Hangman: A Novel (27 page)

Is Hangman here? Has he swept up this hill toward the tower, ghost that he is?

“Mind your manners,” she said, and picked up the glasses again.

The temperature must be hovering around 20 degrees. She checked her watch: 7:54. Riesen would be on his way in from the parking lot.

She heard Raymond breathing in her earpiece. He was scanning the landscape, too, head on a swivel. After a while you could sense what the other person was doing from listening to them breathe, the rustle of the mike, the background scrim of noise.

Abbie heard something, a sound that had been there for a while but had grown just loud enough to emerge from the background shirr of wind. It was a chunking sound, the sound of feet on gravel. But it was distant. She swung her glasses over to the path, which now glowed a light tan in the deepening dusk.

It was Riesen, wearing the same trench coat and dark slacks he’d been wearing the day before. He carried a plastic bag in his left hand, and she heard the sound of his feet clearly on the stony trail.

“Riesen,” she whispered to Raymond.

“I hear something else,” he whispered back.

“Where?”

“Twenty, thirty yards to my left.”

Abbie needed Raymond’s eyes on the tower.

“Stay where you are. Thompkins, come up with one additional to Raymond’s left.”

“Roger that. Moving.”

Riesen was approaching the tower, his head raised in the air like a pointer sniffing. He was eager. Abbie turned the glasses quickly, but she couldn’t see anything to Raymond’s left.

“How long, Thompkins?” Abbie asked.

Sound of movement in her earpiece, scraping branches.

“Two minutes,” Thompkins said quietly.

“Red,” Raymond said, his voice higher. “Red through the bushes.”

“Leave it,” Abbie ordered. “Thompkins is backstopping you. I need—”

“Too long, I got this.”

“Raymond, stay where—”

She heard Raymond breathing hard in her earpiece and she saw a flash of camo from his position.

Damn his overeager
—Her eyes flitted from the movement in the dry bush to Riesen.

“Stand down,” she said urgently on the mike.

No answer. Maybe a branch had ripped Raymond’s mike away. She felt the situation begin to tilt out of control.

Without Raymond, one of the three entrances to the tower was hidden to them. She saw Riesen, thirty feet away, hurrying toward the south entrance, the bag swinging in his hand.

“Thompkins, where are you?” Abbie whispered, realizing Riesen might have been lured here in order for Hangman to kill him.

Breath, panting.

“Coming up … just left of Raymond’s position.”

Right where he should be to catch anyone running downhill from the tower. But where was Raymond?

She brought the mike to her lips and whispered his name urgently. All she heard was scraping and the sound of breathing. Raymond cleared his throat. He began to breathe hard and then she heard a commotion in the earpiece.

Abbie looked toward Raymond’s blind. Forty yards to its left, something moved in the bushes. Raymond or Hangman?

“You have a visual, Thompkins?”

“Negative.”

She shot a glance at the path, and caught Riesen disappearing into the gloomy interior of the tower.

Ten seconds later, a shape emerged at the top and was framed against the last rays of the sun.

A scream burst through the earpiece. Abbie barked into the microphone. “Raymond? Is that you?”

She dashed out of her blind, her feet clearing the vines that surrounded it and hitting the hard pate of a path. Abbie sped down it, heading up toward Raymond’s position, her Glock pointing left where she’d seen the trees shaking.

She stopped. She heard breathing in her earpiece now, slow breathing. It was different.

“Raymond?”

The voice was low, deep.

“Hangman, Hangman,”
it said, and the back of Abbie’s neck went cold,
“what do you see?”

It was Marcus Flynn, the voice from the trial clip she’d watched in the crowded bar the day before. Slow, deep, and perfectly calm.

Abbie’s heart seized up. She hurried toward the trees. There was no movement now.

“Four little girls.”

“Flynn, listen to me,” she said.

“Cute as can be.”

Abbie cat-footed toward the black hillside that faced her. She brought her gun up with her right hand and pulled the earpiece away, listening for the man in the open air.

The earpiece dropped to her chest. She could still hear the voice.

“Hangman, Hangman, where do they go?”

Her eyes scanned the dark branches.

“Down on the ground, where the daffodils grow.”

The earpiece went dead.

Abbie ran into the brush just below the spot where Raymond had disappeared, thrashing at strong thin branches with her gun. Vines grabbed at her legs and branches whipped her throat. She smelled the deep musty tang of decaying leaves and she shouted Raymond’s name again.

Something large and fast burst from the scrub on her right. Abbie whipped her gun up but saw orange and immediately pulled it down.

Thompkins’s face was red as he hustled to her, another burly man just behind him. The SWAT leader was breathing hard.

“You see anything?” Abbie asked.

He shook his head. “Must have gone west. Nothing came by us.”

Abbie nodded, pointed right and the two men shot by, headed for a small trail barely visible between two raggedy pines.

Ahead and to her left, she thought she saw something red moving along the trail, hidden by thick leaves. She brought the gun up, but held fire. It could be Raymond. She pushed her way into the vines and broke through, her feet finding a small animal path on the other side.

“Raymond!” she called.

Ten steps later, she found him. He was sprawled out on the trail, his service gun in his right hand. The back of his scalp was crisscrossed with blood.

Abbie felt her heart thumping hard. Dark trees lined the little path, left and right, leaves silvery in the moonlight. She couldn’t see between them. If Hangman was lurking there, he could be on her before she could point her gun.

Abbie bent down, the tip of her Glock shaking ever so slightly.

“Raymond, stay still.”

Her hand slid along the back of his neck, over the turtleneck. She felt for the jugular and found it, beating.

And then she heard a noise from behind her, like a dog baying in pain.

She turned, her eyes wide with fear.

It wasn’t a dog. It was Frank Riesen, screaming.

She didn’t want to leave Raymond. He was out cold, in
the open. Hangman could watch her leave and then come back and cut his throat.

“Thompkins,” she called into the mike. “Come back to where we met and proceed northeast from there thirty yards. Under a big oak. It’s Raymond.”

A curse. “Roger that.”

Riesen screamed again, some words Abbie couldn’t make out, but the sound communicated a prehuman anguish.

Abbie began to move. She brought out her radio from the camo’s hip pocket and called in her position.

“Go ahead,” called the dispatcher.

“Need a Medevac for Raymond. Unconscious, lacerations to the head. Bring other personnel to the Stone Tower now. Thompkins will be with him.”

“Where is Hangman?” said the dispatcher.

“Last seen moving northeast toward the Red House lot. Bring the copter in and spotlight the trails between here and there.”

“Roger that,” the dispatcher said.

She had to get to Riesen. Abbie jumped onto the narrow path out
of the stand of trees, then hooked left. The tower was forty yards away and as she dashed toward it, gun pointed down, Riesen went silent. The light from the moon edged the parapet in gray, but she couldn’t see a human form anywhere.

“Riesen,” she yelled. “Stay where you are.”

Abbie came down the hills and sprinted toward one of the doorways. She reached the structure and threw her back against it, then swung through, bringing the Glock through the entire arc. She raced for the stairs, her feet splashing in unseen puddles.

The stairs were bathed in a weird glow. She pointed the Glock up and dashed to the platform on top.

The moon lit up the stone. Riesen was hunched against the parapet across from her. He was as still as a gargoyle.

“Mr. Riesen, are you all right?”

Abbie approached slowly. Riesen began to rock back and forth and now she heard him mumbling. But his voice was baby talk, interrupted by groans.

She pointed the Glock at the stone floor and crept over to him.

“Mr. Riesen?”

As she came closer she saw over his shoulder and there was something placed on the stone floor. It was laid out on a dirty gray cloth.

At Riesen’s side, she placed her hand on his shoulder. His shoulder muscle seemed to ripple underneath his coat, in revulsion or fear.

Abbie saw what was lying on the cloth in the moonlight. A severed hand. On the third finger was Sandy’s emerald ring.

Abbie drove home alone in the Saab, her face drained of
color in the light of a half-moon. The radio was off. Riesen was in an ambulance somewhere up ahead of her, suffering from shock. Raymond was at Erie County Medical Center after being airlifted out of the park. As for Hangman, there was no sign. He’d gotten to Riesen, grabbed the money, and left his daughter’s hand in exchange.

This is why cops never talk to their wives, Abbie thought. Holding it all inside, they grow distant and sleepwalk into divorce. I thought I understood why, in Miami, but maybe that was just me. It’s not PTSD or that other crap. It’s—how to put this—solidarity.

Cops think to themselves, Why should I have comfort when the parent or the loved one I just left behind gets none? Is it fair that I get in my car and on the way home I’m somehow forgiven for not finding the killer and by the time I walk through my front door I can tell my boyfriend or husband, “You’ll never guess what just happened”?

“Bad day?” he says, setting the wineglass next to the plate of pasta.

“Honey, you wouldn’t believe …”

No. There must be some kind of alliance with the victim or you’re a piece of stone.

She looked at her phone. But she shouldn’t call Mills, not yet. She hadn’t earned it, that relief.

Hangman is a sadist. Every time you feel pain, he wins. Special bonus for pain caused to families and random cops. She’d been ready for that.

Frank Riesen hadn’t.

And so if you’re not a complete monster, you can’t let the parents suffer alone. You have to take a little of their pain and tuck it away inside yourself. It’s not stress, or whatever the hell the psychiatrists say it is. It’s not the same as a soldier who’s seen his buddies blown up. It’s just the minimum purchase price for the job.

For the split second after she’d seen those pale fingers, and Riesen moaning like he’d been speared in the gut—oh, that sound, couldn’t it go away just for a minute—she thought, It’s not her hand. That clever bastard cut off some other girl’s hand and put the ring on it, just to be playful. Sandy is still alive.

Hangman was capable of that.

But the hand, when Abbie examined it, had clearly been severed postmortem, the cut mark showed no fresh blood at all, just a clean line of desiccated flesh. The finger around the ring was swollen, and the skin underneath was discolored and slightly indented from long use. The ring had been on Sandy’s finger for years. It was her. The lab would confirm it, she was sure. One of the techs had asked Riesen. And he’d nodded. That was after he’d vomited over the edge of the parapet, splashing the gravel below with the acid in his stomach. Which was, in itself, another kind of confirmation.

Hangman had just turned Riesen inside out like a gutted deer. He must be pleased. Was he listening to Riesen moan up there on top of the tower?

She feared Hangman now, the way you did an animal sniffing outside your tent. She’d become one of the people who’d seen his work up close.

Forget capturing him to learn about Hangman’s brain. Forget studying his methodology. She’d be just fine with killing him.

* * *

Her phone, buzzing in her bag. Abbie glowered at the yellow line disappearing under the Saab, then finally picked it up. The screen read “Perelli.”

“We had him,” he said simply.

Abbie closed her eyes briefly. “How’s Raymond?”

“Stable condition. Only thing permanently damaged is his reputation.”

Abbie frowned. “Chief, I missed Hangman, too.”

“But you didn’t get knocked out by him, did you? Raymond got close.”

She had nothing to say to that.

“Listen. We’re doing a status meeting at 9 a.m. tomorrow. Everyone who’s done anything on the case since the fucking beginning of time is going to be in that room, except for the guys running the search teams. I want you there.”

The next morning, Hangman drove through the back
alley parallel to Delaware, hearing water drip, the remains of a storm that had just blown through. The alley was narrow, and the old Cadillac barely made it through, the twin side mirrors only a couple of inches from the yellow brick of the buildings on the left and the raggedy chain link fence on the right. But he knew from long experience that the car would fit.

The building was up on the left another two blocks. As he passed a vacant lot on his left, the perspective allowed him to glance up and see the domed concrete roof. It had been a Masonic lodge back in the days when powerful men lived in the North. Powerful men still lived in the North, but the city itself was no longer powerful.

He told himself that an ordinary man, an ordinary killer, would be going to his mother’s grave at this time, with his latest quarry locked up and ready to be taken. Even among killers, there were clichés, but he didn’t avoid the grave because it was a cliché. No, it was just that his particular formula didn’t have death on both sides of the equals sign. He was going to kill the girl, but he didn’t want to remember his mother in death as he did so. No, he wanted to remember what they
stole from her, and him. Life. And this was where his mother had felt most alive.