Hangman: A Novel (30 page)

“So what you’re telling me in this annoyingly roundabout way is that I can trust you?”

“Right now? Yeah.”

Abbie watched him. McGonagle was corrupt in any number of ways, but she believed he wanted Hangman as much, if not more, than her.

Abbie reached into her pocket and pulled out the Assessment Office folder and handed it to McGonagle. His face didn’t move an inch, but he grimaced and looked down in that cop way of receiving a payoff.

“What’s this?”

“Inside you’ll find twenty-four pieces of paper. I’ve taken six of the commercial buildings and will cover those myself. You have the private homes. Each paper is the blueprint of a building. You’re looking for the coal bin. I don’t have time to explain the history to you, but only a small percentage of the houses in Buffalo still have a coal bin shown on their blueprints. The only homes that kept the coal bins without converting them tend to be in the North. The addresses are on there.”

McGonagle stared at the street for a moment, absorbing this. “Where?”

“It will be in the basement. It will be a small, unfinished room with a window—that’s where the coal man would put his chute and let the stuff down into the bin. But some of them have been boarded up or cemented over. The bin could be used as a storage room, or it could be empty. I want someone to get into the houses and take a look at each one.”

McGonagle’s forehead crinkled, high ridges of dry red flesh. “Why didn’t you go to Perelli with this?”

Abbie gave a small laugh. “I did. He, uh, declined.”

McGonagle whistled. “What you’re telling me,” he said, “is that you’re looking for Hangman in the richest fucking homes in the city?”

“Yeah. One of which, by the way, belongs to Walter Myeong, the father of the third girl, Maggie.”

McGonagle frowned. “I remember him. Slippery little fuck.”

“Put him near the top of your list.”

McGonagle gave her a fish eye. “Lovely. And how, d’ya mind telling me, am I supposed to get some people in and out without being seen?”

Abbie dropped her head and gave McGonagle a stare. “I expected more.”

McGonagle’s face flushed red. “I told you we have nobody on the north side.”

“You did,” said Abbie. “But I know rich people. I went to school with them, I lived with them. And they don’t wash their own clothes, they don’t clean their own homes. You do know some maids who work in the North, don’t you?”

McGonagle looked over at her slowly, his mouth open slightly, then back. “Yeah.”

“And the guys who deliver the oil? And the washer-dryer repairman?”

McGonagle closed his eyes. “I get you now.” He barked with laughter. “No wonder you didn’t tell Perelli.”

“He wouldn’t have gone for it,” Abbie said. “This is the only way.”

McGonagle looked over. “Why would some rich fuck from the north side want to help Hangman kill girls? Is there that many torturers in the city?”

Abbie paused. There was a spark of bright doubt in her eyes—like she was on the verge of saying something. “I don’t think he wants to help,” she said finally.

McGonagle’s eyes widened. “You think Hangman’s got some power over him?”

“Something like that.”

McGonagle’s eyes swiveled to the icy road. “I thought I’d heard everything,” he said.

Abbie checked her watch. “We need to get—”

“What am I looking for?”

“Anything that shouldn’t be there. Clothing. Food. Anything out of the ordinary.”

“What else?” said McGonagle.

Abbie said nothing. The air in the car, the sound of a car’s tire on the road.

“Kearney?”

“Look for anything unusual and report back to me.”

“Is Katrina Lamb down in one of these coal pits?”

“I don’t know.”

McGonagle turned away. He slapped the envelope on the steering wheel. Then he opened the clasp and took a look at the first page.

“It’ll take time,” he said.

“We don’t have any.” Abbie shook her head. “Maids can change their schedules. Security alarms need to be checked. Boiler manufacturers can issue recalls for parts. Use your imagination, McGonagle. It has to be invisible, but more than that it has to be quick.”

“You
do
think she’s down there.”

Abbie reached for the door handle.

“Where are you off to now?” he asked.

Abbie studied him. “If I refused to tell you, you’d probably find out anyway.”

He nodded, seeing nothing amusing in this.

“I’m going to the Galleria.”

McGonagle goggled at her. “The fucking mall?”

She drove to the Galleria, whipping the Saab along the highway at 90 mph and squealing to a stop in front of the back entrance. Abbie pulled the Buffalo PD placard from the glove compartment and placed it faceup on her dashboard so she wouldn’t get towed. Then she opened the door and ran into the main entrance, disappearing into the roiling mass of afternoon shoppers.

Forty minutes later, Abbie was driving along Delaware
Avenue. The afternoon light was the color of old pots in a dark cupboard, pewter shining occasionally through the dimness, as she sped past the commercial district, then slowed as the houses got bigger and grander. The kid at the Assessment Office had plotted out all the houses on a map of the North that he printed on the back side of some letterhead. Clusters of stone houses and a few commercial and state buildings. He’d even placed numbers over the houses with existing coal bins reported on their architectural drawings, then at the bottom matched the number to the address for that house.

Abbie passed by the first one, 42 Delaware. The sign out front said it was the Western New York headquarters of the St. Vincent de Paul charity. She parked in the lot, then hustled up the walkway, tapping her police issue flashlight against her thigh.

Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. She picked it up.

It was a text from McGonagle.

“128 Elmwood. Clear. Storage room, cleaning supplies.” Abbie pulled out the list and crossed the address off the list. One down, twenty-three to go.

This is not the one you want to check, she said to herself. You want
to be looking at Walter Myeong’s house. But McGonagle was still trying to find a way in there.

Somewhere within a radius of two miles, more or less, there might be a girl in a room where the darkness seems to come off the walls onto her hands and blacken her skin. How horrifying it must be for Katrina, the first time she holds her hands up and they, too, have disappeared in the blackness. She won’t know what it is at first. She will feel she’s losing her mind.

The door opened. “Kearney, Buffalo PD,” she said. “There’s a gas leak in the area and I’m helping out Nat Fuel. May I check your basement, please?”

The coal bin at the St. Vincent de Paul building was now a janitor’s room, filled with mop buckets and floor cleaners. Abbie tried the Red Cross next, four doors down, using the same gas leak excuse. The receptionist, a heavyset woman with a unibrow, made a face, then led her down to the basement. Abbie first found the boiler room and shone her flashlight at the pipes coming out of the wall.

“Looks good,” she said to the woman. “I’m going to look around a little, see if there are any other connections. I’ll meet you upstairs?”

The woman nodded, eager to get back to her work.

Abbie pulled out the sheet for this building. The old coal bin was catty-corner from the boiler room, all the way across the basement. Abbie shut the door to the boiler room, walked down the hallway, listening as she walked.

If they heard a scream down here, wouldn’t they have called 911? Wouldn’t they have done it for Sandy Riesen?

Another text from McGonagle. “12 Bryant, 34 Summer, clean.”

Abbie felt a wave of fatigue drift through her body. She reached the end of the hallway. There was a door on her left and another on her right. The bin would be on the left.

She turned the old brass knob and pushed open the door.

Boxes and boxes, stacked from the floor nearly to the roof. The walls were clean, any hint of coal dust gone long ago. Abbie tore open one of the boxes. Fund-raising pamphlets for a post-hurricane drive.

She was looking in the wrong places. Who leaves a room coated with coal dust for decades? Not a place like the Red Cross, with janitors and inspectors and a need for every inch of space.

Maybe a man who lives alone in a mansion.

Hurry, McGonagle
.

She shut the door angrily and headed quickly up to the first floor.

Abbie dodged a car as she ran for her car, pulling her phone out of a coat pocket.

She hit “recents” and dialed the last number.

“Yeah,” McGonagle said.

“What do you have planned for Myeong?” she said.

“He’s a fucking hermit. He has no regular house cleaner, calls Merry Maid when the place gets too bad. I spoke to his meter reader from Nat Fuel, but he says Myeong follows him down to the basement every time he goes by there.”

“Follows him to the basement?” Abbie said.

“Yeah.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he’s annoying.”

“Then a meter reader’s not going to work,” Abbie said. “And we only get one shot without Myeong getting suspicious. If we send a boiler repairman and then someone from the water company, talking about a main break or something like that, he’s going to know something’s up.”

McGonagle grunted.

“So what do you have in mind?”

Abbie put the Saab in gear.

“I don’t know. I want to see the back of the house first.”

Abbie passed in front of the mournful facade of Myeong’s
corner house. She made the turn onto the side street, and parked in back of a silver Volvo, got out of the car and crossed the street. The houses along Summer weren’t as grand as the ones on Delaware, mostly old Tudors or Colonials, some of them in need of a good coat of paint. Abbie walked past the Myeong house and glanced into the backyard, which was separated from the sidewalk by an old chain link fence. There was a gate near the corner, where the property ended, but it was locked with a hefty-looking chain.

From the back the house looked abandoned. There were weeds that had grown most of the way up the fence and the old trees—were they chestnut?—that she could see through the shade from the tangled branches were gnarled and uncared for. The yard itself was long but shallow, and butted up against the new vinyl fence of Myeong’s neighbor to his rear, a yellow Victorian with white trim.

Abbie’s phone buzzed.

“234 Bryant, clear.”

Abbie fumbled for the list of houses and found it, then pulled out a pencil. She crossed off the address. Nineteen to go.

She found McGonagle’s number and called. “Can you get someone
to his front door in ten minutes? They can be taking a survey or selling insurance, whatever. When I know he’s occupied at the front of the house, I’ll take a quick look at the coal bin myself through the back.”

McGonagle hmmed. “How about a chimney cleaning service?”

Abbie glanced toward the house. On the right of the house, toward the rear, was a brick chimney spire, in the same yellow brick as the rest of the house.

“Fine,” she said.

“I’ll text you when he’s walking up.”

The wind was tossing the limbs of the tall chestnut tree in the corner of the yard. The ground was covered with fallen chestnuts, and she heard one or two thump when they hit the packed earth. Did kids collect chestnuts anymore? When she was growing up in the County, the local boys tossed heavy sticks at them up in the trees, gathered them in paper shopping bags, and then had chestnut wars for weeks afterward. She’d been hit by more than a few. But here she could see the dark nuts gleaming through their split green skins.

Abbie waited until the impatience got to be too much, then put the toe of her boot in the chain link and climbed to the top bar, holding on to the top of the vertical pole for balance. She brought her left knee up to the bar, careful not to snag her wool pants, then paused and jumped. She landed on the sun-dappled ground and walked quickly toward the tree. She stepped on a chestnut and nearly rolled her ankle, but hopped up to recover before the bone twisted. Cursing under her breath, she limped to the tree and rested her back against its thick trunk, which shielded her from anyone looking out the back windows of the house. Abbie crouched down, rubbing the ankle and whistling softly.

The pain began to pass. More chestnuts struck the ground as the wind picked up.

A taxi went by on Summer. Abbie checked her watch. It had been thirteen minutes.

“Damn it, McGonagle,” she hissed. “Come
on
.”

Her phone was silent in her hand.

Abbie peeked around the tree trunk and looked at the back of the
house. It was yellow brick with a cement base and the windows were depthless black, like you’d see in a museum. She pulled out the blueprint of the house; the wind caught it and tried to tear it from her hands. She put the paper against the tree trunk, then turned it right way up. She was standing closest to the northeast corner of the house. The little room marked “C. bin” was at the opposite end.

She tapped her phone impatiently against her thigh. It immediately vibrated. Abbie looked at the screen. “He’s ringing the doorbell.”

Abbie crouched down and scooted diagonally across the yard toward the far corner of the house. She heard the noise of traffic passing in front of it, but the brick was too thick to hear the bell. Myeong would be moving toward the front door as the fake chimney cleaner waited for him.

She reached the corner of the house. The base of the brick was hidden by a foot-high fringe of grass that swayed back and forth in the wind. The man never cuts his grass, Abbie thought. He doesn’t call a lawn service to cut it, or have a regular maid, and he doesn’t let kids come in the backyard and get the chestnuts.

Reaching down, she felt along the stone, her hand skimming just behind the grass. The surface was cool, rougher than the cement above it. She bent over and walked forward slowly.

After a few feet, she stopped. The window should be here, she thought. I can’t be that far off. But under her palm she felt only cement. She moved her hand back. There was a ridge where the material rose slightly and then dipped again.