”

“I shouldn’t have hit you,” I said.

“Was that an apology?”

“Not exactly, was it?”

“No.” He laughed. “I’ll start. I’m sorry I provoked you.” He rubbed his face again. “Real sorry.”

I was shaking. I didn’t give a damn.

The anger was subsiding, going out like a tide. I didn’t like the sense of despair it was leaving behind. My lower lip quivered, and that was enough to scare me, so I thought of Cassidy letting me spend my morning listening to Cecilia honk her fucking horn, just to make that tide come in again.

But once you’ve hit high tide, the waves never reach the same point on the beach.

“Tell me you won’t say that again,” I said.

“That I’m sorry?”

“No, Cassidy,” I said, feeling an almost pleasant return to being irritated with him.

“Oh, you mean don’t ever suggest that Frank might be killed?”

“Don’t say it,” I said quietly. “I know what might happen. I know.”

“Do you?” he asked, sounding weary. “I was convinced a moment ago that you thought we were almost home free. That if we gave up Nathan Cook to them, they would send Frank out, and that would be that.”

I almost denied it but couldn’t.

“You’re right. I just wanted to believe — Never mind, it was foolish.”

“No,” he said, “just human. And I really do apologize for making you so angry. I would have picked another way to get the point across, but midnight is getting closer, Hocus plans a call, and this seemed like it might be a fast and sure method to get you to change gears. Anyway, I didn’t want you to say anything to them about Mr. Cook just yet.”

“Couldn’t you just ask me not to?”

“Because you’re noted for doing as you’re told?”

I had no answer for that.

“I thought so,” he said.

Frank’s alive, I told myself. Hold on to that. Hold on. If he can put up with whatever they’re doing to him, you can deal with one lousy Texan.

But it was a mistake, thinking of what might be happening to him. I swallowed past a lump in my throat. “Yeah, well,” I said, “sorry about slapping you.”

“Irene.”

“What?” I said, not looking at him.

“What you’ve been doing — that hasn’t just been busywork.”

I sighed. “Don’t lie to me, Cassidy. I might look like I need a lie, but I don’t.”

“I’m not lying. If you think about it, I’ve told you the truth. You don’t always want to hear it.”

I didn’t reply.

“Not that I blame you,” he added.

“Thanks for that, anyway.”

“Listen to me now. It’s always better for us to know as much as we can about the takers. Knowing who, in all likelihood, took them that night — that gives us something to bargain with.”

“You just told me you could have bargained with a lie.”

“Better if we can bargain with the truth. Much better.”

Somehow I just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm over that. I felt as if I’d spent precious hours hunting for a lost key, only to come back home and find out all the locks had been changed.

He put a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go in.”

“I’m tired, Cassidy.”

“I know you are,” he said. “I know you are.”

I looked up at him. He looked sad. I was going to apologize again for slapping him, but his cell phone rang.

Everything began to change with that call.

29

“SO WE’RE ALL SET?”

It was Samuel’s voice. He tried to listen, to pay attention. It was better than thinking about the restraints, about being back in the bed. Better than thinking about the curtain being around the bed again, cutting off his view.

Bret had drugged him again, given him something mild in a drink that made him less upset about being placed in the restraints again. But now, awake, he had nothing to take the edge off. Better to be alert, he told himself.

He was marveling at how easily he had awakened this time. He did not feel nearly so groggy. And the dizziness was not so severe. Had Bret cut down the dosage?

“Of course we are, Samuel.” A woman’s voice. “Don’t you trust me to do anything right?”

The stranger’s voice startled him. He felt a deep sense of shame that yet another person would see him like this, then set aside those feelings. Pay attention, he told himself again.

“No, Faye, as a matter of fact, I don’t.” Samuel. “Especially not after you broke that bottle of after-shave.”

“I wasn’t the one who broke it!”

“You were the one who didn’t pack it right,” Samuel said.

“It doesn’t matter. Thanks for making the arrangements, Faye.” Bret’s voice, placating.

“The only one who has made any kind of mistake so far is you, Sammy boy,” Faye said.

“Don’t call me that,” Samuel said. Couldn’t she hear his anger? Frank wondered.

“Did he tell you?” Faye went on. “He screwed up the fax yesterday.”

There was a silence.

“Bret doesn’t care,” Samuel said. “You think you can divide us, but you can’t.”

“This isn’t about division. Bret’s not interested in me. But he’s interested in knowing how you really sent that fax. I can see it in his face.”

“No,” Bret said. “Samuel doesn’t have to tell me anything he doesn’t want to.”

Another hesitation. “She’s trying to make a big deal out of nothing!” Sam’s voice, exasperated. “I couldn’t get the computer to work with the pay phone at the airport. So I used the hard copy you gave me and sent it on an actual fax machine. Big deal.”

“Sorry you had problems,” Bret said. “Must have been frustrating.”

“It was,” Samuel said. Frank could hear him gloating, heard his belief that Faye hadn’t caused the trouble she’d intended.

“Where was the fax machine?” Bret asked.

“There in the airport. A commercial one. Self-service.”

“Oh, so you didn’t have to hand it to anyone else.” Frank heard the relief in Bret’s voice.

“No,” Samuel said. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Well, Faye, he didn’t make a mistake. He ran into unforeseen difficulties and found a creative way around them. Which is what an intelligent person does when he encounters the unexpected. A lesser person would have given up.”

“You still haven’t heard just how creative this greater person was. How do you suppose he paid for the fax?”

Silence.

“He stole a woman’s wallet,” she said.

“Faye, I removed one credit card from a wallet and returned the wallet and everything else that was in it to the woman’s bag — all before she even knew it was missing. The charges for the fax are so small, she’ll never have to pay them herself. So try some new way to make trouble.”

“Faye, did you have some problem with the contractor?” Bret asked.

“None,” she answered quickly. “Now, when do I get to take a peek at our guest?”

“You don’t,” Bret answered. “It’s very difficult for him to be in this situation. It would make him feel ashamed to have others see him as a hostage.”

“But he’s asleep! He’ll never know!”

“Doesn’t anyone’s dignity matter to you, Faye?” Samuel asked.

“Honestly! As if a guy who’s knocked out on morphine is going to know who looked at him.”

“People aren’t exhibits,” Samuel said. “This isn’t a zoo or a carnival. Right now, I feel a greater affinity to that man than I do to you. I know what it’s like to have someone else view you as a curiosity. It stinks.”

“We have a lot to do,” Bret said. “We should get to work.”

Faye seemed to understand that it was time to drop the subject. Frank kept listening, but most of what he heard was the sound of the trunks being moved.

He listened and lay wondering why Bret had allowed this wakefulness. When he wasn’t thinking about that, he was thinking about the cop in the story that Bret had given him to read, and Bakersfield, and men who had always made him proud of being a cop, men who had always treated him like a son.

Again and again he thought of Irene, and things he wished he had told her more times than he had.

30

I WATCHED AS CASSIDY’S FACE CHANGED, from weary to suddenly alert. He didn’t say much to the caller. He listened, looked at his watch, and said, “Great. I’ll call back just as soon as I can.”

He put the phone away and smiled. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up, but our luck just might be changing. That was Hank. We’ve had a couple of breaks.

“First, seems a fellow who just got back in town picked up his newspapers from his neighbor’s house and saw a familiar face on the front page of the Las Piernas News Express. It was Samuel Ryan’s photo that drew his attention. Seems he was hired by Ryan — who was using a different name — to do some peculiar unpermitted work on a building. So after wrestling with his conscience and calling his lawyer, he’s on his way down to the department to have a little talk. But from the sounds of it, there’s a possibility that this man can lead us to where they’re holding Frank.”

“What kind of peculiar work?”

“No real details on that yet,” he said.

“Cassidy—”

“A soundproof room of some sort.”

“Oh, Christ….”

“Don’t think like that. It won’t help.”

“No, no — of course not,” I said. “You’re right. Any minute now, we could know where he is. That’s what’s important.”

I was trying hard to convince myself, and he knew it, but he was kind enough not to point it out. He went on to say that the other break had been here in Bakersfield. Detectives had spent time checking out rental car agencies, asking if anyone recalled customers who smelled of aftershave. They’d come across one agency that said no customer smelling of after-shave had been in, but one of their vans had come back reeking of the stuff.

They had been a little surprised, because the van had been rented and returned to them by a woman — who matched the description of the woman in Hocus. The detectives had the van at the crime lab now, but the fragrance had definitely matched the scent on the abandoned “old man’s” clothing.

Her name, according to their records and her driver’s license, was Faye Taft. She had given an address and a credit card number. The rental car agency was near the airport — and Bakersfield PD had learned that Faye Taft also had a pilot’s license. Her flight plans had been to Torrance, and she had left just after the incident at the library. The Torrance Airport confirmed that her plane had been there, but she’d then flown on to Las Piernas.

“Do you think it could have been a woman who approached you?” Cassidy asked.

“Maybe, but for reasons I can’t exactly name, I’m fairly sure it was a man. Besides, if the person who approached me showed up at the rental counter, they would have smelled the aftershave.”

“Well, the fellows at the airport did say she had a large trunk with her, so maybe our magician friend Bret was with her. In any case, between information that’s coming in on Ryan and Neukirk and now this, everybody is pretty busy back in Las Piernas. I think I’m going to have to send Pete on home.”

Pete was happy to go, antsy to get on the road. Rachel was more reluctant. “I don’t want to leave you here alone,” she said.

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “And I’m not alone.”

“You know what I meant.”

“Yes. Thanks. I’ll be coming home soon. Maybe you could help Jack to hang in there.”

“Sure,” she said, and gave me a fierce hug before she left.

The call from Hocus came in right at midnight.

“Good evening, Irene, Tom.” Samuel again.

“Evening, Samuel,” Cassidy answered. “Bret still on his way back from Bakersfield?”

I looked over to him in surprise, then realized what he was doing.

“Now, Tom, that’s the sort of question you know we’ll never answer.”

“I just figured he was the magician in the family. The master of disguise and all that.”

“I have talents of my own,” Samuel said.

“Really? I mean, I’m not surprised, but I guess I supposed the medical training would take up a lot of time.”

“It did. But as it so happens — perhaps Irene will recognize this.” Matching his voice to that of the old man’s, he said, “ ‘As long as you like, honey.’ ”

“So it was you,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, laughing. “And since you were expecting this call, you must have discovered our note. Now, what we’d like to know is, how are things coming along?”

“Well, as I mentioned, it’s tough getting things done on the weekend,” Cassidy said.

“And yet Irene has narrowed the field, hasn’t she? She’s even gone to the place where Powell died. If she’s willing to sit around and talk to the woman her husband was once in love with, she’s making a real effort, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Cassidy said. “I think that shows you that we’re doing our best here. She’s been through a lot today, trying to find out who this man could be.”

“Irene, you’re being very quiet,” he said.

“Sorry, Samuel, I’m just tired.”

“Poor Irene. Cassidy is a man of great endurance. Did you know that? In high school, he was a miler.”

“A miler?” I asked.

“In track and field,” Samuel said. “I could name some of his times, and the races he won. It’s how he got to college. On a track scholarship.”

“I’m flattered,” Cassidy said. “You must have made a real effort to find that out. You interested in track, Samuel?”

“No, Cassidy, in you. You’ve become a specialty of mine. I know all sorts of things about you. I know the name of the little town in Texas where you grew up. I know your high school. I’ve been there. People are very friendly there.”

“Yes, they are,” Cassidy said, but he shifted in his chair. His forehead furrowed with tension.

“Why’d you go into law enforcement, Cassidy?”

Cassidy relaxed a little. “Oh, like a lot of people who get into it, I wanted to make a difference. Is that why you got into medicine?”

“No. I’m not really in medicine, of course, although I know as much as any doctor. I didn’t become an EMT because I was into the humanity of it all, Cassidy. I’m not very fond of most of humanity, for one thing. But it takes a lot to hold my interest — I had such a thrilling childhood, you see. Being a paramedic is far more exciting to me than working in a hospital would be. All except the emergency department. But I like my job better. I like racing to the scene, hearing the sirens, finding everything in chaos — saving them or not saving them. It’s up to me. Just me. We’re alike in that way, aren’t we, Cassidy?”

“There are definite similarities, Samuel,” he said.

“We even have rather tragic beginnings to our stories,” Samuel said.

Cassidy was silent. I was startled to notice he was gripping the phone cord. Cassidy — tense. I watched his face. In the past forty-eight hours, almost constantly in his company, I had not seen this look. He was shaken.

“Yes, that little town in Texas,” Samuel went on. “That’s as far as anyone looks, isn’t it? Thomas Cassidy, track star, likeable guy, very popular. They don’t ask who you dated in high school, do they? They don’t find out that you didn’t date the girls from the local school, do they?”

I saw Cassidy’s gaze wander. I wrote a note: “Cassidy? What’s going on?”

“They do the background checks, but they don’t ask the right people,” Samuel went on. “The jealous women. You met her at a track meet, I hear. From a rival school. But her town wasn’t too far from yours, right?”

Cassidy was ignoring the note. He had closed his eyes.

“What’s the point to all of this, Samuel?” I said.

“You, of all people, should be interested in this, Irene. Your husband’s life is in his hands.”

“So he dated someone from a rival town. Not something that exactly rocks my world, Samuel.”

Cassidy opened his eyes now, seemed to come back into focus. “Not much to that, is there? How’s Faye doing?”

Samuel laughed. “Who cares?”

“Well, you seem to depend on her quite a bit.”

“She isn’t important. Women are not important, Cassidy. Even the beautiful ones. Especially them. Now, the young woman you loved was — you’ll forgive me, Cassidy — she was rather plain.”

“She’s not our concern at the moment,” Cassidy said, but the tension was back in his voice.

“She is if I say she is. And I say so!” Samuel shouted. When he spoke again, his voice was soft and low. “I say she is, and that she was plain.”

“You get that from those jealous women you talked to?” Cassidy asked. Something was still not right.

“No, I saw her picture in her high school yearbook. She wasn’t even Miss Personality or any of the other things they give to the ugly girls.”

Nothing.

“Look,” I said, “as fascinating as this is—”

“Shut up!” Samuel said. “No one is talking to you. No one. Cassidy, aren’t you going to defend her?”

Silence.

“I don’t need anyone to defend me,” I said.

“Once again, Ms. Kelly, you are butting in. No one is talking about defending you. I meant Johnnie.”

“Johnnie?” I asked. Cassidy was pale, and a fine sheen of sweat covered his forehead and upper lip.

“Yes, isn’t that delightful? A Texas name. Johnnie Lee Meadows. Can you believe someone would force a girl — an ugly girl — to go through life with that name?”

“She wasn’t ugly,” Cassidy said. There was steel in his voice now.

“Plain. Totally unremarkable.”

“No, there you’re wrong.”

I felt panic rising. If I spoke, I angered Samuel, which might in turn cause him to harm Frank. My only hope seemed to be to get through to Cassidy. I wrote another note: “Come back to me. Please. I need your help.”

He read it, seemed to snap back out of whatever spell Samuel was weaving.

“You surprised me, Cassidy,” Samuel was saying. “I thought you’d have your pick of the girls.”

“I did,” he said. “Tell me, how did you meet Faye?”

“I can’t seem to make you understand that she is no longer of interest to me.”

“Well, we’re even, then. Johnnie Lee is dead, and she’s been dead for many years.”

“It still hurts, doesn’t it, Cassidy?”

“Of course it does, Samuel. You still feel sad about your father, right?”

“Yes, but to be very honest, Julian was the greater loss. My father betrayed us. All of us. But Julian didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

“You knew Julian pretty well, I guess.”

“Yes. And I look forward to seeing him again.”

Cassidy hesitated only slightly before saying, “Tell me about him.”

“He’s dead, and soon we will be, too. Perhaps Detective Harriman will be joining us. That’s up to you. Good-bye, Cassidy. I’ve enjoyed knowing you.”

“Samuel—”

But Samuel had hung up.

The cell phone rang before I could ask Cassidy what the hell had happened.

“Yes, sir,” he said. He listened, smiled broadly. “I was hoping that would be long enough,” he said. “That confirms the address, then. I’m on my way—”

He paused, listened again. He lost the smile. “Sir….”

He glanced over at me, then looked down. “Certainly. I understand. Yes, I’ll explain.”

He hung up, and it was a moment before he looked up at me. “Samuel talked long enough to let us trap the number,” he said. “Between that and the information from the contractor, they’ve got an address. They’re already getting set up down there. There’s a plane waiting at the Kern County Airport. It will get you home faster than driving will. An officer will meet you at the Las Piernas Airport and take you to the site. I’ll warn you that they probably won’t let you close, but—”

“Cassidy,” I interrupted.

“I won’t be going with you,” he continued.

“What?”

“I’m off the case.”

31

THE OLD MAN PEERED cautiously through the blinds, angled so that he could look out at the cruiser across the street. The officer in the car was watchful, but well past the point where boredom had set in. Would he fall asleep?

The old man wouldn’t. He slept little now. He was fully dressed, waiting. He was always waiting. For almost twelve years now he had waited. He had thought of them each day when he awakened, each night, until exhaustion overtook memory. It was worse during the month of June. In June he hardly slept at all.

He had waited on that Father’s Day for the boys to identify him, to at least mention a policeman.

But the boys hadn’t spoken. Even their drawings had never included a policeman. He knew, because he’d asked Frank Harriman about them.

He had almost confessed everything to Frank. More than once. But each time, he’d thought of Diana Harriman, thought of the cruelty of telling Frank of his betrayal. It should be someone else, he told himself, but never sought another priest.

Instead he waited. He woke up every morning, wondering, Will this be the day?

Three years of hell went by. Silent hell. When the boys started talking, he was sure the first words out of their mouths would be his name.

Instead they didn’t speak of it at all. Did they know then? Did they know how their silence punished him? Made his nights sleepless? Left him wondering when he did sleep, if he had shouted the truth in dreams?

Now this surveillance. He looked back out at the cruiser. Had Cassidy asked them to wait in plain sight, knowing how it would chafe at him?

There was a soft tapping at the back door.

He glanced at his reflection in a hallway mirror, straightened his tie.

“It never hurts to look your best,” he could hear his mother’s voice say, somewhere deep inside his head.

The tapping came again.

He opened the door.

“You,” he said, mildly surprised.

“Us,” came a whispered voice, as others stepped out of the shadows.

32

IT WAS TOO DARK INSIDE the small plane to read the business card I held in my hand, but I skimmed my fingertip over the print, over the embossed insignia of the Las Piernas Police Department and the name Thomas Cassidy. I didn’t need light to know what it said; I had looked at it a dozen times before takeoff.

“Detective,” it said, along with all the other official humbug. On the back of the card, nestled against the palm of my hand, in bold, blue strokes, he had written his home phone number. “Say hello to Frank for me,” he had said as he’d handed it to me. “Tell him to give me a call when he’s up to it.”

I had taken it, not nearly so able to pretend I had faith that I would be able to give it to my husband. “I’ll let you know what happens,” I had said, knowing that for Cassidy, giving me his card was a way to stay connected to the case. For me, the card was a talisman, a protection from panic.

Bredloe had decided that Cassidy needed a few hours’ sleep. That was the story. They needed someone in place in Las Piernas, Bredloe said, needed someone who could take over immediately. It would take Cassidy about three hours to drive back, about an hour and a half to fly. Too long either way. And Cassidy sounded tired, he said.

That was the official line, but Cassidy didn’t buy it. He figured Bredloe had listened to that tape and worried that his negotiator was not in control, had shown a lack of judgment. Worries Cassidy couldn’t blame him for, not with the life of one of his officers on the line.

“Who was Johnnie Lee?” I asked.

“The woman of my dreams,” he said dryly. “Literally. The dream I had this morning.”

“She was the teller? You knew her?”

“Yes. The negotiation part of the dream — that never happened. I was just a kid, just out of high school, trying to decide if I would survive my first year of college without her.

“That summer, I tried to see her every chance I got. She worked in the bank. She’d get a fifteen-minute break at ten-fifteen in the morning. I’d go over there, spend her little break with her, cool my heels until lunch, show up again, and take her to lunch. I did that every day, waited around that damn town for every minute I could spend with her.”

He paused and swallowed hard. “Except — that last morning, when I showed up, the bank was surrounded by cops — wouldn’t let me near it. Local sheriff was a hothead,” he said. “Went in with guns blazing. Used to brag that thanks to him, the robbers didn’t get a dime out of that bank.” He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “She was a remarkable young woman,” he said, but nothing more.

“I’ll talk to Bredloe,” I said.

“No,” he said.

When I abandoned arguments he simply would not respond to and began to plead frantically with him to fly back with us, he said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make this any harder than it already is.”

Calm.

I went into the kitchen, talked to Bea, and made a phone call to Cecilia. I gathered my belongings and waited in Bea’s car while she gave Cassidy instructions on locking up.

I should have been glad to know that they had located Frank, but I was filled with uneasiness. He was still in the hands of Hocus. The man who best knew Hocus, who was best prepared to meet them, was left behind, packing up his gear in Bakersfield. Our disagreements meant nothing. I trusted Thomas Cassidy, would trust him with Frank’s life.

Now I was sailing off without an anchor.

“When do you suppose you’ll get around to telling me what this evening’s performance was all about?” Bea asked, snapping me out of my self-pity.

Leaning close so that I could be heard over the engines, I told her all I knew about why her son was a hostage.

We were met at the airport by a black-and-white and rushed to the scene or, I should say, the outskirts of the scene. The only people who were kept farther away were media and the public. We were only slightly closer than the media. Very slightly.

All attention was focused on the windowless face of a warehouse about a block away from us, all four sides of the square building lit up by police arc lights. A dull, ocher-colored building, hardly worthy of any notice, it now stood front and center, a solo act on a dilapidated stage.

The whole area hummed with the sound of generators, truck motors, voices.

We were in an older part of town, on a stretch of wide boulevard that was once a commercial district but was now falling into ruin. Easily a quarter of the buildings on this same block were abandoned. There were a couple of old hotels turned into low-income apartment buildings; almost all the other doorways had locked grating pulled in place. From where we were stationed, I could see two or three other warehouses mixed in with a storefront church, a pawnshop, a thrift store, and a used-record shop. Not much new merchandise for sale.

The Las Piernas Police Department had apparently reacted swiftly. The phone call from Samuel had ended just two hours earlier, and the neighborhood surrounding the warehouse was clearly under police control. On the inner perimeter a command post and primary negotiators’ area had been set up, and SWAT team members were already in position. Nearby, there were ambulances, a fire truck, a HazMat vehicle — for the hazardous materials team from the fire department — a bomb squad truck, and a number of other specially equipped vehicles. Some belonged to SWAT, others obviously contained communications devices.

All buildings adjoining the warehouse property were evacuated. Not many folks were displaced.

Pete, Rachel, and Jack were waiting for us in our area, one set aside for Frank’s close friends and family. Guarded by a pair of uniformed officers — whose job it was to keep us separated from press and action — I found it difficult not to feel that we were hostages of another sort. Forbidden to take part in the activities, Pete was distraught that Cassidy would not be handling negotiations. When I asked him who would be taking Cassidy’s place, he said, “Guy by the name of Lewis. He’s good, but….”

“Cassidy’s better.”

Pete nodded.

Henry Freeman came over to our area. He was looking tired.

“Hi, Hank,” I said.

He smiled. “You’ve been around Detective Cassidy too long. How is he?”

“Not too good, last time I saw him.”

“Don’t let Captain Bredloe know I said this, but I think he should have given him another chance.”

“Me too. But I guess we’ll have to accept Detective Lewis. You work with him, too?”

“Yes. If this lasts much longer, they’ll get someone to give me a break. That’s all they needed to do with Detective Cassidy.”

“Think Lewis will come back here to talk to us?” I asked.

Freeman ran a finger around the inside of his collar. “Not really,” he said.

“Well, I won’t second-guess him,” I said. “I’d prefer he stays busy helping Frank. Can you tell us anything about what’s going on?”

I heard a voice shout, “Freeman! Get your ass over here!”

Freeman turned red.

“Lewis?” I asked.

He nodded quickly and left.

Thirty minutes passed, with no apparent change in the activities. Feeling penned in, I told the others I was taking a walk over to the media corral and started to leave, only to be halted by one of our keepers. A little testy, I fished press credentials out of my purse, flashed them under his nose, and told him to live with it.

I approached the press gathering cautiously, thankful that attention was on the building, where a helicopter had moved in and was hovering overhead. I felt strange, maybe like the first salamander or whatever it was that originally ventured onto dry land. The water would never look the same.

Taking the plunge all the same, I walked up to Mark Baker, who, to my great fortune, was near the back of the pack. I tapped him on the shoulder — a reach — and he turned to look at me.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” I whispered.

He frowned, but nodded and followed me. When we were beyond the outer perimeter, he said, “Look, I can’t get too far away from the action.”

“What action?”

“There’s a rumor that the roof is soaked with gasoline. SWAT team could smell it from other rooftops. Building was built in the 1930s, has a tar-paper roof. They’re saying the place could go anytime.”

I stared at him.

“Sorry — sorry. I didn’t mean to just say that—”

“You’re stealing my lines, Mark. I came over to offer you my humble and abject apology. My sincere and humble and groveling—”

“Stop,” he said. “Just stop that nonsense.”

“Let me say it, Mark. I’m sorry I even thought of blaming you for what’s happened. It doesn’t have anything to do with you or your story, and never really could have. I guess I wanted to find some reason for it, and before I had one — I’m sorry. It wasn’t right.”

He sighed. “Irene, you think I didn’t understand that? I wish to God that John had put someone else on this story—”

“I don’t. No one else would tell me what’s going on without trying to pry a quote out of me.”

He smiled. “No quote? Why the hell did I follow you over here?”

“Hope springs eternal, I guess.”

He looked toward the building, solemn now. “Got to have hope.”

“What’s happening in there?” I asked, trying to sound braver than I was feeling.

“The police have cut the phone lines and power, had SWAT deliver a throw phone. But the takers aren’t talking on it yet. There’s some kind of backup generator that’s supplying power to some of the floors. The team in the helicopter has used a FLIR — forward-looking infrared devices — you know about them?”

I nodded. “Thermal sensors, right? The devices that can pick up body heat?”

“Yes. They’re also called thermal imaging devices. They can pick up anything that gives off more than two degrees of heat.”

“The building is about five stories high, though—”

“Doesn’t matter. They’ve got them so sensitive now, multiple stories are no problem. You’d have to go to some extreme measures to defeat them.”

“What have they picked up?”

“Two people in the building, on one of the upper floors — third floor.” He hesitated, then added, “One lying prone. Hasn’t moved much.”

I bit my lower lip. He put a hand on my shoulder.

“These guys are the best,” Mark said. “I’ve seen them pull off some amazing shit.”

“Thanks for telling me, Mark.”

“I wasn’t sure I should. I figured I’d want to know, if it was my wife in there.”

“Yes.”

“Look, I’ve got to get back over there. You want me to walk you back?”

I shook my head. “No, I’ll be all right. Go on ahead.”

Reluctantly he started to go. He paused, then turned back. “That other business — I just want you to know, Hocus wasn’t my source. I won’t say who it was, but it wasn’t them. I didn’t want you to think… well, it wasn’t them.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It wouldn’t matter to me anyway.”

“No, I guess not. See you.”

He hurried off.

Slowly I walked back. The cop who had hassled me had been replaced, and I hoped I hadn’t caused him to get in trouble. The new cop apparently recognized me, because he didn’t keep me from walking into the roped-off area.

Jack took one look at my face and said, “My God, what’s happened?”

I didn’t have to answer. We were distracted when everyone who was watching the building gave a collective shout — as the roof burst into flames.

33

WE STOOD IN A HUDDLE, clutching one another, looking and not wanting to look, as flames spiked up into the building’s smoky crown. Black and billowing clouds rose from the roof, carrying ashes that fell on us as swirling, papery rain. The helicopter pulled sharply away. Over nearby police radios, we heard the crackle of voices raised — the staccato of urgent commands.

Get him out of there, I prayed silently. Please, please, please.

“Why aren’t they going in?” Bea asked angrily.

“SWAT team has to clear the building,” Pete said. “Can’t risk the firefighters’ lives. If they can’t get the taker out of there, they may just let it burn.”

To our horror, for long moments it seemed that was exactly what would happen.

The roof suddenly collapsed with a loud boom. The walls of the upper story gave way — bricks flew outward, plummeting to the street in a hot and deadly rain. At the top of the building sparks outdistanced flames, rising orange and bright even as the fire fell. More smoke followed as the blaze began to devour the next floor of the building.

Apparently a signal was given by the SWAT team soon after the roof collapsed, for a great rush toward the building began — orderly but rapid movement by men dressed in yellow slickers and masks, carrying heavy hoses and equipment.

As the interior fire-fighting team went in, another group worked from the exterior of the building. The streets below became slick and shiny with water. Sirens sounded as more trucks arrived.

At one point a set of television lights turned our way, and others soon followed, stark and bright. We turned from them like cave creatures, unused to the sun. Lewis barked some orders and the police moved us out of range. Denied the treat of capturing our tense faces, cameras and lights swung back to the building.

The fire burned for over two hours. Bea and Pete were in bad shape by the end of that time, both weeping openly. As the rest of us tried to shore them up, I found myself outwardly numb, unable to display my emotions. Within, I was not far from collapsing like that roof.

Firefighters were still moving in and out of the building when I saw one of their officials walk up to Captain Bredloe, glance at us, and turn his body so that we could see only his back. I recognized the signs.

“No,” I said aloud as I watched Bredloe cover his eyes. “No….”

The others followed my gaze. Now Bredloe was talking to someone in a blue jacket, a man who used his radio. The man turned toward the building, began walking toward it. The bright yellow letters on his jacket said “Coroner.”

Bredloe began walking toward us. Bea grasped my hand. I wanted Bredloe to stop, to never reach us — but he kept drawing closer, and now I could see his face was drawn into a terrible frown.

“We don’t know where Frank is,” he said. “I want you to understand that before you hear anything else. Do you understand? We don’t know where he is.”

We all nodded.

“There’s a body in the building,” he said. “We don’t know who it is. Coroner is going in there now.”

I felt myself sway. Jack moved closer, let me lean on him. Bea was trembling.

“It’s not Frank!” Pete half shouted. He walked off, reached the limit of the police tape around us, and began pacing, swearing to himself in Italian. Rachel watched him in silence.

“Perhaps we should all sit down,” Bredloe suggested. Pete and Rachel stayed standing; everyone else moved to a chair. Bea began crying quietly again.

Think, I told myself. Think. You’ll have all kinds of time to panic later, hours and hours to fall apart. Right now, just think.

“Only one body?” I asked.

“Yes — so far. It may take us a day to sift through the debris. But we were watching the building with thermal sensors before the fire broke out, and there were only two people in the building — one who moved about and one who stayed stationary. What’s more, the body is in the part of the building where Ryan and Neukirk had special construction done.”

“The soundproof room?”

He nodded. “We asked the fire department to try to get to that area first, because we assumed that might be where they were keeping Frank.”

“And that was the area where….”

“Where the remains were found,” he finished for me. “Yes. The fire department believes a separate fire was started in that room — using an accelerant, perhaps gasoline — that’s what was used on the roof. The chemical analysis will take time. And while it will take some time to make any final determination, they believe the fire in that room may have started after the roof fire. It fits with the last thing the helicopter saw — the person who was moving around in the building left that area not long before the rooftop fire started. Otherwise, the men in the helicopter would have detected the fire in the room before they had to pull out.”

“Any sign of that person?” I asked. “The one who was moving around?”

“No,” Bredloe said. “But we’re searching the area.”

“The arithmetic is all wrong, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” Bea asked. She had stopped crying, was wiping at her face.

“There should have been four people in that building,” I said. “Frank, Bret Neukirk, Samuel Ryan, and a woman — Faye Taft — Samuel’s girlfriend.”

As I said her name, I thought of Samuel’s voice as he’d spoken to us during the last phone call, of his chilling lack of regard for her.

“Yes,” Bredloe said. “Two of them were out of the building before we arrived.”

“And at least one of the other two knew you were coming.”

“Why do you say that?” Bredloe asked.

“They were ready with the gasoline on the roof, and had some method of igniting it without going up there, right?”

“Yes. The arson investigators will find the ignition device, I’m sure.”

“Unless it leads them to Frank, I’m not sure I care.”

He didn’t reply.

“There are other signs that this was all set up in advance,” I said. “Ryan and Neukirk have contacted me by phone several times in the last few days. They never once allowed themselves to be traced — until now. I think they wanted to be traced. Ryan picked a topic that was bound to elicit an emotional reaction from Cassidy. Maybe they even wanted you to do just what you did — remove him, at least temporarily, from the case.”

“Why would they want to do that?” Bredloe asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe because Cassidy is getting a feel for them, is starting to anticipate them to some degree. Maybe if he had been here, he would have reacted differently from Lewis. I don’t know.”

“The negotiator was never really allowed to get involved in this one,” Bredloe said.

“No, I guess not.” I reconsidered. “Maybe it wasn’t to get Cassidy off the case. Maybe it was a distraction — they knew you’d be concerned with Cassidy’s reaction — and might not stop to think about the length of the call, about the fact that they were letting you trace them.”

“You underestimate the ego of this type of taker,” a voice said.

I looked up to see a balding man of medium height standing nearby. He was thin, wearing a brown suit that looked a little too big for him. He had a pleasant enough face.

“Detective Lewis,” Bredloe said, and made introductions all around.

“Takers tend to fit certain profiles, Ms. Kelly,” Lewis went on, even though no one asked him to. “Paranoid schizophrenic, psychotic depressive, antisocial personality, or inadequate personality. We’ve already seen that Neukirk and Ryan are not true political terrorists, as are their friends in jail. Lang and Colson believed all along that they were part of an anarchist organization. Neukirk and Ryan gave them an outlet for their needs.”

Pete, who had moved nearer and listened to this, made a snorting sound. “Didn’t take you long to figure everything out, did it?”

“How do you know what Lang and Colson’s motives are?” I asked. “Have they talked?”

“No,” Lewis said, “but—”

“Have you checked Lang’s and Colson’s family backgrounds?” I asked. “Or did you stop once you knew where they learned to work with explosives? Anyone look back beyond their years in the military?”

Bredloe looked uncomfortable. “We haven’t had much time. We’ve concentrated on Ryan and Neukirk.”

I decided not to mention that Lang and Colson had been under suspicion days before Hocus took Frank; decided against suggesting that perhaps Lieutenant Carlson had been too busy hassling Frank to allow time to thoroughly investigate his prisoners. I didn’t say it, but the anger was there all the same. “No matter which one of Detective Lewis’s four categories Ryan and Neukirk fit into,” I said, “we already know how the damage was done. We also know they are masters of the art of distraction.”

The next bit wasn’t so easy to say, but I swallowed hard and went on. “I don’t believe the body in that building belongs to Frank. They still need him as a bargaining chip. Making you think it was Frank was important, though. I think they’ve kept most of your resources busy while they were up to something else. Exactly what, I don’t know, but I’m fairly certain they just got rid of someone who had outlived her usefulness to them.”

“Her usefulness?” Bredloe asked. “The young woman?”

Before I could answer, his radio squawked.

“Bredloe,” he answered. “Hold on a minute, Carlos.”

He stood up and walked away from us, put an earphone in his ear. But he watched me the whole time.

Lewis was saying something about leaving things to professionals, but no one was listening. We were watching Bredloe.

He walked back over to us. “It’s not Frank,” he said.

“Oh, thank God!” Bea said, then clasped her hand over her mouth. “I don’t mean to sound happy about whoever—”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Harriman,” Pete said. “We all feel the same.”

“Coroner says the pelvis indicates a female,” Bredloe said.

“Pelvis?” Lewis said. “You mean they only had bones—”

“Yes,” Bredloe said, cutting him off. “Lewis, why don’t you wait for me over at the command post? I’ll be along shortly.”

“Yes, sir,” Lewis said, apparently not in the least perturbed by the dismissal.

“How did you know?” Bredloe asked me once Lewis had gone.

“I didn’t. I hoped.”

He was silent.

“No,” I said, “that’s not true. There were reasons I hoped — the ones I gave you. And remembering that last phone call, the way Samuel sounded whenever we talked about her. Remember? He said, ‘I can’t seem to make you understand that she is no longer of interest to me.’ ”

“Hmm. Yes, I remember.”

“A couple I talked to — the Szals? They said that even Bret Neukirk disliked Samuel’s attitude toward women — Bret thought he simply used them.”

After a moment he said, “The firemen found some gas tanks up there. You know anything about that?”

“No,” I said. “Sorry. What kind of gas?”

“Nitrogen. They think it might have been hooked up to the room somehow. Enough to asphyxiate someone, they said.”

We sat in silence, Bredloe’s thoughts seeming far away.

“Put Thomas Cassidy back on this case,” I said. “Please. He understands Ryan and Neukirk.”

“He undoubtedly does understand them,” Bredloe said. “That’s what he specializes in — understanding what drives people, what they want. But Hocus also knows what drives him, I’m afraid.”

“Just because—”

“I heard that tape, Irene,” he interrupted. “Even you would have to admit that the man is exhausted.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“Don’t underestimate Lewis,” he said. “When he’s under pressure, he’s a different man. After SWAT moved in, the intense pressure Lewis has been under for the last few hours was suddenly off, and what you just saw was as close as he gets to a hysterical reaction.” He turned to Pete. “A reaction no one need discuss outside this group. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Pete said.

“Shall I have a car take you home?” Bredloe asked me.

“I’ll take them,” Jack offered. “I’ve got a van here.”

At home, the dogs and Cody gave me an exuberant greeting that went a long way toward holding off my own hysterical reaction. I got Bea settled in and went into the kitchen. Hank Freeman’s equipment was still set up. I supposed he would be back soon. I wasn’t sure what all of the equipment did, but I could figure out which line led back to the recorder. I unplugged it, looked at the clock, and made the call anyway.

“Cassidy,” he answered.

“You’re awake.”

“Yes. Tape recorder on?”

“No, Hank’s not back yet. But I suppose they’ll know I called you?”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t worry over it.”

I told him what had happened, only leaving out most of my conversation with Bredloe.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Hanging in there,” I said. “And you?”

“Tuckered out, I’ll admit,” he said. “But if you hadn’t called to let me know what had gone on, I’d be about as restless as a toad on a griddle. Maybe now I’ll sleep. Thanks for calling.”

I reconnected the recorder just as Hank Freeman came in the door. He sleepily checked over the equipment, then looked puzzled. He pressed a button on one device, which made a phone number appear on a display. He smiled.

“How is he?” he asked, obviously familiar with the number.

“Fine,” I said.

“I thought he’d be… let’s see… ‘nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs’?”

“No, I got the toad—”

“On a griddle,” he finished for me.

I smiled. “Couch okay for you tonight?”

He nodded, yawning. “Don’t bother folding it out. I’m so tired, I could sleep on the floor.”

He was asleep before I turned out all the lights.

Cody, who considered sleeping on the bed itself to be a cat privilege extended to certain humans as a courtesy, would usually not allow the dogs to come too near it. This night he magnanimously let them curl up on the rug within reach of my hand. He snuggled up to me, near my heart, and purred loudly.

I lay awake for a long time.

It was good to be home, just not quite good enough.