Hangman

by Stephan Talty

  Let it go, she thought now. Their kids are dying.

  But does the killer feel what I felt toward the North? Envy? Or is it just pure rage?

  In the Stoltzes’ backyard, McGonagle appeared at her elbow, still dressed in the leather jacket. She flinched. He was like a ghost, an all-knowing ghost.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Everyone calling me with so many fucking questions, thought I’d come answer them face-to-face.”

  Abbie narrowed her eyes. “That’s bullshit.”

  He laughed. “Okay, so it’s bullshit.”

  “Is there something—”

  McGonagle held up both hands in front of him, as if he was trying to calm an angry bear. “I’m here to say that Hangman is an open wound with me and my friends. You understand? He should have died five years ago. We want him caught and put away. Nothing’s more important than that. So anything you want, you come to me and ask. Did you hear what I just said? The word I used was anything.”

  Abbie couldn’t help herself. Her head tilted back almost luxuriantly and she laughed.

  So here it is at last, she thought, the invitation to the shadow force, aka the Murphia, i.e., the Network, that lawless society of cops, ex-cops, and God knew who else that she always knew existed but who everyone denied even hearing about. Cops helping out cops. Favors for the boys. Specializing in everything from parking tickets to, apparently, serial killer investigations. The world her father walked in and was worshipped by.

  The Network was what the County had instead of money.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be wearing a black hood or something, or at least a green silk sash and a shillelagh?” Abbie said.

  McGonagle smiled grimly. “Don’t fucking flatter yourself. You’re not wanted.”

  “Then what is this?”

  McGonagle frowned and gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. It means whatever you want it to mean. “Let’s just call it a seventy-two-hour-pass, huh? You need a phone call made, it will be made. You need a door opened, we’ll make sure it’s unlocked when you get there. When Hangman is found, the pass expires.”

  Abbie glowered at him.

  “Does the name Stacy Jefferson mean anything to you?”

  McGonagle’s face went perfectly still.

  Stacy Jefferson had been the first female black detective on the force. She’d been a local girl, from the tough-if-not-lethal Bailey section near downtown Buffalo. She’d had two solid parents with city jobs and she’d made it to the Violent Crimes division in 2004, her childhood dream. She’d won awards for her outreach to the black community, but she wasn’t window dressing. Abbie had heard she was a detective’s detective—a bulldog with skills. Then a year after she joined Violent Crimes, she’d gotten caught driving a Ford Mustang up from South Carolina with a half-kilo of cocaine tucked inside the door panels. She’d fought the charges, claiming a conspiracy. She’d lost badly, been kicked off the force, and was doing serious time downstate.

  Abbie had heard the real story from another female detective at a barbecue that summer, after the cop had one too many piña coladas. Stacy Jefferson had caught a case involving the head of the Common Council, Buffalo’s city legislature. It was a corruption case: a black council member who’d arranged for his secretary (“the only thing she could dictate,” said the drunk detective, “was their sexual positions”) to live in one of the new condos being built off of Delaware for needy but worthy families. The white Mercedes convertible parked in the driveway had alerted the secretary’s neighbors that she was hardly needy, and a quick check of her work record had turned up her connection to the city council. Jefferson was assigned the folder.

  Jefferson had the secretary dead to rights, but the detective knew it was the council member who was pulling the strings. As soon as she started down that road, however, she’d been stonewalled. She couldn’t find any paper trail linking the condo to the politician; the wiretap was clean; the secretary teary but silent. So Detective Jefferson had turned to the Network. She’d asked a white detective if he could talk to the donors to the councilman’s campaign, see if they could cull one of them from the pack, get them to admit who was funding the secretary’s lifestyle. That was her guess: a rich donor paying for the condo. It was then that Jefferson’s new boyfriend had turned up in her life, sweet, handsome, and a graduate of the same high school she’d gone to. Jefferson had agreed to drive his car back from South Carolina. She’d been pulled over at the city line for a broken taillight and suddenly Jefferson’s badge didn’t work for getting off minor traffic offenses. The dope was found by a German shepherd, and the boyfriend turned out to be an ex-con released early from Attica. He disappeared, along with the case against the council member.

  “What about her?” McGonagle said.

  Abbie laughed and shook her head. “What you’re forgetting is that I’m a second-generation cop. Jefferson was naive. I’m not.”

  “We didn’t fuck Stacy Jefferson. Her jailbird boyfriend did.”

  “Yeah, and I heard he’s working for a construction company in South Carolina owned by a Buffalo cop’s brother.”

  McGonagle smiled. “Everyone deserves a second chance, Abbie. This is America.”

  Abbie studied McGonagle. “How old is she?”

  McGonagle squinted and turned his head. She felt, almost as a physical shock, the potential for violence in him. “How old is who?” he growled.

  “The teenage girl who got you to offer me the special member’s pass for blacks and women.”

  McGonagle’s face seemed frozen. Then he looked away. “You’re a fucking witch, you know that?” he whispered.

  Abbie waited. After a moment, the retired detective spoke again.

  “My granddaughter. Moira. She’s fourteen. Red hair, and probably out of Hangman’s demo, but who’s gonna take a fucking chance with that? There are a lot of Moiras out there.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Abbie could tell he was studying her.

  “There are things you’re going to understand thirty years from now,” said McGonagle. “The cases you want to solve before you die. I don’t want to go out with Hangman still on the books. He’s unfinished business of the worst kind.”

  Abbie thought about it. “No thanks,” she said finally.

  McGonagle folded his arms. “I understand where you’re coming from, but this isn’t the time to be all lily-white about things. We don’t have time on this one.”

  “I’m not being lily-white. And ‘we’ doesn’t exist. This is my investigation.”

  She heard his voice drop. “Abbie?” he said.

  McGonagle had taken a step or two toward her and the streetlight behind him threw his face into shadow. He moved chest-first, like a soldier.

  “You’d call the shots,” he said. “We can do it clean, too.”

  “Go home, McGonagle.”

  He stood there, looming, dark-faced, then turned on his heel and walked away.

  19

  Abbie saw Raymond leading a band of men—deputies, uniforms, detectives—through the gate, lining up at the back edge of the deck. The faces were turned her way, anxious, noses chapped red from the wind, eyes solemn. They were going to walk the yard looking for clues.

  Raymond sidled up to her. “Gonna fuck up my Ferragamos.”

  Abbie grimaced. “Why’d you dress for a first date anyway?”

  Raymond looked at the line of men, still forming up. “You wanna know why black detectives dress nice? Because when one of you ofays sees me running down the street with a gun, I want you to think, ‘Was that Billy Dee Williams I just saw?’ That way, I don’t get shot, see? Cuz who’s gonna shoot Billy Dee?”

  Abbie smiled. “I want you to go slow back there. Got it?”

  Raymond nodded, then turned and called out, “Gentlemen, listen up. We’re going shoulder to shoulder …”

  She moved away, toward Martha. There was something she wanted to look at before the techs arrived. The right
hand. It bothered her.

  Abbie found a heavy wooden box, an old apple crate with metal corners pounded into the wood, lying upside-down at the base of a moss-covered tree. She hefted it and carried it to the body, swaying in the wind. She put it down at Martha’s feet.

  Abbie gently held Martha’s right arm as she stepped up, to keep the body from twirling away from her. When she was steady on the box, Abbie reached out and felt in the girl’s pockets, her fingers swishing inside until she felt the seam at the bottom. The left pocket yielded a Starbucks receipt from 12:14 that afternoon. Abbie pulled out an evidence bag and slipped it inside, then placed the bag in her front pocket. But it was the right hand that intrigued her. She cupped it in hers. The fingers were curled inward. Abbie brought the hand up and looked at the fingernails. A little blood under fingers two and three, possibly some skin cells mixed in—that would be for the techs to decide. Was Martha trying to grab her attacker, was that why the hand was curled like this? The hand had been doing something at the time of death. But what?

  The hand was empty. Abbie looked around the ground in a circle. Nothing but dry leaves and broken twigs.

  The scratches above Martha’s left breast would correspond with the right hand reaching up. Maybe she was clawing at the rope, a natural response to being strangled.

  Abbie reached forward and began to pat the body. The sweater was light wool and she could feel Martha’s cold skin beneath. Nothing around the back. She moved her hands to the front of the body and felt the outline of a bra. Abbie tried not to look at Martha’s eyes.

  Her hands descended toward the girl’s waist. As it moved down, Abbie felt something clumped under the material. She looked around and saw the line of cops moving toward her. She waited until it passed, the men parting on the left and right of her, and moved on. Then she lifted the hem of the sailor’s sweater and placed her hand underneath. Cold flesh. And then, to the right, something else. Paper.

  She pulled it out.

  A crumpled piece of paper, torn in half. A vein beat in Abbie’s neck; she took a deep breath. She stepped off the apple box, the wind ruffling in her ears. The paper was wrinkled, lined in blue like school loose-leaf, no punched holes. The writing was in black ink. She spotted five letters as the wind lifted the top flap of the paper. ished.

  She took the corner and slowly unfolded it.

  Three and a half lines in a haggard scrawl.

  This life is so terrible.

  Darkness is everywhere. The evil-doers are not punished.

  They are not your children.

  I live where

  The last line was cut off.

  Abbie stood, her mouth slightly open. Then she took her phone out and took a photograph of the note.

  Raymond had spotted her. He came walking back as the line of men trudged through the undergrowth. “Two Frito-Lay bags and some empty Jack Daniel’s wine cooler bottles so far. Not much of a party.”

  Abbie handed him the note. “I found this under her sweater. Maybe Hangman left it there, or maybe she snatched it from him.”

  Raymond brought the note up and read the contents, then whistled.

  “Bring it to the lab,” Abbie said. “First test it for fingerprints; if Hangman’s getting any help, maybe they left their prints on this. Then fibers. See if they can tell us what he was wearing, maybe he kept the note in his pocket. Then handwriting. Tell them I want a comparison with anything they have on Marcus Flynn from the original cases. Also, scan it for impressions from writing that was done on pages above this one, if it came from a notebook full of these pages. Got it?”

  No humor now. Raymond nodded and walked off.

  They are not your children. Something tugged at her memory, like the world’s tiniest fish nibbling on the world’s thinnest line. So faint.

  And, even more tantalizing, I live where

  What in God’s name did it mean?

  20

  Abbie waited at the gate for the results of the neighborhood canvass to come in. Cops milled around in the side yard, sneaking glances at her face, and looking away quickly when she locked eyes with them.

  Someone talk to me. Please. Give me something.

  Her phone rang. It was Perelli, calling with the financial info on Carlson, the dead CO that Hangman had killed in his escape. Carlson didn’t show any large deposits into his bank account, just a biweekly payment of $1,843 from New York State, his net wages. He moonlighted on occasion at events and bars in Buffalo; he’d even done security for a few R&B and hip-hop acts that had come through town and didn’t want to pay to fly their bodyguards from New York or L.A. It was a grand here and a grand there. Small money.

  There were regular withdrawals from Geico insurance and payments toward his mortgage, which he’d refinanced in 2011. He paid most of his credit cards off in full every month and had only a couple of thousand dollars on a MasterCard that was being carried forward. In late 2010, Carlson had been sanctioned by the courts for not paying alimony to his wife, one Rita-Claire Montcrief, now a resident of Atlanta, but after having his wages garnished for six months, he’d come up with the outstanding balance in full and hadn’t missed a payment since.

  It was all very normal. But it didn’t answer the question: how does a Corrections officer afford a fully loaded Corvette and a Panerai watch? She told Perelli to find out where Carlson had bought the Corvette and see how he’d paid for it. Perelli had grumbled about remembering who outranked whom in this department, but she reminded him that he was only passing on her requests to someone who did the actual work, so to stop bellyaching. He snorted, then filled her in on what Buffalo PD was doing.

  Marcus Flynn’s last residence, an apartment in a slowly decaying block off Niagara Street, was being staked out. The houses of the detectives who’d worked the case were being watched, in case Hangman wanted to exact revenge. Search teams were being assembled to sweep the city, checking backyards, abandoned buildings, Dumpsters, vacant businesses, and storage sheds for any sign of the killer. Detectives were being given night-vision goggles and thermal-imaging equipment and would be assigned to the North. All burglaries and break-ins were being treated as possibly Hangman-connected unless proven otherwise; no clothing had been reported stolen, but it was impossible for Perelli to believe that the killer was still wearing his orange prison jumpsuit. And Marcus Flynn’s most recent photo, from Auburn, was being shown on local TV, as memories had faded and it was possible he could walk around without being recognized.

  Despite all that, they hadn’t gotten one verified sighting of the murderer.

  “What about potential victims?” Abbie asked Perelli.

  “We’ve told parents of teenage girls not to let their kids out alone under any circumstances,” he answered. “We’ve called all the high schools and made sure they instituted a pickup policy where every girl has to be seen getting into their parents’ cars. No walk-homes alone. No buses. Their parents’ cars only.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “Restrict his opportunities. Maybe it’ll flush him out.”

  “We’ve got extra patrols at the malls. Teenage girls tend to congregate there, though what kind of mongrel would let their daughter go shopping today, I don’t know. And you’ll never believe what the big seller at the Galleria is right now.”

  “What?” asked Abbie.

  “Hair dye. Mostly blond, a few reds.”

  Abbie said, “Huh.” She’d never thought of that, but it was clever. “Who’s buying it, mothers or daughters?”

  “Mostly mothers. Dyeing their kids’ hair.”

  “I’d do it, if it was my daughter.”

  Perelli’s voice cracked with exhaustion. “Abbie, give me something. Soon.”

  Abbie felt a wave of heat across her vision. “It’s a five-year-old case, and I’ve been working it for six hours, Chief. Do you mind?”

  “All right. Just do what you have to do.”

  “How about martial law?”

  Perelli laughed grimly. “I’ve thought
about it. Listen, we checked on purchases of red masks. A few little stores still haven’t checked in, but we’re getting close to Halloween and I’ve got a few hundred devil and monster masks with some red on them, sold at Walmart and other places. Most people paid cash. Tracing the buyers just ain’t gonna work.”

  Abbie rubbed the back of her neck. The muscles were starting to tighten, the first sign of a knockdown headache. “It was a long shot.”

  “Anything else?” asked Perelli.

  “One other thing. In the main case file, there’s a reference to folder 3CW. It’s missing. Do you know what was in there?”

  Perelli sighed.

  “No idea. Take it up with McGonagle.” He hung up.

  21

  Abbie saw the cops up and down the block fanning out, knocking on doors, chatting with people on their porches. One elderly woman three doors down and across the street had her hand to her mouth and Abbie saw her jaw shaking with sobs.

  She found Dr. Lipschitz’s card and called him. Voicemail after five rings. She left a message, saying that something urgent had come up and could he call her immediately please.

  Abbie kept the phone out, clicked on “Photos,” and brought the screen close. She studied the note she’d found on Martha’s body. Except for “They are not your children,” the note seemed straightforward. Hangman was imprisoned, his life hellish. He was killing “the evil-doers” out of a deep black despair.

  But who was Hangman talking to in the note? Was he so insane that he believed that killing the girls was really getting revenge on evil-doers? Perhaps he was truly schizophrenic after all, and the “your” he referred to in the note was actually a voice in his head?

  The phone buzzed in her hand, and she snapped up the call after the first ring. Lipschitz.

  “You’ve seen the news?” she said.

  “Yes,” Lipschitz said.

  “We found a note at the scene.”

  “Bring it to me,” he said quickly. “I’m at 26 Spring Street.”

  A few minutes away.

  “I’ll be there in five,” she said.

  Twenty-six Spring was a small old wood-frame house dwarfed by rust-colored office buildings on both sides. Light gray paint with pearl white trim. She dashed up the steps and found him waiting for her in the doorway.