Hangman: A Novel (22 page)

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.

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.

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 with 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.

“How old are you?” Hangman said. His voice was deep and resonant.

Katrina froze. The voice went through her, echoed in her ears.

“Tell me where I am,” she said, staring at the mask. “I want to call my mother!”

He squatted down to study her. The eyes through the mask were blue and intent, two pools of blue floating in all that red. But Katrina met them. She wouldn’t turn him into a monster. That’s what he wanted to be. She would treat him like the loser he was.

“You’re where you belong,” he said. The voice was even, but the mask, it made anything coming out of the little black hole cut in the cloth seem … terrifying. “Where it all started.”

“Why do you want me?” she asked, and her voice only wavered a little at the end.

The eyes stared, blue and horrible to look at, like the eyes of a jackal. Hungry. At last, he said, “Because you have to pay.”

“Pay for what?” she said sharply.

The eyes, something passed through them.

Hangman seemed in a trance. He shoved the bag with his right hand and slid it along the floor toward her, tipping as it came closer. Katrina screamed and scurried away. She couldn’t stop thinking it was Sandy Riesen’s head in there.

“For her,” he said, his voice almost singsong. Katrina squeezed into the corner, but she wouldn’t turn her face away. Something told her the other girls had turned away. She wouldn’t be like them. Whatever they did, she would do the opposite. Because they were dead now. She would play a part, like Cordelia. Strong and fearless.
Be Cordelia
.

His eyes were roaming all over her, like a ferret. A hungry ferret. She thought he could take a bite out of her with the teeth hidden behind the red mask. “I’m Katrina Simone Lamb. That’s my name. Did you know that?”

But he didn’t appear to hear her as he came closer. He gestured at the bag.

Katrina shivered. Keep him talking. When he’s talking he’s not killing you. “You can take your mask off,” she said. As he stood over her, her eyes drifted down to the crimson spots on his boot.

Katrina didn’t want to think about how they got there.

“I don’t do that,” Hangman said slowly. “I don’t take things off. You put things
on
.” He reached over and grabbed the bag.

She turned her head violently away, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw him slowly pull the zipper back and reach into the bag. He began to lift something slowly out.

It wasn’t the missing girl’s head. It was another mask—like a hockey mask but with something taped over the front. It was the picture of a woman’s face, cut into pieces and taped together, pieces of different pictures, mismatched eyebrows over the eyeholes. It was just horrible.

Her breathing stopped.

The mask dangled in his right hand.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, holding it out to her, and the terrifying thing was that she saw in his eyes that he was serious, that he expected her to say,
Oh, isn’t it?

Katrina backed up, the stone jutting into her back.

Hangman’s eyes were smiling now. “This is what you’ll be wearing,” he said, “when it’s time.”

Abbie found him on the porch of her house, sitting in one
of the lean-back wooden chairs that they’d bought at a yard sale over in Williamsville. The light was on, sending a cone of light onto the dark porch. They’d spent their spare hours this summer in the two olive green chairs, drinking Abbie’s homemade mojitos and watching the neighborhood parade go by, the young mothers with their strollers, the jean-jacketed hipsters, the elderly couple, Mae and Frank, from around the corner.

Mills was cleaning his hunting rifle. It was disassembled in pieces around him, along with a bottle of Elite Gun Oil and several different-colored cloths.

“You shouldn’t do that here,” Abbie said, folding her arms, leaning against a post.

Mills looked up at her, smiling. “I’ve done this a thousand times, Abbie.”

She nodded. She knew that. “I have to tell you something.”

He looked up, worry in his eyes.

“Not about us,” she said, giving him a quick smile that flexed back into a frown. “Well, kind of about us.”

“Okay,” he said, laying the gun barrel down on a piece of chamois spread across the footstool. “Shoot.”

“I’m thinking of accepting McGonagle’s offer.”

“You’re not,” he said flatly. “Why would you even consider it?”