The East Avenue Murders (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 1) (9 page)

“Betty Ann, who is the man that came to see you the day Earl died
; the one who wore the red bandana around his neck?”

Betty Ann looked at Maude
, shocked by the question. “Why, what do you mean?”

“
I’m talking about your man friend, your gentleman caller, the man who helps you in and out of the shower?”

“
I don’t know what you saying,” the woman said, looking at Joe, silently begging for his help.

“Yes, you do know, Betty Ann. On the night your brother died, someone was here, someone who heard you arguing with Earl, someone who saw your brother threatening you.
That man had heard enough and tried to protect you. I need for you to tell me what happened after that.”

The woman sat in her mot
orized chair, the tears drying; a look of resolution on her face.

“My brother was
raging without his medications. He said he wouldn’t take the medicine from the doctor because it made him feel numb and Earl wanted to feel alive. He blamed me for his situation, believing in his mental state that I was trying to poison him. 

“
The night he died he was worse than usual, I tried to talk to him, to calm him, but nothing helped. My friend is a man that I have known for many years. His name is Willy Johnson, and he is homeless, so he stays in one of the parks, but came to see me every day, to help me with my shower, and some other things.” At that point Betty Ann lowered her eyes and blushed. Maude had no difficulty figuring out what the other things were.

“As Earl’s attitude worsened
he got meaner and went to my van. He searched until he found the crowbar under the spare tire and came back in my house, waving it and making threats. He said he was going to kill me because I was evil and wanted to hurt him. He believed it, Officer Allen, she continued, looking at Joe.

“
I don’t know why he went for the crowbar, who can understand what made him so crazy?” It was at this point that Maude interrupted again, wanting to give the woman her rightful dues. She quickly ran through the Miranda warning, making sure that the woman knew she did not have to answer the questions at that time. When Betty Ann refused the services of a lawyer, the detectives sat still and let the woman continue to tell her story.

“Willy saw him with the crowbar and began trying to take it away, but
Earl was mad-strong started to fight Willy for it. I saw what was happening and wheeled myself between them. Earl dropped the crowbar and came after me, wrapped his hands around my throat and choked me. He was wild, his eyes bugged out and drool coming out of his mouth but he was strong as an ox.

“
I thought I was dead. Everything was getting black for me. Willy was desperate and picked up the crowbar by the long end and started swinging it at Earl but he was afraid of hitting me. Finally he got behind Earl and swung as hard as he could, driving it into my brother’s back. The blood started coming out of Earl’s mouth and he let me go when he felt the crowbar stuck in his back, but it was like he didn’t feel any pain, just knew it was there and didn’t like it.

“
Willy was worried about me because I needed to breathe but my throat was bruised and I was gasping like a fish. I could feel my mouth opening and closing but I wasn’t getting any air. Earl stumbled around and ran out the door but it was dark outside and he fell off the porch steps on his head. Willy went out and tried to help him but Earl crawled away and lay down on the grass. I finally got alright as you can see, but while I was trying to breathe, Earl was hurting real bad.

“
I didn’t know how bad the crowbar hurt him. We should have called the police but I was afraid that Willy would go to jail if we did because he’s homeless. I didn’t know Earl was going to die, I thought he was just hurt and would go away.”

Betty Ann stopped for a minute
then continued, “Willy stayed with me for the rest of the night in case Earl tried anything else, but he never came back. He must have died during the night.”

The woman finally ran out of words.

Maude had been very still, not saying anything during Betty Ann’s monologue. Finally she cleared her throat and asked “Is that how Willy lost his handkerchief. Wiping your prints off the crowbar?” 

Betty Ann nodded. “Yes, I had touched the crowbar and Willy was once again protecting me.”

“Where is Willy now, Betty Ann?”

“He’s at the park, afraid to come back here. I miss him so much.” the old lady said with tears in her eyes.

Maude looked at Joe and nodded. “We need to pick him up.”

“What will happen to Willy
?” the woman asked.

Maude answered her, “I can’t say, Betty Ann. We’ll talk to the District Attorney. If the facts prove out the way you say, after the autopsy, he may get off on self-defense. You should have called the police when it happened, then Earl might have still been alive.
For now, I need for you to come down to the station and make a formal statement. I can get a van to pick you up.”

“Okay
,” Betty Ann said, once again concentrating on Joe. “I’ll get ready to go.”

When the woman left the room, Maude called downtown and requested a van for handicapped to be sent to Betty Ann’s house. She called Lieutenant Patte
rson and reported it all to him then stepped outside to light a cigarette, breathing the smoke in, thinking about the woman in the motorized chair, her life fractured by a brother that she didn’t ask for but who had been dumped on her. She thought about the man with no home who slept on newspapers and cardboard, his only joy a gray haired crippled lady who needed his help and his company. Then the brother, oblivious to reality and wanting his own piece of attention runs outside and gets a freaking crowbar to break up the two love birds
. Jeez,
Maude said to herself,
a crowbar. I get em, don’t I?

The trip back downtown was quiet, with Joe driving and Maude looking out the window
, neither of them happy about the circumstances of the Earl Davis incident. More than likely charges of murder one or at least manslaughter would be filed against Willy and Betty Ann because they let the old man die in the yard. No matter what happened, the fall-out was going to be disastrous for them both.

“So, how did you know?” Joe asked her.
”Was it something I missed?”

“Not really
.” Maude told him “I had a feeling about her after reading the responding officer’s report. Her crying seemed timed, not real. She knew we were coming.”

“
The thing is,” she mused, “I know what it is to have a close relative who holds the family hostage with his behavior. That poor woman couldn’t get away from her brother. Everywhere she looked, there he was.”

Back at the station there were congratulations passed around for solving the case, but Maude and Joe were quiet about it, glad
to see the puzzle solved yet disturbed by its conclusion. The new little notebook in Maude’s pocket had its first few pages already filled with her notes ready to transcribe but she had one more follow up to do. Alice was busy entering data into the computer when Maude walked into the clerical office. There were others that worked at similar jobs but Alice was the one that Maude would seek out each time.

“Got a minute Alice?” she asked, pulling up the extra chair from against the wall. “I need for you to run a check for me on a white male, approximately forty years old, five feet ten, brown hair, name is Chris Cole, Christopher Cole, Madison resident. See what you find in local and national. If you don’t mind, I’ll sit here and wait.”

“No problem. Shouldn’t take long, we aren’t busy today.” Alice said, her fingers clicking the computer keys as she talked.

About five minutes passed before Maude heard the telex machine clicking off the information from law enforcement agencies around the country. There were five Chris Coles. Two females, three white males with minor traffic offenses, one had a minor in possession charge from three years earlier. One was local. Christopher Douglas Cole, black male, current age 25 years and three months, height: 6 feet, hair: black, weight: 180 pounds. Charge was minor in possession of marihuana, six months ago, nothing since. Last address: 2231 Bradley Street, Madison, Texas.

Maude sat frozen as Alice read the address off the machine. 2231 Bradley was her address, Mary Ellen’s address. The moment was etched in her brain, the door opening, the sleepy eyed man wi
th disarrayed hair, the edge in his voice, a sound of indignity at being questioned. It was all so modulated, so planned. His intimate knowledge of the local school, of sweet Mary Ellen was unclean, a smear of filth on delicate porcelain.

How easily
Maude had been pulled into the intricate weave of his trap, a trip back into time. Ten years ago the murderer had left his mark in a terrible way.

Maude had been a veteran cop, ten years on a beat, then the test for detective at Chicago PD. She aced it
, once again the model student, always at the top of her class. The years she spent as a street cop had taught her about the evil that strangers do to one another, bar fights that ended with guns or knives taking lives, like little boys comparing the size of their penises to decide who was the biggest. The family violence cases were the sad ones; a husband who slew his wife for looking past him at another. Dead, she looked at no one, not even the kids who sat crying for their mama.

On the day of her fourth anniversary as a detective with Chicago PD, Maude and her senior partner Mason Aldridge, a long time veteran with the PD were sent out on a welfare check. Dispatch had been called by a frantic mother who said her daughter was missing and the last time she had been seen was over two weeks
earlier. Mother thought daughter had been upset with her and had not returned her calls just being snippy as she was prone to do. Mother said at first she didn’t think much about it, but after two weeks and no contact, Mother’s gut told her there was something bad wrong with her daughter.

When Detective Aldridge a
nd Maude arrived at the address the place showed typical signs of neglect; the grass had grown tall, mail overflowed in the out-going box.  A sad-looking cat sat on the front stoop crying for her mistress. Both detectives pulled their weapons and approached the door staying out of the line of fire from the windows along the front of the house. Mason knocked on the door politely at first then harder so he was sure to be heard by anyone inside.

With no response from the house and the obvious signs of neglect of the animal and the yard, Mason signaled to Maude that he was going in if the door was unlocked. They had worked together for
three of the four years that Maude had been a detective and knew each other from earlier when she was a beat cop and he was in Homicide. They understood each other without words.

Mason turned the knob on the door
and pushed it open then flattened himself against the brick wall siding. A bullet coming from inside the door would probably miss him. Maude understood the tactic and waited patiently with her weapon braced should a shot come from inside the house at any time.

All was quiet, and both detectives knew there was a very ser
ious problem- call it instinct, call it whatever you like-but they knew. Mason entered the house first, approaching cautiously, keeping the walls and heavy furniture between him and a possible shooter. Maude went through the door and made her way opposite Mason, a maneuver well practiced by both of them. Still there was nothing.

Just as both the
detectives were about to holster their weapons, a shot rang out from the back yard coming through the kitchen window. A moment before the hit the red dot of the laser sight had centered on Mason’s temple. She saw the dot focusing but time messed with her. Things happened as though in slow motion and even though she called his name it was too late. Her partner took the shot and was dead on his feet, the bullet-proof vest unable to save his life this time.

Maude fell to the floor beside Mason and lay there
, checking him for a pulse that was no longer there. She eased her radio out of its pouch watching the window all the while, called the radio code for “officer down” giving the address and advised “caution, man with a gun”. Even though she knew Mason was dead, Maude requested an ambulance. She had seen enough dead bodies to know her partner was gone but it was procedure.

She
stayed low to the floor knowing the danger wasn’t over then made her way in the shadows putting the furnishings of the house between her and the shooter. The grief for her partner would wait. Her survival depended upon her ability to make it until help arrived. It seemed to take hours for the sirens to sound and car doors to start slamming, the men in uniform filling the street like a horde of locusts covering a field of grain.

Cops were everywhere but the shooter was gone, his shell casings gone, the ground with his shoe prints intentionally stirred erasing any solid piece of evidence. The ambulance came and took Mason away, cops lined up waiting for the stretcher to pass their way, tears in many eyes.

The crime lab techs showed up bursting with energy, determined to find a piece of evidence to help make it right but of course no one could make it right. A veteran cop was gone in the blink of an eye. If it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone.

Maude related the incident to her Captain who showed up before Mason was removed from the premises
.

A
determined look on his face he stated to all listening, “We’ll get this guy, whoever he is, we’ll find him,” he said. “I’ll put my best men on it.”

And that is what he did, leaving Maude out of the loop.

The original welfare check had so far proven fruitless; there was no one in the house. Maude searched all the rooms after she was dismissed by the Captain to carry on her duties. A patrol officer accompanied her throughout the house, searching for any sign of distress that might have made the resident leave.

Everything was spotless, even
more than it should have been considering the neglect outside. Both bedrooms proved to be almost sterile with stripped beds and vacuumed rugs, some even freshly shampooed. The bathroom was disinfected, spotless also, all hairs removed from the drains with nothing left to give any leads.

The kitchen h
ad been the last to be searched; the orderly cabinets and sterilized sink were devoid of stains or evidence. Nothing out of place, once again everything was spotless, too clean. Maude knew whatever it was that had happened in that house was really bad. She walked out to the small laundry room, finding it crowded with a washer and dryer and large stand up freezer. Why a single woman needed a large freezer was beyond Maude’s comprehension. Without any further consideration she reached for the door and opened it, swinging it back, opening the appliance to full view.

The
next thing Maude did was look at her watch to determine the exact time. She glanced at the deputy standing beside her with his mouth open and nodded for him to go get his boss. She took a minute to observe, puzzled by the scene before her.

A youngish woman was
frozen in an upright position taking up the space in the largest part of the freezer. All shelving had been removed to accommodate her. Her arms were folded against her chest, head bowed, knees slightly bent, overcome by frost. The body was naked, and the ice that covered her was old, at least by several days. As the fluids in the woman’s body froze they created a heavy coating of rime from head to foot. Across the woman’s chest a long row of careful stitches could be seen through the frost, an obvious repair of a long and deep incision. It would only be later when the pathologist opened the body for autopsy they would discover that the victim’s heart had been taken.

From the very first Maude had been saddened by the waste of life, the terrible theft of the young woman’s future. Her belly tied itself in knots when she considered the sick
pervert that killed the woman and Mason Aldridge. In Maude’s mind there was no doubt that the killer was one and the same. The shooting of her partner was territorial, the red dot of the sensor a mark of ownership, the piss of a predator who knows he rules that part of the jungle. Maude raged inside, the desire to slash the sick pervert asunder, a primal wish to devastate the evil in him before it seeped out again into her city.

It happened three more times within three months, the killing, the plotting, the gleeful set ups
of law enforcement officers. From each woman he killed, he took her heart, sewing her chest back together afterwards. With each victim, the incisions and closures became less precise, as though his human desire for perfection was growing thinner and the animal part of him more savage. He had noticed Maude from the very first, sending her notes on elementary school paper, written with a soft lead pencil. No smudges at first, then later his writing became slanted and erratic but never careless. The notes were childlike appealing to her for approval rather than condemnation. They made her shudder with revulsion. The newspapers never found out or her life would have been on display. That was one good thing her chief did, he kept the notes under wraps. Finally they stopped coming. She never knew why he chose her, but she was glad when he stopped writing.

They had no real evidence;
no one ever came forward with information that might have helped. It was as though the man did not exist on the same plane as the rest of the world. Maude became obsessed with finding him. She began contacting the victim’s families by phone, encouraging them, telling them that any day a break could come. And it did, but it was Maude who broke. Her supervisor had a phone call from the father of the first victim, asking him to stop Maude from calling. The man said it was too painful to go through it again and again. The FBI had already taken the case from Chicago PD and the detectives in Homicide had been told to let them do their jobs. Her supervisor insisted that she go to the department counselor and get over her preoccupation with the man the local media had named the
Heartless Killer.

After the grisly delivery of the frozen hearts to the Chicago restaurant, Maude put in her letter, packed her bags and moved back to Madison, the place where her mother lived, the place where she and her mother and grandmother were born.