Hangman
| Hangman |
| Special X [10] |
| Michael Slade |
| 2000 : Canada |
The first victim was found in Seattle. The second in Vancouver - just the
first two in a grisly puzzle that's turning the child's game of hangman
into a nightmare of escalating horror....
About the Author
Criminal lawyer
MICHAEL SLADE
has acted in over one hundred murder cases. His specialty is the law of insanity. He argued the last death penalty case in Canada’s highest court. Backed by his forensic experience, Slade’s Special X and Wyatt Rook thrillers fuse the genres of police and legal procedure, whodunit and impossible crime, suspense, history, and horror. Slade was guest of honor at both the Bloody Words crime convention and the World Horror Convention. As
Time Out
puts it, “A thin line separates crime and horror, and in Michael Slade’s thrillers, the demarcation vanishes altogether.” Slade was guest speaker at the international Police Leadership Conference and several RCMP regimental dinners. As
Reader’s Digest
puts it, “The Slade books have developed a strong following among police officers because of their strict adherence to proper police procedure.” For the stories behind his plots, visit Slade’s Morgue at
www.specialx.net
Connect with Slade at
www.facebook.com/MountieNoir
and
https://twitter.com/MountieNoir
Also by Michael Slade
Headhunter
Ghoul
Cutthroat
Ripper
Zombie
Primal Scream
Burnt Bones
Death’s Door
Bed of Nails
Swastika
Kamikaze
Crucified
Red Snow
HANGMAN
Michael Slade
HANGMAN
All Rights Reserved © 2000 by HEADHUNTER HOLDINGS LTD.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Headhunter Holdings Ltd.
Originally published by Viking/Penguin Canada.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Hanging
And naked to the hangman’s noose
The morning clocks will ring
A neck God made for other use
Than strangling in a string.
—A. E. Housman
Hangman’s Noose
Walla Walla, Washington State
February 14, 1993
At midnight on this snowy eve—Valentine’s Day—the state of Washington would hang Peter Bryce Haddon. For the umpteenth time in the past few hours, the reporter Justin Whitfield glanced at his watch. Within a minute he realized that his mind had failed to register the digital numbers. Whitfield checked the clock. 11:51. Barring a last minute reprieve from the governor, the condemned would dance with the hangman on the end of a rope in nine minutes.
Tick-tock
…
Tick-tock …
The minute hand advanced.
11:52.
Time was running out.
Several hours earlier, the Seattle crime reporter had driven inland from the coast through light flurries of snow. Cresting the Cascade Mountains by Snoqualmie Pass to cross the Columbia River beyond Yakima, he had reached the southeast corner of the state, where Oregon and Idaho bordered Washington. Flurries had thickened to snowfall, whitening Walla Walla by the time he parked his car outside the state prison. Television trucks set up satellite dishes on a swirling, wind-swept field as darkness crept around opposing vigils huddled in the parking lot.
A chain-link corridor ten feet wide separated the two camps, which were already divided by an insurmountable philosophical difference. Protesters fenced in the pen marked AGAINST carried printed signs that read “Why kill to show killing is wrong?” or wrote “Choose life” in the ankle-deep snow. Others braved the bite of the wind to kneel in prayer for Haddon, or they marched in a circle, hugging themselves and stamping their feet to keep warm, chanting, “We are justice-seeking people singing for our lives.”
Advocates fenced in the pen marked FOR were in a party mood. Outnumbering the fifty protesters three to one, most were younger than their adversaries. Teenagers wore white twine fashioned into little nooses around their necks. Chants of “Hang him, hang him” taunted the other camp as hand-printed signs waved in searchlight beams. “An eye for an eye,” quoted from the Bible. “What if it was your child?” under a photo of the murdered girl. “Haddon should hang,” illustrated with the crude stick figure of a hangman game, the eyes X’d out to denote death.
Tick-tock
…
Tick-tock …
Justin had entered the prison.
A hundred plus reporters would gather tonight at the Washington State Penitentiary for a death lottery to select the twelve media witnesses who would watch Haddon hang. Only one reporter would spend private time with the condemned, and he, at Haddon’s insistence, was guaranteed a seat in the gallows gallery.
A guard inside the prison had ordered Justin to spread his arms and turn away from him. First frisked, then stripped of everything in his pockets, including his pen and notepad, the
Seattle Star
reporter was led to Unit 6 to wait.
So loud was the jangling of the phone that Justin had jumped. Replacing the receiver, the grim guard ushered him out, and he trudged through snow that tumbled between fences topped with razor wire to reach the death shed. At the door to the killing machine, Justin signed in, feeling colder within the chamber than he had outside.
Tick-tock …
Tick-tock …
Justin faced the gallows.
The two-level structure, built in 1931, had not been used since Joseph Self was hanged in 1963 for killing a cab driver. Of the seventy-three cons Washington had executed since 1904, forty-three had met the hangman on this gallows. Peter Bryce Haddon would make that forty-four.
What Justin faced was not the spare wooden platform of Wild West days. Only the western states of Washington and Montana still offered convicts the option of the noose, but neck-breaking these days had been spruced up.
Ranged behind huge picture windows with pull-down screens that kept witnesses from actually seeing the death, two levels faced the viewing gallery. The ground level, into which the hanged man would drop through one of two trapdoors in its ceiling, also contained the metal table and brown pad used to snuff convicts who opted for death by lethal injection. The upper level was the hanging room. Drilled into the ceiling of that white chamber were two brown closed-loop hooks for the thick manila hemp rope. Boiled, oiled, waxed, and coiled with a hangman’s noose, the thirty-foot-long rope was measured for a scientific drop. How far a condemned must fall to ensure a snapped spine is determined by weight. Haddon, at 130 pounds, would drop seven feet.
Bang!
Snap!
Thump … thu —
Was that how Haddon would hang?
As Washington’s first execution in thirty years, and the first hanging in America since Kansas sent two men to the gallows in 1965, this was a Big Story bathed in limelight. For weeks, Justin had followed the build-up to tonight, reporting last-ditch legal efforts to save the doomed man.
Yesterday, the state Supreme Court had dismissed a lawsuit by twenty-two “taxpayers” who were challenging the noose as cruel and unusual punishment. To contend that hanging was a torturous way to die, the plaintiffs had referred the court to observations made by the warden at San Quentin in California from 1942 to 1954. A participant in sixty hangings, he had described one drop in horrifying detail:
The man hit bottom, and I observed that he was fighting by pulling on the straps, wheezing, whistling, trying to get air, that blood was oozing through the black cap. I observed also that he urinated, defecated and the droppings fell on the floor, and the stench was terrible. I also saw witnesses pass out and have to be carried from the witness room. When he was taken down and the cap removed, big hunks of flesh were torn off the side of his face where the noose had been.
Bang!
Whissstle …
Riiiip
…
Oooooze
…
Was that how Haddon would hang?
Today, while he was driving here, the reporter had caught the result of another lawsuit on his car radio. A convict waiting on death row had appealed, to the ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a federal judge’s refusal to let him videotape this hanging as evidence of cruel and unusual punishment for his constitutional challenge of the death penalty. In denying that appeal, however, the court had granted him permission to have a witness present at the execution, and had ordered that the blinds between the gallows gallery and the lower chamber not be closed until the hanged man had ceased to move.
That meant Justin would
watch
Peter die.
At 4:40 that afternoon, prison officials had moved Peter Bryce Haddon from his longtime cell on death row, in the Intensive Management Unit of the penitentiary, to a holding cell by the gallows on the upper level of the execution chamber. From there, his “last mile” would be just a few short yards to his midnight appointment with the hangman. Two different staircases rose to the upper level. Up one, Justin had gone to spend dwindling time with the condemned …
Tick-tock …
Tick-tock
…
Until his time was up.
Having left Peter with the priest who would offer him last rites, Justin had descended the stairs to the gallows gallery, where now he sat, scribbling notes with a pen and paper provided by the prison, glancing nervously at the clock, which was creeping inexorably toward the hanging hour.
11:53.
Every surface in the gallery, from the concrete walls and floors to the iron bars on the doors to the steel table and chairs, was cold and hard. The smell of fresh paint lingered. The only sounds were occasional pops from the loudspeaker, air rushing in through a heating vent and the scratching of his pen. Then additional witnesses entered to fill the other seats: the father of the dead girl, a stony-faced Greek; the twelve reporters, two pale, as if fearful they might pass out and embarrass themselves; a man from the American Civil Liberties Union, acting for the con who filed the videotape appeal; three guards to keep order; and—out of uniform—a Seattle street cop named Madeline Thorne, who …
11:54.
… sat down beside Justin.
“Cheeseburger.”
“Huh?”
A voice from his other side. Justin turned from Maddy Thorne to face a Seattle TV reporter named Sue Frye. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Perfect teeth.
“Double cheeseburger. A side of french fries. Ice cream for dessert. And a Coke,” said Sue. “That’s the most requested last meal on death row.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Read it in the paper.”
“Not
my
paper,” Justin said.
“No, a cheesy tabloid.”
Conversations whispered in the gallows gallery had all the surface solemnity of gabbing in church. Nervous tension, however, was dissipated by small talk and gallows humor.
“Guess the runner-up.”
“Steak?” said Justin.
“Steak and eggs. T-bone. With the eggs scrambled.”
“Me, I’d order something big, to really mess up the chef. Bouillabaisse. Beef Wellington. Homemade wedding cake.”
“There’ve been some strange last meals.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“An apple. Bubble gum. And two boxes of Frosted Flakes.”
“Comfort food?”
“Got to be. But who orders liver and onions before he’s going to die?” asked Sue.
“Hannibal Lecter. With a fine Chianti.”
“No booze allowed. They give you water instead. I hear Texas may ban tobacco from its prison system. The most active death chamber in the nation, and Texas may deny cons the last solace of condemned throughout our history: a final cigarette.”
Justin shrugged. “Tobacco will kill you,” he said.
“This waiting is killing me,” said Maddy Thorne.
Justin glanced from Sue to her, then at the clock.
11:56.
Four minutes to go.
“One guy’s order,” Sue said, drawing Justin back, “was six pieces of French toast, with butter, syrup and jelly; six barbecued spare ribs; six pieces of burned bacon; four scrambled eggs; five well-cooked sausage patties; french fries with ketchup; three slices of cheese; two pieces of yellow cake, with chocolate fudge icing; and four cartons of milk to wash it down.”
“The condemned ate a hearty meal.”
“And then there’s the con who ordered a last meal of dirt. Seems dirt’s the active ingredient in voodoo rituals. Since dirt wasn’t on the prison’s menu of approved foods, he got yogurt instead. That’s one zombie who won’t return from the grave.”
A tap on his shoulder.
Justin turned.
Madeline Thorne nodded her head toward the gallows level.
“What did
he
order?”
“Peter?” Justin said.
It was as if she couldn’t speak his name. The same way some people say “passed away” and “at rest” instead of “died.”
“Nothing special,” Justin responded. “All Peter wanted was what the other prisoners were having to eat tonight. Salmon, scalloped potatoes, mixed vegetables, and Jell-O.”
“Typical,” Maddy said.
“Typical,” he agreed.
Tick-tock
…
Tick-tock …
The clock on the wall advanced.
“Would you opt for this?”
Again she nodded toward the gallows level.
“No,” said Justin.
“An ugly way to go.”
“He’s afraid of needles. Has been all his life.”
“Still … I mean,
this
over lethal injection?”
“The little girl was strangled.”
“So hanging is some kind of statement?”
“He’s drawing a parallel between him and her.”
“How so?”
“He’s saying they’re
both
victims.”
Tick-tock
…
Tick-tock …
11:58.
Thorne, though still in her twenties, had the hard edge of most female cops. Cropped close, her blonde hair masked dark roots. Good looks were marred by the squint around her eyes, which were creased from too much suspicion in her professional life. All the hardness in her was on view in her tenseness tonight.
“Last words,” Sue said, pulling Justin back. He felt like the rope in a tug-of-war between these two women.
“Don’t know any.”
“Yes, you do. Who said, ‘Let’s do it’?”
“Gary Gilmore. Before he was shot by Utah’s firing squad.”
“And ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do’?”
Justin frowned. “That I know,” he said.
“You’re no doubt thinking of Anthony Antone, sent to Florida’s electric chair for arranging the hit on a private eye.”
“Actually, I was thinking of another guy.”
“‘Adios’?”
“Who’s that?”
“Killer named John Thanos. Lethally injected in Maryland.”
“Thanos? Fitting. Thanatos was the ancient Greek personification of death.”
“‘I love you’?”
“What?”
“Last words,” said Sue. “Some guy, whose name I can’t recall, to the prosecutor before Nevada jabbed him.”
“Where’d you get all this?”
“Bite I’m doing tomorrow. ‘You can be a king or a street-sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.’”
“Who’s that philosopher?”
“Robert Alton-Harris, gassed in California. But my favorite is, ‘I’d rather be fishing’ quipped by Jimmy Glass before Louisiana fried him.”
A tap on the shoulder.
Maddy again.
Another nod toward the gallows level.
“Know what he’s going to say?”
“Yes,” said Justin. “We talked about that. And he asked a favor. In the piece I write on him for the
Star
tomorrow, Peter wants me to—”
“Shhhh,” shushed Sue.
The upper-level window rattled to strike midnight. All whispering in the gallery ceased. The rattle meant Haddon had left the holding cell and was being led to the window for last words. Silhouettes appeared behind the screen, then the muffled voice of the prison superintendent asked the doomed man if he had anything to say. The blind was pulled up, and there he quivered: a slight, blue-eyed convict Justin’s age, wearing a light gray prison-issue shirt, baggy blue jeans with rolled-up cuffs and a pair of navy blue Velcro running shoes. It was like staring twenty feet up at a mannequin displayed in a second-floor department store window. Haddon’s hands were restrained in front of his waist, and the guards on either side stood with their backs to the gallery. Nearby leaned a board with straps, for use as a body brace should Haddon faint.