The East Avenue Murders (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 1) (10 page)

When Maude left the clerical section, she quickly made her way
back to Homicide and burst through the door of the lieutenant’s office, explaining what she had discovered about Chris Cole. She told him the man who had met her at the door of her rent house was a white male and the real Chris Cole was black. She also explained her concern for her renter’s welfare.

“
Boss, it was him last night playing a game, pretending to be someone he’s not. It was all set up to show what a genius he is and what fools we are. And I fell for it, took him at his word and all the time he was laughing at me, at us. We need to get some officers over there and call the crime lab to print the front door where the suspect stood holding the door knob trying to get rid of me. We have to find out if he has hurt Mary Ellen.”

“Get a warrant Maude
. Even though you own the house, we need to have everything legal.”

“No warrant necessary, Boss, it
’s in my rent contract, I can go in anytime to check on the house if I believe my property’s been damaged.”

Three patrol cars, the van from the crime lab, and Maude’s unmarked car arrived at 2231 Bradley within fifteen minutes and immediately officers began surrounding the house
with weapons drawn, a bullhorn in Maude’s hand amplified her command to ‘come out with your hands up’. They were greeted with silence from the house, the quiet overwhelming in its significance.

The trip to Mary Ellen’s had been fast and rough, the old beat up car bouncing Joe off the seat cushion at every pothole, its worn springs loose and useless. The ride had been silent except for radio traffic. When they
had arrived at the house, Joe jumped out of the car and went around to Maude’s side supporting whatever role she decided to take. She was grateful to have him nearby.

The officers stationed around the house waited for
her to make a move. She felt the pressure to end the standoff, to enter the house and answer her own questions. The door waited unopened, and in her need to get into the house she rushed forward placing herself out of the line of fire from inside. The knob turned easily opening the latch. She touched the side of the door and pushed, waiting while the gentle pressure from her touch swung the door inside. Joe had made it to the opposite side of the door ready to rush inside whenever she gave the word.

Caution was the name of the game because Maude remembered Mason Aldridge and the bullet that took him down so many years ago. The killer was twisted and enjoyed the shock value of his work, dismissing human life as unimportant except as a means to his own ends. He would maim and kill as it pleased him with no remorse.

They entered the house as a team, while the officers outside covered the back door and the windows, ever watchful for any sign of the man they sought. He was nowhere in sight. The forensics team was next in the door once the all clear sign went out. No one was allowed in, except the Homicide detectives, and the lab techs. Maude wished she could be anywhere else other than among Mary Ellen’s possessions, about to enter the rooms where the young woman spent her most intimate hours. She felt like praying, like asking Divine intervention in Mary Ellen’s life but in her gut she knew her request to God had come too late.

The silence in the house was broken by Joe and Maude entering the bedroom doors, opening them and taking a self-defensive stance, prepared for the gunshot that could come from out of nowhere. The spare bedroom was an office setup to accommodate Mary Ellen’s school work
. Her desk contained her computer, and on the opposite side of the room, an easy chair had been added as an afterthought. The room appeared to be untouched by intruders other than a small note on the laptop’s power button that said, “Push Me”. Maude stared for a moment then motioned one of the techs toward the computer, indicating the need to print and photograph all of it, the note, the machine, and the desk. She moved on around the room, postponing the terror and the fear that her sweet renter, her friend, was the latest casualty of the diabolical fiend who took the lives of women and humiliated them long after they were dead.

The next bedroom waited
and Maude balked at entering it at first, then steeled herself to whatever lay ahead. At first glance the room seemed in order. The bedcovers straightened, the floor clean just as Mary Ellen would have left it. Her housekeeping skills were always appreciated by Maude who was somewhat of a slob. Nothing seemed amiss until she glanced toward the bathroom.

About
five years earlier before there was a plumbing leak in the rent house and Maude had to call a plumber to fix it. He gave her the bad news that the pipes in the room were old and crusted and needed to be replaced. Along with that bad news he made it even worse with the estimated cost of the repairs.

She had thought about the room and how old fashioned it was
, with its small tub and low shower. While she was willing to spend the money for the repairs needed, she was more willing to spend even more and redo the whole room with modern facilities and new paint for the walls. Pristine white paint with a gold filigreed paper strip separating walls from ceiling replaced dingy flowered wallpaper put there thirty years earlier. Mary Ellen had moved in soon after and loved the clean lines of the high sided tub and gold accented towel racks.

Today when
Maude searched for the clean whiteness of her renter’s bathroom, she thought for a minute that some crazy artist had been at it, the resulting design a series of red brown swathes and circles decorating a once bare white canvas. The lavatory was awash with the same paint and the mirror above reflected that sad and terrible color. Holding her breath, she hoped for the dizziness that follows a hallucination, expecting her vision to clear at any moment, but it would not.

The sparking shower with the modern bathtub was no longer recognizable for in it
and on it was the body and the blood of a black male who fit the description of the real Chris Cole. He was positioned for the greatest shock value. Maude turned her head away, feeling guilty for being glad it was the young man and not Mary Ellen in the bathtub.

He had taken the curly
-haired man with a sap behind the ear. Pop, pop, twice for good measure, he walloped the unsuspecting man who was entering the house, key in hand. Oh he loved surprises! Especially when it was for someone else! The security lock had opened from the outside with a smooth shiny key that he now caressed in his pocket, so cool against his skin. Almost like the feel of cool skin against skin. He giggled with a memory of the curly-haired man struggling against him, their bodies close together, so close. He re-pictured the moment when the dark-skinned chest had been splayed across the porcelain tub bottom, hands tightly tied behind him, buttocks in the air, his belly resting across the edge of the tub.

“The bathtub sides, oh thank you M
other, for buying the premium line!”

The modern high
sided tub with non-skid bottom, durable plastic over porcelain provided the perfect perch upon which his victim had lain helpless frantically jerking the muscles in his abdomen and lower back. The pillow on the floor in front of the tub was
his
and he had rested his lower body upon it until time came to rise up and complete the final act. 

He remembered the man’s long legs, one
tied to the porcelain commode, the other to a towel rack on the wall. He remembered the music playing at full volume and how he had reached around the strong neck. Once again savoring the moment, he recalled the old fashioned straight razor with its carefully honed edge. It slithered along the man’s neck and struck the jugular as easy as pie squirting warm blood into the air in time with the crashing cymbals from the MP3 player. Oh, how he loved concerts.

Next
came the cleanup. Oh and the paint, yes, the paint had been perfect, so much better than the dull white of the walls! The kid had used his gloves to paint the beautiful designs. She would like that. She would try to locate bits and pieces and finger prints, hoping to find him, but it wasn’t time yet. Under the leather gloves he had worn a pair of good rubber gloves also. What if the leather wasn’t enough! He had been fooling Mother for such a long time and she must not find him. He laughed again as the fire in the big blue barrel burned both the leather and the rubber gloves, the booties that had covered his feet, the condom, and the clothes that were stripped from the curly-haired man.

“Tsk, tsk. Mustn’t leave any evidence
,” he shouted, feeling so good that a few quick runs around the barrel seemed appropriate. “Mustn't take too long,” he sang. “There’s so much more to be done!”

Joe had bounced along in the old car then gone with Maude through the
front door of the house, determined to be there for her every minute. His liking for the older woman was equal to the respect he had for her knowledge and experience. She reminded him of every good cop he had ever known and just a little of his grandmother. He knew she had used his youth to her advantage a couple of times, but it worked, and that’s what a team did. Today you get the chicken and I get the feathers but tomorrow it’s a different chicken. The business with this killer was spooky. If Maude was right and the
Heartless Killer
from Chicago had come to Texas, he had changed his M.O. Joe remembered reading about the killings when he was in training at the academy and at least one lesson was taught about psychotic behavior in criminals using the
Heartless Kille
r as an example.

‘
Generally they exhibit repetitive behavior-the killing is always for a deep personal reason-a brutal justification for a madman-and it was usually carelessness or the desire to tell someone about the crimes that ended the killing spree’.

Now this
, the black male in the bathtub horribly murdered and apparently sexually assaulted, the killer had run the gamut of deviance. His crimes against the women were obviously hate inspired but the most recent one seemed to be for personal fulfillment. There was definitely a screw loose in the perpetrator’s brain. Also, Maude seemed very detached, and it worried Joe. She was off her game a little, maybe because she knew the girl and was afraid for her. Either way, it wasn’t the best way to go about police work as even a rookie like Joe could figure out. His job would be to make up for what his partner couldn’t do.

The techs were through in the first bedroom, the earlier clean room now spotted with black powder. The monitor on the computer had been pr
inted but the screen was clean. The button that said “
Push Me”
was waiting for Maude as senior detective to look first into the sick mind of the killer. Joe took notes recalling the incidents of the evening, from the beginning of his and Maude’s wild ride from the station to the house. His notes were short and to the point. Joe was busy writing when he stopped and looked up to see Maude entering the room, a cigarette in her hand. Her face was haggard. The last few minutes she spent observing the body of the victim in the bathroom must have been hell, Joe thought. She nodded at Joe, indicating he should look inside the room.

Maude felt a sense of guilt, believing that the killer had bloodied
the house to get her attention. The victim was a convenient and pleasant diversion but unimportant. Anyone would have served his purpose. The weight of that knowledge tugged her shoulders down. A wave of overwhelming sadness rolled over her quickly replaced with red hot rage
. My God,
she thought,
am I losing my mind? Can all this really be happening?

The button that the killer wanted her to push
was the computer on/off control, a small round switch under the screen. She sat down to maintain her balance knowing it was going to be very bad, that she would feel the pain the madman wanted for her. When the computer queued, a screensaver popped up, first a flash of red, then slowly it settled into a still shot, a close-up taken somewhere inside a dark cave. A small gas-operated generator was positioned at the edge of the photograph in a corner of the cave pumping out electricity for the bright light that shined directly on Mary Ellen’s naked skin, her goose-bumped flesh highlighted by the harshness of the overhead bulb. Directly behind her was a tall backboard of unknown height upon which two hooks were fastened. One held the end and the other held the beginning of a thick-linked chain. All slack had been removed as the length of chain wrapped twice, once beneath her breasts and the other around her waist, biting into bare skin as it contained her.

In a parody of compassion, a
piece of bright red fabric had been folded once and placed between Mary Ellen’s skin and the metal chain directly under her breasts. An expression of pure terror was on the young woman’s face, her eyes wide open, the pupils dilated into black holes, but there was no blood on her body. Her mouth was open in a silent scream, but whatever bloody diabolical action the killer was going to perform had not begun prior to the photograph.

A crude sign was in the forefront of the picture, clearly written with a black marker. It said
,
“5 hours from midnight, Mother”.
Maude avoided looking into the soft brown eyes; the pain was too big to put down once she embraced it. Mary Ellen’s body hung from the hooks, never quite touching the mound of dirt and small rocks an inch below her toes.

Nothing about the floor or the walls looked familiar, just a cave
somewhere in the hills of Texas or so Maude assumed. The madman could have taken the woman anywhere, but she believed it was one more cruel game in which she was a player, this time a central figure. For the life of her nothing jumped out as to reason why she had been pulled so deeply into the intrigue.

Why her renter and friend? Why did he come to Texas to start his sick path of destruction? What was it about Maude that drew the man to her, seeking her out in his
rampage? ‘Five hours from midnight’, what did that mean? Which midnight? Mother? Who was Mother? The victim in the bathtub had been dead for several hours, maybe even since last night. Did the killer mean something other than the time of night?
Maude thought hard, what was the meaning? She lit another cigarette, wishing she had a slug of gin to make all the
Heartless Killer
hype easier to take. Her stomach growled-she couldn’t remember her last meal.

Jeez
, what a mess
. Patterson stood apart from the crowd that had gathered, deep in his own reverie. The screensaver had set them all back. Each person who viewed it spent some time in his or her own mental puzzle room searching for the pieces that would make the picture clearer. So far no one had spoken up offering any ideas. Maude looked at Joe and wondered what he thought of his new detail.

The trip back to the station was long and thought
-filled for Joe. One of the deputies who worked the area gave him a ride, a courtesy extended by the county sheriff who believed in cooperation among all agencies. The deputy talked most of the way, explaining how he got the call. He had been at the local hamburger joint when he heard the traffic over his radio and called the county dispatch to get an address.

“There hadn’t been much activity around the outskirts of
Madison for the last three months. The last crime was the robbery of the local liquor store. A little action was too good to pass up, you understand. My buddy and me sit around and watch for out-of-county speeders blow through the lights. Sometimes we pick up some drunks and take them to Madison overnight. We were wondering how the Sheriff is going to handle this murder in his territory.”

Joe looked out the window of the county car that was six years newer than the
city vehicle he and Maude drove-a testament to the allocation of tax money within the law enforcement division. Maude would have registered a disbelieving remark had she been the one in the passenger seat and no doubt, her thoughts would have been verbalized with some peppery language.

A sea
rch Joe had done for Maude produced a list of violent deaths in the city and county for previous eight years. Most of the deaths were caused by situations of family-violence where one known party was guilty of some form of murder or assault resulting in the death of the victim. Most family violence offenders abused alcohol or drugs and often let jealousy come between them and their significant others.

He had no one waiting at home
even though there had been at one time. Five years earlier he had been happily married, never once believing it would all end quickly and painfully. His wife and two kids had waited for him to come home every night. Sheila and he had been high school sweethearts, marrying early, bringing two boys into the world before Joe was twenty one. After he signed on as a technician for the Madison police, Joe discovered he loved the work and began taking night courses to improve his education. He was gone from home a lot with both work and school then one day he got home and she wasn’t there.

The baby sitter had said,
“Mrs. Allen went out and will be back soon.”

Sheila
came back home that night and announced her intention of leaving Joe and going to her mother’s place in California. She said she didn’t want to be married to a cop and since Joe was studying hard to be one, she was leaving and taking the kids. She said he could have visitation privileges when he came to the west coast.

She had a friend who was a judge and helped her make the transition easily from married woman to divorcee. The kids were three and five
and missed their dad at first, crying on the phone that he should come home with them. Before the divorce Sheila had allowed daily phone calls, then twice weekly after the judgment was decreed and she moved to the coast.

Currently
, when he tried to call, Sheila would relay the message that the kids were at a play date and they would call him later, but the phone never rang. He had made several trips to California, usually frustrated at the small amount of time the children wanted to be with him. The little guy, Eric, was at an age where he forgot baby things every day so forgetting his daddy was not out of line.

Joe’s mother
Virginia was a quiet, happy woman who looked at life and saw silver linings in all clouds. She taught Joe to see the best in everything that happened, even in tragedy. When he lost his family, he wanted to dive into loneliness and heartbreak and stay there, but he soon found life too interesting to live in twenty-four hour gloom.

In the five years
since Sheila had dumped him and moved away, Joe had done everything he could think of to get his wife back but the truth was glaring. She didn’t love him and wanted her old single life. In California, her mother was available to sit with the children and Sheila made the bar scenes as often as she could afford it. He had learned to accept it even though the idea was offensive to him. He hoped that when the kids were older they might want to visit him, maybe even live with him.

After the deputy dropped him off at the station, Joe decided to start on his report. The grisly scene at 2231 Bradley Street had to be written
then thought through later. Joe, like Maude was racking his brain about the killer’s meaning of
‘5 hours from midnight
; however, Joe, unlike Maude, didn’t believe that Mary Ellen was still alive waiting for someone to save her. The addition of the word,
‘Mother’,
was both puzzling and upsetting in its illogical placement. Maude had been bewildered with the message, very disturbed that the person who took Mary Ellen would assume any kinship to her.

Joe’s
assessment of the scene came from a compilation of case materials that he had studied in his old position before making the move to Homicide. Profiling had been part of his job with the criminal investigation team. He had begun as a research technician and studied to become a field officer. When the opening came in Homicide, the cherished investigation detail, Joe had applied. His base of information and array of skills saw him through the testing procedure. Mostly he thought it was just dumb luck when the lieutenant over the squad called him with congratulations. It never occurred to him that his appointment could be part of a much bigger strategy, the displacement of Maude Rogers from her post in Homicide and the Madison Police Department.

The phone sat idle. N
o calls had come in since Joe had been back in the office at the Cop Shop. He thought it odd for the evening phone traffic was usually fast and furious but was grateful for the quiet to write his reports. One of the clerks in the warrants section called over the hand-held radio and asked him to come to her office. She said she had found something interesting that he should probably see. She also said she had tried the phone, but kept getting a beeping sound as though there was a problem somewhere within the system.

Joe called on his cell phone and reported the office p
hone outage then quickly wound up his report and headed for the warrant section. The office ran with a limited amount of employees at night keeping expenses at a minimum. The night clerks took care of all the requests from officers for fingerprint results from the various agencies and entered the information in the appropriate data bases. Information found at night would be available in report form the first thing the next morning.

The fingerprint
from the door hinge was a false lead, possibly planted by a criminal mind looking to extend the game. The owner of the print was a street punk who died the year before from a drug overdose. Joe was gratified that he had learned the truth rather than Maude who already had too many setbacks by the killer. Although it was not as easy as the television programs made it out to be, a print could be transferred from one object to another through careful manipulation. Still, he thought he would follow up a little more.

Joe Allen had been the go
-to guy in CID for finding perps who managed to fly under the radar of standard police detecting. His abilities were honed by years of comparing the personality traits and behavioral aberrations of criminals to the average, or normal, man or woman. Give him a computer analysis program plus a little time, and often, a potential subject would emerge from Joe’s comparisons.