Hangman: A Novel (35 page)

The names of the first two victims did match up with the family names in the diary, Breen and Kent. Those families had hired Mona
Lipschitz in the late 1970s. But after that, Abbie’s hunt had turned up nothing. There was no evidence that Mona had ever worked for Maggie’s family, or Sandy’s, or Katrina’s. Blinded by the vision of his mother hanging by a rope in that shabby asylum ward, her son had gone after every family in the North who had a young girl in the house. He’d simply been killing a class of people, the evil-doers. There was a kill list, it turned out: every brunette teenager in the North.

Abbie shivered, stuffed her hands in the pockets of the nubby sweater.

“Well?” Mills said, taking a pull on his Molson.

Abbie squinched up her eyes. “Patterns. Everyone seemed to have some connection to psychiatry. I got to thinking about psychiatrists, about asylums, about people who believed they were kings.”

Mills nodded.

“Marcus Flynn had been taken to the Psych Center,” she continued. “Lipschitz worked there part-time. It was on the list of buildings with coal bins. Simple, really.”

Lipschitz had been the dark matter warping things. Calling her to claim he’d been offered money for the Hangman transcripts, so that she would think there was a second man out there. Telling Flynn that Sandy Riesen was being abused. Volunteering to talk to Sandy about the alleged abuse if Marcus would bring him the girl. Then he took Sandy and shot Flynn. Then, years later, roaming the city, Lipschitz snatched new victims, while everyone was looking for his escaped patient. Cocky.

Flynn was even in the trunk of Hangman’s ’77 Cadillac when he’d put Katrina in there. Lipschitz had even played part of his recordings of Flynn’s prison interviews to her over the radio at the Stone Tower so she would think he was the killer.

“Hangman, Hangman, what do you see?” Abbie said.

Mills eyed her. “Like hell it was simple.”

Abbie tilted her head back and regarded him. “Are you mad at me or proud?”

Mills ignored that, squinted into the afternoon light. He crossed one leg over the other and looked back at Abbie. “So because Hangman was on the loose, Lipschitz had nothing to worry about,” Mills
said finally. “He kept him in one of those cells in the basement of the old asylum—I don’t even want to imagine why they put the inmates in there years ago—and he was going to kill Flynn and the girl and bury them where no one would find them.”

He looked over at her.

“That’s about right,” Abbie said.

Mills watched smoke pour through the vents of the grill and disappear into the evening air.

“You stopped a lot of killings,” he said, raising his beer. “Congratulations, Ab.”

Abbie drank. “But you don’t like how I saved them, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

Abbie crossed over to him, pushed his leg off its perch, and scooched onto his lap. “Mills?”

“Kearney?” His eyes, up close, were startlingly green and none too friendly.

“I had to do it. Show me another way I could get there before he kills Katrina.”

Mills’s eyes were cool. “You go down that alley you never walk back out, Abbie. Like I told you.”

“I’ve seen it a thousand times,”
she said in a husky voice, imitating him.

Mills eyed her dangerously. “You wanna play?”

“No,” Abbie said, sinking into him until she was laid out against his chest. “I want to have a nice peaceful life. For the first time in my life, that’s what I want. Maybe even with you.”

She didn’t feel as lighthearted as she sounded. Sometimes she believed that each case left a bit of sediment behind, traced along the lining of her heart. Accumulating. Like black lung disease. An occupational hazard.

But the sun was out and Mills was here and Buffalo was her city now.

“Maybe you weren’t cut out for a nice life,” Mills was saying.

Abbie made a face. “That remains to be seen.”

“If I see that guy McGonagle around, by the way, I’m going to bury him in the backyard.”

“He’d poison the roses,” she said.

“Abbie.”

She put her fingers to his lips.

“It’s over,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. You just have to believe in me.”

She was going to a public memorial service for Wendy Lamb, Katrina’s mother, the next day. Her clothes were all picked out, the black dress with the thin leather belt and the new heels. She would go with a full heart. But she’d held up her end. She was at peace with Wendy Lamb.

And what about Mills, she thought. What about yourself? That would take a little longer.

Fiction

Black Irish

Hangman

Nonfiction

S
TEPHAN
T
ALTY
is the author of the crime novel
Black Irish
and six widely acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction. He’s contributed to
The New York Times Magazine
,
Playboy
,
GQ
, and many other publications.

stephantalty.com

@stephantalty