Ox arrived about five minutes after I did. By this time it was twelve thirty. By my calculations, Maggie had been with him about an hour and a half. We had to hurry.
Like most of midtown Kansas City, this was an old, but well maintained neighborhood. Large two-story homes sat on spacious lots, and mature trees and shrubbery shaded the lawns.
Ballard’s home faced Rockhill Road but backed up to the rear of a house on the street behind it. We approached from that direction. Using the bushes and trees for cover, we made our way to the back of his house. A double-car detached garage sat at the end of the driveway. I motioned for Ox to check out the garage. In the meantime, I worked my way around the corner to get a view of the street. No cars at the curb or in the driveway. I returned and Ox shook his head.
Nothing in the garage.
Quietly, we worked our way around the house, peering into both ground floor and basement windows. No light on. No signs of life.
“If he’s got her here, it has to be on the second floor,” I said. “We’ve got to get in.”
“We can’t go in without a warrant,” Ox replied. “Anything we find won’t hold up in court.”
“I don’t give a damn about rules of evidence. Maggie could die while we’re waiting for a piece of paper. I’m going in!”
As quietly as possible, I broke a pane of glass in the back door and reached in to turn the lock. We entered cautiously with weapons drawn and searched the first floor and basement.
Clean.
We crept up the stairway and peered down the dark hallway. Three bedrooms and a bath. One by one we checked them out. Nothing.
Maggie wasn’t there. With the mutilation we had discovered on the bodies, I had expected to find at least traces of blood or evidence of a struggle. The bodies were nude. Maybe Ballard had kept articles of their clothing as trophies. But there was nothing to indicate that any of the victims had ever been in the house.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Ballard wasn’t the killer. Everything had seemed so right, but there was nothing there.
I know I’m right. But where are they?
Then a thought crossed my mind. This was Ballard’s home of record. He was smart enough not to kill Julie Bowen or Brenda Martin. It was too close to home. He would have been an immediate suspect given his recent troubles, so he got his revenge on powerful women with whom he had no connection.
Same thing here.
He was smart enough to know that should he ever become a suspect, the police would find no evidence at his home. The professor had it figured all along. Ballard was smart enough to know not to crap where he ate.
But where then?
Maybe he owns another property, I thought. I went into his office and booted up his desktop computer. There is a program realtors and other professionals use called Jackson County Information Service. It is used to cross reference property ownership. You can enter an address and search for the owner of record of that property, or conversely you can enter an individual’s name and all property owned by that person would come up.
I entered Ballard’s name, and up popped two addresses, the Rockhill Road address and one on Pink Hill Road in Blue Springs.
Blue Springs is a bedroom community suburb of Kansas City. This address was out of my service area when I sold, and I had no idea where it was. I pulled up Mapquest, typed in both the Rockhill and Pink Hill Road addresses, and hit “Get Directions.” Immediately a map with street-by-street directions came up. I hit the print button, and we were on our way.
As we sped east through town toward Blue Springs, I studied the map. Blue Springs had grown by leaps and bounds over the last twenty years, but there was still rural property, small farms, on its outskirts. Pink Hill Road was in a rural area.
It was now one thirty. She had been with the killer for two and a half hours. Fortunately the I-70 freeway runs from downtown Kansas City straight east to Blue Springs. We had taken Ox’s black and white so we could use lights and sirens to bull our way through busy freeway traffic.
We talked about calling for backup, but what would we say? We had no evidence, no hard proof of any kind that Ballard was the guy.
I didn’t think, “Hi, Captain, it’s Walt, and I’ve got a hunch…” would get much attention. We were on our own.
We followed Mapquest and exited I-70 and went north on Woods Chapel Road to connect with Pink Hill. The farther we went, the fewer houses we saw. We watched rural mailboxes for numbers and knew we were getting close.
Open fields were green with tasseled corn or soybeans. Some fields had just been hayed, and massive round bales weighing several hundred pounds sat in the fields like giant monoliths. When I was a kid, I baled hay with my grandfather, but the bales back then were small and square and weighed maybe forty pounds each. I helped him ‘buck’ the bales on the wagon and take them to the barn. The front of the second story of the old barns had an opening for the hay to be hoisted to the ‘haymow’, as it was called. A track ran along the beam of the barn, and a sliding pulley with ropes was used to lift and move the hay around the barn. Today, massive tractors with four-foot solid steel bale spikes spear the bales and load them on flatbeds. That’s progress.
As we grew near, Ox killed the lights and siren. We pulled up to a mailbox and read the numbers. This was it.
It was a working farm. It had probably been Ballard’s old family homestead. I knew he couldn’t have been an office broker and a farmer too. There’s just not enough time in a day, so I figured he probably leased the land out to neighboring farmers who tilled the ground for shares of the crop. They worked the land but didn’t live there.
The perfect spot to commit murder.
We surveyed the lay of the land. A long driveway led to the old farmhouse. To the east of the house was a machine shed and an old hay barn, typical of the era, with open stalls below and storage for hay above. Implements of all kinds were parked around and in the barn. There were mowers, a round hay baler, a hay rake, and of course the big green John Deere tractor with its massive spike pointed skyward. It had the place of honor in front of the barn.
And there was a car in the driveway.
The farmhouse had deteriorated, and it was obvious that it had not been occupied for a very long time. The boards in the porch floor were rotted or missing, pieces of rusted gutter hung from the eaves, and bricks from the chimney were scattered about the ground.
We approached the side of the house keeping low to the ground. We slowly rose and peered into what we determined was the kitchen window. The house was built in the old shotgun style. The front door opened into a living room, which opened into a dining room, which opened into the kitchen, which had a back door leading to another covered porch.
We could see Maggie. She was tied to a hardback chair. On a table by her side was an array of knives, clamps, pliers, and other hardware obviously collected by Ballard to inflict pain and death.
We didn’t see Ballard immediately, but as we watched, he soon appeared. In his hand was a metal object about an inch and a half in diameter and eight inches long. It was an old window weight used years ago as a counterbalance inside the window framework that allowed the window to slide up and remain in place.
I remembered how the three victims had been assaulted and torn and I shuddered.
“We’ve got to do something fast,” I whispered to Ox. “You take the front and I’ll take the back. Let’s count to twenty-five. That will give each of us time to get in position. On twenty-five we bust in, back and front. He won’t know what hit him.”
Ox pulled his Glock and I pulled my revolver, and we moved to our respective positions.
Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five.
I hit the back door with my foot, and the rotted casing gave way. Ox hit the front at the same time.
“Police, freeze!” Ox barked.
Ballard stood frozen. He saw we were both armed, and he dropped the window weight and raised his hands.
Maggie sobbed.
Just as I got her free, Ox came forward to put the cuffs on Ballard. He got halfway across the room, and we heard a ‘crunch’. The old rotten floor gave way under Ox’s 220 pounds, and he disappeared into the basement.
Ox was gone, my gun was on the floor, and Ballard saw his opportunity. He ran out the kitchen door and disappeared around the corner of the house.
Maggie didn’t seem to be injured, just frightened. “Stay here and check on Ox,” I said. “I’m going after Ballard.”
As I rounded the corner of the house, I saw Ballard disappear into the barn. I followed and peered around the corner into the barn. There were a dozen places to hide: stalls, grain bins, equipment. He could be anywhere.
Then blam! I heard the unmistakable sound of a 12-gauge shotgun. Pain shot up my arm like I had been stung by a thousand bees, and my pistol dropped away. I must have only taken a few of the buckshot because I knew a well-placed shot from a 12-gauge could almost cut a man in two. I dropped and rolled for cover as I heard the second round explode into the wood above my head.
Then I heard the ‘click’ as the shotgun was broken open. Ahh, a double barrel. He was reloading. As I scampered to my feet, I saw the wooden ladder leading to the haymow above. He’ll have a hard time climbing that ladder with a 12-gauge, I thought. Maybe I can buy some time.
I climbed the ladder as fast as my injured arm would allow. It hurt like hell, but apparently nothing was broken and I could use it sparingly.
I climbed into the mow and saw that it was maybe half full of the old square bales of hay. They had probably been there for years. The upper hay door was open, allowing light to enter. The hay was stacked against the back wall and rose almost to the ceiling. I saw the rope hanging down from the old hay pulley, and I grabbed it and used it to pull myself up to the top of the hay near the ceiling. I remembered reading somewhere that in a fight the one with the higher elevation had the advantage.
Just as I scrambled to the top, blam! Ballard had followed me up the ladder. Pigeons scattered and splinters flew as the buckshot barely missed. I quickly figured that the higher elevation didn’t seem to be much of an advantage when your opponent had a 12-guage.
I had just ducked behind a bale when blam! I felt the bale shudder under the impact.
Then ‘click’. He had popped the gun open for another reload. I peeked over the bale and saw him standing in front of the haymow door.
Just as Luke Skywalker, in moments such as this, summons strength from his Jedi Masters, a thought came into my head.
I looked at the old pulley overhead hanging from the I-beam that ran across the roof to the open door and the rope dangling from the pulley a mere two feet from my hand, and I remembered how many times I had seen my hero, Tarzan, grab the vine, swing through the air, and vanquish his foe.
I looked again, and my rational self said, “There are a million things that could go wrong.” But then I heard ‘click’ again.
What the hell, I thought. Let’s do it.
“Aaaaeeeeaaaeeehhhhhhaaahhh!” I screamed as I grabbed the rope and launched myself in Ballard’s direction.
A look of sheer surprise and unbelief flashed across Ballard’s face as my feet struck him squarely in the chest. The gun flew from his hand, and he disappeared out of the haymow door.
I dropped to the floor and peered out the door. There below was Ballard, impaled on the massive hay spike of the John Deere.
It was over.
Maggie and Ox arrived just as I came out the door.
We stood for a moment looking at the bastard that had taken the lives of four good people and had nearly taken the life of the person most precious to me.
The three of us embraced, and we wept.
Justice had prevailed.
But at what price?
CHAPTER 20
After our close brush with death, we were spent. Our bodies were racked with pain. My arm was bruised and swollen where the buckshot had been removed, and Maggie’s feet and wrists were raw where she had been bound. We needed a break to recuperate and recharge.
We both had learned that our old bodies don’t heal up as quickly as they did twenty years ago. One day you wake up and realize your skin is paper-thin and bruises like a ripe peach. But even worse, skin that once when pinched would bounce back like an elastic band now just hangs there like a blob.
We needed to get away and clear our minds of murder, mayhem, and Jack Ballard.
We decided on a trip to Branson, Missouri. Branson is about a four-hour drive south of Kansas City. It has been dubbed “The Entertainment Capital of the Midwest.” It is nestled in the hills of the beautiful Missouri Ozarks and is surrounded by crystal clear lakes and streams.
Branson has flourished over the past twenty years. Everybody who used to be somebody has built a theater and has a show. Resorts and golf courses have sprung up like weeds.
We couldn’t wait to get away from the city.
We threw our suitcases in the car and took off. The city traffic soon became the suburbs. Asphalt and concrete gave way to lawns and subdivisions.
We drove on, and the ‘burbs’ became small towns.
About five miles past Osceola, Missouri, we saw a large billboard that read, ‘Gordon’s Orchard’. Another sign told us that fresh peaches were available.
I love all kinds of fruit. I have apples, strawberries, grapefruit, honeydew, cantaloupe, and papaya in my fridge when they are in season.
I also have bananas, but as Chiquita Banana says, “You never put bananas in the icebox.”
Maggie saw the sign first. “Oh, can we please stop?” she begged.
She didn’t have to beg very hard. I was already turning up the drive.
We pulled up in front of the large open market and saw crates of cantaloupe, racks of tomatoes, boxes of blackberries as big as your thumb, and bushels of perfect, ripe peaches.
We roamed through the market, our mouths watering as we looked at the jams, jellies, honey, and, of course, the fruit.
We were puzzling over the different varieties of peaches available when a wiry little senior with a salt and pepper beard and a leather Indiana Jones hat approached us.
“Can I help you with anything?” he asked.
“What’s the difference in all these peaches?” I replied.
I soon discovered that you don’t want to ask one of these country guys a question if you don’t have time to listen to the answer.
In the next fifteen minutes, we learned from our new friend, Bob Gordon, everything a city boy would ever want to know about peaches. We learned that Bob and his wife, Kay, had been in the orchard business almost thirty-five years. We didn’t have to listen long to know that Bob knew what he was talking about.
As I listened to him talk, I recalled a bit of wisdom I had heard from the professor: “Choose a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”
I thought that fit Bob perfectly.
We bought a basket of peaches and some red, ripe tomatoes. As I was checking out, I saw a basket of black, nut-looking things on the counter for twenty-five cents each.
“What are these?” I asked the cashier.
“Those are buckeyes,” she replied. “You carry them in your pocket for good luck.”
Considering what Maggie and I had just been through, I figured we needed all the luck we could get. So I bought one for each of us.
Back on the highway, we passed signs directing us to Bear Creek, Tin Town, and Diggins. They sounded like fun places, but they would have to wait until another day.
We passed by fields of hay, corn, and soybeans, which finally gave way to the rolling hills of the Missouri Ozark Mountains.
We stopped at the Branson Tourism Center and picked up our show tickets and a map of the Branson area. I looked at the map and saw red, green, blue, and yellow routes and the famous 76 Countr
y Boulevard surrounding and bisecting the city. I was curious as to the purpose of the colored routes and soon discovered that their job was to keep people off the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the 76 Strip.
Guess where we were?
As we crawled along the Strip at a snail’s pace, I began looking at our fellow tourists. There were old people everywhere! I thought I’d died and gone to Florida. Old people were in cars and buses and standing in lines at restaurants and shows. And no wonder. There are roughly 130 shows going on in Branson at any given time, and they definitely cater to the tastes and, more importantly, to the memories of the elderly. Shows range from Andy Williams to Dick Clark and from John Wayne to Roy Rogers. Occasionally we would pass a water park or miniature golf course and see kids, but this was definitely a golden age utopia.
76 Boulevard was miles and miles of tourist traps; restaurants, theaters, miniature golf courses, motels, and shops selling authentic Ozark Crap.
I saw a theater playing Noah’s Ark, The Musical and a Titanic Museum. A thought crossed my mind. The ark was built by amateurs, and the Titanic was built by professionals. Hmm!
Even the non-tourist businesses had a tourist-oriented twist. We passed a radiator shop and the sign read, “The best place in town to take a leak.”
The sign on a medical building read “Gynecology. Dr. Jones at your cervix.” How would you like that guy staring at your twat? I had always wondered why your OB/GYN leaves the room when you’re undressing and putting on that silly gown when he’s gonna be looking up there anyway.
After an hour of breathing elderly exhaust fumes, we emerged on the far end of the boulevard and followed the map to our resort, The Chateau on the Lake. Wow! What a place. Built in the style of a magnificent castle you might find in Germany or Austria, it was perched on a high hill overlooking beautiful Table Rock Lake. Just the place to take our minds off a near-death experience.
Or so I thought.
We checked into our luxurious room overlooking the lake and saw ski boats, cruisers, and jet skis streaking across the crystal blue waters.
[Lady Justice 01] - Lady Justice Takes a C.R.A.P. Page 12