The East Avenue Murders (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 1) (7 page)

The next morning found Maude in her chair needing three things: a cigarette, to go pee and a shower. She groaned from the discomfort of lying in the recliner all night, wishing she had gone to bed instead. The night’s horror was still fresh in her memory, the box in its false gaiety a harbinger of worse things to come.

She considered the years she had to go before retirement and moaned a little in self-pity. Standing was difficult, leaning on the arms of the chair and pushing off as the recliner sat straight up propelled her upwards and forward to a position where she could hobble off to the bathroom, taking her pack of
unfiltereds with her, lighting one as she went.

Sitting down on the porcelain commode she drained her night
’s water, sighing with relief, inhaling the first few puffs of the smoke, pulling it gratefully into her lungs. She sat musing over the great taste of the first cigarette in the morning, wondering if tobacco would be the cause of her death.

The
phone stayed quiet, and Maude decided to enjoy the morning, hoping that it would remain a peaceful interlude. She decided against the shower, and chose instead to take a long soak in the garden tub she had splurged on last year. The jets from the tub soothed her soreness, easing the pain of arthritis from her knees. Sunday was the day she sometimes went to the little Baptist church a few miles from her house,  but after the restless night of wild dreams, she needed to rest and begin a plan to protect herself from the East Avenue murderer.

The sicko knows where I live, who my neighbors are and can watc
h me anytime he chooses,
she thought, stretching her arms and legs above the water in the tub. She wondered why her life was so interesting to the killer, maybe it was just the luck of the draw. Maybe he chose her because she pulled both cases; first in Chicago, and now in Madison. He took a chance last night. He couldn’t have known she would fall asleep in her car, yet he had planned to leave her a big surprise for the next day, believing that she would enter her house then not go out again until the next morning.

“You may be slick and smart but you have a fatal flaw I think. Your ego might be your downfall.”
She said aloud to the killer, wishing he was in hearing distance.

The day passed quickly
, and before she knew, it night had come around. Mary Ellen hadn’t been over, even though she usually came by on her way to the restaurant where she put in the late night hours. Maude had called the warrant section and asked the weekend clerk run a check on Chris Cole. She put a rush on it because she didn’t trust the man, and she didn’t want to think about Mary Ellen working to support a man of his age.

There were many young men out there who would appreciate a beautiful girl with ambition or at least Maude liked to think so. She couldn’t help remembering her new partner and his politeness. She wondered if he was married and how he and Mary Ellen
would take to each other. At least Joe was younger than Chris Cole and had a paying job.

Early Monday morning Maude woke feeling better than she had in a long time, crediting feeling good with the long soak she had taken on Sunday. Arthritis ran in
her family. Her old man had it even though it didn’t kill him as she always hoped it would.

Daniel
Hamilton was the first and the worst criminal in Maude’s life, a real he-man who believed in raising his daughter to be his property. His poking and prodding began when she was a little girl and continued until she had the gumption one day to put his lights out with a stick of cord wood. She told him in no uncertain terms that she would kill him if he came at her one more time, and he better not ever tell her mother. The old pervert stayed around the house after that watching her every move with fear in his eyes, but he never touched her again. One day, shortly before Maude went to Oklahoma to go to college the old man walked away and never tried to return to the house as his home. That was a Glory Hallelujah day in Maude’s and her mother’s life.

When Maude was forty-
three her mother was in the bathroom one morning, drying off from a shower and found a tiny lump in her right breast. She thought it was probably nothing, but she called Maude in Chicago and told her about it. Thus began the many trips from her mother’s house in Madison to the big cancer research hospital in Houston.

Chemotherapy has come a long
way,
Maude thought,
because sixteen years ago, they weren’t so smart with it. Didn’t know as much or have the different kinds of treatments for breast cancer.

Grace
lasted two years from the day she found the lump with Maude in and out of Madison finding as much time as she could to get away from work and be with her mother. But it wasn’t enough. The cancer had grown in spite of the treatments, metastasizing in her other organs, finally settling in her mother’s wonderful brain.

Grace
. Grace was both her mother’s name and the way she lived.
She was a kind and loving woman
, Maude thought
, who deserved far more than the rotten pervert she had married.

Grace
had thought she could change him. There at the last, dying from cancer, Grace asked Maude to forgive her father for being like he was and the harm he had done her. Maude said she would try if it made Grace happy, but she lied. As long as the old man was alive she knew she would hate him.

Her
father came around once after Grace’s death, sniveling and wanting Maude’s forgiveness, but she told him to get off her property because her mother left it to her and he could rot in hell for all she cared. She told him he wasn’t getting any validation or forgiveness from her. After all the years she might have wanted to see and hear about his change of heart, she just didn’t give a good crap now. He had waited much too late.

Coffee and a cigarette had started Maude’s day. She never cared much for breakfast
unless it was tacos or a piece of pecan pie. Grace had always made the best pies, the crunchy pecan topping hiding the true delight of the sweet insides.

Maude decided on a protein bar to begin the day, knowing there would be little time later for lunch. She had to get to the station and report her last two days to the boss. The little notebook in her pocket was about full and needed transcribing
into a couple of reports. It all came down to the paperwork.

The
information on her desk concerned the recent murders, and the individual pages were stacked in order of their arrival. Fingerprints and dental were on the bottom of the stack with the rest on top. Maude glanced at the lab reports, interested in seeing them even though she knew what was written there; extensive dental work had been done on one of the women, but nothing was recorded in the United States. Records with requests had been sent to Interpol using FBI contact information. Maude hoped for something to come from her requests. Her big fear was that the federal men would put two and two together, and try to take over her case. If there was even a hint of a connection with Chicago, they would grab it and Maude would be left in the background.

The clerical staff in the Ho
micide Division had two clerks, one named Alice who was a friend of Maude’s. The other was an older man who didn’t like anyone especially Maude. Several times during her friendship with Alice, Maude had requested her help in a report that needed finessing. She knew that Alice would be discreet when the request for help from Interpol was put on her desk. She hoped there were no bells sounding when the fingerprints and dental records were received.

Alice had
knowledge of the fine-line between a request for help in an ordinary situation and an emergency cry from an organization in trouble. That morning, Maude had asked her to make it an ordinary request for information, to keep a low profile. Cops and staff were pretty much in line about their feelings of doing all the legwork, then having the federal cops strut their stuff, and claim the glory when the case was solved. Alice was glad to help out.

The coroner
’s report was short and to the point. The cause of death appeared to be a six to ten inch blade with a slight curve near the end. The wounds on the victims’ necks were curved, not straight. The breasts had been removed with a six to ten inch tree saw blade, or other large serrated edge use for cutting hard wood or metals. The finding was due to the ragged edges of the cuts on the victims’ bodies. The extensive decay to the skin and tissue at the breast cavity made it difficult to be more definite about the type of weapon used, but a tree saw was named as most likely. The autopsy would show more in-depth information on the victims possibly adding evidence that was needed to find the killer or killers.

Maude was hoping to have an identification of the
victims soon. Somewhere someone might have cared about the women. That was always the worst part of the discovery of a dead body. The family had to be told of the death and then questioned. No cop liked that job but it was necessary, and sometimes proved to be enlightening. Many times the victim was killed by a family member, either accidentally, or because of quick violence brought on by any series of emotions.

Maude had been part of a family notification
after her brother was found dead of a drug overdose soon after their mother died. During the grieving for her mother she was told the sad news of her only brother’s fall into drug usage and the eventual overdose. Police had not suspected foul play or suicide as a reason. It had appeared to be an accidental death, but Maude felt it keenly. Her brother was two years younger and had always blamed her for their father’s departure from the family. She had kept quiet about the old man and his perversions choosing instead to let the boy believe the best about their father. She wished later that she had told him the full story.

There were
two other cases on her desk from the past week’s line up of the poor and the dead. One was a homeless woman found strangled in City Park with a piece of electrical cord still wrapped around her neck. Her face was familiar to most of the downtown cops. Diane Jones was often seen pushing a grocery store cart along the edge of the street picking items from trash dumpsters. She would later take the stuff to the Thrift-for-Profit store on Ninth Street where the proprietor would pay a few pennies for Jones’s treasures.

The woman
had smoked cigars of any kind but didn’t pass up a long cigarette butt if there was one on the ground. Several times before, Maude had seen the woman sleeping on a makeshift bed just inside the park entry near the cops’ beat. Jones had felt it was safe to close her eyes with the patrolling officers nearby.

The morning
that Jones was found dead was rainy; the clothing that covered the woman’s body and the mangled sheets and cardboard that was her meager bed were all drenched. It appeared that Jones had been sleeping just before she died. Another of the homeys found her lying there and called to the cop who was returning from a patrol of the park.

The H
omicide desk was notified, and Maude made a quick trip by the crime scene. After the evidence-gatherers left she made some notes then left the scene, aware that the case would have to wait for her and Joe till Monday morning.

The cop who found the woman said that more than one homeless man had been present when he arrived and found Diane Jones, bla
ck female approximately thirty-seven years old, lying dead in the fetal position near the park entrance. The cop was the initial investigator and Maude needed to talk to him before she could get too far into the case. The officer ran a beat between Ninth and Baker most of the time. His hours presently were six to six, four days a week.
Shouldn’t be too hard to locate him,
she thought.

The other case had been open for two weeks. An old man
named Clyde Davis had removed his clothing, climbed upon his sister’s roof and began shouting, naming his sister as a captor who never let him get away from the house. He also said she had stolen his money.

The next morning the man was found on the lawn of the same house
, his neck broken and the bent end of a crowbar stuck firmly in his back. No prints were found on the crowbar but a red bandana was located on the ground about ten feet from the victim, as though dropped by someone in a hurry. The lab had the bandana. DNA tests were often slow to return after the information was sent out to another agency for processing, meanwhile the owner of the red kerchief probably couldn’t be positively identified.

At the time of his death the victim was being treated for a mental disorder
. He had previously lived in a halfway house until the facility released him to his physically handicapped sister. The woman was able to get about her property using an electric wheel chair thus the State in its fogged wisdom believed she could care for her brother as well as herself. She drove a van with an electric lift, managing without help from others, only adding to the belief that she was more than capable.

The sister told
the officer who questioned her that she and her brother had been arguing before he climbed to the roof of her house. She said his behavior had gone from bad to worse after his release from the halfway house because he refused to take the medicine his doctor had prescribed.

Maude made a mental note to go see the sister herself and get a feel for the relationship between the siblings. Maybe she just got tired of his tantrums and fixed his wagon.
It wouldn’t be the first time for it. She also needed to go and see the coroner about the cause of death.