Hangman

by Stephan Talty

  “A mannequin,” Abbie whispered. It wore a tartan skirt and a crisp white blouse. She was momentarily confused, until she recognized the uniform from her school debating days. Sacred Heart Academy. Maggie Myeong had gone to Sacred Heart.

  Abbie moved closer.

  Another mannequin to her left. This one wearing a flowing green dress, one-shouldered. Abbie stared at it in horror, not understanding.

  “Can I help you, Detective?” she heard behind her.

  She swung around, her hand shaking.

  “Mr. Myeong,” she whispered. His eyes were covered by shadow, which cut across his chin.

  “What are you doing in my house?”

  Abbie breathed, her heart pounding furiously. Was Katrina Lamb nearby?

  “What are these mannequins, Mr. Myeong?”

  He stepped closer. Myeong was pale, his face tight with anger or surprise. The eyes were agitated and red-rimmed. His hand came up, pale as a ghost in the moted light, and he seemed to cover his eyes. “When you lose a girl,” Myeong said, and came toward her into the room. “You want to keep as much of her as you can.”

  She saw his eyes now, and they were angry, but they wandered past her and focused on the mannequin just over her right shoulder, the one wearing the school uniform.

  Abbie’s eyes took in the things behind him. A bedroom set. Canisters leaning against the wall, the kind you’d put art, or posters in. A padded jewelry case sitting on a chair.

  “You moved Maggie’s room down here?” she said.

  Myeong looked around, then nodded.

  “I couldn’t walk by her room every day. It’s just down the hall from my bedroom. Even if the door was closed, which is how I always kept it …”

  He paused. Abbie released a breath and dropped the Glock to her side.

  “Their clothes keep their smell the longest. Especially a girl who liked perfume.” He wasn’t crying, he was far past crying. He was numb.

  Abbie felt her body droop. The room was a shrine to his daughter. Hangman wasn’t here, Katrina either.

  His eyes were on her, dead black eyes. “Why are you here, Detective?”

  “I’m looking for Katrina.”

  His eyes seemed to dilate inward. “And you thought she might be here?”

  “We’re searching the area. I saw this”—she pointed to the mannequin, its fingers elegantly curved.

  Myeong nodded. “Do you think I’m insane?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Because only an insane man would take a girl when his own had been killed.” Then he said something low. She thought it was, “I loved her very much,” but she couldn’t be sure.

  Abbie stepped toward Mr. Myeong. She couldn’t go without knowing.

  “In the other room, there’s a baby’s building block. The letter A looks just like the one carved in Maggie’s hand.”

  He nodded and seemed about to speak, but he turned and walked out into the corridor. Abbie followed him, terror at the thought of being locked in this room blooming in her chest. By the door was a jewelry chest, covered in dust. Abbie instinctively reached over and brushed some of the grit off the dust. When she turned back, Myeong was watching her.

  “This way,” he said.

  63

  “The symbol on her hand was a threat,” Myeong said, sitting in the front room with the grand piano gleaming under a picture window. Abbie perched on the edge of the piano seat, while the diminutive man was sunk into the folds of an enormous leather couch. She smelled the Pine-Sol that had been used on the piano, which looked like the only thing in the house that Myeong cared for.

  Abbie didn’t take out her notebook. They were way past all that.

  “Something that happened in Arizona?”

  Myeong shook his head. “Before.” His eyes were far away, fixed on something out the window. He sat slumped forward, his feet spread apart.

  “Mr. Myeong?”

  “You were right, the A was a baby block. I knew it right away.”

  Abbie took a deep breath.

  “But she was your child, you have no doubt?”

  He nodded quickly.

  “You see, the year before she died, Maggie had a child. Secretly. She wanted it that way, and we agreed. Afterward, when it was all over, I’d find her in her room. She …” He hung his head and his eyelids pressed close. Myeong’s ribs strained against his shirt as he cried. He was breathing fast.

  “It was a boy. She thought she would call it Alexander.” He came up, took a ragged breath, then wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “If she’d kept it?”

  Myeong stared at her, shaking his head, his lips pursed to speak but no sounds coming out.

  Abbie closed her eyes.

  “Maggie gave the baby away?”

  He nodded violently.

  “Yes. She did. I never knew she was pregnant until the end. I thought she was putting on weight, that’s all. It was partly my fault, we never talked about personal things and she was terrified of disappointing me. I think my wife knew this.”

  “And you took her to Arizona …”

  “There’s a psychiatric facility in Tempe that deals with young mothers. She felt guilty about the whole thing. So we brought her there.”

  “But why would Hangman carve that into her hand?” Abbie asked.

  “It was a message, a warning. Hangman had time with those girls; he talked to them. What else could it be? A message to me that she’d told Hangman about Alexander. I thought he was threatening to reveal it to the world. A final humiliation.”

  “Is that why you went on TV?” Abbie said.

  “Of course. He wrote me, threatened to send a letter to the newspapers. I paid him $40,000 not to reveal Maggie’s secret. It was the least I could do.”

  Abbie stood up. Her feet rang out on the cold hardwood floor as she walked to the window. The trees lined in the front yards of the nearby homes were filled with leaves, just beginning to change color. A fall day heading into the depths of winter.

  She turned. Myeong’s head was down, bobbing just above his knees. It looked like he was shaking off a punch.

  It felt like there was a magnet in Abbie’s head, with ideas flying toward it: images, snatches of conversation that before had nothing to do with each other. They were forming themselves into a pattern. She closed her eyes.

  “You’re right,” she said. “The letter A was a message to you. But not from Hangman.”

  64

  Abbie sat in her car after finishing with Myeong and watched the leaves fall, swaying and dipping, from the trees that lined Summer. The dark gray asphalt was covered with them near the gutters, and she watched two swoop and fall to the top of the yellow pile.

  The magnet was still pulling things from her memory. Something Myeong said had triggered it.

  “Do you think I’m insane?”

  Walter Myeong wasn’t insane. He was just grieving, and would be for the rest of his life.

  So what was it?

  Her nerves were jangling, her body felt twitchy. She was close. The case’s dark matter was acquiring a shape. What is it? What am I missing?

  Walter Myeong wasn’t insane, but he’d brought Maggie to a psychiatric facility in Arizona.

  Abbie got out of the car and went to the trunk. She popped it open and there was the case file. She hadn’t given it back to HQ.

  She brought it back to the driver’s seat, and closed the door. Abbie opened the file and began flipping through the pages.

  There. Maggie Myeong. She hadn’t been seen by a psychiatrist in Buffalo, not according to the file, but she’d wanted to become one. “For her school project junior year, she’d done after-school work at a psychiatric facility,” Abbie read. Her junior year. She was killed in 2007, and she’d been a senior at Sacred Heart. She’d volunteered to work with psychiatric patients in 2006.

  Abbie flipped forward in the file to the Marcus Flynn profile. She flicked through his bio. But there was nothing there.
>
  Whatever was niggling at her brain wasn’t from the file. It was from something else.

  An interview?

  Let it come, Abbie. You know it’s there.

  McGonagle. The EDP episodes. Marcus Flynn had been brought in twice for public disturbances, both along Chippewa, in the year before the murders began. Which was 2006. Evaluated as an emotionally disturbed person and released, McGonagle had said. But evaluated where?

  She snapped up her phone.

  “Perelli.”

  “It’s Kearney.”

  “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Just tell me one thing. If an emotionally disturbed suspect was arrested in North Buffalo, on Chippewa, where would he be taken?”

  “Wh-aat?” Perelli sounded brain-dead.

  “Where would he be taken?”

  “The Psych Center.”

  Abbie closed her eyes. The old Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane over on Elmwood Avenue, a huge complex of brown brick buildings inside its own neglected acreage. Most of the old wards—in a separate part of the grounds, built God knows how many years ago and hidden behind acres of forest—were abandoned, with only a few modern buildings grafted onto the old structures, which were visible behind a black-spiked iron fence. In front were two looming towers, capped in green metal, their windows staring balefully out at passersby on Elmwood.

  No kings and queens lived in Buffalo, Abbie thought. But Abbie would bet there were patients at the Buffalo State Asylum who believed themselves to be Napoleon, or the kings of England, or Louis XIV. I live where the kings abide.

  Something an inmate would say.

  The buildings were old, late nineteenth century at least. At some point in their history, they would have been heated by coal. She grabbed the folder and paged furiously through the blueprints.

  The second to last was marked “The Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane.” Abbie stared at the thin, spidery lines that traced the walls of the old wards.

  She turned the key on the Saab and revved the engine high, swinging out onto Delaware Avenue. “Still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Send SWAT to the Psych Center, the abandoned part in the back of the grounds. I think Hangman’s there—and Katrina. I’ll explain why after we check it.”

  Maggie Myeong was an intern there in the fall of 2006. Marcus Flynn was detained for being emotionally disturbed in that time span, which means he must have gone to the Center. They had brushed across each other’s paths. It had coal bins.

  Three minutes away. Hold on, Katrina.

  “Kearney, you feel good about this? I can pull guys off the third search team to go in there with you.”

  “Do it.”

  “Listen, that place is like a fucking series of dungeons. Half the buildings are abandoned, the roofs falling in, the whole facility’s locked up, and everything’s connected to everything else by corridors.”

  “I know. But I want to be first.”

  “Give me fifteen minutes,” Perelli said. “We’re going to need bolt cutters and all that shit. And bodies.”

  65

  She approached the Psych Center from the public side. The front part of the old asylum grounds, the acreage fronting on Elmwood Avenue, had been taken over by Buffalo State University. Best to come in through the campus. No one would notice her that way.

  She whipped the Saab along Grant Street, the turbo whining, and made a right into the college entrance. The early evening sky was clear, the sun dropped somewhere behind the soaring trees to the west. Abbie dropped her speed down as she drove the campus roads, passing an imposing building with six stone pillars in front. She came to a crosswalk and a trio of overweight female students stared at her as she nearly plowed through them.

  Come on, girls, for God’s sake. It took an eternity for them to cross.

  Abbie grimaced and stepped on the accelerator. She passed large, newish dorms in bright tan brick and rolled by the baseball field. She went slowly, so as not to attract attention. She hadn’t told Perelli everything, of course, but enough to get what she wanted.

  A large round brick smokestack loomed up on her right. The college power plant. She drove past it and over a large avenue and the character of the landscape changed. The modern buildings and the dorms fell away and were replaced by a range of peaked roofs ahead of her, casting sharp shadows, like a piece of sooty old London transported to the middle of a bucolic campus. She was driving west, so the setting sun was behind the wards, filling their windows with darkness. The ones to the left looked abandoned.

  The old asylum.

  Abbie parked by a large playing field where young women were practicing lacrosse. Their sudden shouts and calls carried over the grass cleanly and came to her. Abbie pretended to watch for a moment, walked along the line of cars parked on the access road, then turned and strode quickly for a grove of black-trunked trees that shaded a path to her right. She hurried down the path away from the college and the fields, the sounds of lacrosse slipping behind her.

  She passed the modern part of the asylum as she raced ahead. Through panes of clear glass, she saw patients moving through the corridors, a security guard standing with hands on his gun belt through the front door. The buildings were the rehabbed wings of the old facility, and they looked like brownstones in a nice part of Brooklyn. This is where they took Marcus Flynn when he was acting crazy. Before the murders started. Abbie hurried on.

  The grounds grew more overgrown and tangled the further she went. On her left she spotted the remains of a rusting wire fence that had once crossed over the path, now choked with vines. To her right was an old metal swing that had provided entertainment for the inmates on summer days, but the top bar had rusted through and the wrought iron seat had crashed to the ground. She moved quickly, listening. There were forest sounds: birds chirping in the sunlight and branches of trees thwacking against each other.

  She came to a new galvanized steel fence that ran across the path and continued both right and left. A white metal sign had been screwed to the horizontal fence posts, with bright red lettering. CONDEMNED BUILDINGS, it read. PROPERTY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK. KEEP OUT. Abbie glanced around before putting her boot on the lowest rung and beginning to climb. In ten seconds, she was over, landing in a patch of dry grass.

  The old asylum wards were ahead to her left. Dark rectangular windows, many jagged with broken glass, stared back at her. It seemed impossible that Katrina could be in there, so close to the idyllic scenes of college life. Obscene. How could Hangman keep her down there? But these buildings were long forgotten, shut away, full of bad memories the city wanted to forget. No one came back here.

  The line of trees on either side of the meadow that fronted the wards seemed to funnel wind down their center. Abbie pulled the collar of her coat tight around her neck. She leaned against the last elm, watching the sun dip below the horizon. Shadows were her friends now. She was a shadow herself, hoping to blend into the tree line. She checked her watch.

  6:53. If Perelli was right, she’d have backup in about ten minutes.

  She waited. The sound of bells came over the elms, all the way from the red-roofed bell tower of Lafayette Presbyterian, she guessed. Abbie slid the magazine out of her Glock, glanced at it quickly, and then jammed it back. A nervous habit.

  Then she heard it. A clear ringing scream, rising quickly from the sound of birdsong, then cut off in mid-shriek. A cry of pure arcing horror.

  Abbie stared at the line of jagged-roofed buildings. Had it come from them, or had the wind carried it from the main psychiatric facility a quarter-mile behind her? Her eyes raked the dilapidated structures, but the shabby redbrick buildings showed no movement. Abbie moved out of the line of trees and headed straight for the door of the middle ward.

  The second scream was louder. A guttural moan twisted into a screech of pain. Abbie ran. Her vision shook as she raced over the uneven ground, her feet bouncing off little hills of rock and earth, the facade of the buildings jar
ring and twisting as she sprinted over the lawn straight toward one of the darkened hallways. The sound rang in her ears. It was a girl’s scream, not a woman’s.

  Bringing the Glock up in a locked-arm stance, she reached the porch and dashed up the steps to the wooden door. She threw her shoulder against the door, but it didn’t budge. Abbie took a deep, shaking breath, and tried the handle. Locked. The place was silent as a tomb.

  Abbie tried to wrench the door. These buildings had been abandoned for decades and the locks were probably rusted solid. She ducked to look in the tall, black-framed window next to the door frame; it was streaked with dirt and the rain had made a pattern on the grime. Inside, she saw a partially razed room, plaster torn from the yellowing walls, abandoned equipment. It sent a chill rattling down her backbone.

  Turning back toward the playing fields, Abbie brought her elbow back and smashed it through the window. Tinkle of glass shards. She knocked away more glass with her Glock until there was a hole big enough to get through. It was too far from the door to reach around and unlock it from inside.

  The building had swallowed up the screamer. Only a breath of stale air from the hole in the glass. Abbie holstered the Glock and stepped through the frame.

  Sirens in the distance. Perelli was coming. Hurry, damn it.

  Abbie ducked her head past the broken glass and found herself in a high-ceilinged room strewn with old bedpans, a broken bed frame, fallen plaster everywhere, a shattered mirror on the wall above a chipped mantelpiece.

  Her pulse was jumping and her mouth went dry. She couldn’t call out or Hangman might kill Katrina.

  Had he heard the glass break?

  Abbie dashed across the room toward a doorway set in the corner of the far wall. The passageway to the next ward. She put her hand on the cool enamel-coated knob, and slowly pulled open the door. Half-light. To the left was a short hallway into a dark, vaulted room. To the right were stairs descending into cryptlike darkness.

  Abbie brought the Glock up and marched slowly ahead into the gloom.

  Gleams of light showed puddles of oily black water on the floor. Flaking green paint on the walls showed patches of white primer underneath. Abbie’s mind flashed on hordes of zombified people pushing along these walls, terrified of the staff, pushing themselves into the plaster and rubbing away the paint. Armies of the mad marching through here, gone now.