“Come in,” he said.
Abbie walked into the front room, which he’d made into a private office—gray-and-white wallpaper, two leather chairs and a desk, a bit messy—and fished for her phone.
“How old was the girl?” Lipschitz said grimly.
“Sixteen.”
He grunted. “This is terrible. In so many ways.”
Abbie hit the menu button on her phone and tocked the photo button. “Mostly one. Another dead girl.”
Lipschitz shook his head. “I have eight patients at Auburn, and there are six thousand in the New York State system alone. I have to think of them as well. Things will get worse not just for Marcus, but for every psychiatric inmate in the system. Funds will be cut in the goddamn legislature, I guarantee you, and guards will be that much quicker with their truncheons. My drug budget is so low I can barely afford Post-its, but it will go lower, believe me. It’s a disaster for all of us.”
The note came looming up. She handed the phone to the psychiatrist. “The sooner we catch him, the less damage he does.”
Lipschitz sighed. He walked quickly to his desk, laid the phone down, and stared at it, rubbing his head.
“This life is so terrible,” he read. “Darkness is everywhere. The evil-does are not punished. They are not your children. I live where …”
Lipschitz’s face flushed red.
“I can’t tell you much. It’s depressive talking, fairly garden-variety. Darkness is a common theme among depressives, and you have to remember that the way they keep prisoners, with twenty-three hours of artificial light, doesn’t help. I didn’t expect this; I thought he would be more exuberant, perhaps more manic. Marcus always showed signs of a latent manic-depressive cycle.”
“What about ‘They are not your children’?” Abbie asked.
Lipschitz rubbed his temple with his hand. He nodded, as if to say, I know, I know.
“Something about that line …” Abbie said. “It connects to another part of the case. At least I think it’s another part of the case. There’s something familiar.”
Lipschitz snorted in frustration. “He never talked about the relationship between the children and their parents. It’s out of the blue.”
Abbie frowned. “Who are the evil-doers?”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, don’t assume that he’s seeing the girls as evil. He might not be referencing them.”
Abbie’s brow crinkled. “Then who?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. God knows what he’d imagined to justify the killings. But Marcus …”
Lipschitz shook his head.
“Doctor?” Abbie said impatiently.
“It sounds so grotesque,” Lipschitz said. He took a deep breath, his voice rising: “He claimed he was saving the girls. From something worse than death.”
“What is worse than death?”
The psychiatrist slumped in his chair, staring bleakly at the phone. It buzzed.
He looked at the text, then handed it to her.
“You’d better go,” he said.
It was from Raymond. Come now.
Night had fully fallen by the time she got back to the house—9:34, the Saab’s clock read. She pulled up in front, tires squealing on the rain-slicked leaves that coated the gutters. Raymond, standing on the front porch, spotted the Saab and hurried over, ducking raindrops.
“Anything?” she said.
Raymond leaned his arm on the door. “One of the uniforms got a hit on a neighbor. But it’s a weird one.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s weird, Kearney. The house is four down on the side street due west, Oakland, which means her yard backs up on the back corner of the dead girl’s lot. Her name is Melissa Chopin. Now get this: the woman says she has information, but she’ll only talk to the lead detective. She’s not even saying if she saw something, and she sure as hell won’t say what she saw. She’s high-strung, you know, talking about preconditions.”
Abbie screwed up her face. “Sounds like a lawyer.”
“Bingo.”
Abbie felt her pulse quicken. Lawyer or no lawyer, the possibility of an eyewitness had perked her up immediately. “I’ll talk to her. What are the preconditions?”
“You have to enter and leave through the backyard; Chopin doesn’t want any of the neighbors seeing a detective coming through her front door. If a squaddie pulls up in front, even an unmarked, she’s gone. She says she’ll only give this information once, and then the family will be unavailable ‘from that point forward.’ You believe this shit?”
“That we can get around. But why?”
Raymond rolled his shoulders like a boxer loosening up for the fight.
“Whatever they saw over there scared the living hell out of ’em. They’re packing up as we speak, according to the uniform, and they ain’t leaving a forwarding address. She’ll talk to you in thirty minutes. You got one shot, Kearney.”
22
Abbie was famished; she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and she could feel her blood sugar falling off a cliff. She needed to eat something before talking to the mystery woman. There was a pub at the corner of the Stoltzes’ block that she’d spotted coming in. Abbie hurried there at a half-trot.
The place was bustling, men in wool coats at the bar crouched over burgers and fries, harried waiters rushing to and fro with a please-don’t-speak-to-me look on their faces, families with extra chairs pulled in around the small round tables, and the sound of jingling silverware mixing with the TV news turned up loud. Abbie noticed four or five parties who’d eaten and had the dishes cleared but were huddling over post-dinner drinks, dawdling, trying not to be noticed. They don’t want to go home, she thought.
People are hunkering down. Better than sitting at home jumping at every creak from the tree in the backyard and every moan of the wind.
A small black-edged TV blared from above the bar. Abbie took one of the few available seats, a rotating leather stool with metal studs along the edges and listened to the broadcast, waiting for the bartender to finish pouring a series of cocktails.
The news channels were in a frenzy, with text running along the bottom of the screen and mobile news vans out on the roads interviewing housewives and business owners along the “Trail of Terror”—the westward line from the Auburn prison to the center of Buffalo. The Trail of Terror again, remembering the TV at the bar where she’d found McGonagle. My God, thought Abbie. It’s not a goddamn hurricane.
The reporter was a striking young black woman with bright red lipstick and a long camel-hair coat, holding the microphone in a hand covered with a thin leather glove. She was only a few blocks away, on Bryant Street in the North, where the red comet of the Trail of Terror ended. Her eyes were bright with excitement. “The escape of Marcus Flynn, the killer known as Hangman, revives haunting memories for many Western New Yorkers,” she intoned to the camera. “They recall the nights of fear that gripped this city in 2007 when four young girls disappeared off the streets. Many people I’ve spoken to talk about staying awake all night, tying pop bottles to strings and attaching them to their front door, as a kind of early warning alarm in case Hangman tried to enter their houses. Teenagers remember spending weeks inside their houses, forbidden to go anywhere. Cops worked double and triple shifts, some falling asleep in their cars and not showering for days on end. But those were the lucky ones. For those who weren’t so lucky, like the families of the victims, the memories are even darker.”
Don’t do this, Abbie thought. Don’t ambush the dead girls’ families and ask them how they’re feeling.
Abbie caught the bartender’s eye and quickly ordered a turkey club and a Diet Coke to go.
Somehow the TV reporter had found the father of Maggie Myeong, the third victim. He hadn’t been ambushed, though. Walter was standing next to her, his hands by his side.
The noise dropped an octave. Abbie glanced down the bar. Most people had turned to the TV.
Walter Myeong was a short Asian ma
n with a long, broad, saturnine face. Abbie would have put him in his late fifties, but in her experience, grief can age you fast. He had thinning black hair and long sideburns going gray at the bottom. He was dressed in a black overcoat and white striped shirt and striped red tie. The only people in Buffalo who wore ties when they didn’t have to were people in the North.
The reporter asked him how he was holding up.
Myeong’s eyes were small and nervous, darting here and there, first looking into the camera and then away. “My family is doing as well as they can. There’s nothing Marcus Flynn can do to us that he hasn’t done already. We do want to know how he got away and why we weren’t informed that he was being moved from Auburn.”
“You weren’t notified?”
“No. No phone call.” A vague clunkiness with the English language.
He turned to look into the camera, squinting at the bright light. His gaze was odd, lost, almost childlike.
The reporter pulled back the microphone. “Mr. Myeong, there have always been rumors that the fourth victim, Sandy Riesen, might still be alive. As painful as those are, do you think there’s any chance that Mr. Flynn might now lead authorities to where …?” She paused.
“To her body, you mean,” he said softly.
She felt the people around her take a half-breath.
“You believe Sandy is dead?” the reporter asked. My God, what a she-wolf, Abbie thought.
“Of course she’s fucking dead,” said an old woman next to Abbie who was wearing a faded green raincoat.
“I don’t know,” said Myeong. “But I can tell you one thing. I don’t want Mr. Flynn killed. If this escape proves anything, it shows that his cognitive abilities, they are returning. Perhaps the memory, too. We’ve never believed that he was unable to remember what he did to our daughter.”
“Why does he want him taken alive?” the bartender said, shaking his head. “I hope they shoot Hangman like a rabid dog.”
The older woman worked over a plate of chicken wings and spoke between bites.
“If she was your girl, Jack, you’d do just what he’s doing. He wants to know details, and so would you.”
The bartender frowned and looked down at the ground, thinking. Abbie looked along the bar at the rapt faces, their skin shining slightly in the glow of the TV. The city was just now reentering the tragedy that Hangman had visited upon them, fitting back into the paranoia that only a killer on the loose can create. But Walter Myeong had never left it.
Abbie’s eyes went back to the TV.
“—the prison was responsible?” the reporter asked. “Do you think the authorities at Auburn were negligent in letting him escape?”
“I can’t say for sure,” Myeong said tiredly. He turned to the camera. “But when they catch him again, I want him interrogated about my daughter and the others. To find out the truth once and for all. I want to emphasize this. We want Hangman captured alive. A dead man won’t do anything to ease my family’s pain.”
Abbie studied Myeong’s face. Why was he insisting on Hangman being captured alive? Either Myeong was a Christian to the marrow of his bones or he really believed that the killer was withholding information.
“That poor man,” whispered the old woman to Abbie, bumping her elbow gently. “Can you just imagine?”
“There you have it,” the reporter said, turning back toward the camera. Abbie’s eyes lingered on the father of the dead girl. He looked down at the ground, but at the last moment he tilted his chin up and stared into the camera, his eyes filled with pain. And just before it cut away to the anchor, Abbie swore she saw Walter Myeong nod.
She wanted to ask the bartender to rewind the video, but it was live and the crowd would have probably lynched her.
“I know where that girl is,” said the old woman.
The bartender eyed her.
“Margaret,” he said, and there was a warning in the gravelly voice. He was carrying a turkey club stacked high on a thick white plate. He set it in front of Abbie.
“Actually,” Abbie said, “it’s to go.”
The bartender’s eyebrows tilted up. He left the plate on the bar. “You sure about that?” he said, leaning in. “We’re going to stay open as long as it takes. Dollar shots at midnight.”
Abbie smiled. Was it a pass? Or a warning?
“I’m sure,” she said.
He shook his head once and took the plate back.
The old woman next to her. “I wouldn’t go out there,” she said, “for a million fucking dollars.”
Abbie turned to her.
“I get paid to,” she said. “Where do you think Sandy is?”
The woman’s eyes were milky and she studied Abbie’s face, as if trying to recognize her.
“Don’t be telling stories, Margaret,” the bartender said as he wrapped up Abbie’s order.
Abbie looked to the old woman. She seemed fearful, but there was a glint of defiance in her eyes.
“Where?” Abbie said.
“Hoyt,” the old woman said softly.
“Hoyt Lake?” Abbie said, feeling a thrill of fear. “Why there?”
The bartender set a plastic bag on the counter. “She’s senile, don’t listen—”
“Shush,” Abbie said. “Why Hoyt?”
The old woman looked at her hands, studying them. Then she looked up again.
“Don’t you know the story of the Madeleines?”
“No,” said Abbie. “I don’t.”
The old woman smiled.
“It’s happened here before.”
“Horseshit,” said the bartender.
“It’s happened,” said the woman.
That’s all the woman would say.
23
Abbie ate half the sandwich and a few French fries in her car before hurrying back to the Stoltzes’ backyard. Two thickset men in forest green windbreakers, the one turned away from her with “Erie County Medical Examiner” written on the back, were wheeling a gurney ahead of her, and the wheels kept getting stuck in the mud.
“Pick it up, gentlemen,” she said.
The man turned. “Excuse me?”
“I said, pick it up. People are getting home and I don’t want the whole neighborhood seeing that poor girl hung up in the tree.”
The far worker—mustache, flushed cheeks, flannel under the windbreaker—made a face.
“I don’t work for you, lady.”
Abbie stopped. “If you make me do your job, you’re not going to have one tomorrow. Pick … it … up.”
They picked it up.
Raymond came hustling up behind her and pointed his left arm straight out. He was wearing a trench coat now—fitted to his lean body—and the arm was spattered with rain.
“Second house from the back. It’s got a vinyl fence, tan and white, only one over there. There’s a gate you can go through. She said it’d be unlocked.”
“Got it,” Abbie said.
“One more thing. Chopin doesn’t want her name on any radio calls or on reports. Like I said, preconditions. Shit, you might find Johnnie Cochran waiting for you when they open the door.”
Abbie made a face and headed toward the gate. She could only see the second story of the house over the level top of the newish fence. She half-ran through the layers of leaves and twigs and reached the gate a little out of breath. The latch was a lift-and-pull device in black steel. She lifted it and the gate drifted toward her.
The yard was neat. A trampoline cloaked in black netting sat at the center, and there was a slide-and-swing set dead center, the colors on the plastic beginning to fade from exposure to Buffalo winters.
Young kids, Abbie thought. I’ll bet that’s why we’re going through the cloak-and-dagger routine. She hurried around the swing set and glanced at the house.
A woman stood behind the gray-green glass of a set of French doors, her arms folded tight over her chest. She was watching Abbie, the first floor in darkness behind her. Her face was ghostly, unreadable behind the s
himmering reflection of the lights on the glass.
The door moaned as she approached and there was Mrs. Chopin, dressed in a charcoal pantsuit, an ivory silk shirt at the neck, holding it open.
“Mrs. Chopin?”
“Yes. Detective Kearney?”
“That’s right. May I come in?”
Melissa Chopin hesitated. Her lips were pressed so tight that they were nearly white. “I guess.”
Abbie nodded and entered the darkened dining room. The floor was hardwood, broad planks, expensive. The dining set was sleek metal with thin-backed leather chairs. There were soft footsteps from the floor above.
“My husband is upstairs packing,” Chopin said, her arms still crossed over her chest. “The patrolman told you about our conditions for talking?”
“Yes, I wanted to—”
“They’re nonnegotiable. Let’s get that straight from the beginning.”
“If I can save a girl’s life, do they become negotiable? You have a child. I would hope they would.”
Vertical lines at the corner of the woman’s mouth. A woman with barely an ounce of fat on her. Burned away in vitality or anxiety or whatever.
“That’s a very manipulative way of putting things.”
“No, that’s my job,” Abbie replied. “But tell me what happened and I’ll see what I can do.”
The woman was tight roping the line between civility and barely controlled hysteria. Abbie wanted to keep her this side of the border for as long as she could, but she couldn’t let witnesses dictate the terms of the interview.
The woman nodded once and turned toward the dining table. Chopin pulled a chair back and sat down, putting her head in her hands. Abbie went around the other side and slipped into the chair facing her.
“My son,” Chopin said from inside her cupped hands, and that was all for a few seconds.
“Yes?” Abbie said.
Chopin turned her head up and her eyes drilled down into Abbie’s. “He stayed home sick today. Croup or something that sounded like it. I had meetings downtown, I couldn’t stay with him. Maria, our maid, was baby-sitting.”
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