She was sick at the thought and overcome with hatred for the cowardly scum. There were times Maude regretted the oaths she had taken to protect and serve.
There should have been a gleeful note in the box, a joyous description of the acts of murder and savagery, but no such greeting came with it. Only the bright-red gift paper and its foul contents were found. Police and sheriff’s officers finally left after searching Maude’s yard and the lots surrounding her. No suspicious persons had been seen or heard by residents. They took her statement, noting that she was a detective with the Madison Police Department, assigned to the Homicide Division.
The team of techs took the box away to the crime lab where the breast tissue and the container would be analyzed as they searched for evidence that might help in finding the killer of the two young women on East Avenue. Maude reminded them to take the bulb from her security light and check it for prints also. When all the law enforcement personnel had departed, Maude dropped into her recliner and fell asleep to dream of a man with blood on his hands that laughed at her, and intermittently called her name, telling her it was Chicago all over again, and he was back.
Chapter 4
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 before she could retire, and moaned a little in self-pity. Standing was difficult. Leaning on the arms of the chair, she pushed off as the recliner sat straight-up. It propelled her upwards, and forward, to a position where she could hobble off to the bathroom. Carrying her pack of unfiltereds with her, Maude fingered one out, and lit it as she went.
Sitting down on the porcelain commode, she drained her night’s water and sighed with relief. Inhaling the first few puffs of the smoke, Maude pulled it gratefully into her lungs, and sat musing over the great taste of the first cigarette in the morning. She wondered 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 watch 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, and 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 back around. Mary Ellen hadn’t been over, even though she usually came by on her way to the restaurant where she put in late night hours. Maude had called the warrant section and asked the weekend clerk to run a check on Chris Cole. She put a rush on it because she didn’t trust the guy, and she didn’t want to think about Mary Ellen working to support a man of his age.
There were many young men 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 married.
Grace had thought she could change him. There at the last, dying from cancer, she 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 her mother 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 usually 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 ones with 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 something would 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.
Yeah, I have an ego, she thought.
The clerical staff in homicide had t
wo clerks, one named Alice, 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, and 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 used 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 needed to locate the killer, or killers.
Maude hoped 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 drug 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 Leonard 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, and 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 Jones sleeping on a makeshift bed just inside the park entry, near the cops’ beat. She felt it was safe to close her eyes with the patrolling officers nearby.
It rained the morning Jones was found dead. Her clothing and the mangled sheets and cardboard that were her meager bed were all drenched. It appeared that she had been asleep just before she died. Another of the homeless group found her lying there, and called to the cop who was returning from a patrol of the park.
The homicide desk was notified, and Maude made a quick trip by the crime scene. After the evidence-gatherers left, she made some notes and 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, a black 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, with 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. There was a chance it had been dropped by someone in a hurry, possibly the killer. 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 see the coroner about the cause of death.
The homicide detail had four detectives for the investigation of all suspicious, accidental, and family violence cases of serious bodily injury or death. You never knew when the bodily injury would become a cause of death.
Along with Maude, there were three men assigned to the section: Lyman Eberhart, a tall man with a bald pate and very dark skin, Alfred Wheeler a short, rotund Irishman who was Eberhart’s partner, and now, Joe Allen.
Wheeler was a whiner, a fact well known by all the detectives and officers alike within the building. He was raised in California, but leaned heavily on his ethnicity when work was passed out, often complaining about his assignments. He could always find a way to bring his Irish in as a reason it was unfair.
Secretly everyone called him Fat Frieda. Wheeler had once made a crucial error and admitted to a man in personnel that his mother had named him Alfred instead of Frieda as she had intended had he been a girl.
One day a street cop had seen Wheeler buying two hotdogs and a sub sandwich for lunch. The cop told his buddies, “If no homicide cases get solved today, it’s Fat Frieda’s fault for eating so much he couldn’t get off his ass to investigate.”
Alfred’s partner was loyal enough to never employ the name, but he never objected when someone else did; so the name stuck.
Joe Allen, the other man assigned to homicide hadn’t made it to his desk yet. Maude thought maybe the boss had some info, so before looking at the rest of the reports on her desk, she did the obligatory two fingered knock on the glass door and went into his office. She told him she still had to write up the events of the day before. She said she had met her new partner and he seemed a little green, but okay.
“Where is he?” She asked. “Did I scare him off?”
“No, he’s down at Personnel fixing his papers for the new assignment, should be here by about ten. Tell me more about Saturday night. Are we finding out anything about this guy?”
James Patterson was a supe
rvisor who liked to remain in the loop, but not close enough for the loop to become a noose and him hung by it. As long as Maude and his other detectives did their jobs he left them alone.
She was very careful of her wording, because one slip about Chicago would be enough for the boss to give the case to the Feds, believing it to be in everyone’s best interest. She explained about the box with the breast tissue that probably came from the crime scene at East Avenue, but said they would wait for the lab to compare tissue samples with both of the victims. She rushed through the part about someone turning off her security light, not wanting to bring his attention to the possibility that the killer might know her from an earlier time.
She spoke of the man at her rent house, and of the follow-up that was in process. Quickly, before he had time to digest all of what she had just said, Maude said that she had to get cracking because of the heavy workload she and Joe were looking at. She told him she was starting to feel overworked like Fat Frieda.
After Patterson ran her out of his office, Maude went immediately to see Alice for any news from Interpol, but there was nothing yet. She called the Medical Examiner’s office and made an appointment to be there by eleven o’clock, trusting that Joe would be back by then. The next thing she did was to call and set an appointment to interview Betty Ann Davis about her brother’s death.
It was going to be a very busy day. So far Maude was feeling good, no aches and pains that a few ibuprofen couldn’t fix. Lately she had begun wondering if gastric cancer could be caused by the anti-inflammatories. Often as not, two of the pills were part of her breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She only took aspirin for headaches.
While she waited for Alice to talk to her, Maude looked down, and caught sight of her black boots, noticing they were scarred a little from wear and tear. She decided they were presentable enough for what she had to do. The M.E. certainly wouldn’t care.
The Maude Rogers Murder Collection Page 6