I made another note.
“Hanging as public deterrent.”
Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. As I worked in the library on November 8, I wondered if the article I hoped to publish could be fashioned into a double hook. Perhaps the Hangman would conclude that Jeffrey Kline was a lawyer who understood the mission and, if the killer was caught, should therefore be the gunslinger to defend the accused in court. Too many “woulds” and “shoulds” made that a long shot, so was there more to be gained by
provoking
the psycho? What if the article induced the Hangman to contact me? Once the killer was hooked, I could reel in the case. Say I made the piece read as if I understood the mission, but I included mistakes that cast doubt? Would that lure the Hangman in to set me straight?
A deadly game in hindsight, as events tonight are proving.
Hanged, drawn, and quartered.
Prophetic words.
Is that the fate the Hangman has in mind for me …?
Scribblers
Seattle
Wednesday, November 8 (Eight days ago)
The galley proofs of
Perverse Verdict
were spread across Justin Whitfield’s desk in the newsroom of the
Seattle Star.
The room was a wide-open space humming with manic activity as reporters writing to deadline banged away at keyboards to fill computer screens with copy, or transcribed interviews from hand-held recorders, or jotted notes while cradling phones in the crook between shoulder and ear. The cubicles in which they worked were scattered around concrete pillars holding up the ceiling. Bulletin boards pinned with maps, work schedules, and union notices covered the supports. A bank of windows along the west wall overlooked Elliott Bay, with Puget Sound beyond. The sky out there was as joylessly gray as the carpet, cubicles, desks, and upright surfaces in here, but not as gray as the hangover clouding Justin’s mind.
Thank you, Jack Daniel’s.
God, how his head hurt!
Deadlines, stress, and the urge to unwind.
Booze was, and always would be, the main hazard of his job.
If Justin had known the Hangman would strike again last night, he would have stayed in Vancouver and sworn off the sauce. Instead, he had imbibed with his brother in the airport lounge, watching planes come and go on the rainy runways of Sea Island while the waiter came and went with enough shots of bourbon and water to drown both men. Ethan drank like a lawyer. Justin drank to keep up. So by the time he caught the last flight to Seattle from Vancouver at close to midnight, the reporter was in no condition to report. Having missed the Hangman scoop despite being in the city where the crime went down, Justin first heard about the second killing on the radio in the taxi driving him home from SeaTac Airport.
Shit! he thought.
Just my luck!
With dawn had come no respite from the pain in his head. It was an ordeal simply to get to work. Work itself was self-flagellation. The piece he had just finished for tomorrow’s edition was, understandably, not up to par. It lacked the insight he brought to a story by personally haunting the murder scene, and his pipeline from Maddy could provide only sketchy secondhand details. As for the crispness of his prose, the craftsmanship of the wordsmith reflected the hangover addling his brain.
The
Star’
s star reporter was fading today.
A shout from across the newsroom caught Justin’s ear. An editor, jumping up, was waving his fist for the story. Time to check the stillborn copy into city desk, so Justin punched a button to send his Hangman article there.
That done, he switched hats from writer to editor.
The galleys covering his desk were page proofs for his soon-to-be-published true-crime book. As such, they marked the point of no return for last-minute changes. How they read was how
Perverse Verdict
would end up in print, so Justin turned his fuzzy attention to weighing Ethan’s margin-scribbled comments.
Justin was proofing this passage when the phone on his desk rang:
The scene in the prison the night of the riot in 1984 was worthy of Dante’s
Inferno.
For prisoners in protective custody, it was a living hell.The riot began in Cell Block Three as guards were searching inmates for drugs before the night lockdown. Using fists and feet, twenty cold-blooded veterans of incarceration overpowered ten guards, then stormed the prison control center a hundred yards away, breaching it by smashing through inch-thick glass with fire extinguishers. The glass, installed just two weeks before, was supposedly unbreakable.
Command of the control center gave the rampaging convicts control of the jail. It contained electronic switches and keys for all the cells. First, they opened the hospital to empty it of drugs, then they unlocked Cell Block Two, known as The Predator. The Predator secured the most vicious, hard-core cons in Washington State.
The party got bigger and bigger as the rioters ran amok. From cell block to cell block they moved through the prison, releasing doors to free their friends or to get at their enemies. The trail they left was littered with pills, bottles, capsules, and hypodermic needles. The drugs they crushed were mainlined indiscriminately, including diuretics that made them pee. They destroyed the prison as they went, gutting the control center to leave it a shambles, torching the hospital so billowing black smoke filled the sky, battering steel doors and concrete walls with pickaxes stolen from a maintenance shed. Armed with baseball bats from the prison gym and homemade knives honed razor-sharp in the workshop, the frenzied mob quickly degenerated into a rabble of stoned psychos out for blood. The blood they craved was that of “skinners” and “rats,” jailhouse terms for the sex offenders and informers who were kept in protective custody in Cell Block Four.
If you have hate in your heart and the keys to the jail in your hand, there’s no stopping you from slaking your thirst for gore.
Skinners and rats are always afraid, but no fear is more ferocious than the fear that the guards will lose control. Peter Bryce Haddon was already unnerved from his first week in custody under a death warrant for the sex killing of a nine-year-old girl when he heard the heavy-duty cons in a take-no-prisoners mood unlock the door and come storming into protective custody.
The first guard to intercept them was beaten to a pulp. “Take that, screw!” the cons shouted as they took bats to his skull, slugging him until his face was a crimson goo and his scalp slipped askew like a cheap toupee.
“That snitch is mine,” someone yelled as the first informer was dragged from his cell, clutching a Bible and sniveling for mercy in the name of one saint, then another.
Haddon almost fainted when the screaming began, a shrill shriek that soared to the whine of a dentist’s drill. The rioters pinned the rat to the floor in the hall so all could see, and those whose turn was yet to come watched horrified as the snitch was scorched from foot to head with a blowtorch. The blue flame was held on his twisted face until the flesh bubbled and melted. When it was over, the head had been reduced to nothing but a charred skull.
A tattooed monster went to work on the rat in the cell next to Haddon’s. He hauled the man out, whirled him around and cuffed one wrist to the bars, then he made him watch as he slowly cut one finger halfway through the joint. “Pull it off,” he ordered, “or I’ll cut your throat.”
Haddon winced as the mutilated informer tore off his own finger. The savage con wrenched the severed digit from his bawling victim to crush underfoot like a discarded cigarette. Then he sawed deep into another finger, demanding the snitch pull himself apart again, and once that hand was stripped to the palm, made him rip the half-sawn fingers off his other hand with his teeth.
The gibbering of another informer yanked Haddon’s attention away. The rat was gripped in a hammerlock by a huge psycho known as the Hulk. The Hulk had in his fist a piece of angle iron which he had stuck in one ear of the squirming snitch and was forcefully screwing back and forth to drive the rod through the man’s brain and out his other ear. Death spasms animated the puppet in his grasp as, gripping the bar on both sides of the head like pumping iron, he carried the corpse from cell to cell to show those quaking in terror what to expect from him.
The clink of a key in the door to his cell pulled Haddon’s attention back.
“Okay, baby-fucker. It’s your turn.”
That was around the time I arrived at the prison, landing in a chopper chartered by the
Seattle Star.
A full moon shone down on the burning buildings as firefighters shot water in through broken windows to quell the flames. Police in riot gear and National Guardsmen armed to the teeth besieged the jail. Rescued inmates stumbled out, eyes swollen and covered in blood from head to foot. Most were unrecognizable; many were in shock. Naked and shivering, a con slumped outside his burnt-out block, jabbering about the horrors he had seen inside. “They killed! They butchered!” he yelled as another con staggered out. “They butchered! They killed!” yammered the second man.Deep within the dark, smoke-filled, sodden ruin, tactical squads moved cell to cell to reclaim the prison. What they encountered was utter destruction. Steel-barred cell doors torn off hinges. Reinforced concrete walls six inches thick sledge-hammered apart, with wires dangling. Toilets smashed and water ankle-deep along the halls, forcing them to wade around broken glass, debris, and smoldering mattresses. A stench of fear seemed to rise from blood streaks in the water. When they got to Cell Block Four, they found a foot-wide swath of caked gore running twelve feet along the wall to end above the propped-up bodies of three men. Their slashed throats testified to the orgy of violence continuing inside. Wails from Peter Haddon’s cell corroborated the warning.
Haddon’s clothes lay tossed out in the hall. His light gray prison-issue shirt and baggy blue jeans. His socks and navy blue Velcro running shoes. His T-shirt and underwear soaked from dread. Four cons, none of whom could lay valid claim to being human, had locked themselves in with him. They were known in prison as the Back Door Boys, and as the tactical squad moved into Cell Block Four, the last thug was pounding at Haddon’s back door.
“Nut him!” someone shouted as the squad came down the hall.
Slight, naked, and wide-eyed, Haddon was standing up. The grunting con behind him wasn’t as huge as the Hulk, but he was big enough. Muscular arms ran under Haddon’s shoulders to lock fingers behind his neck, holding him in a vise grip while he was sodomized. A pair with their pants around their ankles held his legs apart as a fourth con squatted in front of his groin. Like a living jockstrap, Haddon’s hands tried to cup his genitals in a frantic attempt to save them from castration. Crisscrossing his abdomen, hands, and thighs with red slits, the squatter slashed a knife back and forth around Haddon’s exposed crotch.
The squad had almost reached the cell when Haddon squealed. The pair spreading his legs each grabbed a wrist and held his hands away. The con with the knife grasped his penis to jerk him into the air, then swept the blade across in a groin-level arc. The shriek from Cell Block Four was heard outside.
I was there when they brought Haddon out on a stretcher. His testicles came out in a plastic cup. He didn’t undergo surgery to have them reattached. By the time he arrived at the hospital, his mangled manhood was dead.
Imagine his fear the moment before the knife gelded him. It sends shivers down my spine. If there were justice in this brutal world, Haddon’s sentence would have been commuted to life. But it wasn’t, and nine years passed, during which his appeals ran out. Finally, the death warrant was executed, when, on February 14, 1993, the state of Washington hanged an innocent man.
That was the passage Justin was proofing when the phone on his desk rang.
“Newsroom,” he answered.
“Justin Whitfield, please.”
“Speaking,” he said.
“My name’s Alexis Hunt. I’m a writer in Vancouver researching the Hangman case.”
“Uh-huh,” said the reporter.
“You sound suspicious.”
“Competition tends to get my back up.”
“I’m not a reporter. I write crime books.”
“So do I. I’m proofing one now.”
“Is it your first?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve written several. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.”
“
Deadman’s Island
, right?”
“Yes,” said Alex.
“I’ve read your stuff.”
“And I’ve read your reporting. It’s first-rate. That’s why I called.”
“You’ve got five minutes. No more. We’re on deadline here.”
“The depth of your scoop on the Halloween hanging hints at an inside source. I suspect you’ve also seen the Hangman’s word game. It’s under wraps, so you can’t print it. But when the case is solved, you’ll be first with the story.”
“One minute down. Four to go.”
“My boyfriend is Insp. Zinc Chandler. He’s the Mountie investigating last night’s hanging. Needless to say, I have a good source too. But my source is good for only half the case. I lack a similar source for the half down there. As I see it, your situation is the reverse.”
“So?”
“So I think we should consider teaming up.”
“Woodward and Bernstein?”
“They got the Pulitzer Prize.”
“There’s a joint task force in the making. Chandler will get everything you need from down here.”
“It’s one thing for him to give me the scoop about what he controls. It’s another for him to tell me what was told to him in confidence.”
“True,” said Justin.
“The same with you. I’ll bet your piece on last night’s hanging proves me right.”
“I’m still listening. Are you through?”
“The Hangman case is huge. There will be lots of competition. Either I’m just one of many out to scoop you, or we forge a partnership that’s greater than the sum of its parts and scoop the competition.”
“How many words in the puzzle?”
“An odd number,” said Alex.
“How many letters in the first word?”
“Uh-uh. Your turn.”
“The same number as in the second,” said Justin.
“Which is one less than in the third.”
“The guess in the
Seattle Star
after the Halloween hanging was the letter
A.
How many
A
’s were filled in last night?”
“That you’ll have to get from your source.”
“Okay, Alexis. You pass the test.”
“Call me Alex. My friends do.”
“What are you proposing?”
“That we meet face-to-face. I’ll bring my file and you bring yours. It may work out. It may not. But if it does, we’re both better off.”
“When and where?” said Justin.
“This Friday. On a boat. Did you get an invitation to the Northwest Writers’ Crime Cruise?”