Hangman

by Stephan Talty

  She took a sheet of The Buffalo News—yesterday’s paper was fluttering under a rock next to her—and laid it on the top level of mulch, then piled some of the leafy stuff on top. The plants danced in the wind, the tomatoes red with stripes of green.

  She’d put one of the speakers up to the back bedroom window and the radio was playing. It was something people used to do during high school parties back in the County, the two-fisted Irish American stronghold she’d grown up in on the south side of Buffalo. She was playing NPR on the local station, Science Friday. She wanted to hear voices as she gardened. The host was talking to some UCLA physicist about the Higgs boson. Dark matter and dark energy and hidden dimensions. Their voices drifted out over the backyard, interrupted by the buzzing of bees and the scrape of leaves as they were blown across the wooden fence before falling to the ground.

  Abbie usually loved to feel the loamy mulch on her hands, but she’d just had a mani-pedi the day before and didn’t want to ruin her sparkling red nails. She breathed in the stuff’s rich fragrance as she spread it evenly in the small garden, and smiled as she did so. The big Victorian painted Kelly green was her first place with a yard and she’d surprised herself at how she’d taken to gardening, to anything connected with nature, honestly, as she’d always seen herself as a city girl. But now she wanted to hold on to her first summer here, to have one last crop from her little stakehold.

  The fourth bag of mulch was gone. She bunched up the plastic and got up, wiping her forehead with her sleeve and feeling a wave of pleasant tiredness sweep through her. She stopped a moment to watch the wind toss the tops of the hundred-year oaks in the yard next door, Ron and Charles’s place. She’d invite them over for dinner when the tomatoes were ready.

  Her neighbors. It felt good to say that. She turned and reached for the next bag of mulch.

  “Where’s that man of yours anyway?”

  Abbie looked up. A head had appeared over the battered wooden fence that bordered the side of her yard. Ron.

  “He’s shopping for his moose-hunting trip,” she said, smiling and sitting back on her haunches. “He’s Canadian, you know.”

  Ron rolled his eyes. He was the more sociable half of the couple. Ron was a social worker who dealt with some of the toughest families on the East Side. Charles was a professor at the university, teaching in the English Department, and he had the posture and frostiness of an academic. Abbie had his book on medieval poetry on her bookshelf.

  “Nobody’s that Canadian. He’s really going to shoot a moose?”

  Abbie laughed. “Next month, if he can find one. If not, he’ll drink with his buddies and dream about me.”

  Ron scoffed. He had reddish hair and a broad, pleasant farm boy’s face. “I hope for your sake that he doesn’t dream about one of those buddies. Do they have beards?”

  Abbie stood up, stretched her back, then walked slowly and laid her arms across the top of the fence. It needed painting. Maybe she could get it in before winter came. “No recruiting people’s boyfriends. ’Specially mine. How’s Charles?”

  Ron made a face. “Fine, I guess. He’s giving one of his tours.”

  Abbie’s house lay smack in the center of Buffalo’s arts district. Downtown Buffalo was thick with history and she’d found that a surprising number of her neighbors were involved with preserving it. Half of them seemed to be on the landmark commission, and Charles took visitors through the local sites on guided tours: the Albright-Knox Museum, the Frank Lloyd Wright House, the twin spires of the faded but still glorious Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane.

  “Which one is it today?”

  Ron rolled his eyes. “I think it’s the architecture special. Or the tour of the old Erie Canal. You know, the exciting one.”

  “Why doesn’t he start a famous murders of Buffalo tour? I could lead that one.”

  “He’s going to be in that one if he doesn’t get home soon.”

  Abbie gave him a mock-horrified look. “You need a drink, hon?” she asked.

  “I do. I have a foster mom whose fat neck I’m considering strangling. You’d be saving a life.”

  “Give me ten minutes and I’ll—”

  The phone in her pocket buzzed.

  Ron, hearing it, widened his eyes and wagged his finger back and forth with an alarmed look on his face. “Oh nuh nuh no. We have an oral contract. My need for alcohol is much more pressing than some …”

  Abbie said, “Hush,” brushed her hands off, and reached for the phone. Don’t let it be work, she thought. I could use a drink, too. She felt peaceful, the fall glory of her yard filling her with a strange contentment.

  The message was from the Buffalo PD’s emergency channel.

  MARCUS FLYNN ESCAPED. ALL PERSONNEL REPORT HQ.

  3

  The crowd on the second floor of Buffalo Police Headquarters was as big as Abbie had ever seen it, except for last year’s mass-disaster training day where the city had simulated a terrorist attack. Then there’d been sheriffs, firemen, deputies, everything in uniform above the rank of school crossing guard, socializing before they’d gone out to tend to the fake victims with blood painted on their faces and leg wounds provided by the university’s theater department. It had been a carnival of local law enforcement, the mood light. Abbie had eaten a hot dog and enjoyed herself.

  And why not? As one cop had said, “What kind of dipshit is gonna bomb Buffalo?”

  But now there was a dark electricity in the air as Abbie walked through the room. She felt it in her chest. Usually when there was an emergency, you could sense a barely repressed excitement, the guilty little secret of law enforcement. We love the big cases, she thought, the scary ones, the spectaculars. Anything to put us on the front lines and take us away from the dreariness of people stealing from the local Wegmans to feed their kids.

  But as she scanned the crowd, she saw something else. Gray, drawn faces, strangely bloodless. Stiff postures, hands clenched behind backs. A few men with the corners of their eyes ticking. This is like a funeral, she thought, but where nobody knows yet who died.

  Chief Albert Perelli spotted her and nodded. He was dressed in a checked blazer and dark slacks, a white shirt open at the neck. He was talking to a sheriff in a broad-brimmed hat who looked like his face had been carved out of granite.

  “See me after,” Perelli mouthed, and Abbie nodded back, taking her place at the back of the crowd.

  There was a thrum of low conversation as Perelli spoke to the sheriff, his head ducking down to listen. Then he nodded and straightened up, looked over the room. He waved his hand in the air once. There was no platform for him to step on and address the troops, so he stepped up on a sturdy wooden chair.

  “Everybody listen up,” he said sharply. The voices in the room subsided almost immediately.

  “You’ve all heard the news, I’m sure. Marcus Flynn, aka Hangman, escaped while being transferred from Auburn Correctional to Attica. A Corrections officer was killed by two bullets to the head. His service revolver and his watch are missing. The escape location is about fifty miles east of here and most of you will be headed that way in a few minutes. The collection point is behind 74 Franklin and you’ll be going up in vans to the different checkpoints. That’s what we’re here for. We’re building a perimeter out there and we will have this … this …”

  Perelli’s eyes grew wide as he looked for the right word.

  “This prisoner in jail by morning.”

  Abbie noted the respect given to Hangman. “This prisoner,” not the usual cop talk of “this freak” or “this scumbag.” Perelli’s eyes swept from left to right.

  “We have a hundred and fifty men and women here. Syracuse will contribute, Rochester, too, and the Wyoming County Sheriff’s Department is already manning roadblocks on Route 20A and its feeder roads. Let’s hope that by the time you all get halfway up to Warsaw, the prisoner will be back in custody. I’m sure that’ll be the case but to make it happen I need you to listen very carefully.”
r />   He paused.

  “This is not a time for individual heroics, this is a time for what will work most effectively. And that’s teamwork and communication. You’re going into hunter’s country up there. People have guns and they’re not shy about using them. I don’t want to lose two men in the effort to catch one. Wear your orange vests if you’re going into the woods, and only go into the woods if you’re told to.”

  Perelli motioned to a man next to him wearing the sheriff’s outfit.

  “This is John O’Neill. In case you don’t know him, he’s with the Erie County Sheriff’s Department and he’s got the duty roster. Most of you will be stationed on the highways and local roads coming west. The Syracuse PD will be coordinating all recovery operations east of the escape point. Know where you are. We’re about”—he swiveled around toward the plain clock on the back wall—“six hours till nightfall and I want Hangman in custody before we get there.”

  Perelli paused for a moment, and Abbie saw something troubled in his eyes, a look of uncertainty. That was rare for Perelli, an expert smotherer of all forms of worry.

  “A few words on Hangman,” he said, his voice dropping. “He’s a Buffalo native. I’m sure you all know that. This is his home territory, this is the place he’s most comfortable with, and if somehow he gets through the perimeter that we’re setting up, this is most likely where he’ll be headed.”

  He took a breath.

  “Now nobody wants that to happen. We’ve seen, most of us here, what he’s done to this city before. I’ll tell you something: Buffalo has never been the same since Hangman. A killer like that does something to people, permanently. We all still bear the scars.”

  Abbie didn’t know many people in the Hangman’s target demographic—all his victims had been young teenage girls from the North of Buffalo—but she imagined many of the men and women in the room had daughters at home. They’d want to stop Hangman before he got near their schools and cul-de-sacs.

  And she didn’t blame them one bit. Hangman was a scary one. Even from Miami, where she’d been when the murders went down, she’d felt a chill when reading the headlines from her hometown. Hangman was elusive, implacable, a hunter.

  Trap the monster where he is, she thought. Upstate in the woods, where the most he can kill is woodchucks. Everyone was thinking the same thing; she felt their strange, trigger-happy dread: Keep this animal away from my city.

  Perelli stepped down and made a beeline for his office along the far wall.

  4

  Abbie tried to follow Perelli, but was blocked by a crush of cops trailing John O’Neill toward the exit. Finally, she smiled and pressed her way forward until she’d reached the wall, then turned her shoulder and made her way to Perelli’s door.

  Once in, she closed the door behind her and the drone of the office—all those male voices, excited, amped up—was snuffed out. Perelli looked up and shook his head. He’d tossed his jacket on a leather chair.

  “You got here quick.”

  Abbie nodded. “When they say Hangman, you come fast.”

  Perelli closed his eyes briefly, and nodded. “Let me ask you something,” Perelli said. “How much do you know about Flynn?”

  Abbie shrugged, sat in the chair facing his desk. “The basics. He was from the County, but lived downtown when the killings began. He was in his late thirties, good employment record, no arrests except for two drunk-and-disorderly the year before the murders began. Went to college in, was it Fredonia?”

  “Oswego,” Perelli said, watching her.

  “Right. He killed four girls …”

  Perelli was about to speak, but Abbie cut him off.

  “He killed three and kidnapped one. The last one was never found. All were from fourteen to sixteen years old, all brunettes, and all from the North. They died by strangulation, apparently hanged, judging by the width of the rope burn, et cetera.”

  Perelli nodded.

  “The last victim was Sandy Riesen, the killer’s cousin,” Abbie went on. “He was caught in a security video putting her in his car three blocks from her house. They put out a BOLO with the license plate of his car and it was spotted pulling into the parking lot of a hotel.”

  “Motel,” Perelli said, nodding. “Called the Warsaw.”

  “Right, the Warsaw Motel. When deputies arrived, they approached the room and found Hangman with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Hangman survived with some brain damage and was convicted on all four cases.”

  “And Sandy?” Perelli said quietly.

  “Was never found.”

  A nod. “So I’m impressed. You know more than the basics. Well, I want you to know everything.”

  Abbie narrowed her eyes. “This is a search operation, Chief, pure and simple. Why should we reopen the original case?”

  “Now it’s a search operation.”

  Abbie raised her eyebrows. “What does that mean?”

  “What if it goes two, three days? Hangman goes to ground, we can’t find him. Then we’re going to have to use everything we have. I’m not saying it’s likely, I don’t think it is. But if he does get past the first forty-eight hours, then it’s something else, something where your talents might come into play.”

  Abbie’s gaze was level, intense. “I have talents now?”

  Perelli grunted, not quite laughing. “One or two.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You’re insurance,” he said. “You’ll be my lead on this, in case, by some fucking miracle that I don’t even want to imagine, Flynn escapes every law enforcement officer in Western New York and comes calling. You’re going to try to figure out where he might be headed, who he wants to see. Look the case over, see if the detectives missed anything the first time around that tells us where he was hiding for those months back in ’07.”

  Abbie watched him. “Where do you think he’d go?”

  Perelli watched back. “If he gets through, we think he’ll be headed right here. Like I said. He has friends and family here, perhaps, who knows, he has unfinished business here as well.”

  Abbie tilted her head down and eyebrows up. “Meaning what, Chief?”

  Perelli shrugged and gave her an exaggerated frown. “Meaning unfinished business, Kearney.”

  “That’s awful cryptic.”

  Perelli grunted. “You’ve got a highly developed persecution complex, you know that?”

  She laughed. “That’s why I’m still alive and gainfully employed.”

  Perelli made a tossing motion with his left hand. “How the hell should I know where he’s headed? The guy’s been half a retard for the last five years. You know he took a bullet to the brain. Listen …”

  The chief held his hands out in a calming motion. “It’s not going to come to that. We’re going to have more people on the ground than looked for the Lindbergh baby. Just do your thing and let me say I’m holding you in reserve.”

  Abbie nodded. She didn’t want to mention what happened to Lindbergh’s baby. At least Perelli was being honest. She was political insurance on an explosive case.

  “I have to cover every possibility,” he said. “Detective Raymond is looking at everyone Flynn knew who’s still in the area, anyone he might go to. I jotted his number inside the case file.”

  Abbie knew about Raymond, a young black detective from Violent Crimes who’d just been transferred to Homicide. His reputation was solid. Non-political and non-County. The black skin had seen to that.

  “Norwood and a couple of uniforms are passing by the Riesen mansion every fifteen minutes, in case Flynn wants to harass his uncle, Sandy’s father. And what if the killer wants to go out with a few more victims? Or visit the graves of one of the three girls? So …” Perelli pushed a thick file toward her. “What can I do but put my best detective on the case?”

  There was an electric charge in the dark eyes beneath the bristling eyebrows. Perelli and Abbie had never really worked past what had happened the year before: the Clan na Gael mur
ders and his insistence, right here at HQ, that she’d been responsible for them. He’d apologized formally in the ceremony awarding her a commendation—and her father’s detective badge, which she now wore. But he’d never come to her in the hallways of HQ and spoken the words she felt she’d deserved. Personal words, cop to cop.

  Abbie held his gaze. No, she didn’t quite trust him. “I never said I was your best detective.”

  “You didn’t need to. Everyone else did.”

  “You’d rather I be terrible at my job?”

  “Absolutely not.” He patted a thick file marked “Flynn, Marcus” in candy-colored letters arranged on the edge. “That’s why I put you on this. If you’re ever going to hit a home run, I want you to do it on this one.”

  Abbie thought this over. Finding no hidden traps in the offer, she reached for the file. “May I?” she asked.

  Perelli gave a small smile, then lifted his hand, spreading the fingers as if to say, Be my guest.

  Abbie flicked open the file. On top was a photo, a video grab from a security camera. Hangman leading his last victim, Sandy Riesen, to his dented black BMW. She recognized the shot; it had been everywhere five years ago. A grainy, smeared image of a tall, striking, seemingly unconcerned girl following the tall, slit-eyed killer to her death.

  Just looking at Hangman’s eyes, Abbie felt an icy wave go through her.

  “There’s someone you should talk to,” Perelli said. He picked up his phone and dialed a two-digit number.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Raymond. Since Z is still off duty …”

  Abbie nodded. Z was at home, on disability. He was putting on weight and happy as ever.

  “… he’s going to be with you on this.”

  The door opened behind her and she smelled a citrus cologne. She looked over and saw a slim detective in a checked sports coat, tan slacks, and chestnut-colored shoes standing next to her. Billy Raymond smiled.

  “Detective,” he said.