The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (34 page)
Read The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery Online
Authors: David Bishop
“I’ll get the cokes,” Maddie replied. She needed a minute to piece together the scattered links that were streaking across her mind. “Really, I’ll get them. I’d like one myself.”
She dropped the report on the table and, sensing a rush from behind her, spun around to see Rip coming at her, an aluminum club like Gary’s warmup bat held above his head, his arms framing his maniacal face.
Instead of giving ground, Maddie crowded him while his arms were up and drove her right knee into his groin. She then brought the edge of her opened hand up hard against his throat, slamming his Adam’s apple.
With a cry of pain, Rip hunched over, the barrel of the bat slamming against the floor as his arms collapsed from her blow.
She pushed his lowered shoulders as hard as she could. He stumbled back into the coffee table and over it onto the couch. Maddie turned and rushed through the door into the bedroom and lunged for her thirty-eight on the bed.
As she did, she looked back. Ripley was up and again coming toward her. His face distorted from rage. The stained bat again above his head, cocked for the deadly blow he would deliver in seconds.
Maddie landed on the bed, grabbing her holster in the motion. While yanking her Smith & Wesson free, she rolled sideways across the bed and dropped into the space along the wall.
He was now through the door into the bedroom area. His suddenly bloodshot eyes circles of hatred. His forehead wet. The bat held above his head.
He no longer wanted to temporarily incapacitate her and then revive her for his brutality.
She had interfered in his sick game.
He wanted to crush her.
Take her from her son, forever.
He was one step from her and closing fast. His hands were bringing the bat down when she fired.
The bullet hit Ripley in the gut, but he stayed up. Momentarily stopped. Stunned. Then, filled with renewed rage, he again raised the bat.
Maddie fired a second time, taking a split second more to be sure of her target. Her second shot struck him in the chest.
He remained on his feet, the crimson spot over his heart spreading faster than the red splotch over his stomach. The look in his eyes was pure amazement. He dropped to his knees. Balanced. Quiet. The bat drooped against the floor. His hand opened. The released bat rolled in a tight circle. Then it went still.
“No trial for you, asshole,” Maddie said, scrambling onto her feet. Then she reached out with her foot and pushed him over.
Maddie looked down at the now harmless madman, a man she had known, a man who had done his job, a man who at times had shown humor and kindness, a human shell filled with rot.
“That was for my friend, and for the woman Adam loved, and Abigail Knight, and Folami Stowe, the four women of your apocalypse.”
She checked his pulse.
He was dead.
Maddie let the muzzle of her gun rest against the mattress. She slid her finger out of the trigger housing and her palm off the grip. The gun stilled on the bed.
She called Lieutenant Harrison to tell him that Dr. Ripley was the Beholder. That she had put him down. That he would not be getting back up.
The lieutenant whistled. “Are you sure?” he asked, in one of those dumb voices we all use when we don’t know what to say.
“I better be.”
“You got that right, Sergeant, you damn well better be. Listen to me. Don’t do anything. Don’t touch anything of his until I get there. We’ll look together.”
***
After Lieutenant Harrison arrived, he and Maddie searched inside Dr. Ripley’s briefcase. They found a set of scalpels in a plastic food container with a snap-on lid; the container appeared to be the right size to fit the unsolved ring on the nightstand in Abigail Knight’s bedroom. There were also two rolls of the type of tape used on the victim’s lips. The aluminum short bat he had attempted to use on Maddie peacefully rested near the wall, streaked with the blood, tissue and hair of his victims, a horrible sight, but great evidence.
***
An hour later they arrived at Ripley’s home; he lived alone. An evidence team pulled up behind them, accompanied by a doctor of pathology the county had under contract to be available to assist the medical examiner’s office in the event of an overload emergency.
The evidence of Ripley’s guilt was immediately obvious.
The breasts severed from the victims, suspended in jars of watery solution, sat on a shelf along the wall in his bedroom.
They also found five life-size female mannequins. The first, dressed in Folami Stowe’s plaid schoolgirl skirt and white cotton blouse, stood in his bathroom. The second, dressed in Abigail Knight’s blue dress, tirelessly stood in his kitchen. A mannequin wearing KC’s gray poplin slacks and light green blouse waited in his living room. And the mannequin for the woman Lieutenant Harrison loved, Carmen Diaz, stood obediently in Ripley’s dining room. The impressions in the carpets indicated he had periodically swapped their positions.
The surrogate women all wore jewelry and wigs the color of each woman’s hair, coiffed in each victim’s style.
The fifth mannequin, stood naked at the foot of Ripley’s bed, awaiting an outfit, wearing only a wig, the color and style of the hair of Sergeant Madeline Jane Richards.
The department had given Maddie two weeks off. She had spent most of the first week in California with Bradley doing the silly things a mother does with her young son. After getting home, she visited KC’s grave. That night she spent an intimate evening with Gary Packard to celebrate his having been cleared by the Chicago police of the murder of his wife. Gary left for Chicago the next morning.
That same day, Lincoln Rogers had called and told Maddie he was coming. And she was glad, really glad. The Beholder case had been one horror after another, and Maddie could no longer keep what she felt to herself. And when she had heard Linc’s voice, she had known she would no longer need to keep it all bottled up inside.
How had she become convinced that being a cop meant that she couldn’t feel? Had it gone back to her father? No. She was not about to blame her hang-ups on him. Was it because her love for her ex-husband had led her in the wrong direction? No. That had happened to a lot of women and was a feeble excuse at best.
Maddie had no easy answers, but as she stood by the window, watching for the lights of Linc’s car, she knew that life would keep coming. She also knew that she was ready.
THE END
I would love to hear from you now that you have finishing reading the story. I can be reached by email at [email protected]. Please, no attachments, I won’t open them. For those of you who write or who aspire to write, I encourage you to continue writing until your prose lives on the pages the way it lives in your mind. If you have found errors of fact or location, I would like to hear about them. As for any errors you might imagine in spelling or punctuation or capitalization, please let me rest in peace. There are many conventions and styles with regard to these matters, and I often have characters speak incorrectly intentionally, for that is how I envision that character would speak. I promise to personally reply to all emails that respect these requests, and, with your email address, I will send you announcements for my upcoming novels; you will find the working titles and approximate release dates for each of my future stories shown near the front of this novel.
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An excerpt from another David Bishop novel,
Who Murdered Garson Talmadge, a Matt Kile Mystery
begins on the following page. Matt Kile is a mystery series character with two novels out as of this date and a short story mystery planned for around October of 2012. If you will email me at
mailto:[email protected]
I’ll see that you get an email announcing new releases. Thank you for reading my novel.
Prologue
It’s funny the way a kiss stays with you. Lingers. How you can feel it long after it ends. I understood what amputees meant when they spoke of mystery limbs. It’s there, but it isn’t. You know it isn’t. But you feel it is. While I was in prison, my wife divorced me. She said I destroyed our marriage in a moment of rage in a search for some kind of perverted justice. I didn’t think it was perverted, but I didn’t blame her for the divorce.
But that’s enough sad stuff. Yesterday I left the smells and perversions of men and, wearing the same clothes I had worn the last day of my trial, reentered the world of three-dimensional women, and meals you chose for yourself. My old suit fit a bit looser and had a musty smell, but nothing could be bad on a con’s first day of freedom. I tilted my head back and inhaled. Free air smelled different, felt different tossing my hair and billowing my shirt.
I had no excuses. I had been guilty. I knew that. The jury knew that. The city knew that. The whole damn country knew. I had shot the guy in front of the TV cameras, emptied my gun into him. He had raped and killed a woman, then killed her three children for having walked in during his deed. The homicide team of Kile and Fidgery had found the evidence that linked the man I killed to the crime. Sergeant Matthew Kile, that was me, still is me, only now there’s no
Sergeant
in front of my name, and Detective Terrence Fidgery. We arrested the scum and he readily confessed.
The judge ruled our search illegal and all that followed bad fruit, including the thug’s confession. Cute words for giving a killer a get-out-of-jail-free card. In chambers the judge had wrung his hands while saying, “I have to let him walk.” Judges talk about their rules of evidence as though they had replaced the rules about right and wrong. Justice isn’t about guilt and innocence, not anymore. Over time, criminal trials had become a game for wins and losses between district attorneys and the mouthpieces for the accused. Heavy wins get defense attorneys bigger fees. For district attorneys, wins mean advancement into higher office and possibly a political career.
They should take the robes away from the judges and make them wear striped shirts like referees in other sports.
On the courthouse steps, the news hounds had surrounded the rapist-killer like he was a movie star. Fame or infamy can make you a celebrity, and people treat celebrity like virtue.
I still see the woman’s husband, the father of the dead children, stepping out from the crowd, standing there looking at the man who had murdered his family, palpable fury filling his eyes, his body pulsing from the strain of controlled rage. The justice system had failed him, and, because we all rely on it, failed us all. Because I had been the arresting officer, I had also failed him.
The thug spit on the father and punched him, knocking him down onto the dirty-white marble stairs; he rolled all the way to the bottom, stopping on the sidewalk. The police arrested the man we all knew to be a murderer, charging him with assault and battery.
The thug laughed. “I’ll plead to assault,” he said. “Is this a great country or what?”
At that moment, without a conscious decision to do so, I drew my service revolver and fired until my gun emptied. The lowlife went down. The sentence he deserved, delivered.
The district attorney tried me for murder-two. The same judge who had let the thug walk gave me seven years. Three months after my incarceration, the surviving husband and father, a wealthy business owner, funded a public opinion poll that showed more than eighty percent of the people felt the judge was wrong, with an excess of two-thirds thinking I did right. All I knew was the world was better off without that piece of shit, and people who would have been damaged in the future by this guy, would now be safe. That was enough; it had to be.
A big reward offered by the husband/father eventually found a witness who had bought a woman’s Rolex from the man I killed. The Rolex had belonged to the murdered woman. The husband/father convinced the governor to grant me what is technically known in California as a Certificate of Rehabilitation and Pardon. My time served, four years.
While in prison I had started writing mysteries, something I had always wanted to do, and finally had the time to do. When I got out, I had a literary agent and a publisher. I guessed, they figured that stories written by a former homicide cop and convicted murderer would sell.
My literary agent had wanted to meet me at the gate, but I said no. After walking far enough to put the prison out of sight, I paid a cabbie part of the modest advance on my first novel to drive me to Long Beach, California, telling the hack not to talk to me during the drive. He probably thought that a bit odd, but that was his concern, not mine. If I had wanted to gab, I would have let my literary agent meet me. This trip was about looking out a window without bars, about being able to close my eyes without first checking to see who was nearby. In short, I wanted to quietly absorb the subtleties of freedom regained.
Six Years Later:
I had been about to walk out my door to have breakfast with the tempting Clarice Talmadge and her septuagenarian husband, Garson Talmadge, without knowing Garson would be skipping breakfasts forever, not to mention lunches and dinners. The Talmadges lived on my floor, at the end of the hall on the corner with a balcony overlooking the white sand shoreline of Long Beach, California. Then my phone rang. It was Clarice, but she hadn’t called to ask how I liked my eggs. The cops were with her and they hadn’t been invited for breakfast.
A uniformed officer halted me at the door to the Talmadge condo. “My name’s Matt Kile,” I said, “I was asked to come—”
The saxophone voice of Detective Sergeant Terrence Fidgery interrupted, “Let ‘im in.”
