Hangman: A Novel

by Stephan Talty

  “Ugh, could you change the station please?” Katrina said, making a cranky face. The radio was playing classical, which Katrina hated.

  Her mother didn’t move. Katrina couldn’t see her face in the rearview mirror. Her mother must have knocked the mirror getting in, because it was tilted up and toward the right.

  “I mean, really?”

  Her mother said nothing. But a few seconds later the music changed and soon the radio was playing CHUM 104.5. Alicia Keys. She must have hit one of the buttons on the steering wheel.

  “Thank you,” Katrina said, sitting back.

  The car made a right turn toward their house on Sycamore.

  Katrina sat back and watched the bare trees of the North whisk by through the darkened windows that made everything outside seem as if it was in dusk. The car was warm and she began thinking about the clay pot she was making in Art Club. She’d decided on peonies as a decorative motif, but what if she did something original with the stems? An idea came to her cleanly, as if it had been waiting for her since morning: she’d weave a few letters into the design of the stems as they curled up from the bottom of the pot. Her initials, KL, interwoven with her father’s, RL. It would be symbolic. It would be part of her birthday gift to him, with an understated message of love, expressed in a way that fit her personality. Their initials woven together. Unbreakable. Unlike her parents’ marriage.

  It would be …

  Her expression changed from one of almost childish delight to confusion. Katrina brought her face closer to the tinted window. “Hey, where are we going?” she said wonderingly.

  Her mother had passed their street and was driving along the western border of Delaware Park. Katrina saw joggers running along the trails, their breath puffing out in clouds as they moved along. There were young moms pushing their running strollers, taut in their black Lycra.

  “Do you have to get the dry cleaning or something?” Katrina said.

  The Mercedes swept on, doing 35 mph. A car honked far away.

  “Mom?”

  Her mother didn’t turn. Katrina watched as she reached to the console of the dashboard and hit a button there. Clunk. The four doors of the Mercedes locked.

  Katrina didn’t hear the sound. Her eyes were on the steering wheel, on the hand extending out of the sleeve of the black coat that had hit the lock button and that was now resting on the wheel’s black leather.

  It was a large hand. A man’s hand.

  Her bones turned to shafts of ice.

  36

  The wet asphalt reflected the ghostly green of the pale sunlight. Abbie took a sip of Lime Diet Coke. When she looked up, Frank Riesen, wearing a trench coat and dark pin-striped slacks, was stepping out of his white Buick Roadmaster, parked in a corner of the lot. He’d pulled in so quickly she’d barely caught it.

  Abbie pushed the Saab door open and nearly tumbled out of the car. From twenty yards away, she heard Riesen click the button on his keychain and the chunk of the Buick doors locking. Abbie sprinted across the street without looking left and right.

  Riesen heard her footsteps. Turning, his face was contorted with a spasm of terror before his eyes focused and his body noticeably relaxed.

  “Mr. Riesen?” Abbie called, bringing her ID up as she covered the ground between them. “I’m Detective Kearney.”

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

  Abbie came up to Riesen and took a deep breath. “Then you know I came to see you. I wanted to talk to you.”

  He had the features of a nineteenth-century senator, she thought, a Daniel Webster. The lines in Riesen’s face were deep and his eyes were blue and bright.

  “If I thought I could help, I’d be happy to,” he said. “But I can’t.” He began to move around her.

  Abbie swiveled and walked with him. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

  He glared at her in silence, then stepped around her.

  “You know he’s out there,” she said, her voice a little ragged.

  That stopped him. He almost said something but thought better of it. Riesen composed himself and then spoke to her in a clipped voice. “Your department promised to do everything it could to bring back my daughter. That was a long time ago.”

  “This is another chance.”

  “This is not another chance,” he said, walking briskly past her toward the door of the submarine building. He seemed to be shaking slightly. Abbie followed Riesen and dropped into stride with him.

  She touched his arm, then gripped it tight when he wouldn’t stop. “Mr. Riesen, I’m scared he’s going to kill a girl today. This afternoon.”

  Riesen whipped his arm down. “I believed you people once,” he whispered. “No more.”

  She felt the anger come off him in waves. “I am sorry about your daughter,” she said.

  “Leave me out of this,” he said, practically spitting the words at her. Instead of walking into his office, he turned back toward the Roadmaster and reached for his keys.

  Abbie tried to reply but couldn’t. She heard the Buick’s door slam shut, heard the engine roar to life, heard its tires whisper on the asphalt as it sped out of the lot.

  Her mind was awhirl. As Riesen had reached up and grabbed her arm, she’d gotten a good look at his right hand. The fingers were clear in the late fall sunlight. And on Frank Riesen’s pinkie was a signet ring with the letter S curled on it in medieval script.

  Unless Frank Riesen had, in his grief, gone to a jeweler and ordered a duplicate, this was one of the two rings Sandy was wearing when she was kidnapped.

  37

  At 6:45 p.m. Frank Riesen emerged from 19 Chapin Parkway in North Buffalo. His face was lit briefly by a light affixed to the side of the home’s tall scarlet red door. The house itself was light gray and looked like a French country house, with eight windows set in the front facade, four upstairs and four down. The lawn was immaculate, and the path to the front door was lit by a series of lights framed in oxidized metal. There was a white Buick Roadmaster parked in the driveway. Riesen hurried toward it, hitching up the collar of his expensive trench coat against the cold.

  From fifty yards away, parked across the street and a block down, Abbie leaned forward in the Saab’s driver seat for a better look. Riesen pulled open the Roadmaster’s door, and the inside light once again illuminated his face. The Buick started up and began backing out of the driveway.

  Abbie turned on the engine and fastened her seat belt. A minute later, the Buick’s lights came slicing out from the driveway and headed north. Abbie let the Buick go a full block before following. A one-car tail was the most easily spotted. She’d have to lie back and pray that Riesen didn’t make any sudden turns. The Buick headed downtown toward City Hall and the web of highway entrance and exit ramps nestled there.

  “Where’s the traffic?” Abbie said into the empty car. The Saab was exposed. She needed cover, and when a taxi turned right ahead of her, she dropped behind it.

  The Buick’s brake lights flashed ahead and it slid under a yellow light. The taxi stopped ahead of Abbie, but she sped by it and went through the red light, praying Riesen wasn’t watching his rearview.

  The car turned right on Church Street and swept up a highway entrance ramp. She saw the luminescent letters of the green sign flash in her headlights, “Niagara Thruway North.” Abbie followed, grateful to merge into highway traffic. She kept the Buick within ten car lengths as it swept over to the passing lane and surged ahead.

  38

  Katrina Lamb woke, and she felt the cold air of her breath spread across her face. There was no pain; she felt only pricks, a tingling sensation from her body. She was lying on something that was vibrating, like a washing machine.

  Her hands were down there in the dark, miles away. Maybe they were chopped off and she was only feeling phantom limbs. But then she traced a ghostly line of pain across the wrists; her hands were bound together. Something was in her mouth, too. She felt she couldn’t breathe and bit down o
n the gag. It was rubber, round and hard. A cord was tied around the back of her head to keep the gag in place.

  Oh God no, she thought.

  The vibration became a thump. Something metal behind her rattled. I’m in a car, she thought, the trunk of a moving car.

  And then the image of the hand on the steering wheel came back to her. She closed her eyes and screamed into the gag and screamed and screamed. It felt like her eardrums were going to burst because the sound wasn’t getting out, it was just echoing inside her head. Her tongue tasted rubber, oily rubber. Realizing she was biting into the gag, she stopped.

  A thought tumbled into her mind as the screaming died away: her mom’s Mercedes didn’t have a trunk. She couldn’t remember leaving the backseat of the Mercedes. Hangman must have drugged her and made the transfer when she was unconscious. The trunk smelled of oil and the metal under her cheek was cold as a sheet of ice. Inches away, she heard the axle spinning.

  Katrina kicked out with her legs and felt that they were tied together. No, taped. The tape stuck to her skin just above the ankle. It hurt when she twisted it, and she could feel the glue pulling at the hairs on her leg, which she’d forgotten to shave the night before.

  The car made a turn and she slid helplessly to the left. Katrina breathed through her nose, trying not to panic. She had to keep calm and not spaz out.

  Maybe there was something in the trunk she could use. Something sharp to cut the tape on her hands. The car kept shifting and she could feel things, steel things, clinking back here over the hum of the engine from the front. She kept sliding along with the tools or whatever the metal things that were making the noise. If she could just reach one of them and cut the tape on her hands …

  What did they say to do, in the movies? Pull out the brake light wires so a cop would see they were out and pull the guy over. She’d seen that on Dateline NBC or one of those paranoid shows her mom watched religiously.

  She was turned toward the back of the car, lying on her side. The wires would be a few feet ahead of her. But to have any chance …

  The thought of her mom looped around her brain and came back to her. She tried thinking about the lights but the image of her mother came to her instead. How had Hangman gotten the Mercedes away from her?

  Katrina froze. He stole the car, that was all. Her mom was forever leaving keys and bags around where people could take them. Anyway, she couldn’t worry about that now. Her mom was fine. She just had to get herself loose and she could get to the lights, then she would be free and she could have a mental breakdown then. One disaster at a time, Katrina, she said to herself.

  The car turned right and Katrina slid again. Someone outside the car hit their horn and it was so loud that Katrina felt the muscles on her back stiffen. What if someone crashed into the back of the car and crushed her? What if the cops were already pursuing Hangman, and they tried one of those crazy maneuvers where they bumped the back of the car and it went careening out of control and crashed?

  She closed her eyes.

  The blaring of the horn faded and she could hear only the hum of the wheels on the street. Her ear was pressed to the bottom of the trunk so the metal vibration seemed to thrum in her head, as if her face was just an inch above the road.

  She prayed someone would crash into the car. Would cops do that, not knowing she was in the trunk? Would she die in the crash?

  She didn’t care. Bump it, she thought. Flip the car over! Just get me out of this trunk and away from Hangman.

  Focus, Katrina. Block out any negativity from your mind. You have to stop waiting on some guy to save you or you’ll be the next girl on the front page of The Buffalo News.

  She breathed in deeply through her nose, then began feeling around in front of her. Her hands were taped all the way up to the knuckles, so she could only open and close her fingers in a V. It was kind of grotesque, like she was a lobster girl or something, but it was the only way.

  Reaching ahead, she felt a nubby fabric under her. Her cheek was lying against bare metal but under her body was a carpet, or maybe old car mats. That’s what people did in Buffalo, kept the old car mats in their trunk in case they got stuck in a storm and the spinning wheels had turned the snow to ice. They put the mats under the wheels and it helped the car lift out of the rut.

  For a moment, Katrina thought she was going to gag, thinking how dirty car mats were. If you throw up, you’re going to choke on your own vomit. Stop it, Katrina!

  She breathed out through her nose, in and out, in and out. It made a whistling noise, but after ten breaths she was calmer. Katrina laid her hands flat on the floor beneath her and felt around in an arc in front of her body. Just fabric and twigs. Nothing metal or sharp that could cut through the tape on her legs.

  Her hand brushed against something plastic that went skittering away as the car turned right. An empty pop bottle maybe. It was a big trunk. She was scrunched near the brake lights but she could feel the space behind her.

  She arched her back and her hands went further, the fingers of the right hand feeling along the floor of the trunk. Lobster girl to the rescue, she joked, trying to keep the hysteria away.

  An inch further, two inches. One of those tools had to be here somewhere. Her back muscles cramped with the effort. Katrina grit her teeth and her tentacle-fingers crept along the foul-smelling rug a little …

  She touched something. Not steel or fabric but something else.

  Her mind went white with horror. She realized the thing she was touching was bare skin.

  A leg. A human leg.

  Katrina’s eyes went wide and she screamed, whipping her head back and forth.

  The leg twitched and pulled away.

  39

  Abbie trailed the Roadmaster, its distinctive rectangular brake lights flashing occasionally as Riesen drove north toward Niagara Falls. Dusk was beginning to darken the sky. The Buick changed lanes and disappeared behind a chocolate brown tractor-trailer with UPS written on the side. Abbie nudged the accelerator and got into the left lane, searching for the Roadmaster. Nothing.

  “Damn it,” she muttered darkly, accelerating to the right. As she whipped around a big Ford pickup, she saw the Roadmaster’s brake lights disappearing over the hump of the Cleveland Drive exit ramp.

  Abbie snapped the steering wheel right as she jammed on the brakes, nearly overshooting the exit. The pickup came within inches of clipping her back as she dove toward the exit, the horn blaring as it shot past, the Saab sliding on loose gravel, nearly going into the guardrail before she straightened it out. Glancing ahead, she saw the Buick making the left on Cleveland Drive and disappearing around the corner. Abbie speared the gas pedal and zoomed down the ramp, swinging the turn just as the light turned red.

  She was breathing quickly, her heart racing. The Roadmaster was two blocks ahead now. It rolled under the underpass for the 90. The car’s left turn signal blinked on and the big Buick slid up the entrance ramp for the 90 South. Riesen was heading back the way he’d just come.

  “Now why would you do that?” Abbie said, tapping the steering wheel lightly with her palm.

  She let the Buick zoom up the ramp, then followed once it had disappeared onto the thruway. Once she’d made the 90, she closed the gap to ten car lengths, dropping in behind a black Toyota Prius. She followed Riesen as he retraced his route back to Buffalo, doing a conservative 60 mph, then took the exit for Delaware Avenue. Traffic was thinning out, the work crowd already reaching home. She kept her eyes on the Roadmaster as it navigated the broad avenue. College students waited to cross, on their way to the bars on Chippewa. The Roadmaster zoomed by them, heading northward.

  At the main entrance to Delaware Park, the Buick’s right turn signal blinked on.

  Abbie’s face grew puzzled. She wondered for a moment if Riesen was toying with her, leading her on a scenic tour of the Niagara Frontier for some obscure reason.

  Riesen’s car slowed to 20 mph and slid quietly down the lane shaded by elms on bo
th sides. Abbie slowed even further and watched the car navigate the winding park road. She saw something blue appear up on her left. “Oh no,” she said. “Couldn’t be.”

  Two minutes later, Riesen pulled into a parking lot. A sign at the far corner led to a small wooden deck that reached thirty feet over the rippling blue surface of the water. A sign read HOYT LAKE BOAT RENTALS.

  Fifteen minutes later, Abbie crept along the shoreline of Hoyt Lake, carrying her portable radio, the volume turned way down, by her side. Her boots sank half an inch with every step into the mud of the soft fringe. The lake was like a black disc laid out in front of her, with two boats floating across the surface, drifting. Behind them, the sky was dark, edged in the west with streaks of orange, the sun disappeared over the horizon. The boat closer to her was Riesen’s.

  She’d watched him climb unsteadily into it, helped in by the tow-headed teenager who was manning the rental shack. She’d watched him push off the dock with an oar, and begin to row, an old businessman alone in a green-hulled boat at 7:30 p.m. on a fall evening. Abbie had jumped out of the Saab and tracked him, ducking behind the weeping willows and small poplars that dotted the shore. To hop in a rowboat and follow would have been foolish. Riesen or anyone else on the lookout for observers would spot her immediately. She had to assume that the reason for coming to Hoyt Lake by such a roundabout way was to see if anyone was following him.

  Dusk was settling over the lake, and she could hear voices from the other boat ringing softly off the water. Inside were two teenagers dressed in denim jackets, a lanky black boy and a chubby-cheeked redheaded white girl. They were chatting as the boy awkwardly set the oars in the water and tried to row, the girl sending out giggles of nervousness every time the boat tilted left or right. Riesen was silent, turned in profile, the oars pulled out of the water. He was watching the darkened shoreline.

  She checked her watch: 7:32 p.m. The rental shack would be closing soon. She couldn’t imagine it would stay open past eight o’clock. Abbie scanned the fringe of land that Riesen was watching, seeing ducks waddling ashore and a jogger or two pass by on the asphalt runner’s path, but nothing sinister. Who was Riesen waiting for? Did it have anything to do with the myth of the Madeleines, which said there were the bones of female workers just below where Riesen was drifting? Or was he out on a wild-goose chase?