Hangman: A Novel (26 page)

“Listen, you,” he said in a low snarl. “The mailman’s old and stubborn and I’ve already got my neck out for you. Three hours it is.”

“I’ll be waiting to hear from you,” she said.

“You’re worse than a fucking wife.”

Abbie woke at 6 a.m., watched the trees outside her window
as the morning sun burned around them. Dead still. No wind.

She couldn’t get back to sleep, so she dressed in a knit J. Crew jacket and gray slacks, and headed downtown. Pulling into the Police HQ parking lot, she saw that Raymond’s car wasn’t there yet. She breathed a sigh of relief. She felt somehow she was deceiving him by using the Network behind his back. Every detective has informers, she said to herself. Mine are just ex-cops.

At 8:20 a.m., a text from McGonagle.

“Handwritten letter to Riesen, no return address.”

Abbie’s hand shook as she typed back. “Bring to BPD, meet out back.”

Hangman’s DNA picture, the splotchy, parallel bands that gave his genetic profile, was in the files. She’d seen it when looking through the boxes—a stiff white card issued by the FBI’s CODIS program, for Combined DNA Index System. If he licked the envelope, all the lab had to do was swab it and generate a DNA profile. That could take a couple of days.

“Done,” McGonagle wrote back.

The DNA was just insurance. What mattered was what the letter said.

McGonagle was waiting in the driver seat of his old two-tone Ford Explorer. A man with a porkpie hat and a thick overcoat sat in the back and watched through the dirty side window as Abbie walked up. The passenger side of the Explorer was sprayed with a single thick arc of drying mud. Opening the door, Abbie smelled Genesee Cream Ale and chewing tobacco.

She slipped into the back of the car. The man in the porkpie hat had a pale, priestlike face and a shock of dark hair over sleepy eyes. He grinned at her.

“You are?” she said.

“No names, thank you,” McGonagle said, turning in the front seat. The dark-haired man smiled wistfully. In his hand was a large Ziploc bag holding a letter. Abbie took the bag, which crinkled as she handled it, and stared at the white, standard business envelope. It was the security version, with swirls of blue patterns printed on the inside to prevent anyone but the intended recipient reading the contents.

“What do you think of the handwriting?” Abbie said to McGonagle.

“It’s him, or a damn good imitation,” he said. “We steamed it open already. She’s all yours.”

Abbie looked at the envelope.

“You swab the glue where he might have licked it before closing?”

McGonagle looked at the dark-haired man.

“It’s a self-closing envelope,” he said. The man had a strangely high, girlish voice. “You pull away a strip and then seal it. No chance for saliva there.”

Abbie looked at McGonagle. “You didn’t look inside?”

McGonagle’s face was a mask. “It’s your investigation,” he said. “Don’t insult me.”

Abbie pulled out her thin leather gloves and slipped the right one on. She didn’t have any surgical gloves on her—they were sitting on the Saab’s passenger seat so this would have to do. She slid her hand into the bag, caught the corner of the envelope and pulled it out. As
she did this, the flap caught the lip of the bag and pulled away from the envelope. Inside was a folded sheet of white paper, unlined.

As the dark-haired man watched her intently, Abbie pulled out the paper and read it. Script, not block letters. “Allegany. The Old Stone Tower, 8 tonight. Leave the money on the top of the tower. One cop and you never hear from me again.”

Abbie slumped back against the seat, which gave up a puff of chewing tobacco scent. Abbie could smell the mint in it.

She showed the letter to McGonagle. The dark-haired man bent over and peered at it as well, his face somber.

“Good place to meet,” she said. “I have to tell Perelli.”

McGonagle looked out the window, then turned to her. “Yeah, you do.”

Abbie sighed. “Though I’d rather not.”

When Abbie was a girl, Allegany State Park had been the
forest primeval. Acre after acre of thick-trunked trees with spreading roots that looked like dinosaur feet, an impenetrable curtain of green above, paths curling away into the distance, the sound of running water, and voices emerging from the tree cover. Happy voices. Children calling out, parents telling ghost stories over campfires. Peaceful summer nights.

The park had once been called “The Playground of Western New York,” but there was nothing exotic or fancy about it. It was old forest, run-down in places, an affordable place for Buffalo families to get away from their lives for a week or two, working people with no real camping skills who could rent a cabin and build campfires and play Frisbee while the teenagers eyed the other families driving by. The cabins were humble, unheated.

She’d arrived at 1 p.m., believing that Hangman wouldn’t arrive before dusk for the 8 p.m. meeting. The extra hours allowed her and Raymond to scout two positions and to watch the tower, to see who came and went. She needn’t have worried about that part. The park was nearly deserted. No one had been throwing Frisbees or making campfires as she’d hiked in that morning from the parking lot. The
high season for the park was over, the families gone home. Allegany had a few bird-watchers strolling its pathways, but that was about it. She’d heard nothing all day except the tentative steps of deer rooting in the brush and one family of raccoons that had found her hiding spot and had come to investigate, their eyes black hollow discs in a circle of white.

The conference with Perelli at his office had gone … well, it had gone. His color had been one shade lighter, and she guessed he hadn’t emerged into the sun since Hangman had escaped. She’d told him that information had come to her indicating that Hangman would be meeting with Frank Riesen and she wanted herself and Raymond to cover it, along with a nearby backup team. Maybe ten more.

Perelli looked at her like she was offering him a reprieve of some sort. “Tell me everything,” he said.

“He chose Allegany Park because there’s no one up there right now. You can’t have guys with mikes in their ears pretending to be out for a morning stroll or selling pretzels from a cart. It’s deserted. Every extra body is a risk.”

Perelli had looked beaten down. She’d expected more resistance. He asked how she’d gotten the information but she looked at him and shook her head. She wouldn’t lie about it, but she wasn’t going to draw him a map, either.

In the end, they’d agreed on six extra state troopers at the entrances to the park, where all vehicles came in or left. The troopers could plausibly be said to be on normal park duty and could check for anyone unusual entering or exiting by car. A mile from the Stone Tower, they put three SWAT members on the shoreline of Red House Lake, pretending to be buddies camping out after fishing all day for northern pike. They had long guns in their tents and night-vision goggles in their backpacks. The four state forest rangers for that part of Allegany, the rangers who rode lazily around the winding roads inside the park and were a well-known feature of the place, had been replaced by Buffalo cops. They had their own guns and they would be patrolling in the area of the tower, although Kearney had given them a minimum distance of three hundred yards until they heard from her.

So, thirteen men would be listening to their radios. They could get
to the Stone Tower within two to ten minutes, as well as watching the approaches to the monument. The best they could do. But up close, it would be just her and Raymond, with radios on Band 5.

Perelli’s eyes were lined with red veins. “This is it,” he’d said. “We have to get him.”

“I know,” she’d answered softly.

There were no cabins in the immediate vicinity of the Stone Tower—which she could see clearly now in the last of the evening sun—and she’d seen no tents as she’d walked in that morning. She’d borrowed camouflage gear and binoculars from Perelli, who was a deer hunter. The Remington 700 sniper rifle with the Leupold Tactical Scope that was laid carefully next to her right knee belonged to the SWAT team. Pinned to the ground around her was something else Perelli had suggested: a mirrored blind, made of metalized polyester, that reflected the leaves and undergrowth around her. She’d never known such things existed; her father and she had been city campers, roasting hot dogs and tramping the local trails looking for deer, her father a few belts into a pint bottle of Scotch. The only special equipment he’d bought was a metal contraption for making toasted sandwiches over a campfire.

For a moment, she missed her father so much that she thought she would cry out. She cupped a hand to her mouth and closed her eyes.

Too many hours out here alone, she thought. Too much time to think. Someday I’m going to put six months aside and grieve for him properly.

Abbie raised the camo-covered binoculars above the edge of the blind and found the Stone Tower. It was an octagon of rough granite blocks, maybe twenty feet high, with a small balustrade on top. There were three open rectangular doorways letting visitors inside the damp structure, which had smelled faintly of stale beer when she’d inspected it that morning. The inside of the tower had been empty, featureless except for spray-painted graffiti—DANE—on one wall. There was a series of steps leading up to the platform above, which was paved with stones, bordered by a low wooden fence, and was open to the air. It, too, had been empty, the floor slick from intermittent rain. The platform
gave a view of the rolling hills that ran to the horizon in all directions.

She pulled up the microphone dangling on the earphone wire. She, Raymond, and thirteen other men all wore the same headsets. It allowed them to talk in low tones and still be heard in the earpiece.

“Raymond,” Abbie whispered. “Anything?”

The bud earphone in her ear hissed slightly. Then Raymond came on. “I got a damn coyote or something crawling around the bush. That’s it. How long till Riesen’s scheduled to show up?”

Abbie pulled back the sleeve on her camo jacket. “Fifteen minutes.”

Abbie guessed that Riesen would park in the Red House parking lot half a mile away. The path bringing him to the tower cut between two meadows, skirted several groves of birch, and over one rickety wooden bridge. The killer would easily be able to see that he was traveling alone.

Raymond’s voice came over the earpiece. “You ever hear this thing was haunted?”

Abbie scanned the scrub with her glasses. The sun sent beams of golden light shooting through the tree branches; it was setting, almost level with her across the tops of the hills to the west. The colors of the leaves were merging together, deep reds becoming browns and the browns now shaded with black.

“What?” she asked.

“The tower.”

“No, I never heard that.”

“Supposed to be. Indians sacrificed white people on the site.”

“And that bothers you, Raymond?”

Raymond laughed softly. “Oh, I didn’t say I had a
problem
with it. The white man is always poking his nose somewhere it’s not wanted. Speaking of which, if this coyote doesn’t stop messing around, I’m going to shoot it.”

Damn, thought Abbie. I have the choice of the Buffalo PD, which is filled with hunters and fishermen, and I end up with a black cop afraid of coyotes.

“Quiet,” Abbie hissed.

She’d seen something move thirty feet left of Raymond’s position. A pine tree shook and she’d heard the distant snap of a branch, a solitary hard crack. Abbie scanned the trees with her glasses. There was a slight wind and the tops of the pines were bending with it, but this thing had shaken the entirety of the tree.

“I got a, what the fuck do you call ’em,
possum
climbing down a tree,” said Raymond.

Silence now. Abbie watched. “The pine thirty feet to your west?”

“Yeah. Got a baby with her. Go on, Mama, get out of here.”

Abbie looked out over the greenery.

“Hey, Kearney.”

“Yes, Raymond?”

“You ever come to my side of town?”

Abbie was turned away from the tower, scanning the pines fifteen feet behind her. Nothing, but the light was starting to get tricky. She put down the glasses. “You asking me out on a date?”

“I’m just asking if you come to my side of town, ever.”

“Yeah, he’s asking you out on a date,” said a chesty voice. It sounded like Thompkins, who was leading the SWAT team.

“Only Raymond and me talking on this channel, please,” Abbie said. “Everyone else listening unless it’s urgent.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Abbie’s eyes raked the tower again. Nothing.

“Sure I get to the East Side, Raymond,” Abbie continued. “Usually for drug shootings, but once in a while there’s a gang war, or a—”

“Ha. That’s the Genesee Street Boys. Don’t mess with them, now.”

She thought of Mills. She’d called his cell phone twice, though she knew it was shut off. She’d wanted to hear his calm, steady, Canadian voice.

“If you do come over,” said Raymond, “I’ll take you to this new jazz spot on Bryant. They have a guitarist will make you find Jesus.”

“I have a boyfriend, th—”

Raymond cut in. “What’s that, on your eight.”

Abbie turned quickly, bringing up the glasses and peering through the undergrowth. “How far?” she whispered.

“Ten feet.”

Abbie’s heart froze. She hadn’t heard a thing.

She rose up on her knees. There was a shifting black shape drifting across the binoculars’ viewfinder. “Forget it,” she said, exhaling loudly. “Some old garbage bag blowing from tree to tree.” She settled back in.

“You two thinking of moving in together, I hear,” Raymond said.

Abbie rolled her eyes. The BPD gossip machine was ridiculous. “Is that your business, Raymond?”

“All those Canadian boys are good for is waxing you down with otter grease or some such.”

Abbie holstered her Glock and laid the Remington rifle lengthwise. The valleys between the smooth hilltops were settling into gloom. The only sound was the breeze in the trees and birds chattering before darkness came.