Hangman: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

said there was no boyfriend, I believe there was no boyfriend. But the bike leaned carefully against the telephone pole, that was odd. Abbie wondered if it had a kickstand, and if so, whether Charlotte had been relaxed enough to take the extra two seconds to use it. That would indicate some degree of trust in the person that took her away. One neighbor had seen Charlotte pedaling down BryantStreet toward her friend’s, but that was the last sighting. The girl had effectively vanished just a mile from her own house.
    She flipped to the medical examiner’s report for all three girls, clipped together near the back of the file. All the girls had died within three to four days of being kidnapped. Sexual abuse of the bodies negative. The toxicological screens had come back negative for the first girl, positive on the last two for Versed, a fast-acting sedative, basically an injectable chloroform. The ME had found puncture marks in Girl Number Two’s left arm and Girl Number Three’s right thigh, consistent with injection from a needle. Maybe Hangman had trouble controlling the last two. Maybe the first one had believed whatever story he told her at the beginning—
I just want to take you for a drive
, or
I swear I’ll let you go tomorrow
—but the other girls knew better. By then, Charlotte was dead …
    “Where you going, ma’am?” a voice barked.
    Abbie looked up. A uniformed cop, a serious mustache bristling above a metal clipboard, was staring at her intently.
    “Um, the prison. Auburn.”
    He frowned and looked down at his clipboard. “The blue van,” he said, ducking his head sideways and pointing back along a line of cars and trucks with smoke curling from their tailpipes. “Leaving in one minute.”
    “Got it,” Abbie said. She ran toward the van, confirmed with the driver through his open window that Auburn was going to be his last stop, then nodded at two burly men, one in a gray, flat-brimmed hat, the other bareheaded and dressed in a dark green shirt, who were squeezed into the middle row. She ducked down and scooched into the last row, and sat by the window. Abbie placed the file next to her and slowly opened the soda she’d brought. She had the row to herself.
    “Brought some reading material?” said the deputy in the gray hat, turning in his seat. He was older and he looked like a TV dad from some ’50s sitcom.
    Abbie smiled. “A must for long rides.”
    He eyed the file, and his smile tightened. “Anything in there,” he said, “we should know about?”
    His tone was light, but his gaze sure wasn’t.
    Abbie looked at him in surprise, then down at the file. “Don’t think so. Background mostly. I’m just covering all my bases.”
    The deputy nodded.
    The other man—his face looked lean and shadowed in the light of the van, but Abbie could tell that he was Latino—turned to listen to them. She saw the badge on his arm as he leaned it on the backrest. The outline of the U.S. in yellow stitching on a black background. Border Patrol.
    Good Lord, Abbie thought, they’re calling in everyone except Sanitation.
    “I’m sure Hangman will make a mistake soon,” she said to the deputy. “That’s how these things usually end.”
    The Latino agent was looking at her now, and said, “All I know is that my cousin just turned fifteen years old last Tuesday. We had a nice party for her. You ever been to a
quinceañera
?
”
    Abbie shook her head no.
    “Nice,” he said. “Live band. Real nice.”
    He looked out the window, then smiled back at her. “I don’t think that boy’s gonna make it out of the woods, you know what I’m saying?” His voice was quiet, and his teeth in the darkness were even and white. It was as if he were tasting Hangman’s flesh between them.
    It feels good to saddle up and go hunting wild animals, thought Abbie. Especially when you have something back home that the animal likes. “I hope we take him alive, and learn something for the victims’ families,” Abbie