Hangman

by Stephan Talty

  Abbie nodded.

  “Abbie’s going to go look at the escape scene,” Perelli said, “see what we got.”

  Raymond frowned thoughtfully.

  “She’s the lead,” Perelli said.

  Raymond looked over at her. His eyes were cool, evaluating. “Fine with me.”

  “What about Auburn?” Abbie said, paging quickly through the file. “I may need to talk to people there to get a sense of what Hangman was acting like just before the escape.”

  Perelli spread his hands wide. “Be my guest. So long as you stay away from the roadblocks and don’t get involved on the pursuit side, that’s fine. But we don’t have jurisdiction up there. You’ll have to get what you can get on your good looks.”

  Abbie closed the file. “The thing is, Chief, I can’t tell if you’re giving me a real assignment or just cleverly getting me out of the way.”

  Perelli frowned, glanced at Raymond with a see-what-I-mean? look.

  “Hangman’ll be in custody by tomorrow morning,” Raymond said.

  Abbie turned slowly to look at him. “Is that right?”

  “He’ll break into someone’s house, maybe carjack an old lady,” Raymond said. “But we’ll get him. He’s got no one to run to.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got this,” Abbie said. “Maybe I’ll go home and harvest my fall vegetables.”

  “Yeah, I got this.”

  Abbie leaned forward toward Perelli. “Are you telling me everything?”

  Perelli glared, then slowly leaned forward. “Excuse me, Detective Kearney? Say that again.”

  “Is … this … everything?”

  Raymond coughed. He seemed to want to be out of the room.

  Something strange in Perelli’s eyes. Something she hadn’t seen before. He seemed actually distressed. His voice, when he started to speak, was aggrieved and just a tone lower.

  “I’m going to give you a pass on that last comment, because you weren’t here when Hangman was active.” He pointed to his chest, stabbing the tie with a thick index finger. “I was. I was a lieutenant in the 5th District. I interviewed the mother of Sabrina Kent, the second victim.” He took a deep breath and blew it out. “I had to tell her that we found her daughter’s body on Oakland Place between Delaware and Elmwood, three days after she went missing. You know what she was thinking?”

  “Who killed her,” Raymond said.

  “No,” Abbie said. “Not that. She wanted to know how long she was alive. Or what Hangman was doing with her daughter’s body.”

  Perelli looked down at his desk. “Both. Was he talking to Sabrina? Did he have her propped up on the seat next to him as he drove around the city? Did he use—” He broke off. His face was past anger and Abbie saw what he would look like as an old man.

  “So please, Detective Kearney, don’t tell me that I’m not doing my utmost here.”

  Abbie watched him. Perelli was a good actor, she knew that. But she knew just as well that this wasn’t acting. She hadn’t been here. It was true. Never say you know what it’s like when you don’t.

  “Okay,” she said. She didn’t offer an apology. How hard she worked would be her apology.

  Perelli picked up the phone. “I feel better already.”

  Abbie stood and brushed by Raymond. He stepped out of her way, then followed her out. “You headed to Auburn?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool. I’ll let you know when we pull Hangman in.”

  Abbie stopped, her eyes wide. “You’re very sure of yourself, Raymond.”

  “Best solve rate in the department,” he said. “Three years running.”

  “Not to be picky, but those weren’t homicides.”

  He didn’t smile at that one. “You know, most of the guys’d be falling over themselves to work with you. I figure maybe you have something to learn from me.”

  Abbie laughed. At least he was honest. “You know what one of my professors told me in college, Raymond?”

  “What’d he say?”

  Abbie stopped. “I was a lot like you back then. And what she said, my professor …?”

  Raymond grinned.

  “… was this: ‘Abbie, be bold. Be very bold. But not too bold.’ ”

  Raymond nodded.

  “It’s an old French saying,” she said. “I found it to be helpful.”

  Raymond’s eyes gleamed. He seemed to lean toward her on the balls of his feet. “Shit, Kearney,” he said softly, “ain’t no such thing as too bold.”

  5

  The file was as thick as a phone book for a midsize city and Abbie stuffed it into a large liver-colored envelope. She grabbed a Lime Diet Coke from the vending machine on the first floor and walked outside. The wind was swatting newspapers and trash around and there was a line of law enforcement types—in and out of uniform—lined up to the right. The seriousness of any case can be judged by how smartly cops line up for it. The line out back could have been cut with a ruler; it was an informal car pool being directed by a BPD uniformed officer.

  The others glanced at her, holding the file, as they all shuffled forward. Everyone else was holding flashlights and backpacks or, in the case of two officers, Remington Versa Max shotguns, the tactical models with the eight-round magazine.

  Getting in line, she held the envelope in the crook of her elbow. Her favorite reading. She pulled out the file, opened it, holding down the first page so the wind didn’t take it, feeling the jangle of excitement that always came over her when starting a new case.

  She began to read, shuffling forward with the line.

  The file was chronological. It began with the discovery of the first body. Charlotte Breen, sixteen years old, a junior at Nardin Academy, an alternate on the debate team, a fairly nondescript record. On July 2, 2007, Charlotte had told her mother that she was going to bike over to her friend’s house and left at around 4:15 p.m. The North was one of the safest neighborhoods in Buffalo, leafy and rich and heavily patrolled by the Buffalo PD, so her mother had thought nothing of Charlotte biking half a mile. But Charlotte never arrived. By 7 p.m. her parents were driving the neighborhood looking for her. Nothing. Vanished.

  At 10:32 a.m. the next day, a mailman doing his rounds a mile away from Charlotte’s departure point found her bike leaned up against a telephone pole—leaned, thought Abbie, not tossed carelessly or in a panic on the sidewalk. Charlotte’s naked body was found three days later in an open field three miles from the Breen house. No marks to the body. No DNA under the fingernails, only dirt. No signs or notes from the killer.

  Abbie looked up. She was halfway to the front of the line. She saw vans pulling up and taking in cops, like helicopters landing quickly for paratroopers before lifting off again.

  Abbie flipped forward in the file and found a photo of Charlotte. Dark eyes, metal-framed glasses that didn’t complement her face, long brown hair, a tiny suggestion of a mustache that Charlotte either wasn’t too worried about or had failed to notice. A V-neck sweater with a thin gold chain at the neck. She looked … sensible, thought Abbie. She flicked back to the report. The background on Charlotte showed a B-student who had expressed an interest in becoming a dentist. She had two or three good friends, and no boyfriends or girlfriends or romantic attachments. She’d attended the junior prom with a group of girls; her diary had revealed no stalkers, overattentive teachers, jealous boyfriends.

  If her friends said there was no boyfriend, I believe there was no boyfriend. But the bike leaned carefully against the telephone pole, that was odd. Abbie wondered if it had a kickstand, and if so, whether Charlotte had been relaxed enough to take the extra two seconds to use it. That would indicate some degree of trust in the person that took her away. One neighbor had seen Charlotte pedaling down Bryant Street toward her friend’s, but that was the last sighting. The girl had effectively vanished just a mile from her own house.

  She flipped to the medical examiner’s report for all three girls, clipped together near the back of the file. All the girls ha
d died within three to four days of being kidnapped. Sexual abuse of the bodies negative. The toxicological screens had come back negative for the first girl, positive on the last two for Versed, a fast-acting sedative, basically an injectable chloroform. The ME had found puncture marks in Girl Number Two’s left arm and Girl Number Three’s right thigh, consistent with injection from a needle. Maybe Hangman had trouble controlling the last two. Maybe the first one had believed whatever story he told her at the beginning—I just want to take you for a drive, or I swear I’ll let you go tomorrow—but the other girls knew better. By then, Charlotte was dead …

  “Where you going, ma’am?” a voice barked.

  Abbie looked up. A uniformed cop, a serious mustache bristling above a metal clipboard, was staring at her intently.

  “Um, the prison. Auburn.”

  He frowned and looked down at his clipboard. “The blue van,” he said, ducking his head sideways and pointing back along a line of cars and trucks with smoke curling from their tailpipes. “Leaving in one minute.”

  “Got it,” Abbie said. She ran toward the van, confirmed with the driver through his open window that Auburn was going to be his last stop, then nodded at two burly men, one in a gray, flat-brimmed hat, the other bareheaded and dressed in a dark green shirt, who were squeezed into the middle row. She ducked down and scooched into the last row, and sat by the window. Abbie placed the file next to her and slowly opened the soda she’d brought. She had the row to herself.

  “Brought some reading material?” said the deputy in the gray hat, turning in his seat. He was older and he looked like a TV dad from some ’50s sitcom.

  Abbie smiled. “A must for long rides.”

  He eyed the file, and his smile tightened. “Anything in there,” he said, “we should know about?”

  His tone was light, but his gaze sure wasn’t.

  Abbie looked at him in surprise, then down at the file. “Don’t think so. Background mostly. I’m just covering all my bases.”

  The deputy nodded.

  The other man—his face looked lean and shadowed in the light of the van, but Abbie could tell that he was Latino—turned to listen to them. She saw the badge on his arm as he leaned it on the backrest. The outline of the U.S. in yellow stitching on a black background. Border Patrol.

  Good Lord, Abbie thought, they’re calling in everyone except Sanitation.

  “I’m sure Hangman will make a mistake soon,” she said to the deputy. “That’s how these things usually end.”

  The Latino agent was looking at her now, and said, “All I know is that my cousin just turned fifteen years old last Tuesday. We had a nice party for her. You ever been to a quinceañera?”

  Abbie shook her head no.

  “Nice,” he said. “Live band. Real nice.”

  He looked out the window, then smiled back at her. “I don’t think that boy’s gonna make it out of the woods, you know what I’m saying?” His voice was quiet, and his teeth in the darkness were even and white. It was as if he were tasting Hangman’s flesh between them.

  It feels good to saddle up and go hunting wild animals, thought Abbie. Especially when you have something back home that the animal likes. “I hope we take him alive, and learn something for the victims’ families,” Abbie said, trying not to be too schoolmarmish. “Like where he buried the last girl.”

  The Border Patrol agent stared at her. “Uh-huh,” he said, turning away.

  6

  The blue van hummed along the 90 toward Auburn. Abbie felt a slight chill from the window, which was frosted with cold mist, hovering a few inches inside. But the driver had the heat on high and the cold was slowly being pushed out. After ten minutes, the men inside the van stopped shifting and adjusting the armrests and the chatter slowly died away. She took a swig of the Diet Coke and went back to the file.

  Hangman’s next victim was Sabrina Kent. Fifteen years old. Two and a half months after Charlotte was taken, Sabrina had been shopping at the Galleria Mall and had purchased two Tshirts at Abercrombie & Fitch, her credit card billed at 5:38 p.m. on September 12, a Wednesday. The girl had been observed leaving the store by a security guard, who’d found her cute enough to recall her presence. But as soon as Sabrina had left, he’d turned back and kept his eyes on the clientele; the store had been experiencing a rash of shoplifting. Sabrina walked out to the parking lot toward her father’s 2005 Mercedes and was never seen alive again.

  She was another North girl. Her family lived just off Delaware Avenue. So the killer hadn’t been choosing randomly at the mall. He’d followed Sabrina from the North, looking for a moment of opportunity.

  If Abbie hadn’t known her Buffalo history, her tour-giving neighbor Charles would have filled her in long ago. At the turn of the twentieth century, Buffalo had been rich, with more millionaires per capita than any city on earth. It was hard to believe now, but before the sky came falling down, her city was supposed to become the next Paris or New York. And Buffalo’s North is where the newly rich had built their mansions, huge stone behemoths with Greek columns and flying buttresses and an air of permanence that said they’d outlast the next Ice Age.

  This was Hangman hunting grounds.

  Abbie found the autopsy photos. Another brunette; it would become a signature. Sabrina’s body was pale as milk. There were some scrapes on the right knee, but otherwise her body showed no signs of abuse. Not even defensive wounds on the hands. The medical examiner’s opinion was that the girls had been hanged. Ligature marks were visible in several close-up photos, and both the thickness of the burn and angle of the rope suggested it.

  Why did he take the girls if he didn’t want to rape them? Did it indicate a kind of longing—was Hangman looking for a girlfriend? Were they trophies meant to be kept? If they were trophies, did the fact that he discarded them eventually mean that he was living with someone else and couldn’t risk the bodies being discovered?

  She checked the file to see if any traces had been found in the girl’s hair—leather shavings, carpet fibers, anything that might indicate what the killer had used to transport his trophies. But there was no mention of anything. Sabrina Kent had styling gel in hers, and that was all.

  Three months later Hangman found Maggie Myeong. Her father had come to Buffalo in the mid-’80s to study at the university, met a North girl, married her and settled down. The father was a chemist with Dow, the mother was teaching biology at Williamsville North High School out in the suburbs. Maggie was the Asian cliché or the Asian ideal, however you wanted to look at it: studious, a bookworm, “never any trouble since she was three years old and got lost in Delaware Park during the Easter Egg Hunt,” or so said her father, Walter. She’d wanted to work in psychiatry and even volunteered after school at the old Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane over on Elmwood. She was a young woman on her way.

  Hangman somehow got her out of her house, where she’d been dropped off after school. How, no one knew. No signs of forced entry, no snapped locks or broken windows. He’d spirited her out like a ghost.

  But this killing came with a difference: the first message from the killer. On the palm of Maggie’s left hand was carved a symbol: a capital A inside a square.

  Abbie turned and stared out the window. Capital A, square box. She took out her pen and drew the symbol on the bottom left corner of the manila folder and stared at it. There was something the tiniest bit familiar about the image, and she traced it again slowly.

  Did it have anything to do with the fact that Maggie was Asian? What about the anarchy symbol? No that was an A inside of a circle. Abbie thought back to her Mount Mercy days, reading The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne had been forced to wear an A, for adultery. Could the killer have been jealous of someone Maggie was seeing? Abbie searched through the interviews but there was no mention of Maggie having a boyfriend.

  But something about the image tantalized her memories. I’ve seen this before, Abbie thought.

  Abbie flipped open the file and checked the date
of the murder. December 19, 2007. The first two murders had taken place in mid-and late summer but by December, it would have been frigid in Buffalo, with girls wearing their heaviest winter parkas with the hoods pulled up, plus hats and scarves. What if the killer only wanted white girls? He’d picked up Maggie, thinking she was as pale as the other victims, but found she had typical Asian features and skin tone. What if he’d felt compelled to mark his displeasure in the form of the A, as a rebuke. What else could the A stand for?

  The BPD had publicly denied there was any racial component to the killings, but Abbie could guess that was simply PR. They didn’t want any girl or their family getting complacent. They left the victim profile as wide open as possible, to try and save the next girl.

  Abbie looked up and stared out the van’s fogged windows. They were out far past the city limits now, into the farm country that ringed Buffalo on three sides. Working barns, silos, a line of towering wind turbines half-hidden behind rolling hills, tractors, and old Dodge pickups sitting in the enormous front yards of rambling frame houses. Route 20A cut through good dairy country.

  There was one more girl. The missing one, Sandy. The file on her was as thin as a slice of bread. There’d been a huge search effort to try to find Sandy, beginning when her father called in a missing persons report. Hangman had been caught just hours after kidnapping her, but no trace of her had ever been found apart from a red-and-amber silk scarf she’d been wearing when she left her house, retrieved from Flynn’s car. At first, the hope had been that there hadn’t been enough time for Flynn to kill her, and that she’d be found alive. But the years had dimmed that possibility, and most cops who’d looked at the case believed she was buried out near the Warsaw Motel.

  There was another folder attached: a sub-file on the second man theory, the idea that Hangman had a partner in his crimes. It was mostly phone tips: girlfriends calling in boyfriends who’d been acting suspiciously, neighbors snitching on neighbors, bosses ratting on employees who’d called in sick suspiciously often. None of the tips had been substantiated.

  At the end of the file, a handwritten note. “Ex-wife G. Payne suggested p. mot. to SecLD. See folder 3CW attached.”