Hangman: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

said, trying not to be too schoolmarmish. “Like where he buried the last girl.”
    The Border Patrol agent stared at her. “Uh-huh,” he said, turning away.

6
    The blue van hummed along the 90 toward Auburn. Abbie felt a slight chill from the window, which was frosted with cold mist, hovering a few inches inside. But the driver had the heat on high and the cold was slowly being pushed out. After ten minutes, the men inside the van stopped shifting and adjusting the armrests and the chatter slowly died away. She took a swig of the Diet Coke and went back to the file.
    Hangman’s next victim was Sabrina Kent. Fifteen years old. Two and a half months after Charlotte was taken, Sabrina had been shopping at the Galleria Mall and had purchased two T-shirts at Abercrombie & Fitch, her credit card billed at 5:38 p.m. on September 12, a Wednesday. The girl had been observed leaving the store by a security guard, who’d found her cute enough to recall her presence. But as soon as Sabrina had left, he’d turned back and kept his eyes on the clientele; the store had been experiencing a rash of shoplifting. Sabrina walked out to the parking lot toward her father’s 2005 Mercedes and was never seen alive again.
    She was another North girl. Her family lived just off Delaware Avenue. So the killer hadn’t been choosing randomly at the mall. He’dfollowed Sabrina from the North, looking for a moment of opportunity.
    If Abbie hadn’t known her Buffalo history, her tour-giving neighbor Charles would have filled her in long ago. At the turn of the twentieth century, Buffalo had been rich, with more millionaires per capita than any city on earth. It was hard to believe now, but before the sky came falling down, her city was supposed to become the next Paris or New York. And Buffalo’s North is where the newly rich had built their mansions, huge stone behemoths with Greek columns and flying buttresses and an air of permanence that said they’d outlast the next Ice Age.
    This was Hangman hunting grounds.
    Abbie found the autopsy photos. Another brunette; it would become a signature. Sabrina’s body was pale as milk. There were some scrapes on the right knee, but otherwise her body showed no signs of abuse. Not even defensive wounds on the hands. The medical examiner’s opinion was that the girls had been hanged. Ligature marks were visible in several close-up photos, and both the thickness of the burn and angle of the rope suggested it.
    Why did he take the girls if he didn’t want to rape them? Did it indicate a kind of longing—was Hangman looking for a girlfriend? Were they trophies meant to be kept? If they were trophies, did the fact that he discarded them eventually mean that he was living with someone else and couldn’t risk the bodies being discovered?
    She checked the file to see if any traces had been found in the girl’s hair—leather shavings, carpet fibers, anything that might indicate what the killer had used to transport his trophies. But there was no mention of anything. Sabrina Kent had styling gel in hers, and that was all.
    Three months later Hangman found Maggie Myeong. Her father had come to Buffalo in the mid-’80s to study at the university, met a North girl, married her and settled down. The father was a chemist with Dow, the mother was teaching biology at Williamsville North High School out in the suburbs. Maggie was the Asian cliché or the Asian ideal, however you wanted to look at it: studious, a bookworm, “never any trouble since she was three years old and got lost in Delaware Park during the Easter Egg Hunt,” or so said her father, Walter.She’d wanted to work in psychiatry and even volunteered after school at the old Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane over on Elmwood. She was a young woman on her way.
    Hangman somehow got her out of her house, where she’d been dropped off after school. How, no one knew. No signs of forced entry, no snapped locks or broken windows. He’d spirited her out