Hangman: A Novel by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online Page A

describe more details. And the voices perhaps reflected his horror at what he’d done, as well as his efforts to remember it.”
    “Were the hallucinations getting worse?”
    “Well, more intense. His brain was healing, rewiring itself in certain ways. Things were coming back. But Marcus … Marcus is still a confused soul.”
    “Did he have visitors?” Abbie asked.
    Lipschitz smiled. “No
one
visited Marcus. He was the infamous Hangman, after all.”
    “Groupies? Serial killers often have them.”
    Lipschitz shrugged. “That you’d have to take up with admin. They monitored his mail. I wasn’t aware of any. But Marcus was … he was fragmented. He hid things from himself, let alone me.”
    Something buzzed in Lipschitz’s pocket. He seemed grateful for the distraction.
    “If you don’t mind.”
    Abbie stood to leave. “I need to see Hangman’s cell.”
    Lipschitz studied the screen of his iPhone. “Damn nuisance,” he said, placing the device on his desk. He looked up at Abbie. “Um, what did you say?”
    “Hangman’s cell. I’d like to see it.”
    “Why? They had a tac team sweep it already. They didn’t find a thing.”
    “If you could humor me, I’d appreciate it.”
    Lipschitz picked up his desk phone. “A guard has to bring you down.”

9
    Abbie had to wait forty-five infuriating minutes for the new guard shift to come on. She spent the time checking Flynn’s prison file: he’d had no visitors in five years, not a single one. He’d gotten letters, apparently from wannabe groupies, but never answered them. He’d been largely cooperative and had been granted “basic earned privileges”—including the right to have pencil and paper in his cell.
    Finally, a short, squat, thinly whiskered guard arrived to take her down. Hangman’s cell was on the second floor of the prison. There was a straight line of eight cells along the corridor, five feet from a railing that looked down on the public area, the same number across the gap on the other side. The sound of the other inmates—gossiping, calling out to each other—echoed down the row. Abbie glanced over the railing at the cement tables below, painted a light green, those prison kinds of tables that are built right into the floor and can’t be taken apart and used as weapons. After the last cell in the group of eight, the wall angled left and there were six cells in a semicircle facing a guard booth that had Plexiglas windows on all sides. One guard kept an eye on the twenty-two cells from an office chair inside the booth. Hangman’s cell was number 16, the first after the turn.
    She went to the cell window, the only opening in the beige metal door except for a slot for food and for handcuffing. The guard stood behind her.
    It was probably 6 × 8 and unremarkable in every way. There was a single cement bunk, with a thin mattress on top. A blanket had been folded at the foot of the bed with a pillow at the head, the way the guards fixed a cell when it was empty. A lid-less toilet was affixed to the wall in the opposite corner, with a stainless steel mirror above it. There were no posters or drawings taped to the walls.
    If the room had held any indication that it had once held a human being inside, they’d been scrubbed away. She had an image of Hangman running across fields near Warsaw, a mindless automaton, a bald berserk thing, its face smoothed out like a mannequin, running and stumbling over the rows of corn stubble.
    Abbie turned and looked from the door of the cell to the guard booth. There was an older guard in a brown uniform with tan epaulettes sitting in the chair, staring glumly at nothing.
    “Listen, how long you going to be?” the guard behind her said.
    Abbie stood there. Something, some misaligned thing, was bothering her. She couldn’t leave until it was gone. “I don’t know.”
    “Well, I got prisoners to take down to chow in D wing. When you’re ready, call Ortiz over there, and I’ll come get you.”
    Abbie