Hangman: A Novel

by Stephan Talty

“Yes, twice. I just hung up in the middle of his spiel.”

  Abbie started the car and swung it around, heading toward downtown. “Doctor, I want to subpoena your phone records from that period. Will you agree to that? It would go faster if you said yes.”

  “Whatever you want,” Lipschitz said. “I didn’t think this could be related, but I’m not the detective.”

  “This helps.”

  She hung up and said a quick prayer that the man with all this extra cash was stupid enough to use his own cell.

  32

  Abbie drove to the house of Mrs. Chopin, to see if there was anyone lurking nearby. Hangman had an eyewitness to one of his murders; he wouldn’t like that. The mask implied a deep desire for anonymity. And he might not know the family had left.

  The street was mostly empty of cars. As she cruised past Mrs. Chopin’s address, she saw the curtains were pulled and there was a copy of The Buffalo News lying on the welcome mat.

  Abbie drove through light traffic toward Delaware Park, then headed back to Riesen’s building. She parked across the street in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and pretended to watch the traffic pass by. But really she was focused on the front door of the submarine building. The amount of money involved in the case was growing, and Riesen was the richest man in the files. It was time to talk to him face-to-face.

  Abbie tried to clear her mind, but the call from Lipschitz had stirred something up, had linked up with possibilities that had been drifting like loose threads, forming thoughts and then dissipating. Almost against her will, the threads had bound themselves into an idea, but an idea so far-fetched that she rebelled against it. But with Lipschitz’s call, it wouldn’t go away.

  What if Frank Riesen, desperate to find out where his daughter was buried, had gone looking for a way to reach Hangman? What if grief over his missing daughter drove him to contact Joe Carlson? Riesen might have paid Carlson to stand outside Marcus Flynn’s cell and ask the question over and over, in the dimness of the hallway at night, with lights out, Where’s the girl? Riesen could have paid Carlson for this service, and tried to bribe Lipschitz to see what Flynn was saying in therapy. Abbie could imagine herself doing the same thing if she were wealthy and had been robbed of her daughter. What good would millions of dollars do if your child’s body was under some desolate hill, covered with moldering leaves, leaching its flesh into the soil?

  She shivered and turned the key in the ignition until the vents roared with hot air. She turned the switch to low and left the engine running.

  Men like Riesen know that money can find paths around obstacles. It can hire assemblymen, influence mayors, even break through stone walls if need be. Did Riesen imagine that Hangman would blurt out the truth one day, and Joe Carlson would be there to listen?

  Or perhaps Riesen had sent Joe Carlson to Hangman’s cell to torment him. Never let the bastard forget the name of his last victim. Auburn was a modern facility, not the hellhole that Attica was. Maybe Riesen thought Flynn had it too easy, getting three hot meals a day and a remorse-free existence.

  Hangman had tried to erase the memory of what he’d done to his own cousin by firing a bullet into his brain. But maybe Frank Riesen wouldn’t let him forget.

  Her idea sent a chill of nausea through her. She fended it off—thinking through ridiculous theories just exhausted her. But the more she tried not to think about it, the more she did.

  Abbie leaned over and flicked the radio over to Band 9. The neighborhoods around her, all over downtown and the North, had been carved into search grids. Teams were moving from street to street, sweeping west to east, which meant they’d started on the shore of Lake Erie and were headed toward her, parked on Elmwood Avenue. They were checking backyards, rattling the doors of garages to make sure they were locked, rousting vagrants, poking inside toolsheds. The reports were terse. An unlocked basement door on West Huron Street. An abandoned storefront along Fell Alley. An old toolshed off of Niagara Street. The teams checked in as they went in, then called out “Clear” when they left.

  Somewhere at Police Headquarters, a cop was checking off the buildings on a big map of the city. Abbie imagined a dark wave sweeping across Buffalo from the lake. At night, the beams of flashlights would flicker at its edge like flashes from an electrical storm. But they weren’t finding anything.

  Anyone could listen in to the search. HQ believed that the odds on Hangman getting his hands on a police radio were low, but Abbie wasn’t so sure. He’d already escaped from an experienced CO and found himself a victim in record time. Who knew what Hangman was capable of? Perhaps he was listening in, just like Abbie, moving just ahead of the search parties, then looping back around to the streets they’d already cleared.

  Abbie considered calling Perelli with a suggestion. Have the teams stop where they were, surreptitiously load into cars and vans while staying off the radio, drive a mile to the east, and take up the hunt from the other side of the city, pushing back toward their last position from the opposite direction, all the while giving updates on the radio as if their location hadn’t changed. That way Hangman, if he was keeping just ahead of the dragnet, would run straight into the searchers.

  She listened to the police radio for a minute, trying to distract herself. But the idea she didn’t want to think about kept lurking in the back of her mind.

  What the hell. Let’s follow it all the way.

  What if Riesen, mad with grief, had gone one step further, and paid Carlson to take Hangman to the spot of the girl’s disappearance? One last shot at getting an answer before Hangman disappeared into the dungeon of Attica forever.

  As one of the guards entrusted with transporting prisoners from one New York State facility to another, Carlson would get the schedule of transfers ahead of time, perhaps by a week but at least a few days. What if he told Riesen that Marcus Flynn was being transferred? Maybe Carlson had even come up with the idea himself, since his golden goose was leaving and here was a chance at a final payoff.

  If Riesen couldn’t find a guard in Attica to bribe, the transfer would be the final chance, maybe forever, for someone to demand from Marcus Flynn what he’d done with Sandy’s body. Abbie couldn’t think of any other reason that would account for Carlson being up there on that hill.

  Of course, it could just have been Carlson’s personal vendetta. Maybe the guard was a frustrated cop, like so many COs, who thought he’d solve the case the Buffalo detectives couldn’t close: the whereabouts of Hangman’s last victim.

  Maybe a lot of damn things, Abbie thought.

  33

  Hangman waited in the dark. The garage smelled of lawn mower, a mix of old grass cuttings and oil, and damp newspapers. The garage was old, a one-car wooden shack separate from the house, a Victorian he’d been watching all day. He could hear the noise of cars passing in the street, faintly. Not much traffic, a nice quiet block.

  He felt safe. The day swelled with potential. He wasn’t lucky, he was just smart and now it was going to pay off. He’d had strict criteria for what he’d been looking for. There were thousands of people looking for him, but this was no excuse for lowering his standards.

  He’d wanted an unattached garage, and luckily most of the older homes near Delaware Park had been built with them, offering him a range of targets. He’d wanted a woman, and that had been easy enough. The old-money families of the North were so traditional; he’d watched the men leave in the morning for their law offices and corporate suites downtown, leaving behind a neighborhood of females. But Wendy Lamb didn’t even have a man in the house.

  Even better.

  Once he’d seen her at the doorway the day before, fumbling for her keys, her hair a mess, he’d caught his breath. It was wonderful, really, the way things worked out.

  He checked the dead guard’s fancy watch. It was 3:22 p.m. Wendy would be leaving her house soon.

  Hangman breathed deeply, enjoying the smell of the garage. It was as if the odors of summers past were pressed into the oiled wood as
into the leaves of a book. There, a hint of mink oil, the kind used to break in a new baseball glove (he used to use the same oil himself as a Little Leaguer, to soften up the leather). Was there a boy living in the house, or had he gone off to college, as all good children of the North did? Was he imagining things or did he even smell a whiff of Coppertone? There was an old beach umbrella in the far corner by the bikes, and that could still have some faint chemical traces of the suntan lotion in its folds.

  His senses were wholly aroused. He felt he could sniff the air and smell a woman’s perfume from a hundred feet away.

  He heard footsteps, there. Heels on pebbled cement. Wendy was on the path from the house to the garage. He imagined her scent—something rich. Creed. Or Chanel. There was the clatter of a screen door slamming against the frame. She was in a hurry, not stopping to turn and close the door softly. He turned and moved to the garage’s darkest corner, near the bumper on the car’s passenger side. He crouched down, a short piece of rope held across his right thigh.

  The garage door jerked and began to open, a metallic drone filling the garage. Late afternoon daylight poured into the space, and Hangman crouched lower by the bumper, moving toward the passenger door. Wendy walked into the garage, head down, dressed in a black cloche coat, a rough yarn hat, tan slacks, and patent loafers. He tried to time his footsteps with hers, along the other side of the car, but he hardly needed to. Wendy seemed distracted as she reached for the door and pulled it open.

  His heart raced as he slipped around the car, stalking her from behind. Wendy leaned into the car, putting her purse into the passenger seat. When she straightened up, she turned to find him standing there, right in the open driver’s door.

  He caught the first scream like you would a terrified mouse. Just a short burst escaped at a high pitch before his hand was over her mouth. It had been risky but really a little fun. He pulled her toward him as if they were embracing, slammed the car door shut with his left hand, and shoved her head back until the bones creaked and he felt her eyelids flutter with pain. Her eyes were open so wide that it looked like they would pop out, and her flabby body against him was filled with a wild, flailing power. But Hangman had been expecting this, and he was far too strong. He had her trapped against the car now, and he ground against her bucking body as if he were in lust, while he stared deep into her terrified eyes.

  Hangman pressed his fingers into her throat, watching her face contort from a few inches away. The rope slipping over her head, the hair all mussed and the terrified eyes. Gorgeous. He pulled his hand away and she didn’t even have time to cry out before the rope was tight around her larynx, closing on moisturized skin with a velvety thrwiiirrp.

  The woman groaned and her body went into a kind of spasm. He found the keys in her palsied, shaking right hand and pulled them slowly from her grip. Her strength ebbed; he felt it sink away. A thin line of foam appeared in the right corner of her mouth and he pulled back on the noose, twisting the rope to finish her off. As she let go of a guttural moan, he pressed the button on the keychain’s remote. The garage door clattered to life and began to close, slowly sinking the space back into darkness.

  34

  The 7-Eleven across from Riesen’s office wasn’t busy.

  From the parking lot, Abbie watched customers stop in for milk or cigarettes and quickly leave. It began to rain lightly and the traffic lights sent long, wavy reflections down the slick streets. Abbie watched the lights change on the asphalt, her frustration building. She listened to the flow of the radio traffic, switching between the search teams on Band 9, and the regular dispatcher on 8.

  Shivering in the driver’s seat, she turned the key in the ignition. The Saab’s engine purred to life and Abbie turned the heat up all the way. She shifted her body left and resumed watching the front door to Riesen’s building.

  A car pulled in to the 7-Eleven, and two teenage males got out, one fat with an acne-pocked face, another tall and craggily handsome, talking loudly, and headed into the convenience store. Abbie watched them go, arguing about which beer they were going to buy.

  Another Friday afternoon in Buffalo, she thought. Some people just go on living their lives.

  Raymond texted her. “Negative on phone calls to Lipschitz,” he said. “TracFone, a disposable. Used for calls, never again.”

  Abbie slapped the Saab’s dashboard.

  “One break!” she cried. “One goddamn little break …”

  She called McGonagle. As he picked up, she could hear bar sounds: clinking glasses, a droning TV.

  “You heard about the note Hangman left at Martha Stoltz’s house?”

  “Yeah.”

  Of course he had. McGonagle heard everything. The Network was working at high efficiency.

  Abbie felt a strange intimacy talking to the retired detective. There was nothing like the intensity of two cops working the same case. The same dread, the same fear of failing. It brought you close to people you’d never get close to in any other way.

  “Did the words mean anything to you?” she asked. “ ‘I live where the kings abide’?”

  McGonagle exhaled. “Nothing.”

  For a fleeting second, she was tempted to take up the old cop’s offer of full access to the Network. It had a hundred eyes, this thing, a thousand hands. It heard dog whistles, spoke languages she hadn’t mastered yet. Save a life, she thought.

  But she couldn’t say yes. One step in that direction and she would become a greasy shadow of her father.

  “McGonagle.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What was folder 3CW?”

  Silence.

  “What fol—”

  “Do not bullshit me,” Abbie said sharply. “It was paper-clipped to your final case file so I know you were aware of it.”

  Nothing.

  “McGonagle?”

  “It was an abuse report on Sandy Riesen.”

  “CW is for Child Welfare?” Abbie said in a shocked voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said they could find no evidence that Frank Riesen was abusing his daughter, okay?”

  Abbie sat up straight in the seat. “Riesen was the one accused of abusing her?”

  “Yeah. Someone wrote a letter to Child Welfare weeks before Sandy disappeared. Said he’d witnessed her with her shirt off and there were bruises … It was all bullshit. A fucking witch hunt.”

  “Go on,” said Abbie.

  “Bruises and whip marks across her back. Child Welfare looked into it, interviewed her teachers, classmates, even her gym coach. Some had noticed a few bruises but the girl played field hockey. So Child Welfare closed the case without any findings.”

  “And then just after that, Sandy disappeared.”

  “Yeah.”

  Abbie stared at the submarine building, half-sunk into the shrubbery, as if it was surfacing.

  “Do you think he was beating her?” Abbie said quietly. It was as if McGonagle was sitting next to her in the passenger seat.

  “No.”

  Abbie’s head was spinning. “What happened to the folder?”

  McGonagle gave out a low laugh. “It fell through a crack somewhere in the evidence room. Shit happens.”

  35

  The entrance to Nardin Academy looked like a medieval castle, with a high-domed doorway set between a pair of crenellated towers, all in light-colored limestone. No girls gathered out front waiting for their parents, as would be the case on almost any other day. The wide stone pathway between the street and the doorway was empty but for a few strands of crepe paper in green and white, the school colors.

  Two female teachers stood guard at the door this afternoon, peering through the dark glass as each new car arrived in the driveway that fronted the school, opening the door a crack to confirm the car’s identity. Then they would turn and speak to someone inside. A girl would quickly emerge and hurry toward the car, get in, and the vehicle would zoom off. It was a system the girls had taken
to quickly and without much fuss.

  There were a line of cars out front by 3:45, smoke funneling from their exhaust pipes and drifting up into the dripping branches of the oaks that lined the campus. The cars were mostly German, many were SUVs, big ones lumbering up the drive and sitting to wait thirty yards from the door. Nardin was one of the best private high schools in Buffalo, its students from the richest and oldest families in the city. There were college stickers on the back windows of several of the cars: Bowdoin. Harvard. Stanford. Fingernails with French manicures tapped on the leather steering wheels.

  A white Mercedes SUV with tinted windows turned off West Ferry Street into the academy’s entrance, pulled up behind a Honda Pilot, and parked, the engine continuing to run. The door of the academy cracked and a teacher stared out. She turned her head, keeping the door open a few inches. Almost instantly, Katrina Lamb emerged from beside the teacher, said something quickly to her, then hurried down the steps.

  Katrina was annoyed, to say the least. Drama Club had been canceled, as she’d feared, and the principal had informed the students that all extracurricular activities were being put on hold until the crisis was over. When Katrina reached the wide stone pathway, she frowned and folded her arms over two large books that formed the bulk of her homework, staring down as she walked. She hurried down the pathway and pulled open the rear door of the Mercedes.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said glumly. She placed her schoolbag on the leather seat and pushed it across, then got in after it. She waved to Ms. Crump-worth, the teacher at Nardin’s door, and pulled the door shut.

  Her mother said nothing, just put the car in drive and drove slowly toward the gate. She had her black coat on, the one she wore in the coldest weather, and her stupid Alpine hat, the knit one with the ear flaps. Katrina wished she wouldn’t wear it; it was crunchy and weird and it looked like her mother was trying too hard to be young, which she clearly wasn’t anymore. Maybe Katrina would get her a nice new one for Christmas, a black faux fur. That would match the coat.

  The SUV made a U-turn and exited the way it had come in, then made a right on West Ferry.