The East Avenue Murders (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 1) (3 page)

“Detective Rogers, Police Department,”
she shouted, knocking loudly on the door. “I need to talk to you!” Her fists were hurting from pounding the hard wood of the doors. She and the officer waited then she knocked once again. The pressure of her touch moved the door inward. It was not only unlocked it had been left partly open. When she pushed the knob, the door swung open by itself on oiled hinges, revealing a duplicate apartment to the crime scene in 507. A small room with the obligatory kitchen and hard chair were visible through the door.

“
Oh no,” she said to the uniformed officer, though the remark was mostly to herself. Maude’s bad feeling had just gotten worse. The air in the room was as odorous as the crime scene in 50, and all her senses were on alert. The buzzing of a different family of flies filled the small apartment, moving together in groups, as though they were a solid mass.

The detective’s job in Homicide and a long retirement afterward were Maude
’s career goals. She never cared for upward movement in the department, and even though there was the bias in the way women were treated on the force, still she lived for what she did on the job. The thrill of the catch was what she loved. Admittedly, some of her cases smelled worse than rotten fish. It was at those times true dedication to the job made a cop voluntarily enter a place of horror.

The door
to the small bathroom was ajar as though the last person who departed had been too hurried to close it. There was nothing in the small room other than the usual furnishings. Maude gently closed the door, stepping lightly away toward the sleeping area, her weapon trained on the bed where a large lump lay covered by an identical coverlet to the one across the hall.

Struck by the unusual circumstances of the coverlets
, Maude held off pulling the fabric back from the bed, taking time to look the room over. She dreaded the possibility of another crime scene, but knew the elements were there. On the floor in front of the bed lay a white bathrobe, the kind that hotels and cruise ships give to VIP customers. It was smeared with blood on one side. Maude’s guts roiled, the dread in her a stimulus to nausea.

There was a minute possibility that under the coverlet lay a sleeping person
, one who would rise up with indignation at being disturbed by strangers in the room. Maude hoped that was the case, but it was not to be. She borrowed a fresh pair of latex gloves from the assisting officer and pulled the coverlet back, exposing a dead body. A carbon copy in its mutilated state, the body lay decomposing like the victim in 507. Both breasts had been hacked off and the raw flesh grayed and shriveled with the passing of time. Maggots were present in the second victim also, an indication that the time of the murder had coincided with the first. The mouth and chest were the feeding ground for the pale, voracious, flesh eaters.

The b
lood on the victim’s face, neck and chest had sourced from a large slash wound in her left temple near the carotid artery, possibly the cause of death. The extra damage inflicted on the woman was no doubt entertainment for a demented killer who found pleasure in torture. The second murder appeared in its grisly reproduction to be the work of the same person or persons who killed the woman in 507.
.

Wanting another cigarette
, but knowing it was off limits at the crime scene, Maude took out her phone to make the call across the hall. She had stayed in the room paying homage to the dead woman, giving silent tribute to the life taken by a monster. After she dialed the lieutenant’s number, the phone rang several times before he finally answered.

“Patterson here,” he said brusquely.

She was silent for a minute, not quite sure how to tell her boss that his evening away from home had just been lengthened.

“Uh, Boss, you need to come
across the hall to Apartment 509,” she said through the crackling of static over the phone.
The reception was poor but it was better than yelling through
the door
.

“What do you need?”
he impatiently replied. “I’m busy over here.”

“Trust me, Boss, you need to come over here,” she said again.

“Oh alright, I’ll be there in a minute.” Patterson growled, disconnecting the phone.

Maude stayed near the door with the street cop
, waiting for her supervisor. With knees ready to buckle from the strain of the long day she waited for him to arrive. When the door opened she gave him the look, the one that said
we’ve been screwed
.

“Maude, what
do you want?” Patterson asked loudly. The increased volume of his voice was an indication of his frustration. She could tell he was ready to leave, to finish up the day.

“In the bed, B
oss, go check the bed,” she wearily insisted. Maude stayed where she was, delaying the necessity to look one more time. The breasts’ removal touched a nerve within her because of the violence and the obvious hatred from the killer.

The commission of
such an act in room 507 might have been a trip into insanity for the killer, but a replay of the horror in room 509 revealed a need to shock and horrify all who came to observe. He had thrown down the gauntlet and he alone knew where he would strike next. A buzz of worry was beginning in her. They had to find the killer before he murdered again.

She knew
she could put it off no longer and stepped into the sleeping area alongside her lieutenant. Surprisingly, he was calm and observant, his language without expletives.

“Did you touch anything Maude?” he asked.

“No sir, just the coverlet-with gloves.” She added.

“That’s good. I’m sending this officer across the hall to get a team and I want
them to split up and get this room photographed and printed chop-chop,” he said, indicating the street cop who had entered the room with Maude.

Later, after
the noise was over and the extra personnel left, the coroner showed up. His findings were that both young women were probably killed by the same person or persons. He stated that there were too many possible causes for the deaths of both victims, but it appeared that they had both been dead for several days. His information was a repeat of the words Maude had already used. Only an autopsy would tell the cause.

The large amount of blood found under the bodies gave the coroner reason to believe that the women’s breasts had been removed while they were still alive. Speculation was that the breast mutilation was
done by a gardener’s tool or other roughly serrated blade resembling a small saw. The flesh with the nipples attached was not found. No one wanted to voice the word, trophies.

As an afterthought, the coroner ventured a more exact time
of death, based upon the decay of the bodies, the bloating, and the presence of both maggots and flies. His best approximation was the victims were killed about six days earlier. That estimation allowed for generations of flies to reproduce. Due to the large number
of the insects in the rooms, the coroner believed at least one or more generations had already hatched. Samples of the maggots were taken to determine if they were the same type of fly larvae in each victim.

Maude was weary. Her wristwatch hands were sitting on nine o’clock and the streets
outside were already dark .There was little activity in the building. The extra officers who went door-to-door found no one who saw or heard anything. The responses were not unexpected. Seldom did anyone ‘see anything’ if it meant telling it to the police.

The crime scene techs had photographed both apartments, taking them apart to capture any prints
, blood or body fluids on film. The bodies had been removed and transported to the coroner’s office where autopsies would be performed. Blood on the carpet was scraped and put into containers for testing at the lab and the victims had been photographed by two different lab techs. Both women had fingers that were broken in different places, but no determination could be made about those injuries. The tips were printed, and Maude was hoping for an identification of the victims before the night was over.

She
had done her part by looking for residents to question. Sometimes comparing the answers given by potential witnesses gave a cop a lead. Not this time though. The lack of response to door-knocking showed her a thing or two. Some of the people were scared, and they weren’t talking. Thinking they might come around was a pipe dream.

Finding
both dead bodies made the case hers to solve. The women were young, between eighteen and twenty-five, and Maude felt a pang of sadness for their lost young lives. Still, she knew that no matter what happened, a cool head without emotion would be needed to find the man who had killed and mutilated them. In a weak moment she had vowed to cut back on her nightly gin until the murders were solved. Already that promise was a source of regret.

The clock showed ten-thirty when Maude finally arrived at her house on the outskirts of town. She liked it there. It had been her mother’s house, inherited from
her
mother complete with two stories of real wood siding, brick walkways and brick at the base of the structure. Maude had added a metal roof, gutters and a rainwater system for protection against the Texas droughts. The large water container behind her house supplied water to both her house and the rent house down the hill. A college student and her friend lived there at the time sharing the rent.

Mary Ellen was an easy tenant, careful and respectful of others. What she did in the house was
her business as long as she didn’t damage the building. When Maude drove up and parked her unmarked car, she noticed that Mary Ellen’s bike was not on the front porch. The bike was transportation from home to school and work. Maude figured the restaurant job was keeping her tenant busy after school. Smiling, she remembered being twenty years old with the world in her hands.

The night was not over for her, there was
still work to be done. She had to organize the evidence from both crime scenes and try to make some sense of it. The gin bottle called to her but for a while she held out, working through the need. She smoked her cigarettes one after the other, inhaling deeply trying to rid herself of the smell of death. A hot shower and strong soap hadn’t done it for her, but she knew that eventually, it would go away.

The menthol from the muscle rub lotion served two purposes. It helped her sore knees
, and quelled the lingering death odors. She had applied it liberally after her shower, wondering as always how the smell of decayed human flesh could stick to the pores of her body even after a vigorous washing.

Frank Almondera had disappeared
with no sign of him anywhere. CID had posted an
all-points bulletin
asking the public and law enforcement to call the Madison Police Department should anyone see the man. Almondera was a petty drug dealer, not someone she ‘liked’ for the killings. His
modus operandi
was too simple. Get the drugs. Sell the drugs. Maude had checked his file and couldn’t find a history of violence. She was beginning to think maybe Almondera might have been a victim as well. He had been scheduled for court but no one had seen him since he got out of jail on bond.

The gin bottle won out
and over the first two fingers Maude began putting it together.
Whatever had happened to Almondera occurred at least two weeks earlier. The woman in his apartment was killed about six days ago. What had tied them together
? Thinking about the dead woman she picked up the phone and called the lab and asked to speak to the night supervisor. She was told that the prints of the two victims gave up nothing, no identifiers at all which could mean anything. Even dental records were run without any success.

Maude Rogers was a persistent person
who seldom gave up when the odds were against her even when the situation appeared to be hopeless. That night she worked until long after midnight then the gin called her again, burning its way to her stomach, blocking the memory of the horrors of the day.

The next morning came with typical summer weather. A
hot humid atmosphere had seeped into the house in spite of the artificial air that kept the temperature lowered with each cycle of the air conditioning unit. She slept fitfully until the alarm went off, tossing and turning, needing to go to the bathroom, but putting it off until the last minute. Her stomach felt queasy and her head seemed blown up three times its normal size. She got out of bed and dragged herself to the bathroom, turned the light on then quickly turned it off after glancing into the mirror.

The woman in the
reflection was tall and thin with a mop of mostly gray curly hair that had never been obedient to the comb. The color and texture had been modified somewhat by one of the box colors from the shelves of the large grocery store. She needed a haircut and couldn’t decide about a new application.  Maybe she would let the color grow off to rat gray.

“Not much of a choice
,” she said aloud. Her ears flapped a little but not enough to be clown-like and her lips-her best feature-were still full. She stuck out her tongue in the mirror and was greeted with the grayness cause by an acid belly.

“God, I
’m all gray,” she said to herself, moving slowly to allow her knees and back to readjust to standing. “I feel gray.” Her blue eyes were steady, but cloudy, from the early morning pain of arthritis and a headache. She lit an unfiltered cigarette and sat down on the commode, smoking while her head cleared.

“I wonder if I should stop drinking?” she asked herself. “Maybe go to meetings.” She knew some people who went. Some of
them got sober. Some didn’t. “What do I do instead of drinking?” she wondered.

L
ong pajamas were thrown aside as she stepped into the shower, grimacing at the cold water that poured from the big round shower head. Someone had told her to have it installed and she did, but hated it from the first use. Whichever faucet she turned on first created a reservoir of water inside the shower head. The MF would wait until she climbed in and adjusted the other faucet then a small cold lake would dump its load on her.

“
Those kinds of surprises could make a person rethink home ownership,” Maude grumbled to herself.

Soaping in the shower
made her remember that it was the day of the week she always checked her breasts for lumps hoping to get ahead of breast cancer in case it should start growing. So far she was cancer free. Her mother had died at fifty five from the terrible growth which made Maude more susceptible to the disease. The memory of her mother’s suffering was still clear and powerful. The gin bottle first started talking to her back then. She was newly thirty-five, still young and trying to contend with the pain of grief. The booze helped. She started drinking a little at a time, just as a pain killer. Problem was she never stopped.

Three aspirin and a cup of strong coffee later, Maude was thinking clearly, rehashing the day and night before. She was puzzled by the lack of clues from both of the murders. Nothing obvious had been found at the crime scene, the hairs
on the victims’ bodies were their own. Not enough time had passed yet to know if they were raped. The kitchen of 507 was a mess, but whoever handled the food containers must have worn gloves. So no prints, not even the victim’s. The same went for the refrigerator and the stove. Did he hand feed his victims or did he starve them?

Unless they were restrained at all times t
he women would have handled the food containers during meals. The coroner said nothing about restraints and Maude hadn’t seen any signs indicating bruising at the wrists of either of the victims. It could all come out in the autopsy. The wrists weren’t the only place to restrain someone. She remembered a case in the past where a woman was locked in a basement for days, restrained by a chain wrapped around her waist then around her ankles and through an iron bed frame. There was no end to the misery that evil people could invoke upon their victims.

After a second
dose of caffeine and two more cigarettes she dressed to go back to the crime scene for another look. Something about the first room bothered her and she couldn’t put a finger on it. Usually on her day off a list of domestic chores were lined up to be done, but the memory of the victims’ mutilated bodies was too strong to put aside.

A
tree saw seemed an unlikely weapon. It was a difficult tool to use even on hard wood. The time the killer spent getting the teeth set just right, positioning the saw for maximum cutting must have been extensive. A saw with a blade about ten inches long was a possible weapon, the type commonly purchased for removing small limbs from trees and bushes. It would have been sharp enough to cut through tender young flesh.

The coroner said the ragged cuts were not the cause of death. The victims were still alive after the blooding. Maude could he
ar their agonized screaming in her head. The killer must have liked the results of the first amputations so much he had to do it again exactly the same. The thrill of reenacting the slaughter took him to apartment 509.

There were several tests
results that would be available the following Monday. They might answer some of her questions though not soon enough to make her happy. The crime lab was partially dependent upon the feds files and
those
people didn’t work weekends.

The yellow tape was on the building when Maude
got there. She began to climb the stairs that seemed steeper the second day especially because her calves were sore and there was a new savage pain in the bend of her left knee. She really needed to go to the gym more regularly. Truth was, she needed to lose a few years. On the landing of the second floor, Maude stopped and looked down the corridor, hoping to talk to someone who lived there. Her intent was not to question them about the murder, but to feel them out about the people who came and went from the apartment building and the times of day that were the busiest.

There was a small boy about six years old at the end of the landing sitting on the filthy torn carpet rolling a ball against the wall in the same way that people have been rolling balls since rubber was first made round.
The wall would fire it back to the kid after he threw it. Sometimes it went away from him, but the ball roller was patient and would go get it and sit back down.

“Hey kid, what’s your name?” she asked. He sat quietly staring straight
ahead. She got nothing out of him. Somebody had taught him to never talk to cops. “Hey Junior, you’re pretty good with that ball.” The kid turned his eyes toward her, keeping his body rigid, prepared to jump and run.

“Yeah, I have a ball like that only mine won’t bounce. My ball yells ‘ouch’ when I throw it against the wall,” she went on.

The boy grinned for a minute, knowing she was lying but liking the sound of it. “What else does it say?” the kid asked her, continuing to bounce his silent ball.

“My ball calls me bad names,”
she said, watching him giggle. “You live here or just visiting?”

He nodded
, warming up to her.

“Your mama live in that apartment behind you
?” she asked him.

The boy
quickly lost his friendliness when she spoke of his mama. She figured he didn’t have a mama or had been warned to keep his mouth shut about her.

The kid jumped and ran to the door at the end of the hal
l, slamming it after he went through. He returned after a minute or two to open the door a little, peeking out through the small opening. Maude heard a loud female voice yelling from inside the apartment.

“Maurice, wha chew doin? Shut that door
!” The boy looked at Maude, regret in his eyes as he closed the door.

She
thought about the exchange with the kid and wondered if he would be in the hall later. It was obvious to her that if anything had happened in the building he might have seen it. She decided to look on the way back and see if the boy had returned. Who knows? She might even find him another ball.

All of the apartments had been
visited by police. The residents were singly questioned about what they had seen or heard during the previous two weeks. No one saw anything. A good investigator knew to keep asking even though the answer was usually no. Sometimes a guilty conscience would cause an honest man or woman to step forward and tell what they had seen. Maude wanted to go back and ask around but she needed a partner to go with her. She also needed to talk to the Boss to find out what was up with Maxwell, if he was coming back to work.

The tape was the same across the doors at 507 and 509 just like it was downstairs at the front of the building. Maude had a master key that would let her through the police locks
. A homicide detective might have to return to the scene several times before the case was put to rest or solved. She stood for a minute outside 507 thinking about what was inside the apartment.

Pulling one of
her unfiltereds from its crumpled pack she lit up, inhaling deeply of the smoke, blowing it out her nose with pleasure. Funny how a cigarette tasted so good at times. She wondered if she was destined to have lung cancer because of her habit then chided herself for being obsessed with the big C. Someone would probably shoot her before cancer ever got close.

The stink of the apartments hadn’t dissipated
with the removal of the bodies in fact the raw odor had migrated to the hallway. CID had taken the trash to the lab to look for anything connected with the murders, but the filth was still on the floor coating the thin faded carpet just outside the doorways. Groaning with the effort, Maude stooped toward the floor, bending her knees to see what might have been missed by the techs. As far as she could tell they hadn’t missed anything. The carpet though grossly stained had been swept clean of even the smallest items. She was about to rise to her height floor when out of the corner of her eye she spotted two small feet.

“Hey kid,
it’s good to see you, but you aren’t supposed to be up here,” she said.

“Yeah, ah know.” the kid volunteered.