Hangman: A Novel (12 page)

Abbie handed him the note. “I found this under her sweater. Maybe Hangman left it there, or maybe she snatched it from him.”

Raymond brought the note up and read the contents, then whistled.

“Bring it to the lab,” Abbie said. “First test it for fingerprints; if Hangman’s getting any help, maybe they left their prints on this. Then fibers. See if they can tell us what he was wearing, maybe he kept the note in his pocket. Then handwriting. Tell them I want a comparison with anything they have on Marcus Flynn from the original cases. Also, scan it for impressions from writing that was done on pages above this one, if it came from a notebook full of these pages. Got it?”

No humor now. Raymond nodded and walked off.

They are not your children
. Something tugged at her memory, like the world’s tiniest fish nibbling on the world’s thinnest line. So faint.

And, even more tantalizing,
I live where

What in God’s name did it mean?

Abbie waited at the gate for the results of the neighborhood
canvass to come in. Cops milled around in the side yard, sneaking glances at her face, and looking away quickly when she locked eyes with them.

Someone talk to me. Please. Give me something.

Her phone rang. It was Perelli, calling with the financial info on Carlson, the dead CO that Hangman had killed in his escape. Carlson didn’t show any large deposits into his bank account, just a biweekly payment of $1,843 from New York State, his net wages. He moonlighted on occasion at events and bars in Buffalo; he’d even done security for a few R&B and hip-hop acts that had come through town and didn’t want to pay to fly their bodyguards from New York or L.A. It was a grand here and a grand there. Small money.

There were regular withdrawals from Geico insurance and payments toward his mortgage, which he’d refinanced in 2011. He paid most of his credit cards off in full every month and had only a couple of thousand dollars on a MasterCard that was being carried forward. In late 2010, Carlson had been sanctioned by the courts for not paying alimony to his wife, one Rita-Claire Montcrief, now a resident of Atlanta,
but after having his wages garnished for six months, he’d come up with the outstanding balance in full and hadn’t missed a payment since.

It was all very normal. But it didn’t answer the question: how does a Corrections officer afford a fully loaded Corvette and a Panerai watch? She told Perelli to find out where Carlson had bought the Corvette and see how he’d paid for it. Perelli had grumbled about remembering who outranked whom in this department, but she reminded him that he was only passing on her requests to someone who did the actual work, so to stop bellyaching. He snorted, then filled her in on what Buffalo PD was doing.

Marcus Flynn’s last residence, an apartment in a slowly decaying block off Niagara Street, was being staked out. The houses of the detectives who’d worked the case were being watched, in case Hangman wanted to exact revenge. Search teams were being assembled to sweep the city, checking backyards, abandoned buildings, Dumpsters, vacant businesses, and storage sheds for any sign of the killer. Detectives were being given night-vision goggles and thermal-imaging equipment and would be assigned to the North. All burglaries and break-ins were being treated as possibly Hangman-connected unless proven otherwise; no clothing had been reported stolen, but it was impossible for Perelli to believe that the killer was still wearing his orange prison jumpsuit. And Marcus Flynn’s most recent photo, from Auburn, was being shown on local TV, as memories had faded and it was possible he could walk around without being recognized.

Despite all that, they hadn’t gotten one verified sighting of the murderer.

“What about potential victims?” Abbie asked Perelli.

“We’ve told parents of teenage girls not to let their kids out alone under any circumstances,” he answered. “We’ve called all the high schools and made sure they instituted a pickup policy where every girl has to be seen getting into their parents’ cars. No walk-homes alone. No buses. Their parents’ cars only.”

“That’s good,” she said. “Restrict his opportunities. Maybe it’ll flush him out.”

“We’ve got extra patrols at the malls. Teenage girls tend to congregate
there, though what kind of mongrel would let their daughter go shopping today, I don’t know. And you’ll never believe what the big seller at the Galleria is right now.”

“What?” asked Abbie.

“Hair dye. Mostly blond, a few reds.”

Abbie said, “Huh.” She’d never thought of that, but it was clever. “Who’s buying it, mothers or daughters?”

“Mostly mothers. Dyeing their kids’ hair.”

“I’d do it, if it was my daughter.”

Perelli’s voice cracked with exhaustion. “Abbie, give me something. Soon.”

Abbie felt a wave of heat across her vision. “It’s a five-year-old case, and I’ve been working it for six hours, Chief. Do you mind?”

“All right. Just do what you have to do.”

“How about martial law?”

Perelli laughed grimly. “I’ve thought about it. Listen, we checked on purchases of red masks. A few little stores still haven’t checked in, but we’re getting close to Halloween and I’ve got a few hundred devil and monster masks with some red on them, sold at Walmart and other places. Most people paid cash. Tracing the buyers just ain’t gonna work.”

Abbie rubbed the back of her neck. The muscles were starting to tighten, the first sign of a knockdown headache. “It was a long shot.”

“Anything else?” asked Perelli.

“One other thing. In the main case file, there’s a reference to folder 3CW. It’s missing. Do you know what was in there?”

Perelli sighed.

“No idea. Take it up with McGonagle.” He hung up.

Abbie saw the cops up and down the block fanning out
, knocking on doors, chatting with people on their porches. One elderly woman three doors down and across the street had her hand to her mouth and Abbie saw her jaw shaking with sobs.

She found Dr. Lipschitz’s card and called him. Voicemail after five rings. She left a message, saying that something urgent had come up and could he call her immediately please.

Abbie kept the phone out, clicked on “Photos,” and brought the screen close. She studied the note she’d found on Martha’s body. Except for “They are not your children,” the note seemed straightforward. Hangman was imprisoned, his life hellish. He was killing “the evil-doers” out of a deep black despair.

But who was Hangman talking
to
in the note? Was he so insane that he believed that killing the girls was really getting revenge on evil-doers? Perhaps he was truly schizophrenic after all, and the “your” he referred to in the note was actually a voice in his head?

The phone buzzed in her hand, and she snapped up the call after the first ring. Lipschitz.

“You’ve seen the news?” she said.

“Yes,” Lipschitz said.

“We found a note at the scene.”

“Bring it to me,” he said quickly. “I’m at 26 Spring Street.”

A few minutes away.

“I’ll be there in five,” she said.

Twenty-six Spring was a small old wood-frame house dwarfed by rust-colored office buildings on both sides. Light gray paint with pearl white trim. She dashed up the steps and found him waiting for her in the doorway.

“Come in,” he said.

Abbie walked into the front room, which he’d made into a private office—gray-and-white wallpaper, two leather chairs and a desk, a bit messy—and fished for her phone.

“How old was the girl?” Lipschitz said grimly.

“Sixteen.”

He grunted. “This is terrible. In so many ways.”

Abbie hit the menu button on her phone and tocked the photo button. “Mostly one. Another dead girl.”

Lipschitz shook his head. “I have eight patients at Auburn, and there are six thousand in the New York State system alone. I have to think of them as well. Things will get worse not just for Marcus, but for every psychiatric inmate in the system. Funds will be cut in the goddamn legislature, I guarantee you, and guards will be that much quicker with their truncheons. My drug budget is so low I can barely afford Post-its, but it will go lower, believe me. It’s a disaster for all of us.”

The note came looming up. She handed the phone to the psychiatrist. “The sooner we catch him, the less damage he does.”

Lipschitz sighed. He walked quickly to his desk, laid the phone down, and stared at it, rubbing his head.

“This life is so terrible
,
”
he read.
“Darkness is everywhere. The evil-does are not punished. They are not your children. I live where …”

Lipschitz’s face flushed red.

“I can’t tell you much. It’s depressive talking, fairly garden-variety. Darkness is a common theme among depressives, and you have to remember that the way they keep prisoners, with twenty-three hours of artificial light, doesn’t help. I didn’t expect this; I thought he would be
more exuberant, perhaps more manic. Marcus always showed signs of a latent manic-depressive cycle.”

“What about ‘They are not your children’?” Abbie asked.

Lipschitz rubbed his temple with his hand. He nodded, as if to say,
I know, I know
.

“Something about that line …” Abbie said. “It connects to another part of the case. At least I think it’s another part of the case. There’s something familiar.”

Lipschitz snorted in frustration. “He never talked about the relationship between the children and their parents. It’s out of the blue.”

Abbie frowned. “Who are the evil-doers?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, don’t assume that he’s seeing the
girls
as evil. He might not be referencing them.”

Abbie’s brow crinkled. “Then who?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. God knows what he’d imagined to justify the killings. But Marcus …”

Lipschitz shook his head.

“Doctor?” Abbie said impatiently.

“It sounds so grotesque,” Lipschitz said. He took a deep breath, his voice rising: “He claimed he was saving the girls. From something worse than death.”

“What is worse than death?”

The psychiatrist slumped in his chair, staring bleakly at the phone. It buzzed.

He looked at the text, then handed it to her.

“You’d better go,” he said.

It was from Raymond.
Come now
.

Night had fully fallen by the time she got back to the house—9:34, the Saab’s clock read. She pulled up in front, tires squealing on the rain-slicked leaves that coated the gutters. Raymond, standing on the front porch, spotted the Saab and hurried over, ducking raindrops.

“Anything?” she said.

Raymond leaned his arm on the door. “One of the uniforms got a hit on a neighbor. But it’s a weird one.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s
weird
, Kearney. The house is four down on the side street due west, Oakland, which means her yard backs up on the back corner of the dead girl’s lot. Her name is Melissa Chopin. Now get this: the woman says she has information, but she’ll only talk to the lead detective. She’s not even saying if she saw something, and she sure as hell won’t say
what
she saw. She’s high-strung, you know, talking about
preconditions
.”

Abbie screwed up her face. “Sounds like a lawyer.”

“Bingo.”

Abbie felt her pulse quicken. Lawyer or no lawyer, the possibility of an eyewitness had perked her up immediately. “I’ll talk to her. What are the preconditions?”

“You have to enter and leave through the backyard; Chopin doesn’t want any of the neighbors seeing a detective coming through her front door. If a squaddie pulls up in front, even an unmarked, she’s gone. She says she’ll only give this information once, and then the family will be unavailable ‘from that point forward.’ You believe this shit?”

“That we can get around. But why?”

Raymond rolled his shoulders like a boxer loosening up for the fight.

“Whatever they saw over there scared the living hell out of ’em. They’re packing up as we speak, according to the uniform, and they ain’t leaving a forwarding address. She’ll talk to you in thirty minutes. You got one shot, Kearney.”

Abbie was famished; she hadn’t eaten since breakfast,
and she could feel her blood sugar falling off a cliff. She needed to eat something before talking to the mystery woman. There was a pub at the corner of the Stoltzes’ block that she’d spotted coming in. Abbie hurried there at a half-trot.

The place was bustling, men in wool coats at the bar crouched over burgers and fries, harried waiters rushing to and fro with a please-don’t-speak-to-me look on their faces, families with extra chairs pulled in around the small round tables, and the sound of jingling silverware mixing with the TV news turned up loud. Abbie noticed four or five parties who’d eaten and had the dishes cleared but were huddling over post-dinner drinks, dawdling, trying not to be noticed. They don’t want to go home, she thought.

People are hunkering down. Better than sitting at home jumping at every creak from the tree in the backyard and every moan of the wind.

A small black-edged TV blared from above the bar. Abbie took one of the few available seats, a rotating leather stool with metal studs along the edges and listened to the broadcast, waiting for the bartender to finish pouring a series of cocktails.

The news channels were in a frenzy, with text running along the bottom
of the screen and mobile news vans out on the roads interviewing housewives and business owners along the “Trail of Terror”—the westward line from the Auburn prison to the center of Buffalo. The
Trail of Terror
again, remembering the TV at the bar where she’d found McGonagle. My God, thought Abbie. It’s not a goddamn hurricane.

The reporter was a striking young black woman with bright red lipstick and a long camel-hair coat, holding the microphone in a hand covered with a thin leather glove. She was only a few blocks away, on Bryant Street in the North, where the red comet of the Trail of Terror ended. Her eyes were bright with excitement. “The escape of Marcus Flynn, the killer known as Hangman, revives haunting memories for many Western New Yorkers,” she intoned to the camera. “They recall the nights of fear that gripped this city in 2007 when four young girls disappeared off the streets. Many people I’ve spoken to talk about staying awake all night, tying pop bottles to strings and attaching them to their front door, as a kind of early warning alarm in case Hangman tried to enter their houses. Teenagers remember spending weeks inside their houses, forbidden to go anywhere. Cops worked double and triple shifts, some falling asleep in their cars and not showering for days on end. But those were the lucky ones. For those who weren’t so lucky, like the families of the victims, the memories are even darker.”