Free Hocus by Jan Burke

talk to the sign maker. As it turned out, he immediately remembered Guy Fawkes TV. The kid at the counter who took the order hadn’t studied much history, but his boss, an Englishman, had nearly refused to make the sign. Guy Fawkes, after all, had tried to blow up the British Parliament in 1605.
    The young man at the counter had protested that this must be mere coincidence; the order had been placed by a polite man who paid cash in advance. The man had even helped one of the other customers carry several armloads of signs out to his truck.
    At Frank’s request, the sign maker went through his files. He had a phone number for Guy Fawkes Appliances, one his shop had called when the order was ready. The number was traced to an address down on Bay Shore Drive in Las Piernas, not a part of town you would have figured for housing terrorist gangs. The phone was still connected. The owner of the house and the name the phone was actually listed under were the same: Richard Lang.
    Lang hadn’t lived in Las Piernas very long. He’d paid cash for the house, which had been for sale by owner. He’d told the previous owner that the cash had come from an insurance settlement he’d received from a car accident. Nobody had questioned that story.
    The neighbors claimed that Lang had a live-in girlfriend and a frequent male guest who matched the description of the deliveryman. When, after several days of surveillance, the woman never showed, Frank’s boss started pushing for an arrest. Frank wanted to wait, but Carlson didn’t want to risk losing a murder suspect. Lang had no criminal record. Carlson figured he would break under pressure and give them the information they needed to arrest anyone else.
    Armed with warrants, police searched the house. They found books on explosives and minute traces of C-4 in the van. The two men, Richard Lang and Jeffrey Colson, were arrested without resistance. Like Lang, Colson had no prior arrests. Both had served in the military, though, and had met while in the marines. Lang had worked with explosives during his military career. In lineups Lang was identified by the counterman at the sign shop and Colson by the neighbors he had encountered at two of the sites.
    Frank wasn’t satisfied. “If we had found the computer equipment,” he told me, “I’d be feeling better. But at least we have part of the group in custody. Maybe the lieutenant’s right. Maybe they’ll talk.”
    But Carlson had underestimated the ability of the two suspects to take the first sentence of the Miranda warning to heart. Lang and Colson had not been willing to talk about their friends. Lang had simply said, “Hocus will take care of me.” Although they had made no phone call, a lawyer had appeared. Lawyer or no, bail had not been granted.
    When Mark Baker’s story appeared, Frank started voicing other misgivings about the arrests. He began to wonder if Lang was a sacrificial lamb. “Maybe the information is coming to Mark from Hocus itself. Lang and Colson don’t strike me as leaders. What if they drove out to Orange not to make it tougher to find them, but easier? Maybe they knew the sign maker was British. Knew he’d be someone who’d remember ‘Guy Fawkes Appliances.’ ”
    “Maybe,” I agreed, “but the sign maker could be a coincidence. There are lots of people who know about Guy Fawkes who aren’t British.”
    “Coincidence?” he asked.
    “Okay, maybe not. But I’m not sure Hocus is Mark’s source. Maybe it’s someone in your department. Maybe someone who would like to make
you
the sacrificial lamb.”
    I could tell by his face that he had already considered this possibility; the thought obviously depressed him. As if he couldn’t accept contemplating that kind of betrayal, he said, “Hocus would prefer the publicity. Makes more sense to assume Mark has been contacted by them.”
    We were soon too busy arguing about other things to spend much time on whose theory was superior. The biggest argument