Hangman

by Stephan Talty

  Where was Katrina?

  She heard cranking, like a machine with a sprocket. Click, click, click. But it was faint. Abbie turned left.

  It came from outside. Abbie found the first window, streaked with grime. Through it she saw a semicircle of dark, leafless trees. Abbie scanned right. There.

  A girl in a blue sweater and dirty white pants with her neck in a noose, swinging.

  Abbie reared back and kicked out the glass.

  “Katrina!” Abbie cried, vaulting through the glass, curling her head over her knees as she tumbled forward. She landed on her back, and felt a shard of glass cutting through her coat into her flesh, but she was quickly up and running toward the grove of twisted trees.

  She dashed for the girl. The body turned and she saw the girl wore a bizarre mask. She was wriggling, hands tied behind her back. Abbie raced up to the girl and grabbed her by the legs.

  She tried to lift her but couldn’t. The girl was making a noise in her throat. As if it was cut and the air bubbles were escaping out the sliced airway.

  Abbie spotted the box the girl had been standing on, an old wooden one. She gasped and stepped up on it. Immediately, the box began rocking underneath her feet on the unsteady ground, threatening to tip over.

  Abbie saw terrified eyes behind the mask. She grabbed Katrina around the waist with her left arm and lifted. With the right, she pulled out her Glock.

  The rope looked thick and strong as iron. Abbie pointed the Glock a foot above the noose and pulled off four rounds, the sound exploding in the stillness.

  Katrina didn’t fall.

  Oh, God, the shadows were going to reach out and put their fingers around her neck and then get the girl. Where was Hangman?

  The echoes of the gunshots faded into the sky. The rope, snipped by the bullets, was still holding by a few cords. Katrina’s fingers closed around Abbie’s arm and the choking noise pitched higher. Cold as icicles.

  Her brain is dying, Abbie, hurry. But her strength was failing just from the effort of lifting the girl a few inches. Her vision shook as Abbie raised the Glock again, the left arm screaming in pain. She took aim and pulled off another three shots.

  Dizzy now. No change in the rope. The shots had gone wild. Abbie’s legs began shaking from the strain.

  She holstered the gun and grabbed Katrina around the waist.

  “Hold on,” she cried, and taking a jagged breath jumped off the box, clasping the girl to her body.

  Katrina gasped painfully. A horrible moment of suspension, then the rope snapped with the sound of a pistol shot and the two of them spilled to the ground, the impact pushing the air from Abbie’s lungs.

  Abbie pulled her gun hand free and found the grip of the Glock, wrenched it out, her other arm still wrapped around a gasping Katrina. She ejected the magazine, pulled a fresh one from her pocket and slammed it in, her eyes scanning the shadows cast by the eaves of the old asylum.

  Abbie got her finger under the noose. It was wrapped around the girl’s throat, biting deep into the skin. Abbie pushed two more fingers inside the noose, pulling desperately at the rope. She grunted with the effort, and heard the grunt echo out into the grove.

  Slowly, Abbie worked the coil until with a cry of effort she lifted the noose and pulled it over the girl’s hair. The mask came off with it.

  Katrina Lamb, a red-ball gag around her mouth, stared at her in oxygen-deprived shock. Abbie grabbed her and rolled toward the base of the tree.

  As she did, an impression flashed across her mind: something had just moved in the darkness underneath the old ward’s windowsill, second to the left. A shift in the bunched shadows.

  She pulled off Katrina’s gag and the girl gasped. Abbie brought her mouth to her ear and whispered.

  “Where is he?”

  Katrina was panicking, taking huge gulps of air as if she were drowning.

  “Rrrrrr—”

  “Where, Katrina?”

  “Rrrrrright behind you.”

  Abbie’s eyes went wide. She whipped around.

  Emerging from the gloom of the trees to her right was Marcus Flynn. He wore a dark boiler suit and his hands were down by his side. In his right was a black .45. His eyes open nightmare-wide, mouth gaping, staring at her like she was a ghost escaped from his own nightmare.

  “Marcus,” she cried, raising the gun.

  He came, shuffle-stepped, the .45 bouncing by his side.

  “Put the gun down!” Abbie shouted, her voice shaking.

  He kept coming. Abbie pointed at Flynn’s chest.

  “Marcus,” she said. “Stop right there.”

  Fifteen feet. Twelve. His face was strange, a half-smile on his lips.

  Abbie caught his gaze. “I know you didn’t kill those girls, Marcus.”

  The shuffling stopped.

  A gunshot. Abbie twisted away as Flynn jerked to the ground. Abbie dashed back and pulled Katrina away and they huddled behind the gnarled trunk.

  Katrina was shrieking. Abbie cooed to her softly. “It’s almost over. Almost.”

  Marcus Flynn was bleating like a stuck animal. The sound filled the little grove of trees. Abbie peeked around the trunk.

  BAM. Another gunshot. Marcus Flynn’s body jumped, and he let out a long groan, then lay still, twisted over on his right side.

  A voice called out. “You were supposed to shoot him, not me.”

  Katrina’s body twitched violently and she clung to Abbie, her nails biting into Abbie’s arm. The two of them were barely covered by the tree and its roots. Abbie smelled pine needles and dirt. The voice came from her left, at the corner of the old ward. To escape, she’d have to either turn and run into the forest or dash for the far corner of the wards, away from the man with the gun. But both would expose her to moonlight and bullets.

  Katrina’s hand was clamped on Abbie’s gun arm. Abbie slowly peeled the fingers off. She turned toward the corner where the shots had come from.

  “Why would I shoot an innocent man, Doctor?” she called out.

  Andrew Lipschitz’s rippling laughter echoed through the grove. The branches above Abbie’s head whispered as a breeze moved through them. “How did you know?” he asked. The voice seemed to be moving in the gloom.

  She couldn’t see anything there; it was in deep shadow from the roof above. Was he hiding behind the corner of the ward or coming toward her, covered by the inky blackness?

  Abbie took a deep breath. She knew the endgame here. To kill Katrina and bury her with Marcus Flynn where they would never be found. And leave her, Abbie, dead in this grove.

  Abbie leveled her gun, but she could hear skittering. Lipschitz had the advantage. He didn’t mind killing all of them. With Fatty Joe Carlson’s gun. It would make for a perfect ending to the story.

  “Because you don’t know women,” Abbie called out. “You kill them, but you don’t know them.”

  She felt him listening. He was too curious for his own good.

  “When you gave Mr. Riesen Sandy’s hand, you forgot to take off the polish from her nails.”

  “And?” said Lipschitz.

  “Did you know that the makeup companies change the colors all the time? It’s called fashion. Bad mistake.”

  “Is that right?”

  The voice had shifted a few feet right. Abbie pulled Katrina away, keeping the tree between them and the gunman.

  “The one on her nails was China Glaze Groovy Green—I checked at the mall. Which means you must have bought it yourself, because it didn’t come out until June 2008. Marcus Flynn was in prison in June of 2008, Doctor. So I knew he hadn’t killed Sandy. You did. You killed all the girls. But you kept Sandy alive for a while, didn’t you?”

  The wind chinked the dry branches overhead. No answer from the doctor.

  Just give me a shot and I’ll take him out. How long until SWAT arrived? If it was more than a few minutes, she’d be dead, most likely.

  Lipschitz’s voice came floating out of the gloom. “If that was my last mist
ake, what was my first?” The laughter was gone out of his voice.

  “Maggie, of course,” Abbie said. “She was an intern at the Psychiatric Center. You worked here. You saw her here. And you chose her.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  Abbie heard the sirens, closer now. They were coming up the path she’d walked, taking no chances. Two minutes and it was over.

  “It was a bad move, Doctor. If they traced back where she’d been working, who she knew, they would have eventually come here and started talking to the staff. And then she carved that A in her hand, so that her father would know that Hangman knew about her baby. Because you talked to her about it, didn’t you? She wanted to talk to someone, she was in bad shape. And she told you about baby Alexander and the rest of it.”

  Laughter. “All true, Detective. But I had to have Maggie. I don’t regret it. Our time was short, but it was sweet.”

  “Drop the gun, Doctor.”

  A bark of scoffing laughter. “Do you think I’m going to Auburn, with those Mongoloids? It was hard enough working with them, I’m not about to join them.”

  Abbie put her hand on Katrina’s shaking shoulder and slowly circled behind her. She checked the angle from the right. No better.

  “So you looked around for someone to be Hangman, to take the rap for you. You found Marcus Flynn. He was your patient here?”

  “I was on duty when they brought him in. Marcus had problems. It wasn’t much of a loss to society, was it?” His voice was neutral, but she knew he was waiting for her to make a mistake. Lipschitz was crafty as hell.

  “You sent the letter to Child Welfare about Sandy being abused,” she said. “And you told Marcus about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was the girl who died here, Doctor, the one who started you killing?”

  She heard geese shoot overhead, honking, then quiet settled onto the little grove.

  “I thought you already knew. My mother.”

  Abbie closed her eyes. She flashed on the photo of the dark-haired young girl on Lipschitz’s desk at Auburn. Of course. Hiding in plain sight.

  She peeked around the tree again and the bark exploded just above her right eye. Abbie snapped her head back.

  “Let’s goooooooooo,” Katrina moaned.

  “Quiet or we die,” Abbie hissed back.

  He still had time to kill them both and get away. No one knew his identity, except her.

  “She was a maid in the North, just sixteen, when it happened,” Lipschitz said in a voice filled with acid. “That’s where she was raped. After that, they fired her, left her to rot and she never forgot it. Years later, she ended up in this hellhole. That was when they still believed in plunge baths and indiscriminate beatings to cure the patients. She hung herself from a tree not ten feet from where you are.”

  Abbie glanced at Marcus Flynn in the paleness of the moon’s light. A smear of a face. Blood beneath his flung-out right arm. But his chest was rising and falling.

  “I came here to see if I could find out who the family was,” Lipschitz said. “But the records were gone. I only had the diary they gave me years later.”

  The diary he made the girls read. The evil-doers are not punished.

  Lipschitz was punishing them.

  “One man from North Buffalo raped your mother. Not all the families you targeted were guilty.”

  “They’re all the same to me.”

  A nickel-plated barrel emerged from the darkness at the corner of the ward. Then it was gone.

  She heard the click of a gun being cocked. He was crouched down, waiting for the right moment. He was going to rush her.

  Abbie’s heart jumped. Wait here for his charge or take a shot at him? Abbie’s mind froze. He would come around the tree to her left, firing at her and Katrina. Blitzing them.

  Katrina was shouting something unintelligible and shaking her head violently. Abbie grabbed her sweater. “Don’t run,” she whispered. “Do not run. He’ll shoot you.”

  “They treated her like garbage, Kearney,” Lipschitz’s voice called. “And I can still—”

  Katrina screamed. Abbie saw what was going to happen before it did. The girl wrenched away from Abbie’s hand and flung herself away from the tree cover, running for the corner of the old building.

  Lipschitz emerged out of the shadows, his face, shock-white, staring at the fleeing figure as he rotated the gun barrel toward her, the nickel sparking bright.

  Abbie snapped the Glock toward the pale smear of his face and pulled off four fast shots, deafening her. The grove rang with echoes as Lipschitz twisted and tumbled backward.

  Still screaming incoherently, Katrina Lamb sprinted toward the building and disappeared around the corner. No one back there but SWAT. Let her run.

  Abbie got up, the point of the Glock shaking, and ran over to Lipschitz, his khaki pants and dark black shoes etched in the gleams of moonlight, the rest of him in shadow. He was groaning and trying to get up, his right hand lifting gently before falling back to the ground. The gun was a foot away, the barrel faced back toward him now. Abbie kicked it away and stood three feet from the doctor.

  She heard blood gurgling in his throat. It also soaked his white cotton shirt red from a point just above the left pocket, like a dark, poisonous flower.

  From behind her, she heard Marcus Flynn. At first Abbie didn’t understand, but then she heard his words clearly: “Please don’t hurt him.”

  Lipschitz died in the half-gloom.

  66

  Statement by Marcus Flynn. Buffalo Police Headquarters. 74 Franklin Street. September 26, 2012. 10:45 p.m. In attendance: Detective William Raymond, Detective Absalom Kearney, Mr. Albert Hernandez (attorney for Mr. Flynn).

  I have to tell you the truth. My heart is going a thousand miles an hour. Do I sound normal? I feel like it’s hard to breathe and that the walls of this room have moved a couple of inches inward since I sat down.

  I know, I know. I’m just here to give an account of the Hangman case. But it’s not that simple. I really didn’t want to come here today; I almost turned my car around two times. Walking in that door … I felt like if I walked inside Police Headquarters, it would trigger the nightmare all over again. I’d be sitting across from you and we’d all be smiling, like we are now, and then you’d say, “Marcus, you have the right to remain silent.”

  May I have some water? Thank you.

  When it happens to you once, you never quite believe it won’t come true again. I’m not being charged with any crimes? Please say it for the record. OK. That’s better. I believe you. I’ll take a deep breath now.

  I first met Dr. Andy Lipschitz when I was brought to the Buffalo Psychiatric Center on September 4, 2006, after drinking too much in the Eagle Tavern on Chippewa Street and getting into a fight with the bartender. Dr. Lipschitz was the psychiatrist on call that night and I remember speaking to him for over an hour about my life and the reasons for my outburst. I was unhappy. Nothing in my life had worked out the way I’d planned, and I didn’t know why. I was probably a little suicidal, to tell you the truth. Maybe a little part of me wished one of those cops had taken me out while I was screaming and running around on Chippewa. It would have been easier that way.

  Dr. Lipschitz saved me. Ironic, I know. He … he didn’t look at his clipboard and rattle off questions to me. He leaned forward and listened when I talked, really listened. I don’t think anyone had listened to me like that for ten years. I liked him. When I was brought in again three weeks later, I asked for Dr. Lipschitz by name and he came in to talk to me, although he’d been off-duty that night.

  He didn’t cure me or anything. My problems—with women, with work, with trusting people—went pretty deep. I guess you could say now I was paranoid, but that’s not how I saw it at the time. I saw people working against me: people at work, people in my family especially. I’d never had good relations with them, especially my father, who’s a psychopath in a three-piece suit, and I’d lost my mother when I was a teenag
er. The same thing had happened to Dr. Lipschitz. When he told me that, I was like, he could be my brother. Or, he’s the person I should have become. His life had been crap at the start and, look at him, he was a doctor, helping people. It inspired me. I wanted to change.

  We kept in touch after that by phone and would occasionally meet for informal sessions at his offices on Elmwood Avenue. He didn’t charge me anything, although I offered. He seemed offended by that and I never offered again. It was more like a friendship, you could say. I spent the day before we met going over the things I’d talk about, but when I got to his office, it all happened so naturally. Dr. Lipschitz helped me trust people more. Maybe I should say he helped me trust him more.

  Toward the end of that year, I can’t remember the date, I learned from my Aunt Flora that an investigation had been opened by Child Welfare Services on my cousin, Sandy Riesen. I flipped out. I’d always felt protective of the women in my life, and I thought, “Here’s another person being ruined by my evil goddamned family.” I cared about Sandy. We joked that we were twins under the skin: she was a rebellious teenager and I was a rebellious adult. So I was very, very upset. I didn’t like my Uncle Frank, never had really, found him to be a cold, calculating individual, which runs in my family. On my next session with Dr. Lipschitz, I told him about Sandy. I was afraid that Uncle Frank would be able to sweep any allegations about him under the rug because of his wealth. You have to understand, I’d seen things like this happen before. My family is very good at twisting things so that the victims become the bad guys.

  Can I have more water, please? Thank you. I don’t want to talk about my family anymore, if it’s all the same to you.

  So, Dr. Lipschitz. He volunteered then to talk to Sandy, to get at what was really happening with her. I thought, thank God this man is on my side. I felt grateful to the universe for sending him to me. We set up a meeting with Sandy.

  My cousin was always complaining about how strict her father was. I told Sandy that I’d take her for a ride some Saturday—I always talk best when I’m driving a car, don’t ask me why—and we’d solve all her problems in one little trip. She said she thought that would be fun; she wanted to go rowing on Hoyt Lake. I didn’t make any promises but I said that was a possibility, depending on the weather. Dr. Lipschitz wanted to meet at a motel, a neutral site. It was raining that day, so I told Sandy we were going to drive into the country and hang out in this hick town I knew with a friend of mine. She laughed about that. I was the crazy cousin, you see. She expected nothing less.