by Jan Burke
The phone was ringing. In the next second Cassidy was pounding on the bedroom door, calling my name. I stumbled out of the chair in a panic. “It’s open!” I called toward the door, and snatched up the phone.
“Hello,” I half shouted into the receiver. Cassidy entered the room quietly.
There was silence on the other end of the line, then a dial tone.
I hung up. I didn’t try to hide my disappointment.
“Too short,” I heard Freeman call from the other room.
“Make sure our friends caught that, Hank. Tell them to be ready for the next one.”
I looked at the alarm clock. Seven in the morning. The sun was up. I had probably managed to get about forty minutes of sleep. I was so tired, my head felt too heavy for my neck. I realized I was still holding Frank’s pillow. I heard Freeman talking to someone else on a cellular phone. I looked up at Cassidy.
“If it’s Hocus, they’ll call back,” he said.
“You don’t know that!” I said angrily, but no sooner were the words out of my mouth than the phone rang again.
Cassidy smiled.
I took a breath, picked up the phone. I tried but couldn’t keep my voice steady when I said, “Hello?”
“Irene Kelly?” a young man’s voice said. The connection was slightly distorted, as if he were holding the phone too far away from his mouth. I heard noise in the background, the sound of cars going by.
“Yes,” I said.
“This is Hocus,” he said. “Sorry to do this to you on your day off, but you should go into work.”
“I’ve already—”
“We want to talk to you about your husband,” the voice continued, “but it’s important that you are certain we aren’t bluffing.”
“I know that you—”
“We’ll call you back in three hours.”
“Wait — I’ve already been down to the paper. I know you aren’t bluffing. I’ve seen the car.”
He didn’t respond, but the background noise told me he hadn’t hung up.
“I’ve seen the car,” I went on, giving Cassidy a panicked look. He gave me a thumbs-up sign, motioned me to continue. “I’ve seen it,” I stumbled on. “I saw the car — Frank’s car. I know you brought it back from Riverside. I just happened to go into the paper last night. You know, sometimes I have to follow up on a story. I went in last night. I saw the car and what was in the trunk….” I swallowed hard. “Oh, and I read the message on the mirror. I know you’re serious. I don’t doubt you in the least.”
No reply.
“Can I talk to Frank?”
Nothing. Still, he didn’t hang up.
“I’d just like to hear his voice,” I said. “Will you let me talk to him?”
Nothing other than the sound of a highway.
“Are you still there?” I asked.
Freeman walked in from the other room, holding a cellular phone. “They’ve got it,” he whispered to Cassidy, then left the room.
“Are you still there?” I asked again. “Please, let me talk to Frank. Just to know… well, you understand why.”
Freeman came in again, handed a note to Cassidy.
“If you won’t let me talk to him, would you please just say something?”
I waited, but there was no reply.
“Frank’s cousin is going to be out here from Texas,” I said, trying to remember the script I had gone over with Cassidy. “He’s due in today. They’ve planned this visit for weeks. He’s going to be worried when Frank isn’t here. Couldn’t I just talk to Frank for a moment, so that I could tell his cousin that he’s alive?”
I heard the sound of tires screeching on pavement in the background and, not long after, the squawk of a police radio and a dispatcher’s voice.
The police? My panic increased tenfold. If they caught this man, if they didn’t just follow him—
“Ms. Kelly?” a voice said. A different male voice.
“Yes?”
“Las Piernas Police. Would you please put Detective Cassidy on?”
“What have you done with the man who called?” I asked.
“He’s not here, ma’am. Please, just let me speak to—”
I handed the phone over before he could finish.
I waited impatiently while Cassidy talked to him. I couldn’t make out anything from Cassidy’s half of the conversation.
“What happened?” I asked as soon as Cassidy hung up.
“What you heard was a tape being played on a cheap little tape recorder. Phone booth is here in town — gas station near an industrial park. Nobody around this time on a Saturday morning, but of course we’ll be checking that out. Caller made sure you were answering the first time, then called back and pushed the play button.”
“That whole time — no one was there?”
“Probably not. We’ll dust everything for prints, look for witnesses.”
“You won’t find anything.”
“Let’s not make any predictions one way or the other, all right?”
I didn’t answer.
“I’m going to listen to Hank’s tape,” he said.
I hesitated, then followed him into the living room. Freeman, whose head made him look as if he were being paid by the cowlick, sat hunched over a recorder. “In spite of being second generation and all the other problems, it’s very clear,” he said. He played it for us. I listened to myself pleading and cringed.
Cassidy looked at his watch. “Should be getting another call at about ten o’clock.”
“What do we do until then?” I asked.
“Why don’t you try to get a little sleep?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Try.”
“The effort will keep me awake. Besides, I need to call his family.”
The phone rang before he could respond, and once again I leapt to answer it while Freeman scrambled to monitor the call.
“Kelly?”
“Hold on, John.”
I looked over to Cassidy. He motioned to Freeman to turn off the recorder. Freeman hit the button and pulled off his headset.
“You coming in?” John asked.
“No. It’s my day off, remember?”
“I know, but I thought you might want to talk to us before you talk to the competition.”
“Jesus, how do you come up with this crap? Can you just stop thinking about the front page for a minute or two?”
“I’m not trying to upset you, Irene,” he coaxed. “I like Frank, you know I do—”
“Don’t”
“What?”
“It’s been a long damned night, John. I have no — absolutely no — tolerance for bullshit right now. I’ve got to get off the phone. For all I know, a busy signal could cost Frank his life. By the way, the line is tapped.”
“You let the cops put a—”
“Yes.”
“What if one of your sources calls?”
“Not many have this number. I’ll tell them not to talk on this line.”
“Oh, that will be just great!”
“I can’t talk about it now—”
“Listen, you find some other way to call me. Get a cell phone, something — we need to talk.”
“Good-bye, John.”
Cassidy watched me for a moment, then said, “Perhaps we should discuss—”
Before he could say more, the phone rang again. Once again Freeman scrambled to get the headphones on and the tape in motion.
“Irene?”
“Hello, Mark,” I said in resignation. “Don’t say anything yet.”
Once again Cassidy drew a hand across his neck. Freeman turned off the machine and reluctantly removed his headphones.
“Okay,” I said.
“Got a minute to talk?” he asked.
“Did John just tell you to call?”
“I would have called anyway. Will you talk to me?”
Cassidy and Freeman were standing within a few feet of the phone, making no attempt to hide the
fact that they were listening to my half of the conversation. “Are you asking me as a friend or are you writing an article?” I asked.
“Both, I guess.”
“I don’t know, Mark. It’s not really a good time—”
“Look, I’m sorry. I asked John to put somebody else on it, but he won’t. I would have waited, but it’s only a matter of hours before you have other media on the way over there.”
“Other media? Here?” I should have thought of it, but nothing was coming to me as quickly as usual.
“So far, we’re the only paper that knows what happened last night, because nobody else monitors the scanners down here.”
“The police used land lines for anything sensitive,” I said.
“Even so, before long, someone in that bomb squad is going to talk to radio or television, and you’re going to have microphones in your face.”
Mark was saying something about how easy it would be for another reporter to find out where we lived, but I was only half listening. I kept thinking of Frank’s mother and sister learning about him from a television or radio broadcast or, worse, being approached for an interview. (“Mrs. Harriman, do you believe there is any hope that your son is still alive? How do you feel at a time like this?”) Thought about the number of times I’d seen a television crew broadcast the movements of a SWAT team as they took position in a hostage situation. “I can’t talk now,” I said to Mark, my self-control slipping. “I’ll call you later.”
I hung up. Cassidy and Freeman were watching me; I could see they wanted to ask me questions about Mark’s call. “Forget it,” I said.
Cassidy told Freeman to call Bredloe and ask for help with media control.
That wasn’t the answer, either, as far as I was concerned. “I’d rather make my own decisions about whether or not I’ll talk to the media,” I said.
“I can see why you feel that way,” Cassidy said. “And no one is trying to keep you from telling your story at some point down the road. But one of the key elements in any successful hostage negotiation is control of what gets out through the media. Hocus is going to watch television, listen to the radio, read the paper.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Think about the kinds of things this group has done so far. While we may never find anything rational behind all this, they seem to be anarchists of a sort. We’ve got two of them in the pokey, and they seem happy to become martyrs. Don’t you think they’re on a mission?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Hard to tell.”
He looked at me as if I were just being stubborn, which I now admit I was. At the time, I was feeling leaned upon, and stubborn seemed like a good response.
“Look at their possible motivations,” he persisted. “You think someone takes a cop for the ransom money?”
“No. I think they want their friends back out of jail.”
“Maybe as an immediate goal. But if these folks are making trouble for political reasons, they may be looking for a little airtime. Sometimes the members of these groups are willing to die for their cause — as far as they’re concerned, it will be worth it if y’all will help to make them famous.”
“If you’re about to hint that I’d be willing to let Frank join them on their ride to glory in exchange for a byline, stop now.”
“No, ma’am. Not at all. I’ll try to make myself clear. I’m telling you that if you want to write about it later, I’m all for it. No one is trying to prevent that. But for now, let us handle it, okay?”
I wasn’t sure it was in my nature to make that kind of promise. “You don’t know that Hocus is like other groups. Other groups would have published a list of demands. You don’t even know what they want.”
“I have a feeling, Irene, that they plan to tell us very soon. Now, I know you want to cooperate with the press. That’s only natural, given your line of work. At some point, you’ll be able to talk to anyone you want to talk to. I want that to be because Frank is home safe, not because we did something that got him killed.”
He was waiting for a reply.
I couldn’t give him one. I excused myself and made another small escape. I went into the bathroom and washed my face with cold water. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. Something in that unmerciful glass image fully awakened me.
It was the thought of all the tense and weary faces I had seen over my years as a reporter. I was starting to get that look in my eyes, the one I had seen in theirs. I’d interviewed lots of them.
If you’re a reporter, and the victim in your crime story is dead or missing or otherwise unavailable, you do your level best to talk to somebody who gives a damn about that victim. If you fail to do so, nobody gives a damn about your story. So you look for the relatives, the lovers, the best friends. They’ll have your story for you. The cops just have what passes for facts.
Facts aren’t enough for your readers. Readers want to see that sentence, the one that makes your editor say something like, “Great quote from the widow.” No matter how gentle or respectful you are when you’re with the people you interview, the truth is, you’re after their hearts.
A few of the people you talk to don’t have the look. But if the loved one is missing, if there’s no body yet — after a while, they almost always do. I’ve seen it many times — on the face of a father whose daughter had not come home after working a night shift at a college radio station; the face of a wife whose spouse had not returned from a sailing trip; the face of a mother whose son had become separated from the other hikers on a forest trail. It’s not just the worry and fatigue that wears them down. It’s the helplessness. Knowing that something awful may be happening to someone they love and they can’t do a damn thing about it.
“Screw that,” I said to the woman in the mirror.
I had some phone calls to make.
10
“SO, HOW DID HIS MOM TAKE IT?” Rachel asked me.
Pete and Rachel had arrived not long after he got word that Hocus had called. He wasn’t looking so hot.
“Not well,” I answered. “ ‘Hysterics’ is too mild a term for it.”
“Understandable, I suppose.”
“I called his sister first. Have you met Cassie?”
Rachel shook her head.
“Hmm. You’d like her. She was upset, but she took it better than his mom did. She offered to tell her mom, but that didn’t seem right to me. I didn’t want Bea to think I would tell Cassie and not her. Cassie went over there, though, so Bea has some company. I stayed on the phone with Bea until Cassie got there.”
Cassie didn’t live far from Frank’s mother, and the conversation with Bea Harriman probably didn’t last more than twenty minutes. Although Bea Harriman had stoically borne the worries of a cop’s wife throughout her marriage to Frank’s dad, as a cop’s mother she felt no similar need to confine her emotions. Healthier for her, I’m sure, but it had been a long twenty minutes for me.
I looked over at Pete. He was sitting on the couch, hunched forward over his knees, hands clasped in front of him. He was staring at the floor. Every few minutes he looked at his watch. “You’ve met Frank’s mom, right, Pete?”
“What?”
That was how he had answered my last three questions. I asked the question again, as I had the others. It was like listening to a radio that was losing a signal — I had to tune him in again before he could reply.
“Sure,” he said. “Yeah, sure, I’ve met his mom.” His eyes widened suddenly. “You told her yet?”
Rachel swore under her breath, but I simply repeated the gist of the conversation he had been too preoccupied to listen to.
“I shoulda thought of calling her,” he mumbled.
“Yeah,” Rachel said testily. She held out a hand and began counting off his regrets on her fingers. “You should have known something was hinky when Ross left a message asking for Frank. You should’ve gone out to Riverside with Frank. You should have checked up on him earlier. You should have told Carlson and the rest
of the assholes in Homicide to quit riding Frank—”
“That’s right, goddammit!” he snapped. He stood up and walked toward the sliding glass doors, then abruptly turned away. I knew what had happened just then — it had happened to me earlier. He had looked through those glass doors and had seen Frank’s garden. His fists were clenched now, and he looked like he wanted to punch something. Seeing him pace toward the kitchen, Henry Freeman stood up and made a hasty retreat to the guest room. Cassidy, who had just showered and changed clothes, was leaning up against the counter that separates the kitchen and the living room, drinking a cup of coffee. He didn’t flinch as Pete approached.
In a voice that barely reached above a whisper, Cassidy asked, “You get any sleep at all last night, Pete?”
Pete stopped pacing, unclenched his fists.
“I didn’t think so,” Cassidy said. “Why don’t we take a stroll down to the end of the block? I haven’t even seen the water yet. I could use some fresh air.”
Pete looked at his watch. “They might call….”
“I doubt it. I think they’ll be right on time.”
Pete seemed to consider the offer, then said, “I can’t. They might call.”
“Let’s just go out front, then, sit on the steps for a while.”
Pete looked over to Rachel. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll run out and get you if the phone rings.”
When they had gone outside, Rachel said, “I shouldn’t have lost my temper with him. This is so hard on him.”
“I know.”
“Sorry. Not any easier on you.”
“Pete learn anything more out in Riverside?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.
“A little. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Cassidy, because I don’t want to get Pete in trouble. It’s not much, anyway. The Riverside PD was canvassing the neighborhood, trying to locate anyone who might have seen anything, but it’s a pretty isolated area. There’s a business park and a railway nearby, but not many houses.”
“Do they have any idea when this happened? How long Frank has been with these people?”
She shrugged. “Hard to say. They know roughly what time Frank probably arrived at the house — figuring the time he left here, allowing for traffic, and so on. And they can estimate the time of Dana Ross’s death. No one saw the car arrive at the Express, so that leaves a big gap between Ross’s death and the time it would take for Hocus to bring the car to Las Piernas. And no one knows if Frank was still in Riverside when Ross was shot.”
