Hangman: A Novel (25 page)

A car rolled up to her left. Abbie shifted away, her hand dropping to the Glock in the holster. A door slammed and she saw McGonagle walking around the front of the car. He waved to the driver and the car moved off a few lengths ahead and parked, engine still running.

“How’d you know I was here?” Abbie said.

He got in, collapsing into the passenger seat. McGonagle ignored the question and she didn’t press. Her eyelids were heavy. She felt her body wanting to sleep.

“I got to Riesen. He’ll talk to you.”

She sat straight up, her jacket squealing on the Saab’s worn leather. “God bless you,” she said. “Who’s your contact?”

McGonagle chuckled. “No, you don’t get that. Someone he trusts, okay?”

Abbie frowned. The Network moved in its own mysterious ways.

“He won’t deal with Buffalo PD, not officially,” said McGonagle. “Still has a bad taste in his mouth from ’07, the arrogant fuck. I told him you’re different, that you could act on your own if necessary. And I told him you had new theories on the case that might interest him.”

“That’s dangerous,” she said.

“It’s what got him to agree. No promises. He wants to meet you face-to-face, and hear what you have to say. But it has to be somewhere out of sight.”

“Wait,” Abbie said. “Does Riesen think Hangman is
watching
him?”

“I have no idea. He’s skittish. He feels he’s under surveillance by somebody, that’s what I got from him.”

Or he’s involved in the murders. Abbie thought of the signet ring. How had he gotten it?

Abbie’s eyes swept Niagara Square. There were a few college students, two guys and a girl, wandering over from the direction of Chippewa Street, the nightlife strip where bars stood shoulder to shoulder. The students swayed, laughing. They were too old for Hangman. Like immune people during a plague, tipsy and free.

“How do we do that?” she said.

“Fucked if I know.”

Abbie chewed on her bottom lip. “Parking garage?”

“There’s none that you can drive in and drive out without the attendant seeing. I checked. No automatic ones in Buffalo that aren’t on main drags. And why would he be going into a parking garage and then coming out a few minutes later?”

The girl, in a colorful knit hat, balanced on the edge of the fountain in the middle of the square and tried to walk the edge. Drunk, without a care in the world. Abbie felt like she was observing another species.

“How about under a bridge?” she suggested.

McGonagle breathed out. “Yeah, that could work.”

“Something in Black Rock,” she said. “You know Austin Street?”

It was an old railroad trestle in the industrial part of town, with little traffic or street life. It was in darkness all night, no fluorescents on the struts underneath. Perpetual shadows. The BPD had tried to have the Streets Department install lights underneath it for years, to scare away
the vagrants and the drug dealers that sometimes hunkered there, but budgets were tight.

“What time does he want to do it?” asked Abbie.

“Ten o’clock.”

She checked her watch.

“Forty minutes. Fine. I’ll park nearby and walk in. He pulls under the bridge with a driver. If anyone’s tailing him, he stays in the car. Even if he thinks someone is watching from a ways off, he can get out and we talk without anyone spotting him, unless they’re close. The car can head off for a few minutes and circle back.”

“Done. I’ll text you if there’s a snag.”

Abbie stood in the darkness underneath the Black Rock
bridge. The iron struts above her were painted black and seemed to suck in the weak haze of the streetlights, allowing only a tiny glow along the rivets, which humped off the metal like black ladybugs. Ten feet from the street, there was solid darkness. It smelled faintly of urine and the Niagara River, which was only a stone’s throw away. No vagrants or crack-slingers in sight.

Abbie pulled her black wool coat tight around her shoulders. She smelled the churning river, the wind-whipped spray as fine as perfume.

She closed her eyes and heard something rumbling far off. The ground beneath her feet shook. The sound seemed to crackle around her.

The air around her pulsed with compression waves and the bridge above her moaned and shook. Abbie ducked. A train slammed over the rails on top of the bridge and Abbie felt the iron flex down as if it would tumble onto her head.

Twenty seconds later, the train had passed. Abbie stood and looked left. There was a pool of streetlight there, and gray moonlight to her right. Cars moving. It felt like a sleepy old New England fishing town. A bell rang crisply from a ship passing on the river.

She thought of Raymond. He was out there pursuing the leads she’d put him on, and she was here, behind his back, setting up meetings he knew nothing about. The devious mentor. She hoped he’d understand, if he ever found out.

Headlights swept in from a side street. A white Roadmaster paused and then nosed left, toward her.

Abbie stepped back off the sidewalk up the cement slope that rose behind it. She crept back under the overpass, ducking her head. If it wasn’t Riesen, she didn’t want anyone to see her. The car pulled up and stopped with barely a sound. The beams of the headlights were two cones of light. A figure stepped out of the backseat, turned and quietly closed the door.

Nicely done.

Frank Riesen walked toward her. Abbie inched down the slant of the underpass wall until she was standing in front of him.

“You have something to tell me?” he said.

Abbie tried to read his eyes. Impossible in this murk. “I want to talk to you about Hangman,” she said.

He glanced at his watch. “The car comes back in four minutes.”

“I want to find him,” Abbie began, “and I want to find out what happened to your daughter. I don’t care who gets him, whether they wear a badge or not, or who gets credit.”

He stood, listening, emitting no vibration, perfectly controlled. “I’ve heard that many times before.”

A boat horn sounded from the river.

“But you’re not cooperating,” Abbie said. “You’re holding something back, Mr. Riesen. That’s a problem. Because Hangman leaves few clues, he has few friends. It’s hard for me to get a fix on him. I need to know what you know.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“You’re refusing to cooperate.”

“Yes.”

There was no embarrassment. Did the man know she was aware of the abuse report? Had this man really beat Sandy with a whip? Was he involved in his own daughter’s death?

“Three minutes,” he said.

She had to reach him now. “I believe that Hangman has an associate who’s helping him.”

Riesen’s face froze.

“Someone was paying a guard at the facility to be in contact with Hangman,” she went on. “The psychologist at the prison was also approached. Were you offering to pay those people for information about your daughter?”

It was hard to make out his expression. She felt a tiny waver in his control, a leap of excitement.

“So there was someone helping him, someone who could have kept Sandy all these years?”

Abbie caught her breath. Oh, God. She shook her head. “That’s not what I’m saying. Someone’s been monitoring Hangman’s recovery from his gunshot wound, tracking his memory. Did you make an offer to these two men?”

“At the prison? Never.”

There was no offense taken, no theatrics. Riesen didn’t care about her suspicions. The knowledge that there was a second man had only done one thing: given him new hope for his daughter.

“You had no contact at all with either of those people, Joe Carlson or Dr. Andrew Lipschitz?”

“I just told you. No.”

Abbie stepped closer. Her breath lit up the space between them with curling gray steam. “But you’re in touch with Hangman now.”

Riesen held his hand in front of him. In the darkness, she never saw it leave his pocket.

“Quick,” he said.

She looked down. In his hand was a hairband.

“Sandy’s?”

“Yes. From the day of her kidnapping.”

“When did you receive this? Yesterday? At Hoyt Lake?”

Riesen shook his head. “That doesn’t matter.”

“He gave you the signet ring as well.”

That stopped him. He stared at Abbie, then nodded.

“Do you have the envelope?” she asked.

“I do.” He reached and took the hairband back, gently, and placed it in his coat pocket.

“I’d like to see it. We can—”

“Test it for Marcus Flynn’s DNA?”

Frank Riesen was no slouch. “Yes.”

“It was him,” Riesen said. “I had my own people look at it.”

Abbie decided to let it go.

“Is this the only communication?” she asked.

“I was promised another one.”

“What exactly did—”

“That you don’t get. Two minutes, Detective.”

“What does he want from you?” Besides your pain, Abbie thought.

“Money.”

“Are you going to give it to him?”

“Yes.”

Abbie paused. Riesen’s exchange could give her a chance to catch Hangman or his accomplice. But at the price of what? Sandy was dead.

“Your nephew is toying with you, Mr. Riesen. He’s a sadist. He enjoys watching people in pain and you’re a new level, like on a video game. It fascinates and excites him. He’s just getting revenge, making up for lost time.”

What she didn’t want to say was, he wants to torture you because Sandy is now dead and he can’t hurt her anymore. He will hurt you now and he’ll enjoy it almost as much as he did when inflicting pain on your daughter.

Riesen smiled. “You don’t have children, Detective?”

“No.”

“Then I understand what you’re saying, but you’re ignorant of this. Any chance I have of seeing Sandy again, even of touching something she wore, I would pay any amount of money for it. There’s nothing else left in life for me now.”

There were other things to discuss, and time was short. “What did he promise?”

“He said that if I wanted Sandy’s emerald ring, the one she was wearing when she was taken, to bring the money and not to call the
cops for any reason. The ring belonged to my mother, and her mother before that. It’s a family piece, and I’ve wanted it back. But he said there might be a surprise, a big surprise, with it. I think he meant that he would show me evidence my daughter’s alive.”

Abbie stared. “I want to see the letter.”

“No.”

This link between Hangman and his uncle was unnerving. Who knew what they were saying to each other? “Where is the exchange going to take place?” she asked.

Riesen frowned, as if he were dealing with a child. “I’m not telling you that. This is all you get.”

Abbie heard a car engine purring. She looked up. The white car was approaching from the same side street it had come from. “Why won’t you let me—”

“Because he said if he spots one suspicious person, he will break it off. There is no discussion.”

“Mr. Riesen—”

The car pulled up and Riesen turned toward it.

“I want to be there,” Abbie said.

Riesen stopped and turned.

“Why should I let you get near this?”

“Because I’ve caught killers like Hangman before. No one else in this city has. Don’t go in there blind. Just take me and a couple of men.”

He turned to the car, eager to get away now, to finalize the arrangements, probably. Because he now believed Sandy was alive and the thought that she was out there, in pain, imprisoned, was unbearable to him.

“I can’t risk it,” he said.

“He’ll never see me.”

Riesen walked to the car, pulled open the back door. He looked around, scanning the low industrial buildings and the roads leading to the river. Then he looked at her.

“When I have Sandy back, I’ll tell you everything I know. I’ll give you the envelopes he sent me. But even meeting you here …” She saw something flash across his face. Fear. The thought that Hangman was watching them, that he’d blown Sandy’s last chance.

“No one is watching us,” she said quickly. “Mr. Riesen, if it was my own daughter, I’d give this a chance. I swear to you.”

“McGonagle will call you,” Riesen said, stepping into the car and pulling the door shut softly. The car purred away. The struts of the underpass glowed red in the light from the taillights.

Walking back to her car, Abbie’s footsteps echoed along
the narrow streets. She passed a tackle shop and then a bar, both closed.

She took out her phone and called McGonagle.

“Yeah.”

“You know mailmen?” she asked.

“You mean, in a social sense?”

“Cut it out. Riesen is communicating with Hangman. He’s already gotten one package from him and he’s expecting another. I want to see his mail before he does.”

There was a murmur, a man’s voice in the background. “Let me make a call,” McGonagle said. “See who’s on the route. I can’t reach everyone, you know.”

“Sure you can.”

He cackled and was gone.

It was close to midnight by the time she got home. She climbed the stairs to her bedroom, the wood creaking, and took a stinging hot shower. After, she nibbled on a few homemade cookies from Mae and Frank, her friends from around the corner. Oatmeal raisin. Her favorites. While she was drinking a full glass of ice-cold milk, the phone rang.

“It’s set for tomorrow,” McGonagle said. “Riesen’s house is in the last part of the guy’s route. It usually takes him four hours to complete the whole run, about three and a half to reach Riesen’s place. He gets his stack of mail for the day around 8:15 from the distribution center at 1200 William. He’ll go through it and hand off anything suspicious to us as soon as he leaves the main post office. We can have it for three hours, with thirty minutes extra for travel time.”

Abbie tapped her fingernail on the kitchen table. “Why not hold it for a day?”

“Because the guy’s six months from retirement and he won’t risk it. Letters are stamped when they’re routed through the distribution center, so they know when the carriers get them. He doesn’t want this getting traced back to them.”

“McGonagle!” she cried. “You can’t twist his arm?”