Hangman: A Novel (16 page)

“There’s no such thing as an experienced virgin,” Mills said matter-of-factly.

“Don’t be gross,” Abbie said.

“You know what I mean. Either you are or you aren’t. Either you’re with them or you’re not.”

“I guess.”

She frowned. Seconds ticked by, filled with silence. Abbie swung her legs up on his lap. “Rub my feet?” she said.

“Gladly,” he said, and his smile was instant and warm. Abbie reminded herself for the thousandth time to keep this one around.

“Just the feet, mister.”

Mills laughed and slipped her foot out of the black Tory Burch flats she was wearing. Abbie smiled and sank further into the leather. She wanted to sink into the couch, to disappear from the world for ten or twenty minutes. She reached over and pulled one of her fancy throw pillows over and pressed her face into it. She could feel Mills’s thumb press the arch of her foot, a known trouble spot, pushing right up to the edge of pain, and she groaned slightly.

Strong hands on a boyfriend are worth one million dollars, she thought. But there was something she was trying to blot out, to not think about, and of course it came welling up to her out of the darkness of the pillow. The redheaded woman pushing the stroller. The image floated into her brain and stayed there.

What do you want, Abbie thought sleepily. Babies have nothing to do with this case. Go away, go away.

But the image was trapped in the front of her brain. She couldn’t get rid of it, as much as she tried to focus on the foot rub.

Did it have something to do with the note she found on Martha Stoltz—
They are not your children?
Or the original crime spree? Or …

Abbie’s mind churned. The image refused to disappear. It was unwavering. Persistent.

After enjoying the foot rub and hurriedly eating half the gyro, Abbie hurried next door and knocked on Ron’s door. Her watch read 1:45. Something stirred above. She heard feet on the stairs, soft crumps growing louder.

“Abbie,” Ron said, pulling the door open.

“Is Charles home?”

Ron glanced at his watch.

“He’s on a plane, coming home from a conference in Chicago. Some retarded—”

“Have you ever heard of something or someone called the Madeleines?”

“Not the cookie, right?” Ron said dubiously.

“Not the cookie. Something to do with Hoyt Lake.”

“Oh,
that
,
”
Ron said tiredly. “You’ve come to the right place.” He pulled the door full open. “Come on in.”

Abbie followed him across the small foyer and down a dark hallway into the kitchen.

“Wait here, hon,” Ron said before disappearing into a back office.

They’d had the kitchen redone in old French country style. As Abbie waited, she turned on the coffeemaker and heard the water begin to circulate.

Two minutes later, Ron emerged from the office with a pamphlet.

“Found it,” he said.

“What is this?” Abbie said, looking at the unadorned cover, which read
Legends of North Buffalo
.

“Charles gives it out on his North Buffalo tour. The Madeleines is on page 3. I remember because it’s one of the only juicy pieces of gossip in there.”

Abbie opened the booklet and flipped to page 3, “The Myth of the Madeleines” printed in bold at the top of the page. She began to read to herself.

“At the turn of the twentieth century, as Buffalo approached its apogee of mercantile power, local historians began to record a series of rumors that appear connected to the unease the new riches brought. Thousands of young men and women were flocking to the Buffalo area from all over the country, to work in the factories, restaurants, and stores that were the inevitable result of the city’s new prosperity. In a striking past echo of the American situation today, the sudden influx of wealth produced a socio-psychological unease about the men who possessed it. The Madeleine stories were one of the results …”

Abbie skipped a paragraph of sociological theory and picked up the narrative again.

“The rumors vary in details but the main story line is consistent: a
young woman named Madeleine arrives in Buffalo to work in one of its shining new factories. Her origins are unclear: usually the Midwest, but sometimes the poor Southern states. She begins talking to her co-workers about a suitor she’s met, a ‘man of some prominence’ in the community, though she won’t tell anyone his name. The woman, though taken with her new lover, appears troubled by his actions. The myth cites his possessiveness in some cases, his capacity for violence in others. She appears with bruises on her face or arms but attributes them to accidents in the factory or at home. Finally, she fails to show up for work one day. A check of her lodgings at the rooming house finds no trace of her. Her best dress is missing. The girl has disappeared without a trace. The last anyone heard of her, she was going rowing on Hoyt Lake.”

Abbie looked at Ron.

“Hoyt Lake,” she said.

“Keep reading,” he answered, with a smile.

“Hoyt was a popular excursion spot for Buffalonians during this time. On Sundays and holidays, the paths were filled with promenading couples from all over the city. But during the week it was the province of the rich whose mansions backed on the park. Boats could be rented for a nickel an hour. The rumor goes around that Madeleine was taken out on a boat and dumped in the middle of the lake by her powerful lover, who’d grown tired of the girl. Her body was weighted down so that it didn’t float to the surface.

“If the rumor is to be believed, there is more than one Madeleine in Hoyt Lake. The myth always ends with the same image: if you go out onto Hoyt on a particularly clear night when the moon is full, and you row your boat to the exact center of the lake, you can look down and see a litter of white objects on the lake floor. The bones of the Madeleines, the disposable women of Buffalo’s boom.”

Abbie flipped over the page and skimmed the rest. It was mostly theories about where the rumor came from.

“—derives from a shared anxiety about the expendability of workers in the new economic landscape—wealth inequalities spur a reflexive doubt—intentions about those who sit at the pinnacle of power …”

She folded the pamphlet and put it into her pocket.

“Is that all there is, rumors?” Abbie said. “Did anyone ever find actual bones in Hoyt Lake?”

Ron pointed at her, tipping forward. “The exact question I asked Charles. Do you know what he said? That no police in 1910 were going to dredge Hoyt Lake in order to convict a millionaire of murder. So, no real bones.” He walked over to the coffeemaker. “Wouldn’t that have been something?”

“When is Charles home?” asked Abbie.

“Six o’clock or so. He’ll go to UB first, then come home. I’m making him sea bass. You game?”

“Can’t,” Abbie said. “I want to have a look at Hoyt Lake.”

“Don’t fall in,” Ron said cheerfully.

A freezing mist had moved in from over Lake Erie and
she rolled up the window to keep out the cold. The big, two-story houses she passed were swathed in fog, which occasionally parted to reveal a mansion against a backdrop of white. She turned into Delaware Park and drove slowly along the curving road. The park, too, was abandoned, except for an occasional jogger. This is where the local high schools came to practice for their cross-country races, and she saw one group of female students, the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled up over hidden faces, as they whipped by on the right in tight formation. There were no stragglers. On their sweatshirts, just above the heart, she recognized the crest of Nardin Academy, the best girls school in the city.

Despite her lingering resentment toward the North, Abbie felt the urge to step out of the car and clap for these girls, to be their one-woman cheering section. Good for them, carrying on as if nothing had happened. Stiff upper lips.

The Saab swept slowly by the backstop of a baseball diamond, only the top of it visible in the whiteness, and then over a bridge, tiny Hoyt Lake on her right, the wind turning the water’s surface rough like a crocodile’s skin. She passed over the bridge and on her right the mist
parted and a stand of birches appeared. Birches were rare in this park, and their white thin trunks caught in the mesh of fog always seemed to her like the bones of the local Indian dead, sucked from their burial grounds by the mist and now hanging midair like an accusation.

Abbie saw Hoyt Lake emerge to her left, slate blue under the white clouds. It was small, a modest lake for a modest city. She parked and opened the door of the Saab, stepping out into the cold. She leaned against the car’s curved hood. Where would Hangman go? Where the girls were, obviously. What if the girls were all being kept inside? He’d have to find a stray, or he’d eventually have to get inside a house. He hadn’t escaped from Auburn to keep his head low and go live under a false identity in the Midwest. He’d escaped to kill in the place he’d most likely be caught. He was here.

From what she could see, there were very few unescorted girls in the city of Buffalo. There would be even fewer after everyone absorbed the news of the Martha Stoltz murder. Some girls would be going to school Monday morning. If I was the parent of a teenage girl, Abbie thought, a fifteen-year-old brunette, what would I do? Keep her at home and skip work to watch over her? Escort her to school and believe there was safety in numbers?

The sound of footfalls and bird cries emerged from fog, sharp and distinct, but the runners and the starlings that gave them off passed by unseen. It was impossible even to judge how far away the things making the sounds were. There was only a shifting white curtain, sweeping ahead and back as the wind swept it along.

Two minutes later, Raymond’s black Ford Crown Victoria rolled out of the mist like a dark-hulled Viking ship. He stepped out of the car in a black-and-yellow-checked sports coat and wide, mustard-colored slacks. He pulled the sports coat’s wide lapels up around his chin.

“Next time, I’m choosing the meet-up spot. Some nice jazz—”

Abbie smiled. “I was thinking about something my father said one time. He told me there are really only two classifications for murder. Normal or abnormal.”

Raymond sighed.

“Class in session now?”

“Shut up, you might learn something,” Abbie said in her best imitation of a County detective.

Raymond looked away, stared at the white mist for a moment. “Okay,” he said.

“The normal murder means that you tailor your investigation by what you see. Say you have the body of a man with a necklace clutched in his hand. He’s been stabbed multiple times, several times in the face and eyes. Some checking reveals he’s been divorced twice and his friends report that he and his current wife have been having problems. He lives in the suburbs but he was found downtown in the Chippewa district, where every other establishment is a bar, many of them frequented by college students from UB or Buff State.”

Raymond’s eyes were thoughtful.

“So the necklace belongs to some chick,” he said. “Some chick the vic knew. He gave her the necklace, most likely. There was some kind of argument …”

“And he snatched the necklace back. And the woman stabbed him. Assume the wounds to his face were not accidental but were inflicted because the killer wanted to disfigure the man, make him unattractive to other females. Assume stabbing at the eyes meant that he’d been looking at those other women and this was the killer’s revenge.”

Raymond nodded. “I got you.”

“You focus on the single most likely reason for the things you see: jealousy. The killer would be found somewhere in his romantic history. Do that first. Focus on the most obvious explanation.”

“That’s eighty percent of my caseload.”

Abbie nodded. “But an abnormal murder, that’s different. Here it’s the clues that
don’t
make sense that are the important ones. The weird signs, the outliers.”

Raymond watched a male jogger appear out of the mist and trudge by, puffing like a train. The man passed without a nod. “So what is Hangman?”

“Well, the escape has a bunch of normal elements. Marcus Flynn was a prisoner and all prisoners want to escape. He saw a chance and took it. He was a serial killer who started killing as soon as he’d escaped
and in the same MO as before he’d escaped. He’d been successful at not getting caught, and they’d been unable to catch him in the hours since his run began. All to be expected.”

“But what you’re saying is that the abnormal things, they interest you more?”

“They do,” said Abbie. “I think that’s how we’ll catch him. Someone was paying Joe Carlson to find out what Hangman knew. That’s odd. Think about the facts connected to that piece of abnormal information.”

Abbie held up her hand, then uncurled the index finger.

“Fact: Hangman was drawing pictures of Sandy, which were displayed on the walls of his cell.

“Fact: The drawings were getting more and more detailed, indicating his memory was coming back. Flynn’s drawings could be seen by anyone in the prison. Like Joe Carlson. Who was being paid by someone to watch him.

“Fact: Just as Hangman was beginning to get his memory back, he escaped.”

“The timing,” Raymond said.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it?” Abbie said.

“So you think there was a second man, who paid Carlson to keep an eye on Hangman.”

“I do.”

“Who?” Raymond asked.

“No idea. But the important thing is to think of this as an abnormal case. The clues that are in plain sight are what Hangman knows we know. The clues that someone attempted to hide, those are the ones that matter.”

“The second man has money,” Raymond said. “So who does that point to?”

“It’s a pretty short list. The victims’ families. The people in the North.”

Somehow, as the rest of Buffalo was ravaged by layoffs and foreclosures, the North had remained a green oasis where the residents made their fortunes by mysterious means. Few people in the County or anywhere else had the cash to buy $80,000 Corvettes. The second man
had to be from the North, or the richer suburbs. Amherst, Williamsville.