Hangman: A Novel by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online

ago, he drew these and hung them on his cell wall.”
    It was a series of small sketches of human heads. The drawings were roughly the size of apples. Done in a soft pencil, not a drawing pencil but something a little better than a number 2, with a broader point and softer lead. They weren’t half-bad. The shapes looked recognizablyhuman, not a child’s moon-circles, but studies that showed skill and motor control. All of them had hair sketched in roughly. Long feathery hair swept off to the side. Some were slightly more detailed, more worked-over, with serious attention given to the shape of the face. The ovals had no features. It was eerie, faces without eyes and lips, not a smudge of human expression.
    “Well, that’s creepy,” Abbie said.
    “Creepy?” Lipschitz said, surprised. “I guess in this context.”
    Yes, in this context, Abbie thought. A serial killer of girls drawing blank faces. I will hereby qualify that as creepy.
    “I was just happy that he’d begun to look outward and reconnect with other humans, even on a pictorial level. When I first started working with him, his drawings were … inward. Demon eyes. Rage-scrawls, I call them.” Lipschitz paused. There was another sheet tilted in his hand, and he was looking down at it thoughtfully.
    “What’s that?” she said.
    “This?” Lipschitz handed the sheet across to her. “This was last week.”
    Abbie took the paper. Just one face, taking up most of the center of the page, with an inch of white space on each side, and at the top and bottom margin. Much more detail here. The face had eyes, almond-shaped. A pert nose, flared at the end. And the hint of two full lips, drawn faintly, the top one shaded in, the bottom one just traced.
    “The hair, the eyes, the shape of the face,” she said. “It’s Sandy.”
    “Could be. The beginnings of her, anyway. And he drew her face normal size.”
    “What’s the significance of that?”
    “Well, it’s not a
completely
accepted interpretation, but the consensus is that the life-size face indicates he’s thinking of Sandy as fully human, on an equal level with him. He’s literally not minimizing her image.”
    Just the eyes gone, Abbie thought. A human being slipping back into your memory, a human being that you killed. How did that feel?
    “Did he talk about her a lot?” she asked.
    “Yes. Sandy and his daughter.”
    Abbie sat back. “I didn’t know he had one.”
    “Oh, yeah. She’d be about nineteen now. Spent the last eight or nine years with the mother. Marcus has a lot of guilt about her, growing up without her daddy. Some anger, too. I gather his wife got full custody.”
    “Apart from his memories, did Flynn have hallucinations?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can you tell me anything about them?” Abbie asked.
    Lipschitz leaned back in the chair and it creaked under his weight.
    “They were both visual and auditory. As I said, he saw faces. Not only of his victims. He visualized his own daughter, Nicole … hung. He was very upset about those instances, naturally. He hadn’t seen Nicole for years, but he began to dream about her death.”
    “Do you think those fantasies of Nicole’s death were a way of atoning for his crimes?”
    Lipschitz smirked. “That would be classically Freudian, I guess, but I don’t think it’s that simple.”
    “What about the auditory hallucinations?”
    “At night, he’d hear voices asking about Sandy.
Where is the girl? What did you do with Sandy?
”
    Abbie shivered despite herself. “ ‘What did
you
do with her’?” she said. “Was Marcus a split personality?”
    Lipschitz clucked. “We haven’t used the term split personality in about two decades.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “Did he have dissociative identity disorder? No, I don’t believe so. This was part biology, having to do with brain injury. But it could also be Marcus coming to terms with what he’d done. It was like a horror movie for him, a flash of gore. Each session, he’d