Hangman (20 page)

“Yes,” said Justin. “That’s the one. Publishing it brought more hate mail. But among those damning letters was a troubled one tipping me anonymously to a cover-up at the lab.”

“Which lab?”

“The lab that did the hair and fiber tests. From my secret informant, I learned there was a contamination problem at the lab back when it did the tests on the fibers recovered from Anna’s clothes and the trunk of Haddon’s car. An internal search for the source of that contamination went on for years, and finally the only solution was to move the lab.”

“But testing continued?”

“All the while. Hard as it may be for some people to believe.”

“Not me,” I said. “It’s like pollution. You don’t see company employees running to the press to blow the whistle on the hand that feeds them.” I winked at Alex. “Are those metaphors mixed?”

“The lab techs really mucked it up,” Justin said. “The samples taken from Anna’s clothes and Peter’s car were contaminated with foreign fibers
at the lab.
Then scientists analyzed those samples to see if there were fiber matches, effectively creating the ‘matches’ that indicated Peter had driven Anna from her home to where she was killed in the trunk of his car. That’s why the lab found fibers on Anna’s underwear, the match that Peter’s lawyer couldn’t answer at the trial with an argument of random transfers.”

“Junk evidence,” I commented.

“Which made Peter a suspect and got him charged,” said Alex.

“Got him convicted too,” Justin added. “The junk evidence intensified in impact when the state attorney gave his closing address to the jury standing beside a chart mounted on an easel. Arrows linked photos of the car to shots of Anna’s pathetic remains to connect the matches. ‘Good old common sense will tell you that Anna was abducted in Haddon’s car,’ he said.”

“What about the hairs snagged in the chain of the locket?” Alex asked.

“After the fiber bombshell exploded, I got another tip from my informant. Stored in the lab, I was told, were samples of hair snipped from Anna’s classmates at the time her body was found. They were to be analyzed for the purpose of exclusion. Then Peter was arrested after his hair matched, and testing of those samples was never done.”

“Was it later?”

“Yes, I forced the matter. And sure enough, hair from two of Anna’s classmates matched as closely as had Peter’s.”

“Unbelievable!”

“Hardly,” I said. “Didn’t anybody watch the O. J. Simpson trial? That’s what happens when lab techs play Sherlock Holmes. They get so caught up in trying to be of help to the police that they forget the fundamental rule of scientific method: They are to work vigorously to challenge and
disprove
a hypothesis, rather than to prove it.”

“That’s the excuse I got for the oversight,” said Justin. “The tech on the Haddon case had been too busy analyzing other samples that might strengthen the case against him.”

Ethan was turning puke green around the gills. He looked like he was seasick on a tossing tide of booze. I feared he might hurl the dinner in his stomach at us.

“Fresh air, Eth?”

He ordered another Scotch.

“Next, I went after the snitches,” Justin continued. “We have a recipe for disaster in the States. You don’t have minimum sentences and a ‘three strikes rule’ in Canada, do you?”

“No,” I said. “Many wish we did.”

“The result has been the spawning of professional rats. The only way an American con can get his minimum sentence reduced is if a prosecutor recommends it. No recommendation and he comes out of jail dead in a box. A desperate situation calls for desperate measures, so cons will comb newspapers for the facts of sensational arrests, or even send relatives to pretrial hearings to get snippets of evidence that will make a false confession credible.”

“Is that what happened to Haddon?”

“Yes,” Justin said. “Nothing makes the heart of a professional rat beat faster than learning that an infamous accused will share space with him. Peter’s arrest came before the three strikes rule, but the snitches had the same motive to work a deal: leniency.”

“So how’d you crack ’em?”

“It took me four years. I had to wait until both were arrested again.”

“Both?” I said.

“They were a team. The pair finally got popped in Florida and tried to work the same deal with prosecutors there. Too bad for them, there were guards within hearing distance of the cell, and the confession the pair swore they heard wasn’t heard by anyone else.”

“Polygraphs?” Alex asked.

“They beat them in Florida too. For pathological liars, passing lie-detector tests is a cinch.”

A festival photographer entered the bar. I called her over by waving my arm. Here was my chance to get Justin Whitfield, the brother Ethan suspected of being the Hangman, in an innocent photo of the four of us.

Alex glanced behind her. She was sitting with her back to the starboard windows. “Are those the lights of Victoria coming up?” she asked.

We all looked forward off the starboard bow.

“Yes,” said the photographer.

“Angle the shot so they’re in the background,” I suggested.

She stood aft to snap the picture; the three of us drinking coffee smiled naturally. Drunken Ethan attempted a plastered grin.

“Copies will be available as you leave the ship,” she said, then left.

“We had to petition a court for the DNA test. My paper made the application,” Justin resumed. “I took the stand to explain why I doubted the verdict and, under cross-examination, was accused of grandstanding by the state. ‘What harm can there be in a test?’ I replied. ‘The case is closed. Haddon was hanged. The state has nothing to lose. But isn’t there a lot to lose if the test
isn’t
done? Public confidence in and respect for the law dictate that no stone be left unturned if we’re to ensure justice didn’t miscarry.’

“The state attorney responded, ‘You went fishing and are down to your last worm.’

“‘The question is, Do I use it or not?’ I replied to the judge. ‘I want to use it.’

“So she made the order.

“A Boston lab affiliated with Harvard was agreed upon. In terms of quality, the DNA left by the killer in the semen stains on Anna’s underwear was almost as bad as it comes.”

“Is that a pun?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Contaminants known as inhibitors were the stumbling block. In Anna’s case, the problem was organic matter that was left behind as her body decomposed in the rain-soaked Washington woods. DNA analysis had failed in 1988 and 1992 because the degree of sophistication required to overcome the contamination wasn’t available. DNA science had been refined since the year Peter was hanged, so I hoped enhanced technology would finally be able to extract workable DNA from the semen left by the killer.

“I won’t bore you with the details,” Justin said. “To neutralize the contaminants, forensic serologists combined four techniques. They diluted them, added enzymes, soaked them up with protein, and extracted them. The purified DNA underwent two state-of-the-art tests: polymarker analysis, known as PCR, and DQ Alpha testing. These two tests, variations on the same strategy, compare biochemical traits or gene markers at various sites on the DNA chains in both samples: the killer’s and the suspect’s. If the genes match, the suspect is the killer. A mismatch on a single point and he is in the clear.

“The scientists scored the DNA off the underwear first. As I recall, the killer’s gene markers came up B, B, AB, B, AC.

“Then, late one August night in the Boston lab, surrounded by four scientists and two state attorneys, I watched them score Peter’s DNA.

“His gene markers came up A, B, A, AB, AC.

“‘He’s excluded,’ the tester said.

“‘Fuck me!’ muttered one of the prosecutors.

“The genetic jury was in.

“No matter what their combination, those letters spelled acquittal.”

Ethan put down his drink. Scotch slopped on the table. He was swaying in his seat as if he was going to pass out. The server came over to mop up the spill. “Due west,” she said as she wiped the face of the inset compass.

“Monday morning quarterbacks,” I commented. “DNA has made a lot of people smart … in hindsight.”

“It worries me,” Justin said, “that what I wrote about the case may have inspired the Hangman.”

I cocked a hungry ear. This was what I was here to hear. The Hangman’s masked confession?

“I don’t feel good,” Ethan groaned, slumping low in his chair.

“Too much booze,” I said. “Did I not try to warn you? What you need, partner, is a breath of fresh air on deck.”

“Come on,” Alex said. “Let’s take a walk.”

“You and me?” he mumbled.

“Yes,” she replied.

Wrapping an arm around him, Alex helped Ethan to his feet.

“Want help?” I asked.

“No, stay and talk. I’ll find you later to catch up on what I missed.”

With that, she led my wobbly associate out of the bar.

“You were saying?” I said.

“Huh?” said Justin, distracted.

“Something about what you wrote may have inspired the Hangman?”

Hung Jury

Strait of Juan de Fuca

November 10 (Six days ago)

While the killer was in the process of stalking his victim on the ship, Zinc Chandler and Maddy Thorne were comparing Hangman files. They sat in a quiet corner off by themselves, having abandoned the Moby Dick mob for a top-deck hideaway, a table in the Regal Lounge up on the Crown Deck. Stars by the billions shone in through the skylight overhead, for the storm predicted the day before had died at sea. It was buried somewhere out in the dark Pacific, beyond the narrows of the strait. The cruise would be smooth sailing. Or so they thought.

“You don’t drink?” Maddy asked.

“Can’t,” said Zinc. “I took a bullet to the head a few years back. Doctor’s orders. I’ve sipped my last booze.”

“Headaches?”

“Screamers.”

“Me too, lately.”

“Mine are linked to epilepsy.”

“I get migraines.”

“Bad?”

“And how. The kind that crush your head in a vise.”

“Must lay you low.”

“To the mat. It’s a bitch to be on call twenty-four hours a day with a disability like that.”

Clinking his glass of Perrier against hers of Canada Dry, the Mountie offered a toast: “To no more headaches.”

“Unfortunately, we share one with this damn case. What say we go back to square one and run through it again?”

“You first, Detective. The headache began in Seattle.”

Rummaging in her file, Maddy found a photo of the first hanging and dropped it on the table.

“Mary Konrad—then Mary Somerset—was a juror at Peter Haddon’s trial. Because he was wrongfully convicted, Peter hanged. Shortly after Mary married Dag a year ago, Justin exposed the perverse verdict in the
Seattle Star.
Mary fell apart from guilt and split up with Dag. Ten days ago”—she tapped the photo—“Mary was hanged. The Hangman left a hangman game at the murder scene. The game—we now know—hid Peter Haddon’s name.”

“Question,” Zinc said.

“Shoot,” said Maddy.

“If the perverse verdict was the Hangman’s motive, why wait a year after it was exposed to take revenge on that juror?”

Maddy shrugged.

“Dag?” said Zinc. “He and Mary were in the throes of a dirty divorce. He loathed his wife for fattening up on guilt. If Mary were to die in a way that left him in the clear, Dag would lose nothing from the split and be rid of her.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You’ve changed your mind?”

“There’s a problem,” Maddy said.

“A fatal one?” asked Zinc.

“Dag’s out of the picture unless we can break his alibi. He held an orgy last night to shoot a porn film starring him. The sound track recorded a TV blaring in the apartment next door. I checked the programs on the tape and found that they aired last night. Faking the alibi would require filming the visual earlier or later, having his cohorts record the audio track while he was off hanging Busby, and then somehow melding the sound with the image to fool our lab.”

“It might work in a novel.”

“But not in real life. Besides, if Dag dreamed up the Hangman to mask getting rid of his wife, and after hanging Mary went to Vancouver to hang Jayne Curry as a blind, why use ‘Peter Bryce Haddon’ as the answer to the hangman puzzle?”

“I see what you mean. It doesn’t make sense. What Dag would want you to do is make the Mary Konrad-Peter Haddon and Jayne Curry-Dr. Twist jury connections, and assume the Hangman was on a mission of revenge against perverse jurors.”

“In which case, the solution to the puzzle should be ‘perverse verdicts’ or something like that. What Dag would do is lead us
away
from the real motive, not pose ‘Peter Bryce Haddon’ to lead us back to Mary … and back to him.”

“Right,” said Zinc. “And hanging Busby would make even less sense. Having hanged Curry to lead you away, he wouldn’t hang another Haddon juror to lead you back to Mary.”

“No, he’d lynch a juror from a
third
travesty.”

“I’m convinced.”

“Scratch Dag?”

“Yes,” said the Mountie.

“Your turn, Inspector. Let’s do Curry.”

While Zinc and Maddy were bouncing theories about in the Regal Lounge, the killer was hanging his victim several decks below. The ship was cruising westward in the narrows of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Olympic Peninsula in Washington State was a dark brood of mountains to the south. British Columbia stretched forever off the starboard side, where the glitz of Victoria had twinkled by.

Zinc finished his Perrier and set down the glass. From his file he fetched a photo of the second hanging and dropped it on the table beside the first.

“Jayne Curry was on the jury that tried Dr. John Twist. Thanks to Curry’s romantic fling with the gold-digging doctor, the Lady-Killer was wrongfully acquitted of poisoning a defenseless old woman. That verdict is currently under appeal, but any chance of a new trial died with Curry.”

“A strong motive,” said Maddy.

“And Twist is cunning. I wouldn’t put it past him to hang Mary Konrad as victim one. Having established a serial psycho taunting police in Seattle with a hangman game, he then crossed the border to get rid of Curry as victim two. The final twist was returning south to hang Busby. So here we sit, trying to puzzle out the Haddon motive, while Twist gets away with murder and avoids a retrial.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Why?” asked Zinc.

“Sandwiching Curry between two Haddon jurors makes her murder stand out. As with Dag, Twist would get more out of lynching three jurors from different travesties. That the puzzle answer is Haddon’s name makes it worse. I find myself wondering why Curry is the anomaly of this case, which focuses my attention on her and Dr. Twist. Not a smart move for a cunning man.”

“Okay, let’s put Twist on the back burner.”

“He’s still in the States?”

“As far as we know.”

“Agreed,” said Maddy. “The back burner it is. We don’t scratch the deadly doctor until he offers us an alibi as tight as Dag’s.”

While Zinc and Maddy were whittling down the suspects in their files, a
North Star
crewman was touring the stateroom decks below, cranking his key in the box at each safety station to confirm that security rounds were made on a regular basis. His cheerful whistle preceded him along the empty passageway dividing ocean-view and interior staterooms on the starboard side of “A” Deck, until the startled crewman spotted blood pooled on the floor of an exterior cabin with its door to the corridor propped open.

The crewman radioed the bridge for help.

Meanwhile, in the lounge on the Crown Deck, Maddy dropped a photo of the third hanging onto the table beside the other two.

“The Hangman isn’t Dag. The Hangman isn’t Twist. Where does that leave us?” she asked.

“One thing we know: the victims aren’t random. The Hangman isn’t a serial killer in the classic sense. He, or she, didn’t choose Konrad, Curry, and Busby to play a fill-in role in some warped fantasy this killer is acting out.”

“True,” said Maddy. “Each was personally stalked. And each was hanged because she or he was on a jury that rendered a perverse verdict.”

“The Hangman isn’t a psycho in the lunatic sense. He … let’s use ‘he’?”

“Sure,” said Maddy. “I don’t go for all that word-torture shit. We’re deep in a manhunt. Not a person-hunt.”

“He—the Hangman—doesn’t have a motive that’s rational to him alone. This killer has a motive we can all understand. The jury system—yours and mine—is supposed to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Perverse verdicts happen when jurors fail to keep the judicial oath they took. And if a jury fails to do its duty—”

“The duty falls to
vigilantes
to correct.”

“The Hangman’s not a psycho. The Hangman’s a vigilante. He’s directly descended from the lynch law of the Wild West. The ‘cowboy coil’ and the hanging tree. What the Hangman is doing is—”

“Balancing the scales.”

“He’s a vigilante who goes straight to the source. The Hangman doesn’t wreak vengeance on those who escape justice because jurors fail to do their duty. Instead, he exacts retribution from the cause of that injustice by lynching
the perverse jurors themselves.
”

“The motive’s more than that.”

“Yes,” said Zinc. “It’s also personal. The Hangman’s ulterior motive is to avenge Peter Haddon. That’s why his name is the answer to the hangman game.”

While Zinc and Maddy were interlocking the jigsaw pieces of the Hangman’s motive, the
North Star
’s captain rushed down from the bridge to assess the implications of the hanging aboard his ship. One glance into the bloody cabin was enough to convince him that this was as bad as it could be, so he dispatched a crewman he could trust to be discreet to fetch a senior Mountie from the decks above.

Inspector Chandler, the sailor was told, was the top cop.

He went to find him.

“Back to square one. Let’s put it together,” said Maddy. “Peter went to the gallows for a crime he didn’t commit. Wrongful conviction by a jury placed the noose around his neck. The Hangman is hanging jurors because of that travesty. The killer’s motive is hidden in the hangman game.”

“Question,” Zinc said. “
Why
play the game?”

“What’s your theory?”

“The Hangman is on a crusade. The hangman game has caught the public’s attention. Lynching those responsible for Haddon’s hanging isn’t enough. The Hangman wants to scare the hell out of every potential juror who might do something similar in the future. Fail to perform your duty and this could be you.”

“So the motive is bigger than Haddon?”

“In a way. But Haddon’s the martyr whose death is behind the Hangman’s rage.”

Having passed Victoria and Port Angeles, the ship had left the Strait of Juan de Fuca behind. From here it would sail up the west coast of Vancouver Island, past the sound where Captain Cook had planted the Union Jack to claim British Columbia for the Crown in 1778. Rounding the top of the island sometime in the night, it would then cruise down the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver, docking at dawn so those from Seattle could Amtrak home.

“We’re slowing down,” said Maddy.

“I wonder why?”

The Seattle detective placed the death photos of Konrad and Busby side by side. “After Dag made the jury connection between these two, I spoke with some of the jurors who convicted Peter. We’ve put the ones we can find under police protection.”

“Their reaction?”

“Varied,” Maddy said. “As you would expect from a group composed of a Boeing factory worker, a geriatric nurse, an accountant, a fisherman, a computer tech, an ad exec, a car mechanic, a shop clerk, a plumber, and a mother who had a premature baby during the trial.

“Some blamed the system. ‘My faith in jury trials is shaken forever. How can you expect twelve people to make a just decision if you don’t give them all of the facts? If we’d had more to work with, the result would have been different.’

“Others accused themselves. ‘People point fingers at us now and ask how could twelve rational jurors not have a reasonable doubt? How could we send an innocent man to the gallows? They don’t understand what went on in that jury room. In hindsight, I made a mistake that will haunt me the rest of my life.’

“The one thing they agreed on was that Peter would not have been convicted if not for Mary Somerset—Konrad, to us—and Bart Busby.”

Zinc sat forward. “Why?” he asked.

“The jury deliberated for several exhausting days. In the end, Mary threatened to hang the jury. As the only holdout for acquittal, she held Peter’s life in her hands. A hung jury would have forced a retrial, at which the mistakes of the first trial could have been corrected, and what Justin later exposed might have come to light in time to save Peter’s neck.”

“But Mary caved in?”

“Without a rational reason. She simply gave up to stop Busby from bullying her.”

Zinc picked up the photo of Mary Konrad hanging dead from the beam in her home. He studied it and said, “The Hangman is on a crusade to punish the jurors who doomed Haddon, and to scare the hell out of anyone who may pervert the course of justice in the future. Mary represents all jurors who have a reasonable doubt but lack the backbone to do their duty. By not hanging the jury, she hanged Haddon instead, and for that Mary became the Hangman’s first victim.”

“It fits,” said Maddy.

Zinc continued: “The single word ‘guilty’ from Konrad’s mouth was what hanged Haddon. That’s why her tongue was slashed. Before Mary died, she told the Hangman that Busby was to blame. Busby became the Haddon juror the Hangman hated most. That’s why—unlike the women—he was butchered alive.”

“You look puzzled.”

“I am,” said Zinc. “If the Hangman suddenly hated Busby that much, why didn’t
he
become victim two?”

“Because he was out of state in Oregon on a selling trip.”

The sailor searching for the inspector had reached the deck below. After he combed it from stem to stern, his last stop would be the Crown Deck above.

Maddy took over from Zinc. “With Busby away from Seattle, the Hangman faced a problem: What if we linked Mary to the Haddon jury before Bart returned, and theorized that she was lynched in revenge for Peter’s hanging? In a flash of insight, we might see Peter’s name as the answer to the hangman puzzle and put the other Haddon jurors—
including
Bart Busby—under police protection.”

Zinc picked up the photo of Jayne Curry hanging dead from the upper landing in her home. He studied it and said, “To prevent that, the Hangman struck again. The second murder was a smokescreen to blind you until Busby returned. Hanging another Haddon juror would only increase the odds that you would make the connection. That’s why the Hangman went to Vancouver to hang Jayne Curry.”

“Not only did that hanging blind us to the Haddon motive, but it also advanced the Hangman’s crusade to scare all potential jurors. If Mary hanged because she unjustly convicted an innocent man, Jayne Curry hanged because she perversely freed a guilty one.”

“The
Scream
mask, the slashed tongue, and the hangman game ensured that Seattle police would connect Curry and Konrad. While you followed the false lead of that red herring, the Hangman bought sufficient time for Busby to return. That explains why the Vancouver lynching is the anomaly in the case.”