Hangman: A Novel

by Stephan Talty

  She heard the plash of oars. Riesen was rowing now, just a couple of strokes. The current was taking the craft toward shore, and he was pushing it back toward the center of the lake. When he’d regained his position, he pulled the oars back in, the wood scraping along the gunwale.

  The teenagers’ boat turned in the water, its prow headed back toward the dock. The craft passed within ten or fifteen feet of Riesen’s, but he barely glanced at the pair.

  Abbie felt a stab of annoyance. Had Riesen led her here on purpose, keeping her away from the true action? What if Riesen was here to throw himself into the lake, unable to bear the reminders of Sandy that were popping up on the local news every ten minutes?

  A voice snapped her thoughts back to the radio in her hand. Abbie crouched down, turning her back to shield the sound. She turned the volume down further and brought the radio up to her ear.

  “—Team 3. Thirty-four Sycamore off of Delaware. White female, Signal 7.”

  Abbie closed her eyes. Stephenson was North Buffalo, maybe six blocks away. Signal 7 meant a dead body.

  “Tell the chief and get the ME’s office here,” the voice said. “We’re going to check the house, see about next of kin.”

  Static, with voices calling out in the background. The dispatcher came on.

  “Team 3, supervisor wants to know if it appears connected to ongoing investigation.”

  Just say “Hangman,” Abbie thought. Everyone knows what you’re talking about. Half the city is listening in right now and your codes aren’t fooling anyone. Just … say … Hangman.

  “Uh,” the rough voice came back on. “That’s unknown at this point.”

  Abbie felt like throwing the radio into the lake. If it was Hangman, she could be at the scene in ten minutes. But if it wasn’t, she didn’t want to leave Riesen alone on the lake. The radio popped with static.

  Stay or go? Abbie turned and shot a glance at Riesen. He was tilted away from her, looking over the gunwales down into the surface of the water. The boat drifted in a circle. Did he see white bones down there? Were Sandy’s among them? Abbie shivered.

  The channel was going to fill up with voices fast. She darted up the bank, heading toward a path that curled back toward the parking lot. When she reached the path, almost invisible in the fading light, she brought the radio up. “Team 3, this is Kearney.”

  She heard yelling through the static. People were piling in already. They were going to muck up her crime scene. Abbie began running.

  “Kearney?” The search team leader barked. “All right, go ahead.” He sounded annoyed. He wanted to deal with Dispatch only, and not open up the channel to every cop in the city. Too bad. She was the lead here.

  “What is the method, Signal 7?” she said.

  Waves of static.

  “Kearney …”

  Abbie climbed a steep incline on the path and saw the parking lot. She snapped the button down. “Just tell me.”

  Blasts of interference, cutting to silence as the search team leader hit the talk button.

  “Strangulation.”

  40

  For a moment, Katrina imagined that she was dead, that this was the moment her spirit lifted from her body and she was given one last look at herself, lying on the ground, because she could sense that, yes, she was lying on a rough stone floor. In a few seconds, her spirit would rise and she would gaze down on her corpse and see her lifeless body, a noose tied around the neck and her hands bound.

  She was out of the car, she knew that. It was over. He had taken her out of the car and hung her. The lonely death of lobster girl, she thought.

  The joke didn’t help. Katrina whimpered softly.

  Her body felt like it was drifting on a fuzzy cloud. It was almost pleasant. She waited for the moment when her spirit departed. It wouldn’t be long now. She felt weird, as if she was grieving for herself. She had the sense she’d been lying on this stone floor for hours.

  What will I look like down here? Did he strip me naked? Am I mutilated? She felt strange that she was so unemotional, that the questions didn’t send horrific images spinning through her head. Why am I so freaking calm? It wasn’t normal.

  She felt the flank of her right thigh on the floor, the cold pressing uncomfortably through the thin material of her capri pants. How dead can I be if I can feel my leg? That makes no sense whatsoever.

  He must have drugged me again, she thought, and I’m coming out of it now. I’m not in the trunk anymore.

  Her left foot tingled far away, and then it was like lights winking on in a city that’s just been through a blackout. Little stabs of light all along her back and legs, numb but glowing brighter, as if each nerve in her body was lighting up one by one.

  As her mind slowly cleared, fear rose over it like a black wave. Katrina closed her eyes and tried to breathe steadily. She was able to rock her shoulders forward slightly, but she couldn’t sit up.

  She creaked her neck now and as she did, her gaze swept along the floor. She was in a dark little room with a small window above her head, smudged with dirt, with rusty iron bars outside the glass, just visible in the gloomy light. Katrina could see a wall made of rough stones. For a second she thought she’d been transported to somewhere in Europe, a castle or a dungeon or something like that. Where would you see old stone walls like that in Buffalo, she thought.

  She was not particularly claustrophobic and in fact at home she liked to wrap herself up in her duvet as tight as they wrapped Russian babies—she’d seen this in The Buffalo News once. The Russians wrapped their babies up tight until they looked like little mummies, with their red faces sticking out on top. It gave them a feeling of security and it prepared them for a life of regulations. She’d used it in a Social Studies paper she did on Russia and she’d gotten an A on it.

  The idea of how important that A had been to her then and how stupid it seemed now unnerved Katrina and she let out a gasp. But she caught it quick. Now I’m alone, she thought. I can escape.

  Her hands, still taped together, felt the wall just above her head. It was rock, not smooth stone, but actual bumpy, jagged rocks cemented together, like Old Fort Erie that they went to on school trips. The stones were dry and large and Katrina stuck the fingers of her right hand between them, running her fingers along the cement that held them together and she was unable to even scrape off a little.

  When she brought her hand away, she felt something on her hands. She brushed it off quickly. It was an old place. It’s like he’s taken me to a faraway land, she thought. Dracula’s castle.

  Think, Katrina. What buildings have I been in that are built of stone? Nardin, that’s the oldest place I know. Katrina realized she had no idea when it was built. Think of the letterhead, she thought, it must have a line saying when it was founded. She closed her eyes and pictured the letters the school sent home but she couldn’t even visualize the paper. Then she thought of the bills her mother got every semester from the school and, maybe because she always freaked out a little, wondering if her father would send the check, she saw the seal of the school, the weird-looking shield with the two lit torches beside it. She remembered the Latin words, Pro Christi something or other, she couldn’t recall the rest, and on top the year. Oh, but it was Roman numerals. She could remember the first four or five. M. D. And then three Cs.

  So it was from the 1800s. Could she really be locked in the basement of Nardin?

  Tiny slivers of light came from her left and Katrina got up unsteadily, first on her knees and then up on her feet and walked toward them, afraid that in the darkness there would be a hole in the floor and she would go plunging down. She felt ahead uncertainly with her feet, waiting to feel them touch down on solid ground before shifting her weight forward. In five steps she’d made it to the door, and she could see it was made of thick planks of wood.

  Then she thought of a place older than Nardin: the tombs at Forest Lawn Cemetery by Delaware Park. Katrina rushed to the door, her breath rattling in terror, and pounded
on it. What if she was in a crypt with a dead person?

  Katrina screamed Help meeeee! again and again but there was no response. Oh, please don’t let me be in a tomb with a body, I hate dead bodies, I will freak—

  Somewhere far off a door opened, and there were footsteps. Someone was coming. Katrina thought, cops, and then, Hangman, and she put her taped hands over her mouth to stop from making a noise.

  Closer and closer. The footsteps rang out like the sounds of rocks dropped in a well, echoing. Katrina backed up to the far wall, darkness enveloping her. She turned her face to the wall as the footsteps stopped in front of the wooden door.

  A key squeaked in the lock. The handle turned. Katrina shook her head back and forth and pressed her hands harder over her mouth, tasting the duct tape. The door rattled slightly in its hinges and then swung free. Air rushed in, foul, musty air.

  Katrina turned and saw a boot, a brown boot coming her way, dragging in a single leaf as it stepped over the threshold. On the boot were speckles of dark red.

  41

  There was only one black-and-white out front of 34 Sycamore. The hordes hadn’t arrived yet. Abbie parked the car in front and walked quickly to the porch. A uniform—short, pigeon-toed, nervous—stood there, shifting from foot to foot as he glanced up and down the street.

  “Kearney,” she said. “Where’s the body?”

  The uniform grimaced. “Back there,” he said, pointing to the driveway.

  “The garage?”

  He nodded and Abbie was down the steps, running. The one-car garage, door open, was lit harshly from a naked bulb. Black silhouettes moved in front of ladders, shovels, household goods. There was no car. In the corner, she saw a man crouching. He turned, and she recognized Raymond.

  “Kearney,” he said, standing quickly. “You got here right quick.”

  The other men—the search team members, she guessed, nodded and walked toward the garage’s open door. As they left, Abbie saw a body behind them, the body of a middle-aged white woman. Not a teenage girl.

  “Who is she?” she asked quickly.

  Raymond blew out a breath. “Looks like the home owner, Wendy Lamb. The address on her driver’s license matches the house here. Walks in and BOOM!”

  Abbie could hear car doors slam crump, one after the other, like a mortar going off in the distance. Soon this place would be swarming with media and cops. “You think it’s him?”

  “You tell me,” Raymond said.

  The body was slumped in the corner of the garage next to a pair of old snow shovels. The woman was elegantly dressed. She had a patterned brown-and-yellow Hermès scarf around her throat and a forest green sweater and tan wool slacks. There was a Louis Vuitton bag on its side next to her leg, some of the contents sprayed across the garage floor. Her head was turned away, as if she’d been struck and tossed to the floor, and her left arm was trapped beneath her body.

  Abbie bent down. She could make out a line of purplish black around her neck an inch and a half above the sweater’s collar. It seemed to grow darker even as Abbie looked at it. “Any other marks on her?”

  “Not so as I can tell right now. Looks like this piece of old clothesline is what did it.” He flicked the flashlight and the beam moved past the woman’s body three or four feet to the left. The garage floor was painted a dark industrial gray. There was a piece of thin, dirty white rope lying on the floor, twisted like it had been tossed there.

  “No blood? No note?”

  “Nothing.”

  Abbie reached over and went through the woman’s pockets, inside and out. Only a dry cleaning receipt, dated the day before, in the right pocket. Abbie gently eased the Louis Vuitton bag away from her leg and looked inside. Raymond watched as she went through it.

  “Wallet’s still here,” Abbie said, popping it open. The money compartment held a thick band of cash. Abbie riffled through it. Two hundred, two twenty-five at least.

  Abbie put the bag aside and reached beneath the corpse, feeling along the cold cement floor until she touched flesh. She tilted her head at Raymond and he took the woman’s shoulder and pushed it back gently until she could pull the left hand into the light.

  “Here’s a ring he didn’t take,” Abbie said with a sigh. “No defensive wounds. This happened quickly.”

  A snatch-and-grab, except that the killer hadn’t grabbed anything of value. The killing was over in a couple of minutes. There was no staging, none of the ceremonial feeling that the other killings had. Hangman hadn’t bothered to do anything to the woman except strangle her to death.

  “Where’s her coat?” Abbie asked.

  “Mm-hmm.” Raymond said softly.

  “Raymond? I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  His eyes met hers. They were soft and sad. Abbie flinched.

  “Yeah, well, we spoke to the neighbors. Wendy has a sixteen-year-old girl, Katrina.”

  Abbie turned her head as if she’d been slapped. Raymond reached out and grabbed her shoulder. She turned back, folded her arms across her chest.

  “Go on.”

  “Went to the Nardin Academy,” Raymond said, looking at his notes. “Sophomore there. Someone picked her up today in her mother’s car.”

  “It was him,” said Abbie. “There weren’t enough girls on the street so he found a way to get himself one.” Abbie stood up, turned her wrist, and looked at her Cartier watch. “Nardin probably gets out just before four. It’s 9:46 now. He’s had her for five and a half hours. That’s just way too long.”

  “I hear ya, I hear ya. I’ve got Traffic looking up her plates now. Should have them in a few minutes.”

  Abbie felt her heart race, thinking of how much a jump Hangman had on her. Five and a half hours was an eternity.

  “He’s dumped the car somewhere by now,” she said, bitterness in her voice.

  “Hey now. Don’t turn this freak into Superman. He made a mistake before, and that’s exactly how we caught him.”

  The bare bulb cast a harsh shadow forward as someone approached from behind Raymond. Abbie turned. A potbellied Asian man in an olive green vest, faded jeans, and scuffed combat boots was carrying a padded camera bag and a flash rig toward the body. Abbie recognized Sam, the BPD’s crime scene photographer.

  “You guys ready for pics?” he said, placing the camera bag on the floor. Unzipping it, he pulled out a banged-up Nikon. She thought about Riesen, sitting in the rowboat on Hoyt Lake. She thought of the Madeleines, the urban myth about the girls dumped on the lake bed. She saw the signet ring gleaming on his fat pinkie finger.

  She stepped around Raymond and went over for another look at the woman slumped against the wall. Sam was taking pictures fast in the tight dark corner of the garage. As the shutter clicked and the flash hit the body, Wendy Lamb’s face seemed to burn like phosphorous.

  Abbie felt anger coursing in her bloodstream like spiky particles of poison. Her hands cramped in the cold, but then the rage washed away and she felt sick. This morning I drove a few blocks from here, remembering how I’d felt humiliated by these rich people in these big homes, because some Yale alum was mean to me. I was feeling sorry for myself about something that happened twenty years ago.

  And here you were, Mrs. Lamb, the object of my resentments, getting the life wrung out of you so that Hangman could get to your daughter.

  Abbie felt something shift inside of her, like ballast in the depths of a ship.

  42

  Katrina felt the man staring at her, breathing in the half-dark.

  Just keep still and he’ll go away. Just relax, Katrina. Her eyelid twitched uncontrollably. Oh God.

  The man shuffled forward.

  Katrina opened her eyes just a slit, but she wouldn’t look at him. All she saw was the boot. She knew the color of old blood on leather. One day three winters ago, tobogganing at Chestnut Ridge Park, her friend Nathaniel had cut his foot on one of the long metal chutes that guided the toboggans down the slope. He’d worn the same Timberlands every year, streaked wi
th the blood.

  It’s the same color, she thought. Her heart was beating so fast it was painful.

  No sound. Just his slow, heavy breathing.

  The man didn’t go away. He stood there, watching.

  Katrina felt the absolute need to know where she was, whether she was in Buffalo or in Fort Erie or in Transylvania.

  “Where am I …?” she said.

  The boot came closer. Then something dropped three feet from her, hit the floor so unexpectedly that Katrina jerked back.

  It was a bowling bag. Red and cream, with tiny cracks that ran along the creases.

  She screamed and the sound echoed off the walls, almost deafening her. There’s a head in the bag, I know there is. Sandy Riesen’s head.

  “Where am I?” she repeated, and this time it was clear and loud. She wasn’t going to stay quiet. She would fight. Maybe the other girls didn’t fight, and that’s why they’d died.

  Hangman stood there, unmoving. She pulled away from him and painfully twisted her legs under her. She scrabbled her feet along the stone floor. She tried to push back further but she could feel the rough stones of the wall through her blouse.

  Katrina brought her gaze up slowly. Hangman was tall, and he wore a dirty gray boiler suit, his face covered by a red felt mask that looked like one of those Mexican wrestlers. His eyes were blue, but Katrina quickly looked away, hating the look in them, like a boy who was going to unwrap his Christmas present—a sicko boy who’d gotten what he wanted.

  He was watching her, the door standing open behind him. Beyond the door frame she saw a long shadowy corridor.

  She tried to look anywhere but at his red mask. A little gray light filtered into the room now from the window above her. The place she was in was small and filthy, with black grime caked into the seams of the rocks. There was no bed, no toilet, nothing.

  God, he can’t keep me here. It’s inhuman.