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

by Linda L. Dunlap

  “Maude, have you seen the results of his shooting before?” Bill asked quietly.

  “We tracked his movements, detective,” Lieutenant Patterson said, “He had more than one gun with him when he went calling on you. He wasn’t looking to kill you. Standing up against the side of your rent house was a sniper rifle with a laser sight. It hadn’t been fired. Your boy was trying to send you a message. But he wasn’t trying to kill you or you’d be dead.”

  “Fraid so Maude,” Joe said quietly. “Dawson must have had another reason for coming to your house. Not sure what it was, but it wasn’t to kill you, unless something changed his mind when he got there. Either way, I’m glad to see you still spitting and sputtering, alive and sassy.”

  Maude lay back, pondering the information, her confusion disappearing with the iteration of the facts from the scene with Dawson. She wondered why he didn’t try to kill her, or if maybe he didn’t get the chance after she returned his fire. Why would he shoot at her if he didn’t mean to kill her? She still wasn’t clear about his obsession with her. So she knew him for three months when he was a little boy. That wasn’t enough to create a strong attachment, was it?

  Determined to get some answers to her questions Maude pretended to be falling asleep, hoping the group of well-meaning men would leave her for a while. Thankfully, it worked. All three of the men left the room and went elsewhere. Easing her feet over the side of the bed she discovered that Bill Page had made a very good prediction concerning her feet. There would be no walking on them today. A wheelchair sat off to the right of the bed, its large spokes stilled.

  Maude pulled herself as far down the bed as she could go, trying to reach the chair and pull it to the bed. She leaned outward, grabbing at the edge with her fingertips but found it to be too far away. Frustration with the helplessness of her situation had her swearing to herself, renaming the chair and the entire hospital with less than respectable epithets. When she was about to scream ‘uncle’, and forget the whole thing, she heard a small laugh, and turned to see her Joe standing beside the bed.

  “I thought you’d try something like this so I came back. Figured I could help,” he said, going for the wheelchair. “Let’s go before they come back.”

  Loading Maude into the chair with ease, Joe released the two hand brakes on the wheels, placed a coverlet on Maude’s lap, and handed off control of the machine holding the intravenous solution to her before starting down the corridor.

  “Room 326,” he said. “That’s Dawson’s room. Let’s go.”

  The stand with the bottle, clips, and tubes reeled a bit as they made the first corner of the corridor, but after a little time, Maude grew accustomed to holding the tall pole loosely so it could turn easier without careening off to the side or threatening to fall and pull the lines out of her body. Several staff members of the hospital gave Joe the eye as he raced past them, but his friendly face belied the illicit purpose of his patient’s outing.

  The ‘B’ elevators, listing critical care rooms as well as surgical recovery rooms as destinations, rose upward for the necessary three stories to the floor where Dawson lay in his room in a waking coma. The two fleeing fugitives of hospital nursing care entered then departed the lift, treading the tiles of the corridor that began with room number 310.

  Sixteen doors away lay Dawson, the machinery connected to his body twice what had held Maude down, confined to her bed, before her unlikely escape. The sound of footsteps coming quickly down the corridor permeated Dawson’s sleep, reminding him that he had previously been running from some woman. Using a force greater than mere willpower, the man in the hospital bed tried to rise, only to find himself imprisoned in double casts on his arms and one on his left leg, each held high in the air by pulleys connected to the ceiling. The accident two nights before had left him in a helpless state, with the solid weight of plaster encasing three limbs and a portion of his lower anatomy, while the smaller, uninjured portion of his body lay supine upon the small hospital bed.

  Try as he might, Dawson couldn’t move from the bed, but could only lie there, listening to the labored breath of the man pushing the wheelchair down the corridor.

  The guard outside the hospital room nodded as Joe Allen arrived, winded but resolute.

  “We’re going in. Write your report if you need to but we’re going. My partner here chased this man all the way across Kingdom Come and she isn’t about to give up now,” Joe said, catching his breath.

  Stepping back from the door, the uniformed officer allowed the two detectives to enter the room where Dawson lay, attached to the hospital bed. The man seemed to be asleep, his body still except for the gentle motion of his breathing.

  Maude wheeled herself to the side of the bed, staring at the killer, hoping to see something that made this man different from all the other perverts and murderers that she had known. He looked perfectly normal, except for the deep road rash on his face where the car had pushed him down the street on the bicycle, before the driver could stop his forward motion. Dawson was lucky to be alive, she thought. Of the two bullets she had fired at him, one had connected with his shoulder, barely missing his heart; the other had singed his right buttock.

  Maude felt nothing for the man who lay there, even though her young friend, Mary Ellen, had lost her life to him. The anger and grief had been put aside for a while. Now she must feel gratified that the madman was constrained and under guard, his murdering days curtailed.

  “One question, Dawson,” she said, not expecting a reply. “Why me? What did you want? Was it my approval, or were you hoping that I would kill you?”

  The man lay still, apparently still in a coma. She started to turn away, to give it up.

  “Bobby.” A whisper came out of the man’s mouth. “Kid loved you. He saved your miserable life, wouldn’t let me use the rifle. You were lucky. Bobby’s gone now, gone forever.” The man on the bed suddenly lost his animation then lay still.

  She was tired. Her feet hurt and she felt bone weary. The man under the hospital sheets was just another case, another captured lunatic who thought he could rule the world by taking lives. She had plenty of other questions, for sure. Right then, the most important fact was that Dawson wouldn’t be hurting anyone else. A tiny tic stirred the memory of a small boy, sitting in her lap, the tears from his eyes wetting her hands. Maude shook her head impatiently at the memory, casting it off quickly as finished business, content to let the laws of the land determine the fate of the man.

  “I’ll see you in court, Robert Dawson, or whoever you are,” she said, turning her chair and wheeling herself down the hallway, hoping to see Bill Page once again.

  Epilogue

  The tall rock surface of the building seemed to go on and on, the floors ascending higher and higher. The guards said that the ‘crazier they were, the higher they were sent’. The twenty-second floor was only for the really bad ones, the ones who killed for pleasure, or because they had been told by voices to get it done. In the middle of the floor, in one of the many rooms enclosed by bars running vertically from floor to ceiling was one of the settled residents, number 73. He was formerly known as Robert Dawson, but on Floor Twenty-Two, each resident had a number instead of a name. Number 73 was not only insane; he was catatonic as well.

  In the state of Texas an insanity plea may be called a prettier name, but it means the same as it does in other states. The end result of the court’s decision was that Robert Dawson be locked away forever, with no hope for release.

  Number 73’s traumatized mental condition following his encounter with the automobile was credited to a wallop to the brain during his head over heels slide on the pavement. A large part of his cerebellum had swollen against the skull, causing irreparable damage, or so the experts said. A jury had heard the evidence against the man, labeled him an insane killer, and sentenced him to life in the Madison-MacArthur Prison for the Criminally Insane.

  Dawson’s son and daughter were represented at the trial by the children’s gran
dmother and paternal uncle. They raised no pleas for mercy for the defendant-both children had lost their mother in the killing spree of their father. Dawson sat still during the proceedings, not comprehending his fate, a vacant look in his eyes, saying nothing and acknowledging no one, the light in his mind extinguished.

  The killer made no sound during the trial except once, when he cried for his mother as Detective Maude Rogers testified concerning the list of horrendous incidents, including murder, uncovered in her investigation of Robert Dawson. Detective Rogers was an effective witness, relating both the findings of the bodies of Dawson’s victims, and later, the retrieval of a cache of ‘treasures’, located in the floor of Dawson’s airplane. The cache contained pieces of body parts from many different people. Forensics was still trying to identify the enormous amount of victims represented there.

  On a Friday night, a year from the day that Robert Dawson was sentenced to life in prison, a new, young male inmate was introduced to Floor Twenty-Two. The inmate, Number 90, was a bully to the other residents, and during an unguarded social gathering proceeded to make his presence known to the mentally deranged and highly sedated before being stopped. He had begun by punching Number 73 in the lower stomach, an area on the inmate that was particularly sensitive to pain.

  The next morning the same young man was found dead in his bunk, his throat torn open, his body exsanguinated. Number 73 was questioned briefly, along with the others, but only as a matter of procedure. The absence of verbal response from the Number 73 was in keeping with the fixed, blank canvas of his face and the line of drool that dripped from the corner of his mouth. It was a presentation devoid of emotion and comprehension.

  No blood trails led away from the brutalized inmate’s bunk, nor was any blood found on any of the persons of Floor Twenty-Two. Number 73 had been dismissed as a suspect; his mental condition only one reason. All violent criminals were locked in their rooms on the night of the murder as well as on every other night. The list included Number 73.

  Chance would have it that the idea of an early dinner that night was very tempting to the investigator who searched number 73’s room after the murder. His reservation at the local Italian restaurant was hard to get and he had no intention of missing it because of a dead crazy inmate. After no more than a cursory look-see of the room, the investigator gave the all clear sign and left the cell.

  A bit of patience and a touch more perseverance might have delivered a treasure into the hands of the restaurant-bound fellow. A watchful eye would have spied the piece of shiny metal as it reflected the room’s garishly bright light. A shifting of pillow and sheet this way or that would have revealed that shine to be a crude key made in the hospital’s machine shop, a key that slipped perfectly into, and out of, the lock on number 73’s door.

  It was only a small treasure by itself, but it had company. A nest of pink and white pills lay wrapped inside a sandwich bag, long-bodied capsules used specifically for the control of personality crossover. The investigator might also have heard the brief, soft sounds of a small boy crying for his mother had he listened more closely to his instincts, and less to the growl of his stomach.

  The End

  Watch for Maude Rogers’s next crime novel, Murder on Edwards Bay, to be released in April 2014. Please contact me for your comments at iwritemysteries.com. Your review of this book on Amazon will be greatly appreciated. Please take the time to voice your thoughts and ideas. Thank you.

  Linda L. Dunlap