Hangman: A Novel (32 page)

The magnet was still pulling things from her memory. Something Myeong said had triggered it.

“Do you think I’m insane?”

Walter Myeong wasn’t insane. He was just grieving, and would be for the rest of his life.

So what was it?

Her nerves were jangling, her body felt twitchy. She was close. The case’s dark matter was acquiring a shape. What is it? What am I missing?

Walter Myeong wasn’t insane, but he’d brought Maggie to a psychiatric facility in Arizona.

Abbie got out of the car and went to the trunk. She popped it open and there was the case file. She hadn’t given it back to HQ.

She brought it back to the driver’s seat, and closed the door. Abbie opened the file and began flipping through the pages.

There. Maggie Myeong. She hadn’t been seen by a psychiatrist in
Buffalo, not according to the file, but she’d wanted to become one. “For her school project junior year, she’d done after-school work at a psychiatric facility,” Abbie read. Her junior year. She was killed in 2007, and she’d been a senior at Sacred Heart. She’d volunteered to work with psychiatric patients in 2006.

Abbie flipped forward in the file to the Marcus Flynn profile. She flicked through his bio. But there was nothing there.

Whatever was niggling at her brain wasn’t from the file. It was from something else.

An interview?

Let it come, Abbie. You know it’s there.

McGonagle. The EDP episodes. Marcus Flynn had been brought in twice for public disturbances, both along Chippewa, in the year before the murders began. Which was 2006. Evaluated as an emotionally disturbed person and released, McGonagle had said. But evaluated where?

She snapped up her phone.

“Perelli.”

“It’s Kearney.”

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“Just tell me one thing. If an emotionally disturbed suspect was arrested in North Buffalo, on Chippewa, where would he be taken?”

“Wh-aat?” Perelli sounded brain-dead.

“Where would he be taken?”

“The Psych Center.”

Abbie closed her eyes. The old Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane over on Elmwood Avenue, a huge complex of brown brick buildings inside its own neglected acreage. Most of the old wards—in a separate part of the grounds, built God knows how many years ago and hidden behind acres of forest—were abandoned, with only a few modern buildings grafted onto the old structures, which were visible behind a black-spiked iron fence. In front were two looming towers, capped in green metal, their windows staring balefully out at passersby on Elmwood.

No kings and queens lived in Buffalo, Abbie thought. But Abbie would bet there were patients at the Buffalo State Asylum who believed themselves to be Napoleon, or the kings of England, or Louis XIV.
I live where the kings abide
.

Something an inmate would say.

The buildings were old, late nineteenth century at least. At some point in their history, they would have been heated by coal. She grabbed the folder and paged furiously through the blueprints.

The second to last was marked “The Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane.” Abbie stared at the thin, spidery lines that traced the walls of the old wards.

She turned the key on the Saab and revved the engine high, swinging out onto Delaware Avenue. “Still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Send SWAT to the Psych Center, the abandoned part in the back of the grounds. I think Hangman’s there—and Katrina. I’ll explain why after we check it.”

Maggie Myeong was an intern there in the fall of 2006. Marcus Flynn was detained for being emotionally disturbed in that time span, which means he must have gone to the Center. They had brushed across each other’s paths. It had coal bins.

Three minutes away. Hold on, Katrina.

“Kearney, you feel good about this? I can pull guys off the third search team to go in there with you.”

“Do it.”

“Listen, that place is like a fucking series of dungeons. Half the buildings are abandoned, the roofs falling in, the whole facility’s locked up, and everything’s connected to everything else by corridors.”

“I know. But I want to be first.”

“Give me fifteen minutes,” Perelli said. “We’re going to need bolt cutters and all that shit. And bodies.”

She approached the Psych Center from the public side.
The front part of the old asylum grounds, the acreage fronting on Elmwood Avenue, had been taken over by Buffalo State University. Best to come in through the campus. No one would notice her that way.

She whipped the Saab along Grant Street, the turbo whining, and made a right into the college entrance. The early evening sky was clear, the sun dropped somewhere behind the soaring trees to the west. Abbie dropped her speed down as she drove the campus roads, passing an imposing building with six stone pillars in front. She came to a crosswalk and a trio of overweight female students stared at her as she nearly plowed through them.

Come on, girls, for God’s sake. It took an eternity for them to cross.

Abbie grimaced and stepped on the accelerator. She passed large, newish dorms in bright tan brick and rolled by the baseball field. She went slowly, so as not to attract attention. She hadn’t told Perelli everything, of course, but enough to get what she wanted.

A large round brick smokestack loomed up on her right. The college power plant. She drove past it and over a large avenue and the character of the landscape changed. The modern buildings and the dorms fell away and were replaced by a range of peaked roofs ahead of her,
casting sharp shadows, like a piece of sooty old London transported to the middle of a bucolic campus. She was driving west, so the setting sun was behind the wards, filling their windows with darkness. The ones to the left looked abandoned.

The old asylum.

Abbie parked by a large playing field where young women were practicing lacrosse. Their sudden shouts and calls carried over the grass cleanly and came to her. Abbie pretended to watch for a moment, walked along the line of cars parked on the access road, then turned and strode quickly for a grove of black-trunked trees that shaded a path to her right. She hurried down the path away from the college and the fields, the sounds of lacrosse slipping behind her.

She passed the modern part of the asylum as she raced ahead. Through panes of clear glass, she saw patients moving through the corridors, a security guard standing with hands on his gun belt through the front door. The buildings were the rehabbed wings of the old facility, and they looked like brownstones in a nice part of Brooklyn. This is where they took Marcus Flynn when he was acting crazy. Before the murders started. Abbie hurried on.

The grounds grew more overgrown and tangled the further she went. On her left she spotted the remains of a rusting wire fence that had once crossed over the path, now choked with vines. To her right was an old metal swing that had provided entertainment for the inmates on summer days, but the top bar had rusted through and the wrought iron seat had crashed to the ground. She moved quickly, listening. There were forest sounds: birds chirping in the sunlight and branches of trees thwacking against each other.

She came to a new galvanized steel fence that ran across the path and continued both right and left. A white metal sign had been screwed to the horizontal fence posts, with bright red lettering.
CONDEMNED BUILDINGS
, it read.
PROPERTY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK. KEEP OUT.
Abbie glanced around before putting her boot on the lowest rung and beginning to climb. In ten seconds, she was over, landing in a patch of dry grass.

The old asylum wards were ahead to her left. Dark rectangular windows, many jagged with broken glass, stared back at her. It seemed
impossible that Katrina could be in there, so close to the idyllic scenes of college life. Obscene. How could Hangman keep her down there? But these buildings were long forgotten, shut away, full of bad memories the city wanted to forget. No one came back here.

The line of trees on either side of the meadow that fronted the wards seemed to funnel wind down their center. Abbie pulled the collar of her coat tight around her neck. She leaned against the last elm, watching the sun dip below the horizon. Shadows were her friends now. She was a shadow herself, hoping to blend into the tree line. She checked her watch.

6:53. If Perelli was right, she’d have backup in about ten minutes.

She waited. The sound of bells came over the elms, all the way from the red-roofed bell tower of Lafayette Presbyterian, she guessed. Abbie slid the magazine out of her Glock, glanced at it quickly, and then jammed it back. A nervous habit.

Then she heard it. A clear ringing scream, rising quickly from the sound of birdsong, then cut off in mid-shriek. A cry of pure arcing horror.

Abbie stared at the line of jagged-roofed buildings. Had it come from them, or had the wind carried it from the main psychiatric facility a quarter-mile behind her? Her eyes raked the dilapidated structures, but the shabby redbrick buildings showed no movement. Abbie moved out of the line of trees and headed straight for the door of the middle ward.

The second scream was louder. A guttural moan twisted into a screech of pain. Abbie ran. Her vision shook as she raced over the uneven ground, her feet bouncing off little hills of rock and earth, the facade of the buildings jarring and twisting as she sprinted over the lawn straight toward one of the darkened hallways. The sound rang in her ears. It was a girl’s scream, not a woman’s.

Bringing the Glock up in a locked-arm stance, she reached the porch and dashed up the steps to the wooden door. She threw her shoulder against the door, but it didn’t budge. Abbie took a deep, shaking breath, and tried the handle. Locked. The place was silent as a tomb.

Abbie tried to wrench the door. These buildings had been abandoned
for decades and the locks were probably rusted solid. She ducked to look in the tall, black-framed window next to the door frame; it was streaked with dirt and the rain had made a pattern on the grime. Inside, she saw a partially razed room, plaster torn from the yellowing walls, abandoned equipment. It sent a chill rattling down her backbone.

Turning back toward the playing fields, Abbie brought her elbow back and smashed it through the window. Tinkle of glass shards. She knocked away more glass with her Glock until there was a hole big enough to get through. It was too far from the door to reach around and unlock it from inside.

The building had swallowed up the screamer. Only a breath of stale air from the hole in the glass. Abbie holstered the Glock and stepped through the frame.

Sirens in the distance. Perelli was coming. Hurry, damn it.

Abbie ducked her head past the broken glass and found herself in a high-ceilinged room strewn with old bedpans, a broken bed frame, fallen plaster everywhere, a shattered mirror on the wall above a chipped mantelpiece.

Her pulse was jumping and her mouth went dry. She couldn’t call out or Hangman might kill Katrina.

Had he heard the glass break?

Abbie dashed across the room toward a doorway set in the corner of the far wall. The passageway to the next ward. She put her hand on the cool enamel-coated knob, and slowly pulled open the door. Half-light. To the left was a short hallway into a dark, vaulted room. To the right were stairs descending into cryptlike darkness.

Abbie brought the Glock up and marched slowly ahead into the gloom.

Gleams of light showed puddles of oily black water on the floor. Flaking green paint on the walls showed patches of white primer underneath. Abbie’s mind flashed on hordes of zombified people pushing along these walls, terrified of the staff, pushing themselves into the plaster and rubbing away the paint. Armies of the mad marching through here, gone now.

Where was Katrina?

She heard cranking, like a machine with a sprocket. Click, click,
click
. But it was faint. Abbie turned left.

It came from outside. Abbie found the first window, streaked with grime. Through it she saw a semicircle of dark, leafless trees. Abbie scanned right.
There
.

A girl in a blue sweater and dirty white pants with her neck in a noose, swinging.

Abbie reared back and kicked out the glass.

“Katrina!” Abbie cried, vaulting through the glass, curling her head over her knees as she tumbled forward. She landed on her back, and felt a shard of glass cutting through her coat into her flesh, but she was quickly up and running toward the grove of twisted trees.

She dashed for the girl. The body turned and she saw the girl wore a bizarre mask. She was wriggling, hands tied behind her back. Abbie raced up to the girl and grabbed her by the legs.

She tried to lift her but couldn’t. The girl was making a noise in her throat. As if it was cut and the air bubbles were escaping out the sliced airway.

Abbie spotted the box the girl had been standing on, an old wooden one. She gasped and stepped up on it. Immediately, the box began rocking underneath her feet on the unsteady ground, threatening to tip over.

Abbie saw terrified eyes behind the mask. She grabbed Katrina around the waist with her left arm and lifted. With the right, she pulled out her Glock.

The rope looked thick and strong as iron. Abbie pointed the Glock a foot above the noose and pulled off four rounds, the sound exploding in the stillness.

Katrina didn’t fall.

Oh, God, the shadows were going to reach out and put their fingers around her neck and then get the girl. Where was Hangman?

The echoes of the gunshots faded into the sky. The rope, snipped by the bullets, was still holding by a few cords. Katrina’s fingers closed around Abbie’s arm and the choking noise pitched higher. Cold as icicles.

Her brain is dying, Abbie, hurry. But her strength was failing just
from the effort of lifting the girl a few inches. Her vision shook as Abbie raised the Glock again, the left arm screaming in pain. She took aim and pulled off another three shots.

Dizzy now. No change in the rope. The shots had gone wild. Abbie’s legs began shaking from the strain.