It was murky in the great hall. There was light up on the fifth level, where the trial was going on, but it was insufficient to penetrate down here. The government was cheap when it came to lighting public buildings, so all we had to guide us through the cavern was the glow from a few pot lamps.
The doors slid open to admit an elderly Sikh. His white turban was soaked with rain. The swish of traffic crossing Hornby Street on Nelson came in with him. Cars streaked by in flashes of white and red. The doors slid shut to exclude their noise.
Another turn right put the doors at our back. The Sikh took the escalator that rose from the U between us and the dim entrance from which we had emerged. A concrete divider separated us from him. Eth and I faced a flight of thirty wide stairs, and by the time we climbed them to reach the next level, the Sikh had left the escalator to trudge his way up the zigzag route that scaled the tiers of courts.
With the toe of the wedge to one side and the stack of courts to the other, we walked the length of the great hall while rain ran in rivulets down the sloping glass roof. So heavy was the downpour that lights glittering in the office towers looming overhead had no more definition than bright smears. So cold was it in the vault that we could see our breath. So shadowy was it at the far end that the bust of Lord Denning, Britain’s great judge, could have been a mugger skulking to waylay the two of us in the dark.
“You’re not out of the woods, Eth. You must keep that in mind.”
“You think they’ll charge me?”
“They could,” I replied. “There’s nothing to stop the AG from giving his consent.”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“I know. You were framed. What we must decide is what do we do about it?”
The statue of the goddess of justice blocked our way. Blindfolded Themis stood on her pedestal, her cape flowing behind and her scales held high. At her feet stood Ethan and I.
“Twins are strange, Eth. The bond that ties them together is almost supernatural. An identical twin is like a doppelgänger, the ghostly double or counterpart of a living person. Your twin brothers had that bond, so that’s why Justin is obsessed with Peter’s hanging. Psychologically, he was hanged too.”
Ethan shook his head.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Justin and Peter weren’t identical twins. They were fraternal twins.”
“So?” I said.
“They didn’t share the same DNA. And they didn’t look alike.”
“Nature or nurture? They shared a womb, Eth. You can’t get closer to a brother than that.”
“What’s your point?”
“Justin is sick. And we can use that sickness to help both him and you.”
“How?” he said.
“Listen and I’ll explain. Justin is the Hangman. He has hanged five people. Konrad in Seattle, because she was on Peter’s jury. Curry in Vancouver, to throw the cops off track. Busby in Seattle, because he too was on that jury. Hunt on the boat, after she figured out who he was. And the Greek in Seattle, to kill two birds with one stone. Not only did hanging him avenge what he did to Peter, but hanging the Greek while you were in jail might have helped free you.”
Ethan frowned.
“Now what’s wrong?”
“Something I should have noticed about Justin’s trip to Vancouver.”
“You mean when he drove up to see your mom? And to get the page proofs from you?”
“Yes,” he said. “The same night Jayne Curry was hanged in Vancouver.”
“So what’s wrong?”
“He drove up, Jeff. That’s what Justin told me when he phoned from Mom’s and we agreed to meet later for dinner to discuss his book. He was already at the restaurant when I arrived, and could have lynched the Curry woman in the interim. After we ate, I drove him to the airport, where we drank in the lounge until he caught the last flight to Seattle. What didn’t log in my mind as a mystery before now was that if he drove up to Vancouver in a car, what happened to the vehicle when he flew home?”
“Maybe it was a one-way rent-a-car.”
“I suppose.”
“You can ask him when he comes up to talk with me.”
“Justin’s coming?”
“He will when you ask.”
There was some sort of commotion upstairs, as two men got into a war of words. The term “Nazi” was used by one and the term “raghead” by the other. The trial was being retried outside the court.
“You’re in danger of standing trial for a murder Justin committed. Justin’s in danger of being charged with the Hangman crimes in the States. If he is, your brother will face the noose himself, so how I suggest we defuse both dangers is this.
“Justin retains me to act for him in the Hangman case. In exchange for surrendering the Hangman to the Mounties, I’ll get them to guarantee to try him here for the Canadian crimes, and to make Seattle authorities promise not to seek the death penalty if they attempt to extradite him later.
“That will free you from being a suspect in the Hunt murder. When Justin stands trial for the Hangman crimes, I’ll plead him not guilty by reason of mental disorder. That disorder will be that he was psychotic at the time, and was suffering under the delusion that he was his brother. Because of the psychic bond existing between twins, Justin thought he was possessed by the spirit of his dead brother, and Peter Haddon used him as a means to seek revenge from beyond the grave. The defense can also be raised to stop any attempt by the Americans to extradite him south to face a hangman in the States.”
“How do you know he’s insane?”
“I don’t,” I said. “But shrinks need a cash flow like everyone else, and they’ll be scrambling to take part in that Cadillac defense.”
“So all we need is Justin?”
“That’s your job, buddy.”
“I’ll talk to Mom.”
“When?”
“Tonight,” he said.
“Time is of the essence, Eth. If they charge you with Hunt’s hanging before I can work a deal, I’ll be caught in a conflict of interest if I surrender him to free you.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Good. Call me later.”
I lingered by the statue while he walked toward the stairs and watched him disappear from sight step by descending step. The cavern around me was as bleak and austere as could be, a far cry from the cozy buzz of the Rattenbury courts. I had come a long way since that day in Kinky’s court when Mrs. Mudge’s explosion had hooked me on the law. If there was any justice in this dog-eat-dog world, I wouldn’t have been left to make my name in this shitty shell. So bankrupt of foresight were the silver spoons that they made the dumb mistake of letting the old courthouse go. Like the Old Bailey in London, it had built up respect for the law during the hangman’s reign, and while the Brits had the smarts to keep that tradition going, the slicks from the West Side had trashed it here. The result was this hole, which stood for nothing in a contemptuous time, and nothing proved that point better than the fact that some malcontent had spit on the goddess of justice.
No, it wasn’t spit.
It was a trickle of blood.
A red streak marring the robe of Themis.
I’ll be damned.
Who did that?
“Justice is bleeding,” I muttered.
Let it bleed, I thought.
My footsteps echoed in the great hall as I too walked toward the thirty wide steps that descended to the main doors. As my foot touched the bottom step, a drenched figure in a raincoat with the hood pulled up approached the law courts. The doors slid back to let it in, the swishing of the traffic beyond bursting in with the cold. As I U’d around to the left to make my way past the escalator to the hall that would lead me back to the barristers’ lounge, I was followed by the dripping form.
Wet rubber soles squished on the hard floor.
Squishh. Squishh. Squishh.
The shadow of the hooded figure closed around me.
The Reaper? I thought.
>
The shadow of Death?
Then I laughed to myself when I smelled garlic on its breath.
At least it’s not a vampire out for—
Whack!
The blow to the back of my head hit as I was skirting the mouth of the escalator. The force of it dropped me to my hands and knees on the cold concrete floor, and my chin struck the edge of one of the planters that lined the escalator’s base on its open side. The Hangman slipped the noose about my neck when my head bounced back.
The rope cinched tight to cut off my air. Before my senses could recover from the shock of the blow to my skull, I was caught in a desperate tug-of-war for my life. My heart was pounding, but no blood rose to my brain. I tried to gasp for oxygen, but the noose was strangling me. My frenzied fingers clawed at the rope with no success. It was buried deep in the flesh of my neck.
The shadow of the Hangman darkened the floor. It was cast by a light above the escalator. The moving steps were conveying the killer up. I thought I saw a hook at the end of the rope in the shadow’s hand, and thought I heard the clang of metal striking metal, then—confirming what I feared—the noose jerked me back and up.
The rope was somehow hooked to the rising mechanism!
Like a marionette dancing on a string, I was yanked from my knees to my feet. I tried to scream, but only mewling came out. I tried to gasp, but all I heard was gagging. Dangling over the open side of the escalator, I was dragged along the floor below as up, up, up slipped the Hangman and the secured end of the rope. With one hand gouging into my flesh to get a grip on the noose, and the other hand raking the slick surface of the escalator’s flank, I had to rise up on my tiptoes to keep from being hanged.
Glass …
Stainless steel …
And smooth drywall …
Everywhere my hand clutched, it failed to find a grasp.
Then up, up, up, and I too was in the air.
Bulging like those of a fish, my eyes bugged out of my head. Flopping around on my lip, my tongue stuck out of my mouth. A sign for the Law Courts Inn leaned against the escalator. I kicked it over as my feet thrashed about, snapping fronds off the ferns in the line of planters. My heels tried for a foothold on the side of the escalator, but, where it angled up to the next level, a cubbyhole was recessed into its base. The only foothold was air.
The killer had me suspended several feet off the floor and must have hit the emergency button to stop the upward glide. I was in the angle where the escalator ended at a wall, from which my spastic kicks were knocking photos of judges.
The blood engorging my head burst a vessel in my nose, and life trickled down my lip to wet my wagging tongue.
My ears filled with the surf of a calling sea, then a death rattle gurgled in my constricted throat.
I began to convulse.
I was passing out.
In my dying consciousness I must have grasped the rope, for there it was in the clutch of my clinging hands. With every fiber of strength muscled into my arms, plus that shot of adrenaline that squirts when death is at your throat, I yanked on that line like I used to do in my high-school gym.
Not many people can climb a rope hand over hand. Never had I been this glad to be an East End kid, for if you want to survive in a place ruled by the law of the jungle, you learn every Tarzan trick you can. The noose around my neck stopped pulling as I climbed the rope, and soon I was able to hold myself up with just one hand, freeing the other to slacken the strangling cord around my throat.
I slipped the noose from my head.
My grip on the rope let go.
And like Tarzan in the movies, I pounced out of my “hanging tree.”
The Hangman fled while I lay gasping for breath beneath the noose, scared off by a gang of skinheads coming down from the trial above.
Stalked
Vancouver
November 16 (Tonight)
Zinc was parked across the street and half a block down from where he had watched Ethan Shaw park his Ford at a meter beside the law courts. Stepping out into the teeming rain, the lawyer had pulled a hideaway hood out from the collar of his coat to protect his head against the downpour, then had run toward the rear doors of the building. It was too risky to follow him in, so instead the Mountie sat back in the driver’s seat of his car to reflect on the good times he and Alex had shared. It was a memorial service of sorts, for on the floor of the passenger’s seat she had once graced sat a funeral urn filled with his love’s ashes. When this was over, when she had justice, he would return Alex to Cannon Beach, Oregon, and give her remains to the sea to rest in peace. Until then, she would stay with him, and the seat she once occupied would be cluttered with an array of high-tech surveillance hardware supplied by Special Eye.
Rat-a-tat-tat, the rain drummed a military tattoo on the roof.
Tapping the steering wheel in time made the cut on his finger hurt.
The Mountie mourned and waited.
The way he had it figured, the surviving brothers were in this together. For Steven Mark Haddon—Justin Whitfield—the vendetta against those responsible for the wrongful hanging of his brother was motivated by a warped sense of twin bonding. For Ethan Quinn Haddon—Ethan Shaw—the vendetta was the outburst of a ground-down drunk. Whatever unresolved turmoil made him drink, it was channeled into revenge against those who had destroyed his mom by lynching the brother Ethan never got to know.
Together, they were the Hangman.
The perfect alibi.
One or the other—or both—had used Halloween to hang Mary Konrad. To mask the fact that they were out to hang jurors in Seattle, one or the other—or both—had hanged Jayne Curry in Vancouver. Not only did that expand their spree to embrace all perverse jurors, and thus turn what began as a vendetta into a crusade, but that blind bought them time to get Bart Busby. One or the other—or both—had hanged him in Seattle while the smokescreen distracted police.
Very clever.
Mix-and-match killers.
One could forge an ironclad alibi while the other was on the hunt, then they could reverse roles to alibi-up the one who had no alibi for the prior killing.
The Hangman was actually Hangmen.
Like the Hillside Strangler(s).
Peter Haddon’s brothers were a killing team.
Ethan was the weaker link because he was a drunk, and Ethan drank too much that night on the boat. Something Alex said caused Ethan to snap, and in a drunken stupor, he killed her in his cabin. Did Justin go down to the cabin after Alex was dead and stumble upon the mess that could send them both to the gallows? With no time or opportunity to cover up, did he do the best he could with the situation? For all those reasons the lawyer argued in court, did Justin turn it into a Hangman crime Ethan wouldn’t commit? Then, to put any doubts to final rest, did he hang the Greek while Ethan was in jail?
That Ethan was the Hangman, Zinc had no doubt. It was too great a coincidence that he was Peter Haddon’s brother, and that he lived in the same city as the smokescreen victim, and that he was found in the cabin where Alex Hunt was hanged.
No, he was guilty.
And he was free.
And Zinc had insufficient reason to arrest him or his older brother.
But he would get it.
No matter what the cost.
Zinc sat up when he caught sight of Ethan rushing down the street, hood up and shoulders hunched against the rain, the trees on either side of the walk as bare as skeletons. The lawyer had exited from the courts by the main doors at the corner of Hornby and Nelson, not by the rear doors through which he had gone in. Was he rushing because of the rain or something else?
Something like going to meet Justin?
From pool of light to pool of light, Ethan dashed to his car. Unlocking the door, he climbed in and soon drove away. From one of the Special Eye devices on the seat beside him, the Mountie could hear his quarry breathing in the Ford ahead. The bug would catch any talk in Ethan’s car.
The Ford angled east on G
eorgia Street and drove past the fountain out front of the old courthouse, the spray foaming with soap suds someone had tossed in for a prank. The Hudson’s Bay Company and the central post office, the dual coliseums of the new library and the arena where the Canucks play—all approached and passed the spattered windows of both cars. They left the uptown core by the Georgia Viaduct to reach the darker part of town: the squalid East End. Through the dismal streets the game of cat and mouse continued until Ethan’s Ford finally stopped out front of a small bungalow.
Zinc knew the address.
The home of Ethan’s mom.
Into which the lawyer vanished to escape from the wet and the cold.
The only light on inside was behind the window to one side of the door. No others came on. Zinc wondered if Justin Whitfield was in that room, waiting with his mother for his brother to arrive. If so, what they had to say was what he wished to hear, so Zinc pulled into the shadows directly across the street and rolled down the driver’s window of his car.
From the spy gizmos supplied by Special Eye, Zinc selected the laser-bounce listening device, then aimed it so the beam hit the window at a right angle to turn the pane of glass into a microphone. Voices within the house vibrated the window, and the laser bounced those vibrations back to Zinc’s car, where the receiver next to him converted them into words.
He wondered if this drizzle would play havoc with the beam?
* * *
The Hangman watched as the lawyer limped out from the great hall, and contemplated gunning him down in a drive-by shooting. That, however, would merely end his perverse career, without tying the means of his death to the motive for it. So instead of killing Kline here and now, the Hangman followed him to his car and waited for him to get in, then followed that car along Georgia Street and across the Viaduct to the East End, where it drove to a dilapidated house and parked in the driveway along one side.
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