Hangman (5 page)

“Here’s the ME. Catch you later, Justin.”

“I’ll be waiting for a description of the abattoir inside.”

“If it bleeds, it leads?”

“You ought to be a reporter.”

“So you keep saying.”

The medical examiner’s car cruised down the street with an escort. Lumbering along beside it lurched three walking dead, jeans filthy from having crawled out of a muddy graveyard, bullet holes and knife slits dribbling poster paint from their zombie hearts, faces gray, lips black, and dirty hair squirming with spaghetti al dente as worms.

The car parked at the curb and Ruthless Ruth got out.

“Fitting escort,” Maddy greeted her.

“Naw, they got it wrong. The chest wounds indicate murder. So there’d have been an autopsy and each should have a suture stitched from behind both ears up over the crown of the skull to show where I removed each of the little fuckers’ brains.”

Ruthless Ruth was the nickname Homicide detectives bantered behind Ruth Lester’s back. Lester the Les was another sobriquet. Your average Homicide cop doesn’t care about political correctness. Day in, day out, a Homicide bull (cow, too) wades through bloody messes left by what one human being has done to another, and he must be excused if he cynically calls something what it is, instead of by some wishy-washy term that has no meaning.

Homicide cops are crass.

And honesty is dying.

Maddy Thorne couldn’t have cared less what went on at home in Ruth Lester’s bed were it not for the discomforting fact that the ME wished her sex partner to be Maddy, and came on to the detective whenever they met. Lester was a mannish woman in both dress and appearance, her hands and wrists those of a strangler, her pants with blazer those of a sports jock and her ham face with no makeup and maximum butch about as feminine as Sly Stallone playing Rambo. Head to toe, then toe to head, Ruth gave Maddy the twice-over.

“Looking good, Mads. Very Homicide cop.”

“Can’t do the job if you don’t look the part.”

“Been inside?”

“No.”

“Let’s see what the fuck’s going on.”

The ME took her by the elbow to guide her along the sidewalk. The fingers examined the bones. Was that a sigh?

Homicide cops are the elite in all police forces. No one becomes a cop to work anything less than first-degree murder, and killers by definition are the tough ones on the street. Male or female, Homicide cops must be tough too, for much of the work involves intimidation. Maddy got her toughness from the rough breaks in her life. Her dad was ground to hamburger when she was two, sucked off his feet into the whirling blades of a jet engine. Her mother remarried within a year, so the child was raised in Seattle with two stepbrothers from her stepfather’s first marriage. He was a cold man who belittled his sons and resented her. By fourteen, Maddy had lost her virginity to one of the boys. It wasn’t rape. Both teens had consented. It wasn’t incest. Blood relatives they weren’t. It was Maddy yearning for someone’s love.

Tough love.

C’est la vie.

It had toughened Maddy.

What doesn’t break you makes you stronger, she thought.

The boy was three years older.

And later he had died.

But as tough as Thorne could be as a Homicide cop on the street, she was frilly and pink compared with Ruthless Ruth. Of late, Maddy had suffered debilitating migraines that were exacerbated by the stress of her job. Last night she had turned in early with codeine painkillers coursing through her veins. She must have overdosed, for the nightmare that followed had her stretched out naked on a cold slab in Seattle’s morgue. It was after-hours on the graveyard shift. Not a sound to be heard in this realm of the dead, until a door opened, a door shut, and a lock clicked. A shadow crept over Maddy’s flesh as someone approached, then a hand began to probe her body from head to foot. Though she tried to move, rigor mortis froze her; Ruthless Ruth looked down at her with lust in her eyes and ran that intimate hand up Maddy’s thigh. “Looking good, Mads,” sighed the pathologist.

Maybe it was the migraine.

Maybe it was the drugs.

Whatever it was, Ruth gave Maddy the creeps.

Zinc, still standing where the Seattle detective had left him, read the body language between the two women and thought it best to wander over and introduce himself.

“Zinc Chandler,” he said, holding out his hand. The mannish woman had to release her grip on Thorne’s elbow to shake it in return.

“Ruth Lester,” she said. “I’m the ME.”

“Good to meet you. I’m Maddy’s new partner.”

Ruth glanced at Maddy, then back at Zinc. “You’re a Homicide cop? How is it possible that we haven’t met before?”

“I work in Vancouver. With the Mounted Police. Maddy and I had a dinner date until she caught this murder.”

“He doesn’t mean ‘partner’ like Ralph,” Maddy cut in, slipping Zinc a warm smile for Ruth to see. “He means ‘partner’ in the looser sense.”

Leaving the ME to make of that what she wished, the detective added, “A client awaits. Shall we all go in?”

Turning on her heels, Thorne led Ruth and Zinc up the walk.

The house was similar to the one in which Maddy had grown up. They climbed three steps to a pillared porch littered with jack-o’-lanterns. Flanked by evil orange grins, a blue stood guard at the door. “Brace yourselves,” the woman warned as they entered the spooky haunted house in the hall. Their teeth aglow with black light, they angled left through the door to the living room.

Dying room was more like it.

“Sorry,” said yet another female cop within. “I puked on the floor.”

The ME whistled. “We’ve come a long way, baby.”

At first Maddy missed the gist of what Ruth was saying, then the pathologist added, “He doesn’t count,” with a nod at Zinc, and that’s when it struck her how far they’d come indeed. Excluding the Canadian, every player in this room—victim, blue, sawbones, dick—was female.

“’Bout time,” said Thorne.

They sidestepped the vomit on the floor to move toward a ceiling beam that separated the living room from the dining room beyond. This beam was supported at both ends by wall struts and angle braces, like a double gallows. Screwed in the center of the beam was a pulley, and hanging from the pulley was a hangman’s noose, and cinched within the hangman’s noose was the neck of a woman. A heavy woman dressed in black, with the face of a witch.

“That’s how they used to hang ’em before the long drop,” said Ruth. “Her neck wasn’t broken. Death was by slow strangulation.”

“How do you know?” asked Maddy.

“Petechial hemorrhages above the ligature.”

“Your eyes are better than mine.”

“See those tiny blood spots in the whites of her eyes? If not for the green makeup, you’d also notice them on her face. Strangulation congests blood in the head, causing the eyes to bulge and blood vessels to rupture.”

“So blood gushed from her mouth?”

“No, that’s different. A closer look and you’ll see her tongue’s cut out.”

Ruth’s coming on to Maddy was annoying, but Maddy hadn’t shut her down with a slap, for the truth was Ruth was the best ME around, and if she sought to impress Maddy, so much the better.

Women network better than men.

“Impress us, Ruth.”

Lester winked at Thorne. “A pulley on the beam. A pulley on the floor. The killer tied the victim’s hands behind her back, then fed the rope through the pulleys to ease traction, then hoisted her up with the noose around her neck. He’d need a pulley system for a heavy woman like this.”

“Sounds like he knew her.”

“Or stalked her,” Zinc suggested.

“Whatever the reason,” said Maddy, “this hangman came prepared. Screwing that pulley into the floor left those shavings.”

“A lot of work,” Ruth said, “to lynch somebody. There’s the tongue. See it? In that pool of clotting blood under the foot.”

“Nagging wife?” Zinc posed the question.

“Don’t ask
me!
That’s
your
department,” said the ME’s frown.

“What’s your take, Ruth?” This from Maddy.

“The pressure of the noose on her throat forced out her tongue. Her lips were lacerated by the slash that cut it off. The mouth wound bled profusely down her chin.”

“She looks like a cross between a vampire and a witch. Something said by the victim must have pissed off the hangman.”

“That would explain the tongue. But why sever the leg?”

“Damned if I know,” Maddy said. “It obviously has something to do with the puzzle on the wall.”

All eyes turned toward the bloody game.

The body hanging from the beam was missing a leg. The killer had used a hacksaw to cut it off. Draining blood dripped from the stump under the black dress to pool on the floor. The hacksaw lay beside the tongue in the pool. The severed leg had been kicked over against the wall. The muscles had contracted and the bone stuck out an inch. A chunk was chipped from the bone where it had snapped off the thigh. Blood that oozed out of the leg had been used by the hangman to draw the grisly gallows game on the wall.

The game was this:

A as in Abattoir

Seattle

October 31

The way Maddy explained it to Zinc was this.

Justin had been a reporter a few years longer than Maddy had been a cop. He had covered the first case she had investigated. As it turned out, the squeal became a headline shriek, and this resulted in legs up the ladders of both careers. Since then, under strict rules, Maddy and Justin had worked hand in glove, feeding each other information of mutual benefit, and bouncing crimes around to place them in perspective.

Zinc understood.

He had the same relationship with Alexis Hunt, who would be waiting at home for him in the bed they shared in Vancouver.

Every cop needs a confidant
outside
The Job.

It keeps you sane.

“That’s not how you play hangman,” Justin Whitfield said.

“No,” replied Maddy.

With Zinc in the back seat, the three of them sat in the detective’s car, sipping Starbucks coffee from take-out cups. They were parked a few blocks away from the crime scene to avoid the stares of the sidewalk crowd.

“The way to start,” Justin said, “is you draw an
empty
gallows. Everything down to the end of the rope in this diagram.”

Maddy had sketched a copy of the gallows game on the living-room wall into her police notebook. Justin traced the scaffold with his finger as he related how to play.

“The person who draws the gallows also thinks up a word puzzle, and he writes down a dash for each letter in the mystery.”

“He becomes the hangman.”

“Uh-huh,” said Justin. “The challenger guesses a letter in the word puzzle. If the guess is a good one, the hangman fills that letter in above the appropriate dash.”

“Or dashes,” said Maddy, “if the letter occurs in the mystery more than once.”

“If the guess is a bad one—”

“The hangman starts the hanging—”

“By drawing a circle for the head of the missing hanged man in the hangman’s noose.”

Justin traced the circle beneath the rope in the notebook sketch.

“Yeah,” said Maddy. “It’s coming back. The
right
way to play is the challenger gets five wrong guesses to solve the mystery. Head, body, both arms, then one leg. Every wrong guess adds to the hanged man. If the hangman gets to complete the drawing before his adversary can crack the word puzzle, the hangman wins the game. But if the challenger solves the mystery before a sixth wrong guess adds the other leg, he beats the hangman.”

“What you’ve got here is a killer playing hangman
in reverse.
”

Justin traced the head, body, both arms, and one leg in the notebook sketch.

“He starts with the man already hanged—”

“Woman,” said the detective. “The vic’s female.”

“Are we talking the game or the crime?”

“Both,” said Maddy.

Justin shook his head. “You want to
liberate
the game of hangman?”

“To avoid confusion.”

“Isn’t that what I’m doing? A man for the game. A woman for the crime. That way we keep straight which is which.”

“Okay,” she capitulated. “The killer starts with the man already hanged—”

“Then removes a leg.”

“You mean he doesn’t draw it?”

“Right,” said Justin. “Hangman in reverse. Part of the body is removed, not added on.”

“The game’s a cheat,” said Maddy.

“How so?” asked the reporter.

“The leg was butchered before we got to guess.”

“Three words of five, five, and six letters. What three words solve this puzzle?”

“I have no idea.”

“So it’s not a cheat. He knows you won’t solve the mystery right away. And his game
is
hangman in reverse. If guess-before-he-adds is the right way to play, isn’t cut-before-you-guess the reverse?”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Come on, Maddy. A story like this doesn’t pass by every day.”

“Say we make a guess.”

“You have to, don’t you? If you don’t and he kills again, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Say our guess is good. What then, Justin? Do we get another guess before he strikes again? And if that guess is sound, as are the next few, might we not solve the puzzle without a mistake? In which case, hangman in reverse
is
a cheat.”

“Who says the hangman must be fair?”

A car crammed full of illuminated jack-o’-lanterns drove by. A horde of wicked grins glared out at them through steamy windows. The driver wore a jack-o’-lantern over his head.

“More to the point,” said Zinc Chandler, “is the conundrum of the chicken and the egg. Which came first? The crime or the game?”

“Ahhh,” said the reporter.

“Run with it,” said the detective.

“Was this woman killed to play the hangman game?” asked Zinc. “A
random
victim, so anyone would do? All the killer wanted was a corpse to pose the puzzle, a means to grab attention to taunt the police. Which means the word game has nothing
unique
to do with her. She’s merely the first random victim of a serial killer.”

“If the game came first,” said Maddy.

“Right,” said Zinc.

“So checking this woman’s background is a dead-end waste of time.”

The Mountie nodded.

“And if the crime came first?” asked the reporter.

“Then the game may hide a motive
unique
to her. It could be the hangman game is a double-blind. It taunts the police with that unique motive hidden in the puzzle, and masks the fact the hangman was specifically after
her
by making the woman’s hanging look like a serial killing.”

“In which case, checking her background isn’t a waste of time,” said Justin.

“And there could be an alternative twist,” said Zinc. “What if the killer is hunting serial victims with the
same
unique motive? The victims wouldn’t be random and the crimes would still come first, but outwardly it would appear that playing the hangman game is the motive behind a random killing spree. Not only would the real motive be specific to this victim, but it would be specific to every victim in the spree.”

“A triple-blind?” said Maddy.

“Possibly.”

“You really know your stuff.”

“I told you, Special X is the psycho hunting unit of the RCMP.”

Justin took out his notebook and licked his pen. Ballpoint ready to fill a page, he turned to Maddy and asked, “What’s it like inside?”

“An abattoir.”

“That bad?”

“Take it from me.”

“Was the leg amputated while she was alive?”

“No,” said the detective. “Not enough blood. If her heart was pumping, there would have been arterial spurts and venous sprays. What we found was passive dripping from her severed thigh.”

“How much?”

“Half a pint.”

“Doesn’t sound like a bloodbath.”

“It looked like a lot on the floor.”

“Why just half a pint?”

“That’s all there was to drain. According to Ruth, of the six to eight pints of blood in the human body at any given time, only a fifth is available to drain away from wounds.”

“Where’s the rest?”

“Capillaries.”

“A fifth is more than a pint.”

“Don’t forget the hanging sacs of both arms and a leg, and the blood trapped in the head by the hangman’s noose.”

“How big was the pool?”

“Eighteen inches across.”

“An abattoir? A slaughterhouse? Sounds like hype, Maddy.”

The cop sighed. “You’re jaded, Justin. Blood pools don’t just form a surface skin. Active clotting goes on for an hour after death. The pool inside was still warm and congealing. Body parts—her tongue and her leg—were strewn about the room. Tell me a better way to describe the scene.”

He paused to think of a word.

“Try
yuck!
” said Maddy.

The car full of jack-o’-lanterns cruised by again, going the opposite way. The grins on this side were those of happy pumpkins. Jekylls hiding Hydes.

“How was the leg cut off?”

“Hacksawed,” she said.

“Details?” he asked.

The pen jotted notes.

“According to Ruth, the leg was disconnected by sawing through skin and muscles, as well as most of the femur bone. The bone broke when the blade was three-quarters in, like happens if you saw an unsupported board. When it snapped, a chunk was chipped out of the bone left in the dangling leg. The cut was high on the thigh, close to the ball-and-socket joint. The saw severed the rest of the flesh and the leg was tossed aside. Do you want
more
details?”

Maddy drained her coffee as Justin wiped mist off the windshield.

“The leg’s a clue to which came first, the crime or the game,” said the Mountie.

“How so?” asked Justin.

“Cut the leg off while she is alive and I’d say that shows hatred toward her personally.”

“Or the killer’s a sadist.”

“Cut the leg off after death and it must be tied to the hangman game.”

“Or the killer didn’t want blood all over him.”

“Why cut off that single limb unless it’s linked to the puzzle?” asked Zinc.

“You’re forgetting the tongue,” Justin replied.

“That was to keep her quiet.”

“Hardly necessary. A gag would do. Sound effects from the hall and the speaker screams next door covered any noise.”

“I think it’s the husband,” Maddy said. “Most murders are committed by someone known to the victim. He and the vic were embroiled in a bitter divorce. He threatened to butcher her, and that’s what happened. The cut-out tongue suggests getting even with a scold. And what better way to hide his motive than by posing as a serial killer? Thus the hanging, and the leg, and the madman’s game. I wouldn’t be surprised if the puzzle is gibberish.”

“You’ll want the husband’s address. I got it from a neighbor,” Justin said.

“Screaming Joe?”

“No, the other side.”

The reporter flipped back in his notebook to find the address. The detective used a penlight to copy it into her notes after the sketch of the hangman game.

“Time of death?” asked Justin.

“Ruth won’t commit. Blood settled by gravity had begun to discolor the hands and foot, so judging from that lividity, a good guess would be about an hour and a half before we saw the body.”

“If that’s the time frame, the same neighbor may have seen the killer.”

“Where?”

“On the sidewalk out front of the vic’s home.”

“When?”

“About an hour before that time of death. Or two and a half hours before you went in.”

“Description?”

“Sort of,” Justin said. “The suspect was dressed in a hooded robe like the Grim Reaper. Whoever was in the costume wore a mask. The mask—and I quote—‘was like a skull face, but wasn’t a skull. It was the face in that famous picture.’”

“What famous picture?”

“She didn’t know.”

“Height?”

“Average. Hard to tell with the hood.”

“Weight?”

“Unknown. Hard to tell with the robe.”

“Color?”

“Black. The robe, not the person.”

“She see the hands?”

“No, covered by gloves.”

“Anything else?”

“The suspect carried a bag.”

“What makes the neighbor think that may have been the killer?”

“Circumstantial inference from what she witnessed later. Her son is only two, so they went out to trick-or-treat early. As they walked from their house toward the front sidewalk, three kids in costume, followed by the Reaper, turned up the walk toward the house of her neighbor. She thought the Reaper was the parent of the kids, and led her son the opposite way at the sidewalk T. Later, she passed the same kids
without
the Reaper. And no one answered next door when the witness and her son knocked.”

“Time she saw the suspect?”

“About five-thirty.”

“Time she knocked on the door?”

“About six o’clock.”

“The murder was called in at 6:53. Some trick-or-treaters saw the body through the open door. The killer must have been inside when the neighbor knocked at six, then escaped in costume, leaving the door ajar.”

“It fits,” said Justin as Maddy entered the timetable into her notes.

“Was the neighbor suspicious when no one answered the door?”

“No, she assumed Mary was answering the call of nature.”

“The neighbor’s name?”

“Gustafson. Sara and Rolf. Rolf’s off traveling. He sells lumber.”

“Okay,” said Maddy, closing her notebook. “First I’ll track down Mary’s husband, then I’ll talk to the neighbor.”

“What of what you’ve told me
can’t
I use?”

“The only hold-back evidence is the Hangman word puzzle. You can mention the game itself, but not the number of words or how many letters in each. If that got out and the game is valid, there could be copycat trouble.”

“Are you going to guess in the papers?”

“Yes,” said Maddy. “If only to throw the husband off guard. But as you warned, if the game is real, we can’t afford not to.”

“I get the scoop?”

“Of course, Justin. The best first guess must be a vowel.”

“I read somewhere it’s a consonant.”

“Which one?”

“Don’t recall.”

“You’re a big help.”

“Which vowel?”

“Start at the start.”

“
A
,” said Justin.

“
A
as in abattoir,” said the detective.