The East Avenue Murders
by Linda L. Dunlap
The East Avenue Murders is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously or they are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is coincidental.
Copyright © December 2013 Linda L. Dunlap
To Larry Dunlap, thank you for loving me first and Maude second, to my collaborator, Billie Simpson, thanks for everything. You helped me make it real. To Carla Dunlap, your support and love is a treasure, and to my niece Cyndi Rudd, wordsmith, for all that you did and offered to do, thanks a million.
Linda
Don’t mess with Maude Rogers. She’s a seasoned homicide detective whose specialty is catching murderers.
Sent on an innocuous duty to a rough part of town, Maude finds herself smack in the middle of a horrific case. With a new partner beside her she tackles the problem from the ground up, finding clues that will eventually lead them to the solution. A high action thriller, The East Avenue Murders will keep you guessing as Maude travels long distances and discovers forgotten truths that tie her to the inexorable Heartless Killer.
From one page to the next, The East Avenue Murders will curl your hair and have you checking for missing body parts. If at the end you still have your nerve, read the next in the series, Murder on Edwards Bay.
Warning: graphic crime scenes
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 1
Mornings were always the worst. Her stiff joints refused to work without pain, and a sharp cough every few minutes set fire to her lungs. The wrinkled pack of unfiltered cigarettes lay on the nightstand where it could be reached easily during sleepless hours of tossing and turning. She crinkled the pack, and took out one of the three remaining cigarettes, fingering it to her mouth.
Her cigarette lighter was butane, old, with the inscription To Maude from Paul worn slick with use. She gently lifted the top, rolled the cylinder against a small piece of flint and watched a burst of blue and yellow flame engulf the cigarette. Inhaling deeply, she pulled the first smoke slowly through her mouth and across her teeth, tasting the burning tobacco, the guilt hitting her. Flicking a loose shred from her tongue she thought about her mother dying from cancer and wondered if filtered cigarettes were a better choice. Someone said she would be changing rooms on the Titanic.
She took another drag from the cigarette and saw the blood under her fingernails, dried and dark spots she missed in the wash-up, careless as she had grown older. Not so long ago that would have been out of the question for her, a professional in the murder business. She stood and stretched upward as far as her stiff knees would allow, the bones creaking in her shoulders and upper back.
Every day it was more difficult to pick up and carry anything heavy. She didn’t know how or when she began losing her youthful muscle strength, probably a little with each birthday. Just seemed that one day overlapped the last and they all looked the same over her shoulder.
She remembered when she could work all day then go to the gym for an hour and a half lifting and pushing weights. Still not tired, she would crack out a hundred and fifty sit-ups never even breathing hard. Her waist had been slim then, tucked neatly between firm breasts and the generous curve of her hips. Long legs and the strength of a man had pushed her forward on the force, even in the days before politically correct supervisors were told to hire women for the job.
Memories of arresting the scum of the city were sweet. Sometimes, she and her partner, John Maxwell, would follow paper thin leads for weeks on end until the break came and the puzzle pieces of the case all fit together. Afterwards they would guzzle cold beer at one of their favorite bars celebrating the end of the story, toasting each other for their team effort. The memory made her mouth water even though the stale taste of last night’s gin burned her throat and the hangover headache had begun pounding across her temples.
Last night…last night, she kept trying to focus, to remember how it all went down, how the bullet was loosed. The shot had flown across the small space of the room, and the hot casing had been ejected from the gun, popping to the floor beside her feet. It was bad. The slow-motion mental replay recalled in detail the hot blood of the target.
Bright red had spurted from the artery in the man’s chest as he fell slowly to the floor after the second bullet fired automatically. Her firing range instructor would have been proud. The fatal bullet flew from the long barrel to the center-mass target just as she had been taught. The only reason to pull a weapon and fire it is to kill. There is no such thing as a warning shot. Good things to remember.
Maude had seen it coming. She knew where the shooter would be and quietly crawled through an open window, dropping to the floor on knees that screamed at her, gun already in hand. She saw the front door of the warehouse opening slowly and crawled along the wall behind the row of oil drums, her breathing fast and shallow, afraid of being too late. Finally, she was across from the man and saw him raise the loaded shotgun in the air, Maxwell’s body almost level with the barrel of the powerful weapon. She called out and the man quickly turned toward her, confused by her presence. She lifted her gun and fired, no time to use the sight, just a lucky pull of the trigger for her and the blast of gunpowder for him. The sound echoed in her ears, once, then twice.
The man had no pulse, no breath. She had touched his face, his neck and the arm that cradled the cold sawed-off shotgun. She opened the chamber of the gun and acknowledged the two huge shells. Her partner had stood staring, the hot burst of urine cooling as it trailed into his new black shoes. The shock of almost dying had released his bladder.
As always, the paperwork had to be done. She had to write it: who, what, why, when and how, all the elements of a report.
Who was the mystery; she hoped his fingerprints might help to identify the man.
What was the shotgun; the man had been a thief looking to murder a cop and had to be taken out.
Why did a man choose to die on a particular day?
She knew how. It was her gun that blew his lights out, not the first time she had wielded that tool ridding the earth of pestilence.
The when was always the most important of all the elements-the grace that could save a career or send it spiraling into an abyss.
Maude had known to make her report clear and concise. She must never give the big boys upstairs reasons to question her ability to deal with circumstances. Her gun had been taken away until the shooting could be investigated. Standard procedure, every death caused by a police officer required it. Still, she had felt naked on the street when the door of the shop closed behind her. The Cop Shop, slang for the Madison Police Department of Madison, Texas, the place where Detective Maude Rogers was growing old.
Afterwards, there was
the trip to the cop bar, soaking up the victory, washing the taste of gunpowder out of her mouth. She smoked cigarettes and slung back gin and tonic until the memory of the hole in the man’s chest faded, his dying sounds no longer echoing in her ears.
Raucous laughter erupting from the cop’s tables grew louder as the hours passed. She finally stumbled to the bar and asked the skinny kid serving drinks to call a cab for her saying she wasn’t drunk enough yet to drive a car. The joke made her laugh, a low chuckle that didn’t last long. Behind her the men and women around the tables were still throwing the liquor back enjoying the night, some waving at Maude as she walked unsteadily out the door.
Morning had arrived too quickly bringing the pain in her head and the need for more sleep. When she arrived at work her lieutenant had nodded acknowledging her return. She was assigned to the desk until the gun was cleared and Internal Affairs was satisfied with her story. Her partner had supported Maude’s actions all the way, claimed he owed his life to her but that was never enough. An investigation had to be done. She would have insisted on the same procedure if the command was hers. But that would never happen.
Maude accepted that she would never be more than what she was with the department. She was too old, and a woman, so promotions were out of the question for her. “Hold onto the job” had become her mantra for the last few years. In five, her social security money would kick in, and she could file the papers with the city for retirement. Until then, she didn’t want to lose her employment. If that meant accepting what the bosses laid on her plate, she would follow orders.
The desk job was pretty simple, taking calls from citizens needing answers about parking tickets and minor citations received from traffic cops. Occasionally someone from the warrant office would call and ask for help serving an arrest warrant, but Maude knew to direct them over to the county constable. Lieutenant Patterson didn’t send a man under his command to serve warrants unless he was looking for a way to punish.
She hoped she was still in good standing with the lieutenant because she hated warrant detail. Once she had to go along with a rookie for a week, getting him broken in, serving warrants and arresting citizens for unpaid tickets. What a boring business that was. She had fallen asleep in the passenger seat between calls, trying to pass the days as quickly as possible, wanting a cigarette, but reluctant to smoke in the city vehicle.
The week on desk detail passed quickly with Maude logging the calls that came in and filling in the lines on the computer screen, tying in the names and times of day for the call. Friday came and she hoped that the boss would let her take an extra hour off for lunch to get a headache under control. The pain she had at waking continued in spite of three aspirin taken at eight o’clock. With a heavy heart she saw her boss coming down the hallway, opening the door into the dingy little control room where she had spent the last few days.
“Hey Boss, what’s up?” she asked quietly, trying to appear busy, dreading what was going to come out of his mouth.
“Maude, take your gun back. You’re cleared of any wrongdoing in the firing and I think they should give you some kind of award for what you did. I’ll put you in for it. Maybe they’ll give you a medal. The perp was identified as Tony Masters, a three time loser who had been casing that warehouse for a month. One of our snitches told us that Masters had bragged he was going to kill a cop if any showed up. Looks like you were in the right place at the right time.
I have a job for you after lunch. Serve this warrant, and when you have the man in custody, bring him in and give your report to Sergeant Johnson in Central Investigations.”
“Oh come on, Lieutenant! There are other people that get paid to do that.” Maude protested as loudly as she dared.
“Yeah, I know. But today you’re getting paid to do it. We’re shorthanded because of the city holiday. After that, make an appointment with Psych about last night’s shooting. You know the drill.”
His news kept getting better and better, she thought.
“But the shoot was righteous,” Maude exclaimed, getting louder. “I don’t need anyone poking around in my head about my folks, looking for reasons that I might be going loco. Yeah, sometimes I wanted to kill my old man, but I didn’t. The pervert outlived most of my family.”
“Easy, Detective Rogers.” Patterson used her name with emphasis. “It’s the rules,” he finished, handing over her weapon, and an envelope addressed to Frank Almondera, 501 East Avenue, Apartment 507, Madison, Texas. The return address was the State of Texas.
“Oh alright,” she reluctantly agreed. “What’s so important about this warrant?”
“Don’t know. Just do it, Okay? Remember; come back here when you’re done. I would send someone with you, but your partner is gone, and I don’t have anyone else. Think you can handle it?” the lieutenant asked, walking out of the room before she could give him some other kind of argument.
Patterson wondered for a minute why the Criminal Investigations Division wanted Almondera arrested so fast. Maybe the Captain was just hassling Maude a little more. He dismissed it from his mind and began trying to clear up the workload that cluttered his desk. Friday was always a difficult day to get away from the job, and the Chief had given notice that there would be no overtime. It was too close to the end of budget year.
The address on the warrant was in an apartment building that had seen better days. It just happened to be in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the city.
“Thanks Lieutenant,” Maude muttered under her breath. She fit right in. Her unmarked car was old and junky in an old junky neighborhood. Easing her sore knees out of the car by rotating her butt on the seat from right to left, Maude put her feet out on the curb, stepping away from the car, wondering as she did how many more times she would be able to complete the once-easy task. She made a mental note to see an orthopedic man about an injection to relieve some of the soreness in her knees and hips.
501 East Avenue was a rundown walk-up, a tenement building and hit house for acid freaks, meth heads, and heroin addicts who used the empty apartments for shooting up. They paid for the convenience by leaving drugs for the apartment renters, an altogether nice way to do business. It was a bad place to arrest someone for failure to appear in court. Maude was tensing up, she could feel it. The adrenaline was starting to increase her heart rate as she walked the stairs to the third floor of the building. Two more floors to go, she thought. Maybe it was just the walk itself that had her blood flowing faster.
She began to wonder why two people weren’t sent to such a bad location, a known place for cop haters, or maybe she knew why. They were always testing her. Even after eight years on the force, they still put her through this kind of bull to see if she could survive. The fifteen years I spent at Chicago PD were never that bad, she thought, getting ticked off again.
There were a few families that lived in the building. She could tell because of the kid noises and the televisions blaring. The canned laughter of sitcoms reverberated down the halls, loud even through closed doors. Some of the apartment doors had bars on them, self-protection from the dirt bags that roamed the hallways looking for a fix.
By the time Maude climbed the stairs to the fifth floor her feet were feeling the effects of the late August heat and she was huffing, the years of smoking taking their toll. Her gun hand tensed as she climbed onto the fifth floor landing and began the last few steps to apartment 507, the sweat beading on her forehead from the lack of circulating air in the old defunct building. She leaned against the wall for a minute to pull herself together, bracing her body to get better control over her legs, happy that at least she didn’t carry any extra weight. Thank God for good genes.
Last night’s gin had soured her in her gut pushing up a foul reminder of a night of excess. A deep breath later she spotted the door she needed and moved cautiously toward it. The hallway had become too quiet, the kids on the lower level suddenly finding other places to be besides the stairwell. Years of police work had taught her a few
things. Always wear a vest in dangerous situations and feel the tension of a crowd.
She had one right today and was glad she had worn the vest. The silent building was a screaming message that a bad scene had gone down somewhere close and maybe the danger was still nearby. Lock and load was her response.
Sidling up to the door was hard to do because of the trash littering the floor on both sides up and down the hallway. Old takeout trays and pizza boxes were stacked helter-skelter on top of empty twelve pack beer containers. Soup cans with lift back lids buzzed with flies; cockroaches scattered when Maude’s feet touched an empty paper cup lying near the door. The smell was horrendous. Old booze, puke, and unwashed body smells mingled with the spoiled food container odors making the heat almost unbearable. How could anyone live in such a place? She wondered. Maybe they had to be high to stand it.
She stood beside the door and yelled out, “Police. Open the door. I need to talk to you.”
Rats skittered from the piles of trash causing her to jump as she knocked on the door once more. God she hated rats. Leaning from the outside wall, weapon in hand, she saw the door was already open. A gentle push opened it all the way to a straight-on view of the small living area with minimal furniture. Once again she called out “Police.”
Cautious of being alone Maude wasn’t eager to show herself to whoever might be in the room. No sound came through the space of the opened door, the quiet once again giving her a bad feeling about what waited there. Her weapon went before her when she entered the room, yelling “Police!” over and over, extending her foot to kick the door against the wall.
The East Avenue Murders (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 1) Page 1