The East Avenue Murders (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 1) (2 page)

By the time Maude
climbed the stairs to the fifth floor her feet were feeling the effects of the late August heat and she was huffing, the years of smoking taking their toll. Her gun hand tensed as she climbed onto the fifth floor landing and began the last few steps to apartment 507, the sweat beading on her forehead from the lack of circulating air in the old defunct building. She leaned against the wall for a minute to pull herself together, bracing her body to get better control over her legs, happy that at least she didn’t carry any extra weight.
Thank God for good genes.

Last night’s gin had soured her in her gut pushing up a foul reminder of a night of excess. A deep breath later she spotted the door she needed and moved cautiously toward it.
The hallway had become too quiet, the kids on the lower level suddenly finding other places to be besides the stairwell. Years of police work had taught her a few things. Always wear a vest in dangerous situations and feel the tension of a crowd.

She ha
d one right today and was glad she had worn the vest. The silent building was a screaming message that a bad scene had gone down somewhere close and maybe the danger was still nearby. Lock and load was her response.

Sidling up to the door was hard to do because of the trash littering the floor on both sides up and down the hallway. Old t
akeout trays and pizza boxes were stacked helter-skelter on top of empty twelve pack beer containers. Soup cans with lift back lids buzzed with flies; cockroaches scattered when Maude’s feet touched an empty paper cup lying near the door. The smell was horrendous. Old booze, puke, and unwashed body smells mingled with the spoiled food container odors making the heat almost unbearable.
How could anyone live in such a place?
She wondered.
Maybe they had to be high to stand it.

She stood beside the door and yelled out,
“Police. Open the door. I need to talk to you.”

Rats skittered from the piles of trash causing
her to jump as she knocked on the door once more.
God she hated rats
. Leaning from the outside wall, weapon in hand, she saw the door was already open. A gentle push opened it all the way to a straight-on view of the small living area with minimal furniture. Once again she called out “Police.”

Cautious of being alone Maude was
n’t eager to show herself to whoever might be in the room. No sound came through the space of the opened door, the quiet once again giving her a bad feeling about what waited there. Her weapon went before her when she entered the room, yelling “Police!” over and over, extending her foot to kick the door against the wall.

The smell of putrefaction
assaulted her from the first, the odor thick and strong, coating her clothing and hair. The sweetish smell of rotting flesh activated her gag reflex and she fought the urge to vomit. The hideous droning of swarming flies filled the room, the size of the swarm larger near the bed.

Oh Jeez
, was all she could think.
Those scumbags in CID knew there was trouble here. That’s why I pulled this duty!

The apartment was small, just one and two bedroom kitchenettes in the whole building. At one time it was swanky before the road construction that cut the area off from the downtown train station and contiguous cross streets.
Afterwards the streets became potholed and almost impossible to drive with only beaters or two wheelers making the trip to the front doors of the building. There was a bus two blocks away that came and went three times a day, but ask anyone who lived there about public service. They’d tell you how thinly it was spread through the hood.

The room that greeted Maude with its unholy smell was a twelve by twelve kitchenette
with a small bathroom, closet and sleeping area included. There was air conditioning but the thermostat was turned off producing a stiflingly hot apartment.

A thirteen inch television sat on an orange crate against the wall near the chair.
The small stove and kitchen counter top were covered in the detritus from take-out meals; cockroaches crawled with abandon on empty food cartons and soda cups. The sink-full of dirty dishes gave her an idea about the lack of housekeeping. Aiming her weapon at the bathroom, Maude lightly kicked that door open, the soft impact revealing a filthy four-by-four shower with an adjacent commode. A tiny lavatory sat off to the side crowded into the room leaving little space for a man or woman to stand.

She
stepped away from the bathroom and moved toward the single bed where the dead thing was lying, the sound of flies’ buzzing growing louder as she stepped closer. She hoped it was an animal, really hoped, but she knew in her gut that the covered corpse on the bed had been a living human being.

Moving
next to the bed she found the smell to be even more cloying, the odor an entity owning the bedroom and the object on the mattress. Usually at those scenes someone would have a small jar of chest rub with them. The menthol rubbed on the nose was always a welcome cover for the smell of death.

Maude
pulled rubber gloves from the pouch on her belt and went back to the bathroom where she removed some of the toilet paper from the roll, careful to touch nothing else. A few drops of water on the paper made a temporary mask for her nose, and after applying it, she began breathing through her mouth. Rotted flesh smells always made her nauseous in confined spaces.

The picture of Frank
might be all that she needed. If he was the person in the bed then everyone’s job could have become a lot less complicated. Using her gloved hands to avoid compromising the crime scene Maude gently took hold of the top corner of the red and white bed coverlet and pulled it all the way back, exposing the head and torso of the victim. She almost groaned for the grisly picture of viscous liquids and dark dried blood covering the face and chest lay before her exposing the open maggot-filled hole where the mouth should have been.

The body appeared to be a fully developed
adult human female. The breasts had been hacked off leaving two ragged holes in the chest where other maggots moved slowly back and forth feeding on the decaying flesh. Mature flies, like those that had been buzzing around since Maude opened the front door covered parts of the body, the lightweight coverlet a poor barrier between the victim and the noisy insects.

While t
rying to get her breath and stop gagging, she stepped back and noted the dried blood on the floor directly under the body where it had soaked through the thin mattress. Withdrawing her cell phone from her pocket she dialed her boss, informing him of what she had found.

“
Lieutenant, the warrant serve for CID is not happening today. I went to the address, and found the door open. There’s a dead female here who appears to have been tortured and mutilated, been here a while. Better send out the crew and a guy who knows about flies.”

A dozen expletives flew from James Patterson’s mouth.

“I was getting ready to go home! Just one Friday I’d like to set out on my patio with a cold beer in one hand and one on the table, watching the sunset.”

Maude
chuckled. The boss had thought that by sending her with an arrest warrant for a petty drug dealer he could forget about keeping her busy for the rest of the day. For his part he would have had the CID lieutenant in his debt, never a bad place to be. She probably should have left it alone, but what the heck.

“Yeah
, Boss, I guess you’ll need to be here since we’re working shorthanded during the holiday,” Maude drawled, wishing for a cigarette to complete the satisfaction of screwing him over.

“I’ll be there
detective. CID will get their boys out there with a team to secure the building. We’ll need to knock on doors and find witnesses.”

“Small chance of that
; this place has gone into lock-down in the last fifteen minutes.”

What she really wanted was to get
out of the room. A few steps into the hallway brought a measure of relief from the stench, giving her lungs a chance to breathe in some non-putrefied air. She yearned for nicotine but knew there was no time to smoke.

While waiting for the team to arrive she had to protect the scene with her person. No leaving until she was relieved.
Too many cases were lost in court because of a break in the evidence chain. Her small notebook was in the top pocket of her shirt, and she recorded the facts of the find, noting where the body lay, and how she had observed it, while the details of the room were still fresh in her mind.
Always you wrote the facts,
she thought,
just the facts, no emotional
response must be recorded in the book
. She had stacks of those used books back home in file boxes.
Just like tax forms, you have to keep them forever.

The
traffic cop who arrived soon after was breathless from running up the stairs, and Maude knew the forensic team with the cameras was close behind. Still she waited. Her experience told her that the mistakes she made would be fodder for the critics later. Leaning against the door was restful to her back. Muscles down her vertebrae were tense from the late night partying and the five floor climb. She almost regretted the interruption when CID arrived with their bags and cameras. Right behind them, breathing hard and coughing on the last step was Lieutenant Patterson.

“Okay, Detective, where’s the body? Is this the
place? Has anyone been here and left the room?” The questions were coming from three sides, but the only one she answered was from her supervisor.

“No sir, no one has been here at all except for me,” she said, watching as the techs from the lab dusted the front door for prints after the first of the gloved county photographers entered the door.
“The body is on the bed. I touched the doorknob barehanded and gloved up to pull back the coverlet and use the bathroom faucet. I never entered the kitchen.”

Maude accompanied
Patterson inside the small alcove that made up the bedroom, nodding at the techs that stood back waiting.

“It
’s pretty bad, Boss,” she said.

Once inside
Maude walked straight to the bed and found it undisturbed as she knew it would be. She checked her gloves to make sure they were sound, nodding again at the techs standing off to the side as they waited for the police to do the look-see before they got involved. All those standing in the vicinity of the body were assaulted by the over-ripe smell of human flesh decomposing in a hot room. The flies continued their buzzing, lighting on the live bodies gathered around the bed. An investigator from the crime lab brought out a large container of chest rub and began passing it around, sharing the menthol cover-up with anyone who wanted it.

Maude tol
d her story as it had happened, how she searched for Almondera to serve him with the failure-to-appear warrant, and not finding him she was presented with the crime scene and its grisly offering. After a bit, Patterson released her and some of the uniformed officers to knock on doors for witnesses, the other cops glad to help, grateful they hadn’t been part of the body find.

The need for a cigarette was overpowering by the time she stepp
ed outside the room and lit one.
To hell with policy
, she thought.
It’s a hit building. They cook drugs here over an open
flame.

When the cigarette burned down
she used a soda cup on the floor with a few drops in the bottom to extinguish cigarette’s fire. She was reluctant to see it go as she put the cold butt in her pocket to keep from contaminating the scene. Giving a nod to the traffic cop she readied her notebook as they walked a few paces down the fifth floor corridor looking for someone who might have seen something happening in room 507. The street cops were going door-to-door on the other floors asking for anyone who might have observed strangers in the building. Never could tell what someone might remember.

The first door belonged to 504 just in front of her and Maude knocked on it with authority
.

“
Open up, Police,” she yelled for all to hear.

A
fter two more tries she gave up and wrote down the time and door number in her book. She would be expected to keep an accurate account of the time spent searching for witnesses. Her job was sometimes more record keeping than action, even on days when there were crimes committed and cases to be solved. The end of the story was often played out in the courts where the cops presented written accounts as vital testimony.

She thought about her partner
, one of the most accurate record keepers she had ever worked with, and wondered how he was doing. The boss had given him a few days off after the shooting because he was really messed up about nearly getting killed. The last she heard he was taking a short vacation with his wife and kids, headed to the beach and the clear blue water of Mexico. She hoped he was okay and would be back, but it was doubtful. His wife had been nagging him to quit and go back to work in her daddy’s company. The same old story, she had heard it a few times before, only this time it might just happen. There’s nothing like a near-death experience to wake a man up and make him realize where his treasures lie. She was thinking about that when she and the street cop got to 509, the apartment that was catty-cornered across the hall from the crime scene.