Hangman: A Novel (10 page)

“What’s your feeling, was it him?” Abbie asked Livingston. Normally, she’d ignore the theories of those who got to the scene before her, but now she needed to expand the pool of opinion. She sensed the other cops behind her, trying to catch a word of the conversation, like water building up behind a dam. She didn’t want to turn and look, address the crowd. That was Livingston’s job.

Rain was speckling the cop’s glasses, made him look like he was crying. He grit his teeth and nodded. “I’d say a hundred percent. It’s too early for copycats, and she didn’t get up there on her own.”

“House show any signs of entry?” she asked Livingston.

“Not as far as I can tell. I did a quick walk-through to see if there was anyone alive inside. Front door locked, back open, door ajar. The mother is on her way here. She was in Albany on business, some banking thing.”

“Did the mother know any of the earlier victims’ families?” Abbie asked.

“None we know of. The girls didn’t share the same grammar school and seemingly no social contacts.”

“Had she heard Hangman escaped?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s the one who called us.”

“What?” Abbie said.

Livingston looked at Raymond.

“I set up the protocol,” Raymond said. “For the schools. We knew it was coming.”

Raymond explained. It was late in the afternoon and children were just arriving home from school, unaware that a deranged killer was on the loose. About a quarter of the city’s teenagers had failed to pick up their parents’ calls. So the police lines were jammed. A call had come to Buffalo 911 forty-five minutes before from a Mrs. Stoltz, who’d been well on her way to hysteria. She’d been calling and texting her daughter for the last hour at five-minute intervals, without any answer. The operator had asked Mrs. Stoltz questions from Raymond’s protocol:

How old is your child?

Sixteen.

Where do you live?

The North.

What color is her hair?

Brunette.

“They were getting fifteen hundred calls an hour in dispatch,” Raymond said, “with every paranoid mother in the city phoning in, asking if their kids were safe, could we check on them. So they worked out a triage system. Girls first, teenagers between fourteen and sixteen, brunettes, then girls from the North. Narrowing it down. We sent a patrolman out and he saw her up in the tree.”

Abbie felt a cold chill. Every cop had an MO they hated. For some, it was shootings, though they were the bread-and-butter of Homicide. Those cops hated to see the holes blown in the human body, the casual destruction of the flesh. A big-bore bullet tended to aerosolize the blood inside the wound, sending it out into the surrounding air in a fine mist that you could still smell when you walked into the murder room. Some Miami cops called it “getting Febrezed.”

Other cops got queasy at the sight of a slashing, because deep down they hated knives. It was the way the mind worked, tossing up your gravest fears onto the Technicolor screen inside your head. Suicides in
bathtubs, the bodies all swollen up, could stop you eating for a couple of days. Bludgeoning had its detractors, too: the bones turned to jelly, crackling like loose ice cubes as you lifted the body.

Abbie hated hangings. The unnatural angle of the neck, the bulging eyes. They had the hopelessness of the suicide along with the echoes of old-time executions, the ones depicted in crude woodcuts from the Middle Ages. Hanging was how they dispatched witches, when people still believed in spells and hauntings. They were rituals of punishment. They gave her the creeps.

“Why’d the girl go into the backyard?” she asked.

Livingston turned to look at the dark trees looming behind the house. “We found her dog back there, down in a hole, its voice nearly gone. My guess? She was coming out after him.”

Hangman dug a hole? He really wanted her outside, Abbie thought.

“Let’s do the yard, Raymond,” she said. Abbie nodded to Livingston. “You come, too.”

“Hold on,” Raymond said, turning to survey the crowd. “Mackleveigh,” he called.

A fat, silver-haired sergeant turned. He’d been talking to some other cops and his hands were caught in some expansive gesture.

“Yeah?” he said, turning.

Raymond frowned and nodded him over with a quick nip of the head, like
Hangman on the loose and I gotta spell shit out?

The sergeant came over, walking like John Wayne.

“Mackleveigh, you’re the doorman now. No one in until we give the all clear.”

The sergeant seemed pleased. “Got it.”

Raymond took Abbie’s elbow and guided her forward. He unlatched the white picket gate and they walked through, the hum of conversation beginning to fall away. Abbie reached down and grabbed her phone, punching in something as they walked.

“You, too?” Raymond said. “Just like my daughter.”

“I’m not texting my BFF, Raymond, I’m seeing how Hangman came in.”

Raymond stopped, gave her a quizzical look. “Wha-at?” he said softly, coming around her to look.

Abbie punched up Google Maps and entered the address. The little circle appeared and there was the pictorial map, laid out in tans and yellows. Abbie hit the button on the upper right for the satellite view and the picture changed to black and green, spotted here and there with silver flecks of houses. As Abbie pinched and zoomed, the picture darkened and the houses bloomed bigger.

Abbie stared at the photo, then pointed to the property line near the park. “Here it is. It’s a really long backyard, backs up all the way to Delaware. I’ll give you three to one that’s how he came in. The street would be too risky, even if word was just getting out that he’d escaped.”

“Mm-hmmm,” said Raymond.

Abbie frowned. “But did he choose the house because of the easy access to the backyard or was he coming here anyway and tailored his approach to what he found?”

Was there a kill list or was it random?

“Chicken or the egg,” Raymond said.

They started walking again and turned the corner into the yard, clearing tall bushes that hugged the back of the house.

There was Martha. The girl was up in the trees like a scarecrow, shrouded by low-hanging branches and leaves. In the quiet of the backyard, Abbie could hear the groaning creak of the branch, the rope straining under the unexpected weight of the girl. Her head was pitched forward, her long brunette hair spilling forward and covering most of her face, with the thin line of her center part like a pale centipede. Of her face, only an ashen forehead and one eye, open wide, were visible at thirty feet.

Abbie moved closer.

She was dressed in a low-cut sailor’s sweater, the blue and white horizontal stripes that only thin girls wore, because it gave them a little more bulk. The waist of the sweater ringed tightly around her waist, a good fit, but the neck hung away from her breastplate, probably because the angle of the girl’s back caused it to hang loose. She wore jeans, expensive ones, expertly faded down the front and with some copper-colored stitching on the seams. Martha had one black ballet flat on, the other down under her bare foot, the nails of that foot recently painted a rather daring shade of crimson. She had long arms,
the wrists raw and splotched hanging out of the ends of the sailor shirt, the left hand open, the right one half-shut. There were three red scratches, all aligned, above her left breast, as if something had raked her skin downward. A tall girl, a little gangly, with style making up for the new height that thinned out her frame and probably mortified her, a growth spurt at the worst time …

It was like when the boys and the girls played together when Abbie was growing up, swapping toys out of a sense of novelty. By the end of the day, the G.I. Joes ended up in some ridiculous situation—their guns taken out of their hands and parasols jammed into the round little hole that formed their hands, or a pot of tea hanging from the green plastic arm. And the Barbies, in her experience, always ended up dead, hung with a shoestring more often than not, victims in some tribal war game the boys had made up. And what better hostage than a pretty girl, her feet pointed downward and a tangle of mussed-up hair over her face.

That’s what Martha looked like. A teenage girl should be jittery with life, but she was so motionless that she seemed to have imparted stillness to the rest of the yard. A magic spell.

“We have to get her down before they start taking pictures from the other houses,” Abbie said.

Raymond frowned. “You want me to get some tarps, string them from these branches?”

Abbie took a deep breath. If it was a normal investigation, sure. It would give her a chance to study the body, visualize the crime, sweep every square inch for fabrics and minutiae. But time was short.

“No, give me a few minutes and then we’ll have the ME bring her down and take her away. What’s the ETA on the mother?”

Raymond glanced at his watch. “An hour.”

Abbie looked him in the eye. “Whatever you do, do not let the mom back here before the body comes down. She will never forget it if she sees this. I don’t even have to say that, do I?”

Raymond blew out a breath. “No, you sure don’t.”

“Get the canvass going. Perelli is sending every uniform not patrolling, so we’ve got the manpower to do the whole neighborhood. Anyone who saw
anything
, I want to talk to.”

Abbie strode forward, lifting her feet and bringing them down on the rain-slicked leaves, not wanting to kick them and cover something the killer might have dropped. She came to the hanging tree, saw it was a rough-barked elm, thick. There were no notches or spots in the bark. Martha’s foot swayed back and forth at the height of Abbie’s chin, a cold wind stirring from the direction of the park.

Abbie took Martha’s right hand in hers and studied it. The hand itself smelled strongly of a detergent—she caught the scent without even bringing the hand up—and she could see green crystals smeared along the palm. No marks of a struggle, nothing defensive.

Abbie walked around the body, looking at the rope. It was an old one, thick-twined, the color of olives spotted here and there with something dark like motor oil. Probably stolen from Martha’s or a neighbor’s garage. It was looped twice over the elm’s thickest low branch, then the section on the opposite end of the noose was tied tightly to an elm standing alone about ten feet back of Martha’s swaying feet. The rope had blended into the background; it was a dull autumn color, similar to the moss-covered bark of the trees and the dead foliage. Martha, rushing out to rescue her dog, had probably never seen it.

Abbie spotted the hole. It had been freshly dug, the dirt thrown back away from the house in a half-circle, only noticeable if you looked for it, otherwise just looking like dark spots on the leaves covering the ground. The girl had obviously heard the dog barking and been lured out.

Why didn’t he keep her for a few days, like the others? Was he overeager, unable to control himself after staring so long at blank walls? Like a tiger that’s been caged for years being set back in its old hunting grounds and spots a deer—a deer so young that it’s forgotten or never learned about the predator that once haunted this place.

She walked around the scraggly bushes that partially screened the hole and knelt at its edge. It was about half the size of a manhole cover. The shovel was lying about ten yards away, its long tan wooden handle pointed away from the hole.

“What kind of dog was it?” Abbie asked.

“Schnauzer,” Raymond said, coming up behind her. “Why?”

“Think about it. If he was going to dig a hole to the right depth, and not waste precious minutes by going too deep, he’d have seen the dog first. He’d have to get inside the house or at least close enough to get a glimpse. Too deep and you can’t hear the dog clearly. Too shallow and it runs away. So either he knew the dog or he got up close to see it.”

Raymond frowned. “So, what you’re asking is, if he got so close to the house, why not take the girl inside?”

“Exactly. He took his time—and added risk—by luring the dog out and setting up a fairly elaborate death mechanism. Why not just take her in the house, in her room?”

Raymond kicked a leaf. “Because he was crazy to start out with, and then he took a bullet to the brain. You asking for common sense from someone who’s double-fucked in the head?”

Abbie glanced at him sideways, a look of disappointment on her face.

“All right, that shit was weak.” Raymond sighed. “You say what?”

She turned to stare into the hole. “The things that drove him five years ago still drive him today. The rope and the noose are important to him. He couldn’t find a place inside to stage a hanging, and he didn’t have time to get her to his usual spot, if that’s even available anymore.”

“And he wanted her dead very, very badly,” Raymond said. “So he took the risk.”

Abbie stood up, brushed off the thighs of her slacks. “This is what I need in addition to the regular canvass. Find the bus driver from her school route and ask if he spotted anyone along the way, either standing on the sidewalk or trailing the bus in a car. Get someone to Nardin Academy, see if anyone was lurking at the school, anyone out of the ordinary. See if anyone called the school asking about the girl
before
she got on the bus. Start talking to the neighbors.”

Raymond had pulled out a little leather notebook and was taking notes with a small silver pen.

“Wait,” Abbie said. “What time is it?”

Raymond turned his wrist: “6:53.”

“Good. That’s peak jogging time back there in Delaware Park. It’s empty during the day, but right about now you get the after-work runners
who cover a few miles on the trails and paths. Put two uniforms on the main jogging paths and flag down everyone who comes by. Ask them if they spotted anyone or anything unusual. I want to know what Hangman is wearing and if he’s on a bike or using a car, and also, is he alone or accompanied? If he’s accompanied, get a description. When you’ve assigned all that, come back to me.”

It took Raymond a few minutes to delegate the different
tasks. Abbie stood, studying the body and the yard, and thought. Why was Hangman stalking the North? It wasn’t where he’d grown up. The houses out here were big, older, well maintained, Tudors next to Victorians next to stone French country mansions. Some of them had names as well as numbers, like The Priory or Lane’s End. The air seemed thicker here, the sounds of car doors closing and voices carrying from the next street held in a kind of luxuriant oxygen-rich stillness. Quaint ethnic restaurants, not cheap pizza joints, lined the main strips.