Hangman

by Stephan Talty

  “Done. I’ll text you if there’s a snag.”

  48

  Abbie stood in the darkness underneath the Black Rock bridge. The iron struts above her were painted black and seemed to suck in the weak haze of the streetlights, allowing only a tiny glow along the rivets, which humped off the metal like black ladybugs. Ten feet from the street, there was solid darkness. It smelled faintly of urine and the Niagara River, which was only a stone’s throw away. No vagrants or crack-slingers in sight.

  Abbie pulled her black wool coat tight around her shoulders. She smelled the churning river, the wind-whipped spray as fine as perfume.

  She closed her eyes and heard something rumbling far off. The ground beneath her feet shook. The sound seemed to crackle around her.

  The air around her pulsed with compression waves and the bridge above her moaned and shook. Abbie ducked. A train slammed over the rails on top of the bridge and Abbie felt the iron flex down as if it would tumble onto her head.

  Twenty seconds later, the train had passed. Abbie stood and looked left. There was a pool of streetlight there, and gray moonlight to her right. Cars moving. It felt like a sleepy old New England fishing town. A bell rang crisply from a ship passing on the river.

  She thought of Raymond. He was out there pursuing the leads she’d put him on, and she was here, behind his back, setting up meetings he knew nothing about. The devious mentor. She hoped he’d understand, if he ever found out.

  Headlights swept in from a side street. A white Roadmaster paused and then nosed left, toward her.

  Abbie stepped back off the sidewalk up the cement slope that rose behind it. She crept back under the overpass, ducking her head. If it wasn’t Riesen, she didn’t want anyone to see her. The car pulled up and stopped with barely a sound. The beams of the headlights were two cones of light. A figure stepped out of the backseat, turned and quietly closed the door.

  Nicely done.

  Frank Riesen walked toward her. Abbie inched down the slant of the underpass wall until she was standing in front of him.

  “You have something to tell me?” he said.

  Abbie tried to read his eyes. Impossible in this murk. “I want to talk to you about Hangman,” she said.

  He glanced at his watch. “The car comes back in four minutes.”

  “I want to find him,” Abbie began, “and I want to find out what happened to your daughter. I don’t care who gets him, whether they wear a badge or not, or who gets credit.”

  He stood, listening, emitting no vibration, perfectly controlled. “I’ve heard that many times before.”

  A boat horn sounded from the river.

  “But you’re not cooperating,” Abbie said. “You’re holding something back, Mr. Riesen. That’s a problem. Because Hangman leaves few clues, he has few friends. It’s hard for me to get a fix on him. I need to know what you know.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “You’re refusing to cooperate.”

  “Yes.”

  There was no embarrassment. Did the man know she was aware of the abuse report? Had this man really beat Sandy with a whip? Was he involved in his own daughter’s death?

  “Three minutes,” he said.

  She had to reach him now. “I believe that Hangman has an associate who’s helping him.”

  Riesen’s face froze.

  “Someone was paying a guard at the facility to be in contact with Hangman,” she went on. “The psychologist at the prison was also approached. Were you offering to pay those people for information about your daughter?”

  It was hard to make out his expression. She felt a tiny waver in his control, a leap of excitement.

  “So there was someone helping him, someone who could have kept Sandy all these years?”

  Abbie caught her breath. Oh, God. She shook her head. “That’s not what I’m saying. Someone’s been monitoring Hangman’s recovery from his gunshot wound, tracking his memory. Did you make an offer to these two men?”

  “At the prison? Never.”

  There was no offense taken, no theatrics. Riesen didn’t care about her suspicions. The knowledge that there was a second man had only done one thing: given him new hope for his daughter.

  “You had no contact at all with either of those people, Joe Carlson or Dr. Andrew Lipschitz?”

  “I just told you. No.”

  Abbie stepped closer. Her breath lit up the space between them with curling gray steam. “But you’re in touch with Hangman now.”

  Riesen held his hand in front of him. In the darkness, she never saw it leave his pocket.

  “Quick,” he said.

  She looked down. In his hand was a hairband.

  “Sandy’s?”

  “Yes. From the day of her kidnapping.”

  “When did you receive this? Yesterday? At Hoyt Lake?”

  Riesen shook his head. “That doesn’t matter.”

  “He gave you the signet ring as well.”

  That stopped him. He stared at Abbie, then nodded.

  “Do you have the envelope?” she asked.

  “I do.” He reached and took the hairband back, gently, and placed it in his coat pocket.

  “I’d like to see it. We can—”

  “Test it for Marcus Flynn’s DNA?”

  Frank Riesen was no slouch. “Yes.”

  “It was him,” Riesen said. “I had my own people look at it.”

  Abbie decided to let it go.

  “Is this the only communication?” she asked.

  “I was promised another one.”

  “What exactly did—”

  “That you don’t get. Two minutes, Detective.”

  “What does he want from you?” Besides your pain, Abbie thought.

  “Money.”

  “Are you going to give it to him?”

  “Yes.”

  Abbie paused. Riesen’s exchange could give her a chance to catch Hangman or his accomplice. But at the price of what? Sandy was dead.

  “Your nephew is toying with you, Mr. Riesen. He’s a sadist. He enjoys watching people in pain and you’re a new level, like on a video game. It fascinates and excites him. He’s just getting revenge, making up for lost time.”

  What she didn’t want to say was, he wants to torture you because Sandy is now dead and he can’t hurt her anymore. He will hurt you now and he’ll enjoy it almost as much as he did when inflicting pain on your daughter.

  Riesen smiled. “You don’t have children, Detective?”

  “No.”

  “Then I understand what you’re saying, but you’re ignorant of this. Any chance I have of seeing Sandy again, even of touching something she wore, I would pay any amount of money for it. There’s nothing else left in life for me now.”

  There were other things to discuss, and time was short. “What did he promise?”

  “He said that if I wanted Sandy’s emerald ring, the one she was wearing when she was taken, to bring the money and not to call the cops for any reason. The ring belonged to my mother, and her mother before that. It’s a family piece, and I’ve wanted it back. But he said there might be a surprise, a big surprise, with it. I think he meant that he would show me evidence my daughter’s alive.”

  Abbie stared. “I want to see the letter.”

  “No.”

  This link between Hangman and his uncle was unnerving. Who knew what they were saying to each other? “Where is the exchange going to take place?” she asked.

  Riesen frowned, as if he were dealing with a child. “I’m not telling you that. This is all you get.”

  Abbie heard a car engine purring. She looked up. The white car was approaching from the same side street it had come from. “Why won’t you let me—”

  “Because he said if he spots one suspicious person, he will break it off. There is no discussion.”

  “Mr. Riesen—”

  The car pulled up and Riesen turned toward it.

  “I want to be there,” Abbie said.

  Ries
en stopped and turned.

  “Why should I let you get near this?”

  “Because I’ve caught killers like Hangman before. No one else in this city has. Don’t go in there blind. Just take me and a couple of men.”

  He turned to the car, eager to get away now, to finalize the arrangements, probably. Because he now believed Sandy was alive and the thought that she was out there, in pain, imprisoned, was unbearable to him.

  “I can’t risk it,” he said.

  “He’ll never see me.”

  Riesen walked to the car, pulled open the back door. He looked around, scanning the low industrial buildings and the roads leading to the river. Then he looked at her.

  “When I have Sandy back, I’ll tell you everything I know. I’ll give you the envelopes he sent me. But even meeting you here …” She saw something flash across his face. Fear. The thought that Hangman was watching them, that he’d blown Sandy’s last chance.

  “No one is watching us,” she said quickly. “Mr. Riesen, if it was my own daughter, I’d give this a chance. I swear to you.”

  “McGonagle will call you,” Riesen said, stepping into the car and pulling the door shut softly. The car purred away. The struts of the underpass glowed red in the light from the taillights.

  49

  Walking back to her car, Abbie’s footsteps echoed along the narrow streets. She passed a tackle shop and then a bar, both closed.

  She took out her phone and called McGonagle.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know mailmen?” she asked.

  “You mean, in a social sense?”

  “Cut it out. Riesen is communicating with Hangman. He’s already gotten one package from him and he’s expecting another. I want to see his mail before he does.”

  There was a murmur, a man’s voice in the background. “Let me make a call,” McGonagle said. “See who’s on the route. I can’t reach everyone, you know.”

  “Sure you can.”

  He cackled and was gone.

  It was close to midnight by the time she got home. She climbed the stairs to her bedroom, the wood creaking, and took a stinging hot shower. After, she nibbled on a few homemade cookies from Mae and Frank, her friends from around the corner. Oatmeal raisin. Her favorites. While she was drinking a full glass of ice-cold milk, the phone rang.

  “It’s set for tomorrow,” McGonagle said. “Riesen’s house is in the last part of the guy’s route. It usually takes him four hours to complete the whole run, about three and a half to reach Riesen’s place. He gets his stack of mail for the day around 8:15 from the distribution center at 1200 William. He’ll go through it and hand off anything suspicious to us as soon as he leaves the main post office. We can have it for three hours, with thirty minutes extra for travel time.”

  Abbie tapped her fingernail on the kitchen table. “Why not hold it for a day?”

  “Because the guy’s six months from retirement and he won’t risk it. Letters are stamped when they’re routed through the distribution center, so they know when the carriers get them. He doesn’t want this getting traced back to them.”

  “McGonagle!” she cried. “You can’t twist his arm?”

  “Listen, you,” he said in a low snarl. “The mailman’s old and stubborn and I’ve already got my neck out for you. Three hours it is.”

  “I’ll be waiting to hear from you,” she said.

  “You’re worse than a fucking wife.”

  50

  Abbie woke at 6 a.m., watched the trees outside her window as the morning sun burned around them. Dead still. No wind.

  She couldn’t get back to sleep, so she dressed in a knit J. Crew jacket and gray slacks, and headed downtown. Pulling into the Police HQ parking lot, she saw that Raymond’s car wasn’t there yet. She breathed a sigh of relief. She felt somehow she was deceiving him by using the Network behind his back. Every detective has informers, she said to herself. Mine are just ex-cops.

  At 8:20 a.m., a text from McGonagle.

  “Handwritten letter to Riesen, no return address.”

  Abbie’s hand shook as she typed back. “Bring to BPD, meet out back.”

  Hangman’s DNA picture, the splotchy, parallel bands that gave his genetic profile, was in the files. She’d seen it when looking through the boxes—a stiff white card issued by the FBI’s CODIS program, for Combined DNA Index System. If he licked the envelope, all the lab had to do was swab it and generate a DNA profile. That could take a couple of days.

  “Done,” McGonagle wrote back.

  The DNA was just insurance. What mattered was what the letter said.

  McGonagle was waiting in the driver seat of his old two-tone Ford Explorer. A man with a porkpie hat and a thick overcoat sat in the back and watched through the dirty side window as Abbie walked up. The passenger side of the Explorer was sprayed with a single thick arc of drying mud. Opening the door, Abbie smelled Genesee Cream Ale and chewing tobacco.

  She slipped into the back of the car. The man in the porkpie hat had a pale, priestlike face and a shock of dark hair over sleepy eyes. He grinned at her.

  “You are?” she said.

  “No names, thank you,” McGonagle said, turning in the front seat. The dark-haired man smiled wistfully. In his hand was a large Ziploc bag holding a letter. Abbie took the bag, which crinkled as she handled it, and stared at the white, standard business envelope. It was the security version, with swirls of blue patterns printed on the inside to prevent anyone but the intended recipient reading the contents.

  “What do you think of the handwriting?” Abbie said to McGonagle.

  “It’s him, or a damn good imitation,” he said. “We steamed it open already. She’s all yours.”

  Abbie looked at the envelope.

  “You swab the glue where he might have licked it before closing?”

  McGonagle looked at the dark-haired man.

  “It’s a self-closing envelope,” he said. The man had a strangely high, girlish voice. “You pull away a strip and then seal it. No chance for saliva there.”

  Abbie looked at McGonagle. “You didn’t look inside?”

  McGonagle’s face was a mask. “It’s your investigation,” he said. “Don’t insult me.”

  Abbie pulled out her thin leather gloves and slipped the right one on. She didn’t have any surgical gloves on her—they were sitting on the Saab’s passenger seat so this would have to do. She slid her hand into the bag, caught the corner of the envelope and pulled it out. As she did this, the flap caught the lip of the bag and pulled away from the envelope. Inside was a folded sheet of white paper, unlined.

  As the dark-haired man watched her intently, Abbie pulled out the paper and read it. Script, not block letters. “Allegany. The Old Stone Tower, 8 tonight. Leave the money on the top of the tower. One cop and you never hear from me again.”

  Abbie slumped back against the seat, which gave up a puff of chewing tobacco scent. Abbie could smell the mint in it.

  She showed the letter to McGonagle. The dark-haired man bent over and peered at it as well, his face somber.

  “Good place to meet,” she said. “I have to tell Perelli.”

  McGonagle looked out the window, then turned to her. “Yeah, you do.”

  Abbie sighed. “Though I’d rather not.”

  51

  When Abbie was a girl, Allegany State Park had been the forest primeval. Acre after acre of thick-trunked trees with spreading roots that looked like dinosaur feet, an impenetrable curtain of green above, paths curling away into the distance, the sound of running water, and voices emerging from the tree cover. Happy voices. Children calling out, parents telling ghost stories over campfires. Peaceful summer nights.

  The park had once been called “The Playground of Western New York,” but there was nothing exotic or fancy about it. It was old forest, run-down in places, an affordable place for Buffalo families to get away from their lives for a week or two, working people with no real camping skills who could rent a cabin and build
campfires and play Frisbee while the teenagers eyed the other families driving by. The cabins were humble, unheated.

  She’d arrived at 1 p.m., believing that Hangman wouldn’t arrive before dusk for the 8 p.m. meeting. The extra hours allowed her and Raymond to scout two positions and to watch the tower, to see who came and went. She needn’t have worried about that part. The park was nearly deserted. No one had been throwing Frisbees or making campfires as she’d hiked in that morning from the parking lot. The high season for the park was over, the families gone home. Allegany had a few bird-watchers strolling its pathways, but that was about it. She’d heard nothing all day except the tentative steps of deer rooting in the brush and one family of raccoons that had found her hiding spot and had come to investigate, their eyes black hollow discs in a circle of white.

  The conference with Perelli at his office had gone … well, it had gone. His color had been one shade lighter, and she guessed he hadn’t emerged into the sun since Hangman had escaped. She’d told him that information had come to her indicating that Hangman would be meeting with Frank Riesen and she wanted herself and Raymond to cover it, along with a nearby backup team. Maybe ten more.

  Perelli looked at her like she was offering him a reprieve of some sort. “Tell me everything,” he said.

  “He chose Allegany Park because there’s no one up there right now. You can’t have guys with mikes in their ears pretending to be out for a morning stroll or selling pretzels from a cart. It’s deserted. Every extra body is a risk.”

  Perelli had looked beaten down. She’d expected more resistance. He asked how she’d gotten the information but she looked at him and shook her head. She wouldn’t lie about it, but she wasn’t going to draw him a map, either.

  In the end, they’d agreed on six extra state troopers at the entrances to the park, where all vehicles came in or left. The troopers could plausibly be said to be on normal park duty and could check for anyone unusual entering or exiting by car. A mile from the Stone Tower, they put three SWAT members on the shoreline of Red House Lake, pretending to be buddies camping out after fishing all day for northern pike. They had long guns in their tents and night-vision goggles in their backpacks. The four state forest rangers for that part of Allegany, the rangers who rode lazily around the winding roads inside the park and were a well-known feature of the place, had been replaced by Buffalo cops. They had their own guns and they would be patrolling in the area of the tower, although Kearney had given them a minimum distance of three hundred yards until they heard from her.