Hangman

by Stephan Talty

  30

  Katrina Lamb sat in her homeroom in the chilly west wing of Nardin Academy, the swirl of female voices bouncing off the tile floor and getting lost in the high-ceilinged room. She was thinking of Drama Club, which met every Tuesday at four. This being Tuesday, Katrina was getting worried. There was a rumor going around the school that had apparently started the moment the girls had arrived that morning. Katrina had heard that all after-school activities, including clubs and sports, were going to be canceled because Hangman was still on the loose.

  She listened to her friends’ chatter, their four desks scooched close to each other, and hoped this wouldn’t happen. The steam from the old iron radiators made hissing noises as it floated into the classroom.

  Katrina wanted to go to Drama Club. She’d been chosen to play Cordelia in King Lear and their second and very important rehearsal was scheduled for this afternoon. The club had voted to do Lear because for the past three years the members had chosen the most awful plays you could think of, including, two years back, South Pacific. But if the club was canceled, it would mean another week before Katrina would get the chance to speak the lines she’d been practicing nightly.

  She’d decided to move Actress to number two on her life’s ambitions, right behind Oral Surgeon, which is what she’d always wanted to be. If she took science courses at Harvard and tried out for the Drama Club, she’d have four years to decide which was for her. But now Hangman was getting in the way. Everyone in school was talking about how insane he was, where he was hiding out, and when the police would catch him.

  It was 2:49, and they were still waiting for the principal, Ms. Ferrote, to speak over the intercom and let them know if after-school activities were canceled. Obviously, the killer had thrown the principal into a spin, just like everyone else, because she was fifteen minutes late getting on the intercom and Katrina was supposed to be in Spanish, not hanging around here with her friends. She stared down at her white capri pants and blue cable-knit sweater and wished she was wearing the long flowing dress that was Cordelia’s costume.

  “Did anyone see The Voice last night?” Bea asked.

  Katrina frowned. “I don’t watch that show,” she said.

  “Why?” Bea said in a shocked voice that had no real shock in it.

  “Because everyone gets so excited by the new voice and then a few months later you can’t even remember her name. It’s so fake. I hate fake excitement.”

  Bea nodded. The hissing of the radiators was making them sleepy.

  “I guess you’re right,” Bea said.

  Julia leaned in. “So if Hangman was going to grab some Nardin girl …” she began, her voice low.

  Katrina looked over at her.

  “Who do you think it would be?” Julia finished, looking at the others in turn, a look of serious concern on her face.

  “That is in poor taste,” said Katrina.

  Julia made a face.

  “No, it’s not, it’s just being proactive.” She ducked her head down, and looked at Katrina. “So who do you think? I know who I think would get it.”

  “You know who I think?” Katrina said.

  “Who?” asked Julia.

  “You.”

  “Me?” she squawked, clutching at nonexistent pearls on her neck. Her throat flushed red.

  Bea and Katrina laughed.

  “Yes,” Katrina said, studying Julia with mock solemnity. “Because you’re so nosy. You’d see something in your backyard, like a man in a red mask, and you’d just have to go investigate. Is that true or not?”

  Julia looked at her dubiously. “I’m inquisitive. There’s a difference.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’m nosy, but I’m smart about it,” she declared.

  Katrina rolled her eyes.

  “I think it would be Kris Shepherd,” said Bea, twisting her red-gold ringlets and looking out the window. “She’s odd. I think Hangman chooses odd people to target.”

  Katrina made a face. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because it’s not normal to get murdered by a serial killer.”

  Their half-smothered giggles rang sharply against the polished floor. The homeroom teacher, Mrs. Taylor, looked up.

  “Girls?” she said.

  They lowered their heads and tried not to catch each other’s eyes. After a minute, Mrs. Taylor went back to reading a book. Crackling noises came from the intercom, but the principal’s voice failed to emerge.

  “God, when is she going to give her speech?” Katrina said. “This is torture.”

  “Maybe she’s waiting to announce that they caught Hangman,” Bea said. “She’s just now getting all the details so that everything can go back to normal.”

  Julia frowned. “Getting back to potential victims,” she whispered, “I’m thinking the Indian girl, Anandi.”

  Katrina shot her a look. Anandi had arrived from India the previous year. There were Indian girls in the school, three at last count, but they’d been raised in the States and had fit in more or less seamlessly at Nardin, especially Shooki, who was Katrina’s third-best friend. But Anandi was different, still more Indian than American. The other girls whispered that she smelled like hot spices and that in gym class she’d stood on the sidelines during volleyball and refused to participate. Some wondered if she had crazy tattoos, even though Katrina had assured them this was not the case.

  “Julia,” Katrina said now, shaking her head sadly. “Really?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “I’m not. I’m being entirely scientific. Or what’s that word? Forensic. I have three reasons.” Julia presented her hand to the group and held up a finger. “One, she’s brunette. Hangman always goes for girls with brown hair.”

  “Ha,” said Bea, tossing her golden red hair. Katrina again rolled her eyes and turned back to Julia.

  “Two. She has no friends. Therefore, she’s always alone. That’s what detectives call ‘opportunity.’ ”

  “You don’t know that she’s alone at home,” Katrina said, interested in the question despite herself. “Maybe she has, like, five brothers that she lives with.”

  Julia shook her head. “I know from reliable sources that she’s an only. Three, her house’s backyard faces the park. I think he’s hiding in the park.”

  “My backyard faces the park,” said Katrina. “Am I going to get murdered?”

  Julia ignored her. “All in all, Anandi is an excellent candidate. I heard she’s always on the Internet. The Internet has really become a way for these creeps to get their victims. Maybe Hangman learned all about computers in prison and now he’s in a Starbucks looking at profiles on Facebook, narrowing his list.”

  “God, Julia,” Bea said. “They had computers five years ago, when he got caught. It’s not like they were just invented.”

  “I feel sorry for Anandi,” Katrina said. “Her life here isn’t very easy. Why choose her, just because she’s a loner? Why does everything have to be a popularity contest?” She wondered for a moment if her own popularity would falter if she made a complete ass of herself in Drama Club, and it was as if she felt a little tremor in her belly, like when you go over a bump on a roller coaster.

  “I’m just saying, think like Hangman does,” Julia said. “He’s not going to go after a girl who has like a million friends she walks home with. That’s not his MO.”

  Bea snickered. “MO? Who are you, Inspector Clouseau?”

  “I’ve been studying the case, yes. Isn’t it creepy to think that he’s out there”—Julia nodded toward the window, which looked out over the Nardin playing fields—“looking for his next target? I hardly slept at all last night.”

  The intercom crackled to life. Katrina looked at the clock: 2:55. She would miss Spanish, for sure.

  31

  Walter Myeong’s home was on a corner lot on the eastern fringe of the North. It was a large house, squat, symmetrical, with pale yellow bricks flecked with tiny lines of bl
ack. The brick gave the house a dingy look, but old-money dingy. Abbie parked the Saab in the driveway and got out, started up the flagstoned pathway toward the front door, painted a deep crimson.

  The name Myeong in the North was jarring. When she was growing up, she thought that the North was populated exclusively by people with WASPy names: Rich (the makers of Coffee Rich, a hometown product), Ellicott, Pratt. It’d taken her years to realize that the North she’d carried around in her mind was a figment of the County’s imagination, that in the intensity of its racial memory, the County had recreated the geography of Ireland right there in her home city. The County was the South of Ireland: Catholic, warm, working-class, and righteous in its bones, and the North, like Northern Ireland, was Protestant, rich, and foreign.

  But there were all kinds of people in the North now. Myeong was proof.

  Out front, there was an old-fashioned lamp held by a black iron pole, as tall as a man. The lamp was lit even in the afternoon light, and she could see a figure in the picture window, bent over, a patch of dark black hair. Beneath the bent-over man was the head of a young girl, looking down.

  Abbie rang the bell and heard a gong sound deep inside. She heard murmuring, then footsteps. The door opened a crack and Abbie introduced herself to the sliver of a male face, showing her ID in the fading light.

  “Police?” Myeong said, a tiny screech in his voice, as he opened the door wider.

  Abbie tucked her badge and ID back into her bag. “Can we talk inside, Mr. Myeong?”

  He studied her, sharp worry in his eyes. Walter Myeong wore a light blue button-down oxford shirt, black slacks, black socks and no shoes. He wore unfashionable black rectangular glasses and his face was lined, especially at the corners of the unsmiling mouth.

  She heard music from the left, piano.

  “Why would you want to come in?” Myeong said.

  “Because it’s cold out here?” Abbie said, smiling.

  “Oh,” he said. He opened the door and Abbie stepped into the house. The playing stopped and a young Asian girl appeared in the squared-off archway that led into a living room furnished with heavy leather pieces. The girl was eleven or twelve, plain, wearing the uniform of one of the local Catholic schools.

  “Your daughter?” Abbie said.

  A disturbed look crossed Mr. Myeong’s face—pain and exasperation combined—and he glanced quickly at the girl. “No, this is Shun Wa. My student.”

  The girl smiled and nodded, then looked questioningly at Myeong.

  “Please finish up with the Brahms,” he said. Motioning to Abbie with a quick nod of the head, she followed him past the living room into the darkened kitchen, where he flicked on an overhead light. The piano playing resumed, faltered, then picked up a smooth tempo again.

  “You teach piano?” Abbie asked.

  “Since I lost my job at Dow, yes.” Myeong was standing by the sink, his arms crossed. “I take anything I can get.”

  Abbie’s eyes wandered over the room. The plastic containers that looked like they’d held leftovers in the yellow plastic drying rack chimed in her mind with the untended rosebushes in the overgrown garden that lined the front of the house and the single car in the driveway. She didn’t feel a feminine presence here, especially not in the living room furniture. The house felt cold to her.

  The divorce rate for the parents of children who died, despite the belief that it was far higher than normal couples, was actually less than half. People who lost kids tended to cling together. But maybe Myeong had lost more than his job.

  “Do you want to sit down?” she suggested.

  He shook his head. “This is fine.” His voice was nasal and abrupt. Abbie took a breath. Myeong looked like he was poised for a blow. Whether to throw one or receive one she wasn’t sure.

  “I know that Marcus Flynn’s escape must be bringing back awful memories, but I’m part of the team trying to catch him, and I want your help.”

  He watched her. “But what brings you here, to my house?”

  Abbie felt the ground under her grow precarious. Myeong gave off a fragile anger, not uncommon in families of murder victims. The interview could go bad quickly. “I’m talking to everyone connected with the case, Mr. Myeong, not just you. Anything I can learn might help us find Hangman before he hurts another girl.”

  Mr. Myeong closed his eyes, and rubbed them. “It’s been so long, I can’t think of anything I could tell you that would help.”

  “The latest girl, Martha Stoltz. Did you ever hear your daughter talk about her? Was there any connection at all between Martha and your daughter?”

  He stared at the kitchen floor. “I went through Maggie’s high school yearbook, for sophomore year. There’s nothing.”

  “What about activities?” Abbie asked. “Martha Stoltz was active in her Art Club and swimming.”

  A shake of the head.

  Abbie frowned. “There is the symbol that was found on your daughter’s hand …”

  Myeong flinched as if she’d struck him, the body flexing inward, the eyelids pressing shut a millimeter, just briefly and then it was gone. “I’ve never understood what it meant, that A. We spent many hours thinking about this. Was it the killer’s initial maybe? As you know, it wasn’t.”

  “You said we—you and your wife?”

  He swallowed, then nodded.

  “Are you and Mrs. Myeong still together?”

  “We’re divorced,” he said. “After the …” He looked at Abbie. “After.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Is she still in the area?”

  “No. Her family had been here for generations, but she’d had enough. She lives in London now.”

  She’d gone far away, about as far as you could. “So the A never rang a bell, even in the years afterward?”

  He whispered, “No.”

  Abbie looked down at her notes, as much to break the rhythm of the No’s as to look for the next question. “I noticed going through the interviews that the year before your daughter died you went with her to a hospital in Arizona.”

  Myeong nodded. “Yes.”

  “What was that for?”

  Myeong looked like he could burn a hole in the ground with the heat of his gaze. “Maggie had problems with her stomach. The doctors here told her they were psychosomatic, that she was worried about her grades. We went to Tempe to the special gastrointestinal hospital there, looking for answers.”

  “How long were you out there?” Abbie asked.

  “Three months.”

  “And did you meet anyone, especially, that you remember? Anyone she kept in touch with?”

  “No. There was no one.”

  Myeong was a tightly sealed box, sealed from inside. Abbie studied him. She felt sorry for the man. He wasn’t good with people, she could see that. He was rigid, and he didn’t understand how he came across to others. To women, especially. He’d clearly given up ever trying to master charm or witty conversation. He was stuck as himself and would never change.

  “Mr. Myeong, I have to ask you a sensitive question. The killer left a note and in it he said, ‘They are not your children.’ ”

  Myeong watched her, his eyes unfocused.

  “I’m thinking of the letter A inside the box. I think that it’s a baby block, like the ones infants play with.”

  Myeong flinched, his body twisting back away from her. His eyes sought the floor and stayed locked there. “Is that possible?” Abbie asked. “Mr. Myeong?”

  Myeong only shook his head. His eyes never left the floor.

  Abbie grimaced. “I have to ask you,” she said. “If you have any doubt about who Maggie’s parents were.”

  When the voice came, it seemed to rumble out of him. “Maggie was my daughter!”

  “You’re sure—?”

  “Of course!” he cried. “Of course I’m sure she’s my daughter.” His eyes were wild now, and Abbie felt he might dash out of the room.

  “Does the statement mean anything to you?” Abbie pressed
on. “They are not—”

  Myeong waved his hand in front of his face. “Nothing. He’s insane. It means nothing to me!”

  After that, Myeong closed down. Grunts and shakes of the head to Abbie’s questions. No eye contact. He didn’t ask her to leave, only went still and stopped communicating.

  She said goodbye to Myeong and walked back to her car. When she got in and turned the key, she glanced left and saw him leaning over the girl at the piano, his head a foot above hers, both of them silhouetted against the golden glow of a floor lamp.

  Of one thing she was sure: Walter Myeong had known or figured out a long time ago that the image on his daughter’s hand was of a baby block.

  Her phone rang as soon as she put the key in the ignition.

  “Hello?” she answered.

  “It’s Lipschitz.”

  “Doctor.”

  “I want to tell you something that might have to do with the case. Someone offered me money for summaries of my sessions with Marcus Flynn.”

  Abbie’s eyes went wide. “When was this?”

  “About a year and a half ago. I got a call one night and they said that if I photocopied the notes from my twice-weekly sessions, and just happened to leave the notes in an envelope in a certain book in the public library near here, I could go back the next day and the envelope would be back in the book. But with two thousand dollars in it.”

  Four thousand dollars per week. Sixteen thousand dollars a month. Indefinitely.

  “Who was the caller?” she said sharply.

  “I have no idea. I hung up on him.”

  Abbie grimaced. “Can you tell me what he sounded like?”

  Lipschitz paused. “A white male, older. Over forty, I’d say. I didn’t spend a lot of time on the phone. I was offended, and of course I said no. No accent. That’s all I remember.”

  “Why did he want the notes?” asked Abbie.

  “Didn’t tell me.”

  “What did you think?”

  “It could have been anything, but I assumed it was one of those serial killer groupies. They collect anything they can get: letters, artwork, I mean anything. That’s why I didn’t mention it before.”

  “Did he call back?”

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