Hangman

by Stephan Talty

  “Point taken,” said Raymond.

  “Who was the lead on the original Hangman case?”

  Raymond stared off. “Shit, who was it? I can see him.”

  “Big Irish guy?” Abbie said. “Red face?”

  Raymond chuckled.

  “Kearney, you’re bad. But yeah, he was a County product. He’s retired now. What the fuck was his name?”

  He snapped his fingers. “McGonagle. Charlie McGonagle.”

  “Is he in the County?”

  “Yeah, he hangs out at a cop bar on Seneca, last I heard. Del Sasser’s Bar and Grill on Seneca.”

  Abbie handed him her phone.

  “Punch it into Google Maps. I need to talk to him.”

  16

  Opening the door sent a wedge of light across the old linoleum flooring. Faces turned from watching the news station where Hangman: Trail of Terror ran across the bottom of the screen in red. Three or four of the faces looked vaguely familiar—her father’s old friends, perhaps. She knew what kind of place it would be; the County didn’t have retirement homes for cops, it had bars. One reason she left Raymond outside. A young woman would be startling enough, let alone a black man.

  The bartender, an older man with a short-sleeve dress shirt above a stained apron fraying at the strings nodded.

  “Charlie McGonagle?” Abbie said.

  “Over here,” said a voice.

  He watched her approach, his head tilted back at an angle as if she were poisonous and he didn’t want to set her off. He didn’t put his hand out. Charlie McGonagle was dressed in a black leather jacket, not the motorcycle type but a blazer, a little too big for him. His hands were big and meaty. He had a scar near his left eye, but his face was striking, memorable even, its cheeks pockmarked with old acne craters, the nose sharp and red. His eyes were blue and sly, his hair was the color of old carrots. Dyed, Abbie thought. His potbelly was under control, but it strained the green knit sweater he was wearing. He had a gold chain around his neck and on it was a miniature gold badge.

  Her heartbeat dropped down and she nodded. At first glance, McGonagle looked like a bookie or a boxing promoter or a “friend” who comes to ask you when you’re going to have the third installment of that money you got from the local loan shark. There were two kinds of detectives when it came to clothes. There were those like her father who dressed like English squires, who took their first big paycheck when they moved up from patrol and went to the best store in town and ordered brown leather shoes that shone like mirrors, Irish walking hats, checked wool pants, and white oxford shirts, ties with a floral pattern or maybe a conservative stripe. Who had a certain mental image of the detective as the prince of the department and dressed to match it. Maybe guys like her father wanted to put as much distance between themselves and the perps on the street, to emphasize that they represented Society with a capital S, so they dressed like what they imagined the gentry to be. Upper-class swells with a dash of boulevard style.

  That was her dad. Dressed to the nines to go see a dead bouncer rotting in an alley down near Chippewa.

  Something twinged in Abbie’s chest. She’d forgotten for just a second that her dad was dead. It happened to her once or twice a day. She caught her breath; it was like a rib had shifted and brushed her heart.

  Then there were the other kind, those like McGonagle, who dressed closer to the men they chased. Who wore leather and gold chains and black, always black. They wanted people to know they were associated with the hard men in the city. A whiff of danger and uncertainty. They wanted you to look at them and not know for a tantalizing second or two which side they were on, whether you were about to be greeted with a gruff “Buffalo PD” or smacked in the mouth. Men like McGonagle enjoyed blurring the lines. They were comfortable with evil. Maybe they even saw the humor in the chase, or the futility.

  Both types could go bad. She wouldn’t judge him. Yet.

  “Yeah?” A deep, gruff voice.

  “I’m Abbie Kearney from the PD.”

  The voice came reluctantly, each word parsed, heavy. “I know who you are. I want you to know that I respected your father greatly. I didn’t get a chance to tell you that at the funeral.”

  She didn’t want to think about her father or the funeral now, but a surge of warmth pressed through her heart. The County was at its finest when it was mourning, seemingly the only time it was permissible for the Irish to express actual emotion. The elaborate bouquets in the shape of a harp (from the Irish-born) or a shamrock (from those who thought that’s what the Irish liked) from people he’d given a break to twenty years before, the burly men taking her hand and pulling her in for an embrace, sobbing while they stroked her hair, the matronly women with voices too choked by emotion to speak. The filmy eyes of old widows whose walks he’d shoveled or whose sons he’d gotten plea-bargained for bashing some guy’s head in …

  If they knew anything, the Irish knew grief.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “That’s the only reason I’m talking to you.”

  Ah, that’s the County I know, thought Abbie. She said, “I thought the fact that there’s a serial killer on the run might be a motivator, too.”

  “I won’t joke about that fucking cockroach,” McGonagle rasped. “You have to catch him.”

  “There are probably two thousand people actively looking for him right now. We’ll get him.”

  “Not unless they get very lucky.”

  Abbie sat on the stool next to McGonagle. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I tracked him. And he was the most careful criminal I ever came across. He loves killing too much to risk it. He has a story written in his head, like a play. You’ve just seen the opening goddamn act.”

  “You never had a chance to interview Hangman about the murders, did you?” she said. “He was in the hospital for months, and then went right to trial.”

  “That’s right. But some killers want to get caught. They get sloppy or cocky. None of that happened with him.”

  “Where do you think he’ll go next?”

  “Where the girls are,” McGonagle said. “The kind of girls he liked. He’ll stay in the North.”

  Abbie made a face. “The North is going to be locked down. I doubt if there’ll be a girl out alone.”

  “There are always girls out alone, Kearney. It’s not 1954 anymore.”

  “He won’t look elsewhere, like the County?”

  McGonagle chuckled, took a gulp of his amber-colored drink. “Not unless he wants to disappear. There’s no one who’d take him in.”

  “His family might.”

  “True. But do you think they’re not being watched right now? If they buy an extra half-dozen eggs at the Wegmans, it will be noted.”

  Abbie thought about that.

  “What about Sandy, the last girl?” she asked.

  “What about her?”

  “You never found her, obviously. Do you have any theories of what happened to her?”

  “I might. Do you?”

  “Three possibilities,” she said. “One, Hangman killed her and buried her, but that would be a departure from his MO. Two, he put Sandy somewhere and was going back to her. But the search for her was pretty thorough—”

  “It was more than thorough.”

  “And she was never found,” Abbie said. “Or three, he had an accomplice and passed her off to him before he was caught. The accomplice disposed of the body.”

  “The second man theory,” McGonagle said. “I spent many a night on that shit, I can tell ya that.”

  “And?”

  “Hangman didn’t have many friends. He had co-workers, acquaintances. But friends? No. And the percentages on serial killers working in tandem is pretty low.”

  “But it exists. The Hillside Stranglers. Charles Ng and Leonard Lake.”

  “Yeah, and the Copelands,” McGonagle said. “No shit.”

  “Did Flynn have any girlfriends after he and his wife divorced?”

 
; “A few one-night stands. No one he confided in. And I know because I spoke to all of them.”

  The bartender came over and tipped his head backward toward Abbie. She shook her head.

  “No previous arrests?” she asked McGonagle.

  “He had a couple of drunken incidents in late ’06,” McGonagle said. “That’s when he was out of control on Chippewa Street, running around yelling his head off. He was brought in as an EDP, checked out and released.”

  An emotionally disturbed person, Abbie thought. Was he contemplating his murder spree the year before he started it? Was he trying to drink away the urge to kill?

  “Let me ask you something,” she said. “Did you ever see money in this case?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Money where it shouldn’t have been. Anyone have more in their bank account than they should have?”

  McGonagle hummed to himself. “Some of the victims’ families were pretty fucking well-off. But I never saw anything out of the ordinary. Hangman was paying his bills, getting along. Why do you ask?”

  Because I found an $80,000 Corvette owned by a Corrections officer. Who also wore a Panerai watch, which might not be unusual in Miami or New York but is a rare brand in Buffalo. Whose son was in Catholic school instead of the local public school. A CO who made $45,000 a year, tops. In Wyoming County, that could only mean two things: Carlson was dirty or lucky.

  “Just a thing that came up,” she said, changing the subject. “No one heard the shot when Hangman tried to kill himself?”

  “The motel manager did.”

  “How soon did the first person enter the room?”

  McGonagle cleared his throat. “Only two people in the Warsaw that day. One guest at the opposite end and the manager, doing repairs four doors down from Hangman’s room. Someone clogged up the toilet by flushing a wig down. The things you remember. The manager heard a shot, but figured it was a hunter or someone taking target practice in the woods. A few minutes later the cop pulls up and finds Hangman.”

  “You checked his car, of course,” Abbie said.

  “Of course. We checked all the cars in the motel lot. Hangman liked to transport in his trunk; we found fibers from the second girl’s clothes.”

  “That’s not in the file.”

  “Some things aren’t,” McGonagle said, taking a drink from his beer. “We had the perp, we had the case locked up. Life moves on.”

  “But if he rents the room,” Abbie said, “he’d want to have her in close proximity, so he can go and get her quick. Unless the killing site was somewhere else.”

  “Yeah, maybe the room was just for him. You can drive yourself crazy.”

  You could, she thought. Trying to follow the logic of a regimented serial killer without knowing the scenario in his head could lead you to madness.

  “Anything else?” McGonagle rasped.

  “Hmm?” Abbie said, distracted by her thoughts. “Oh, there was a notation in one of the tip files, two callers saying that if they found Hangman, he would be a PSK.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “A daughter of John Kearney doesn’t know what PSK means? What is the world—”

  “Maybe I blocked it out,” Abbie said. “It happens with parts of my childhood.”

  “You’re a funny girl, Abbie. Maybe too funny for your own fucking good.”

  “What’s it mean, Detective?” Abbie said.

  “It’s an old County term that’s used for anyone who, let’s say, does something unforgivable. It means that if they found Hangman they wouldn’t turn him over to the cops. He’d be a PSK, a public service killing.”

  Abbie caught her breath, then let it out. “That’s lovely.”

  “Just the neighborhood’s way of saying that they’d take care of him.”

  “And to think I moved away.”

  His laugh was like an old pebble rattling down a metal chute. “Ah, the old breed. You’ll be sorry when we’re gone.”

  Abbie rolled her eyes.

  “Anyway, you can’t say that anymore,” McGonagle said. “But believe me, if Hangman shows his face, he will be a PSK.”

  Abbie pulled the torn brochure out of her pocket and placed it on the bar. The bartender, a toothpick between his lips, set McGonagle’s drink next to his empty and watched her unfold it.

  “This mean anything to you?” she said.

  McGonagle leaned forward and studied the picture in the dim light from the Genesee Beer sign and a dirty amber light near the TV.

  “Nothing. What is it?”

  “Something I found near the escape scene. It’s part of a brochure for the rowboats at Hoyt Lake.”

  Even in the half-lit bar she could see the blood drain from his face. “One of Sandy Riesen’s girlfriends, it was,” McGonagle said, staring at the photo.

  “What about her?” Abbie asked.

  “She told me that Sandy had told her she was going out the day she disappeared. And when the girl asked her where, she said, ‘Rowing.’ ”

  A cell phone rattled to life and jittered along the bar toward the rail. McGonagle grabbed it with a large paw. Abbie’s phone buzzed in her purse. She reached for it, but saw the pallor of McGonagle’s skin deepen as he answered the call. He hitched his right hip up and put the phone back in his pocket, then lowered himself out of the chair.

  “Where are you going?” Abbie said.

  “He got another one. Dead.”

  She felt something bloom in her chest like an old sickness.

  Abbie swore, closing her eyes. She pulled out her phone; it was Perelli calling. She hit “Talk.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Where do you think?” Perelli said.

  “The North? Already?”

  “Get there now.” Perelli hung up.

  Two men at the other end of the bar got up and turned to leave. One nodded at McGonagle. Abbie felt the air of the old tavern electric with that thing her father had with his cop friends. Irish telepathy.

  McGonagle raised two fingers at the bartender, who gave a barely perceptible nod. Then the old cop turned to look at her, his face gray as old asphalt.

  “He’s come home,” he said.

  17

  She ran to the idling Saab. Rain was falling in a silver mist.

  “It’s 42 Summers Street,” he called as she hopped in. No time to kick Raymond out of the driver’s seat.

  They were off and racing toward the 90 headed downtown, the skyline a ragged smudge through the rainy windshield.

  “What do we know?” Abbie asked.

  Not much. A young girl had been found up in a tree. The radio was a jumble of voices, the dispatcher trying to discipline them. They were ten, twelve minutes away.

  The rain was a shadow of gray on trees and the facades of houses as Raymond steered the Saab off the ramp and gunned it through downtown Buffalo on the way to the North. When they approached the house of Martha Stoltz, Abbie could already tell the place was going to be a goddamn crime-fighting convention. A quarter-mile before the GPS showed her arriving at the address, the sides of the road had been spotted with squad cars, deputy cars, unmarked cars from four, five different jurisdictions, even fire chiefs and civilian cars with blue lights on the dashboards. And then the sides of the elm-lined avenues became choked with vehicles, bumper-to-bumper. Finally, at the entrance to the Stoltz house itself, the lawn was chock-a-block with cars jack-knifed in crazy directions, a calligraphy of terror. She didn’t even have to check the house number. The sidewalk was thronged with men in uniforms, like there was some kind of bizarre costume party spilling out from inside.

  At the thought of a trampled crime scene, Abbie felt anger rise in her slowly, like steam knocking up the pipes.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Raymond said, looking over at her. “But it’s Hangman. You’re not going to get a pristine scene, Kearney.”

  Abbie took a deep breath.

  You’re not solving a crime, she sa
id to herself. You’re solving a criminal. There’s a difference.

  This was the biggest deal to hit Buffalo in years and everyone and their CSI: NY–watching cousin would want in. She’d have to be diplomatic.

  You are the lead detective now. Play nice, smile, and be diplomatic.

  Raymond glided up to the house and she jumped out. The Stoltz home was a Tudor, painted cream with dark red trim, the color of kidney beans. As she hustled up, details ticked in her head: Shades drawn, parents probably not home yet. New landscaped front garden with a curving stone border. Typical North house, money spent tastefully. Third house from the corner, a main street that would have seen plenty of traffic. A risky move to come in from the front. She wondered what was out back, if the yard reached all the way to the groves of Delaware Park, which offered countless entrance points and hiding places.

  Abbie grimaced, then slipped through the crowd toward the side of the Stoltzes’ house, where a flagstone path led toward the backyard. There were men smoking in the driveway but no perimeter established out here. She prayed someone had choked off the entrance point to the actual location where the body was.

  At the side of the house, there was a waist-high wooden fence, literally of the white picket variety. Extension cords snaked out from the side door of the house, one linked to the other, like thin snakes with mice in their gullets. A phosphorous glow in the backyard lit up heavy-limbed trees.

  There was a slim uniformed cop with a mustache and wire-rimmed glasses standing in at the gate to the backyard. He had a gaggle of men in front of him and he was talking low, his shoulders hunched forward like he was telling a secret or giving his team a play in the huddle. She didn’t recognize him.

  He saw her coming, held up a hand to the man he was talking to, and took a step across her path, presenting himself.

  “Kearney,” he said.

  She read the nameplate. “Livingston. You the doorman?”

  “Yep. I’ve kept everyone away from the body, so far.”

  Raymond came up on her side.

  “Good, let’s keep it that way,” Abbie said to Livingston. “No one in unless I ask for them. The techs on the way?”