Hangman: A Novel (29 page)

“I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to tell you,” Braintree said. “I did a course in soil forensics in postgrad, but that was about ten years ago. We don’t get much call for it here.”

Abbie nodded.

Braintree reached up and turned a small dial on the base of the microscope. “God, I hope it’s not granite. There are literally thousands of kinds of granite and we’ll be here all day trying to find the right variety. What that will tell you”—Braintree glanced up at Abbie—“I have no idea.” She pushed a glass rectangle onto the lighted pad at the base of the microscope and hovered over the eyepiece. “Let me start with low power, see what kind of sucker we got here.”

The hum of the fluorescents droned in Abbie’s ears as she watched Braintree.

“This is strange,” the examiner said after a minute. She turned a dial on the right side of the microscope. She straightened up and reached for the laptop. She began navigating the FBI site, a frown on her face. She clicked through several pages, shaking her head briefly at each.

“Sand, pollen, diatomaceous earth …” Braintree’s brow creased as she flicked through more images on the site. Abbie saw ghostly gray-and-white shapes that looked like amoebas or tiny boulders. “What the hell is this? Looks a little like black basalt but not really.” She went back to the microscope. Two thin gold bracelets jangled on her right wrist as she adjusted the knob slightly.

“It’s an oh-point-oh-five.”

“Huh?” said Abbie.

“The size,” Braintree said. “It’s small.”

“Small compared to what?”

“The FBI gives a basic identification chart for podunks like me, ME’s with limited experience in this stuff. If you want something for a court trial or for a subpoena, you have to send them the physical samples. But”—she was back at the microscope, talking as she looked—“there are about two hundred minerals on the basic chart. And damned if I haven’t ruled out about 190.” She clucked her tongue. Braintree straightened up, turned, and gave Abbie a questioning, squinty look. She clicked the laptop keypad once and turned it to face the detective. “You’re sure Sandy was buried around here?” she said. “And not, say, West Virginia?”

“I’m not sure of anything. Why?”

Braintree pointed to the laptop screen. “Because this here is what was under Sandy’s fingernails.”

Abbie stared at the screen. There was a jumble of tiny jagged pebbles in red, topaz, tan, and deep black. Her eyes flicked up and read the header.
“Coal?”

“Coal dust,” Braintree said. “Six of the seven particles found under Sandy’s nail. The other one looks like a granite. These are black coal dust, not from anthracite, which is really clean, but the softer, messier stuff.”

Abbie peered at the image on the screen. “What the hell,” she said softly. “Where did he bury her?”

“That I can’t tell you.”

They stood there, the only noise the sound of people passing in the hallway and the hum of a refrigerator. Abbie had trouble focusing. The sound of the fridge intruded. What was the machine keeping cold? She imagined its contents, lit by a bright bulb as you opened the door. Ruby red bottles of blood. Pale fluids in test tubes. The effluvia of the human body, neatly stored.

Braintree hit a button on the keypad and a printer whirred to life in another part of the room. She walked toward the sound, heels clicking, and came back with a sheet of paper, which she handed to Abbie.

She studied the printout of the coal. “Coal dust, you’re saying. Not coal
soot
.”

Braintree smiled. “Well, aren’t you the A student? I hadn’t thought
of that. I don’t know if the heat of the fire would change the composition of the particles. I’m going to have to call Quantico on that.”

“Would you?” Abbie said, already moving toward the door. “I left my card. And, Doctor …”

“Yes, I know. There’s a girl missing. I’ll get right on it.”

Abbie pushed through the steel doors and headed for the exit.

The Assessment Office of the City of Buffalo is located in
Room 101 of City Hall, across the blank expanse of Niagara Square from Police Headquarters. The door was old wood with gold lettering, “Assessments” painted right onto the varnish. Abbie knocked.

The door cracked open. A pale young man stood there, dressed in an orange dress shirt, khakis, and a striped bow tie, along with fashionable glasses that he wore without any confidence. Eyes magnified slightly by the lenses looked at her.

“Are you McGonagle’s friend?” he asked.

Abbie nodded. The door swung open. The room smelled of decaying paper and ink.

“I’d like to see some blueprints,” she said.

“You’ve come to the right place. I’m—”

“You don’t have to tell me your name,” Abbie said. “I’m not sure if this is an official visit yet. It’s easier this way.”

The young man smiled uncertainly, then led her to one of the broad, polished tables.

“I’m looking for homes with coal bins,” she said, taking her jacket off. “I’m most interested in ones near the Delaware Park area, but show me everything.”

The man frowned. “I thought …”

“Yes?”

“I thought I was just letting you in.”

Abbie smiled. “McGonagle can be a little slippery. I’m going to need your help.”

The boy—she thought of him as a boy, something she suspected he would reluctantly agree with—licked his lips. “Coal bins,” he said.

McGonagle had chosen well, Abbie had to admit. The kid was surprisingly knowledgeable about the city, and he carried on a mini-lecture as he hurriedly brought her blueprints from behind the counter, where they were stacked on caramel-colored wooden shelves with the varnish beginning to flake off. The blueprints were bound between heavy blue-gray covers, the material worn and fraying at the edges, and they slapped down with a soft
thwap
.

As she opened the books she listened to the kid’s lecture. The gist of it was that little of the city’s Civil War–era housing stock had survived. Most of the oldest buildings still standing dated from the late nineteenth century, when Buffalo, as the western terminus of the Erie Canal, was churning out hairpins, automobiles, and steel braces. That’s when the new millionaires who owned the factories built their stone mansions along Delaware Avenue. Most of those mansions burned coal. With the city being so close to Niagara Falls, hydroelectric power in the form of electricity soon made its way over wires to Buffalo, which got the first electric streetlights in the country in 1881.

Abbie whipped through the plans of what looked like a church. “So I should be looking for stone houses?” she said.

“Yup,” the clerk said. “I’ve never seen a coal bin in a frame house. The city changed over to electricity and then oil and then gas. The only houses that I’ve seen where the coal bin wasn’t switched over to something else are the big mansions. They had so much room that sometimes they didn’t need to do anything with the bins, which were dirty and out of the way to begin with. I’ve given you four books,” the clerk said, pointing to the one she was flipping through. “This is the Delaware area from Niagara Square to Amherst Street.”

Her eyes were struggling to trace the blue lines along the faded yellowing pages.

“Look at each address and start with the first page,” he said. “Those will most often be the ground floor. Usually they’ll say ‘Coal Bin’ or ‘CB’ for short. They’ll be out back, and the way you can tell is that there will be a window marked at the top of the room.”

“Why a window?”

“Originally it would have been an opening for the chute to come in and dump all the coal into the bin. When they stopped using them, the owners usually changed the opening over to a window.”

Abbie nodded. “How many houses total are we talking about?”

The clerk got up, walked toward the counter and then turned quickly and leaned against it. “Two hundred, maybe two fifty. Only a small fraction will still have the bins, but if you want a complete picture, you’re going to have to check them all.”

Abbie let out a small moan. “Buddy, I don’t know your name and I don’t want to know. But please grab a book and start looking.”

He jumped up from the counter and sat across from her.

Her phone buzzed. “Yep,” Abbie answered.

“Spoke with Quantico,” said the voice. Dr. Braintree.

“Shoot.”

“Well, it’s good and bad,” said the medical examiner. “Coal dust, the stuff we found under Sandy’s nails, is different than coal soot, which is produced when the stuff has been burned at high temperatures. What the FBI is telling me is that the heat changes the shape of the residue molecules. Got that?”

“So this means what was under the girl’s nails was—”

“There’s an eighty percent chance that what we’re looking at is dust from coal that hadn’t been burned. Stored coal.”

Abbie thought about that. “Eighty percent? I like that number.”

“So do I.”

“Dr. Braintree, do you see what this means?” Abbie said quickly.

“Not really.”

“Sandy Riesen was kept in a place that used to store coal, long enough to get particles deep under the skin. You think this was premortem?”

“To be that deep under the nail, I would think so.” Braintree thought about it for a moment. “How would that happen when the poor girl was alive?”

Abbie pictured it in her head. “Only one way,” she said. “She was trapped somewhere, and was trying to scratch her way out.”

Perelli was waiting for her in his office. She swept in and
closed the door against the hum of ringing phones and frustrated male voices.

“I need search warrants,” Abbie said, pulling out the folder stamped “Assessment Office.” The first Xerox was a blueprint shrunk down to fit an 8½ x 11 sheet, and was marked “34 Summer Street” in old-fashioned script in the upper right-hand corner. The copy didn’t reproduce the original’s faint blue pen lines but it was clear what they were looking at were house plans.

“Where’s this?” Perelli said.

“In the North, Summer Street. I went searching for every structure in the area that has an existing coal bin and these twenty-four buildings are the only hits.”

“Coal?” Perelli said, and Abbie explained about the coal dust found under Sandy Riesen’s fingernail.

Perelli looked at her like she had two heads. Lack of sleep seemed to magnify the confusion in his eyes. He narrowed his eyes and repeated, “Coal?”

“I need search warrants for twenty-four buildings.”

“Explain, Kearney.”

Abbie tried to keep her temper. “Six out of the seven grains of dirt are coal dust,” she said. “That’s a very high percentage. It indicates”—she almost said
preponderance
but she was trying to keep it simple for Perelli’s exhausted brain—“a lot of coal where she was kept. I believe that’s consistent with an old coal bin.”

“You know what it’s also consistent with? The fucking ground. A hundred years ago, Buffalo was probably covered in coal dust up to the curbstones.”

“The odds are this is premortem. The FBI lab says there’s a good chance—”

“Are you a mineralogist all of a sudden? I thought we had a break here.”

He waved his hand and walked slowly back to his desk chair, dropping into it with a
thunk
, then leaned back and closed his eyes.

“Chief.”

“This is all you’ve got?”

“No. I’ve been wondering how Hangman kept the girls without their screams being heard. If they were in one of these stone rooms, in an old house with thick walls, that would answer the question.”

“You finished?”

In response, Abbie only glared at him.

“That body was buried five years ago,” Perelli said. “The coal dust could be from anywhere. And on this basis you want to target homes in the North? Not going to happen.”

“Who cares if it’s the North?” Abbie yelled. She could feel a vein at her right temple begin to throb ominously. “There’s a connection to Hangman. Because these homes are owned by CEOs and such, we can’t take a look?”

Perelli slammed both palms onto his desk and leaned toward her, his face going a darker shade of red. “It’s not because they’re rich! It’s because this so-called connection is weak as hell. The particles could be from anywhere.”

Abbie’s vision shook. She took a deep breath, then opened her eyes and stared at Perelli, who held her gaze. Her hand trembled a bit as she reached toward the folder and placed her hand over it. “Trust me on
this, Chief. If I’m wrong, I’ll fall on my sword. I will write a letter of apology to every rich bastard—”

Perelli held out his hand. “Give me something stronger, Kearney. Something connected to Katrina Lamb, not a five-year-old case and
not
some fucking dirt from under a dead girl’s fingernails. Do that and I’ll blow down doors all over town with dynamite.” He pounded the Assessment Office folder with an extended index finger. “But not on this.”

Abbie slid the blueprint back in the folder and left without another word.

An hour later, Abbie parked by the underpass where
she’d met Riesen. McGonagle’s Explorer was idling in the half-darkness. She got out of the Saab and walked toward it.

I feel like I’m in a damn mob movie, Abbie thought. A sense of unreality swept over her. “You look like absolute shit,” McGonagle said as she got in.

“I’m not in the mood.”

McGonagle snorted. “So what brings you out?”

“I need one more thing.”

She heard him breathing in the dim light.

“Go on.”

“Let me say first that, if we agree on this, no one can know it’s related to Hangman. No one. I don’t know how it came to be that I’m trusting you on this, but I have no choice. Can you tell me that I’m making the right decision?”

McGonagle smiled. “Trust is about status, Kearney. If you trust me with some information, and I’m presented with a choice between you and someone else, someone I like more than you, I might rat you out. Their status is higher, so they get the nod.”

“You realize that doesn’t make me feel better?”

McGonagle hmmphed. “It should. I told you before, Hangman is my number one concern. He’s a blot of fucking acid on my career, eating away at it and at me. I can’t rest until he’s caught or dead. Most of my friends feel the same way. That means you get the nod every time, because of who you’re chasing.”