The Coffee Shoppe Killer

by Rod Kackley

  The Coffee Shoppe Killer

  Inspired by a Shocking True Crime Story

  Rod Kackley

  Published by Rod Kackley, 2017.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE COFFEE SHOPPE KILLER

  First edition. June 27, 2017.

  Copyright © 2017 Rod Kackley.

  ISBN: 978-1386246923

  Written by Rod Kackley.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty One

  Twenty Two

  Twenty Three

  Twenty Four

  Twenty Five

  Twenty Six

  Twenty Seven

  Twenty Eight

  Twenty Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty One

  Thirty Two

  Thirty Three

  Thirty Four

  Thirty Five

  Thirty Six

  Thirty Seven

  Thirty Eight

  Thirty Nine

  Forty

  Forty One

  Forty Two

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  Further Reading: Janice is Missing: A Crime and Suspense Thriller

  Also By Rod Kackley

  About the Author

  “I know what I did was horrendous and wrong. I felt so miserable like I couldn’t go on. I would have ended it all but I didn’t have the courage to kill myself.” — Mary Eileen Sullivan

  One

  Mary Eileen Sullivan was closing up the Coffee Shoppe, getting ready to head home, thinking about the slob who was waiting for her at the dining room table. That was only partially true. The slob was not really waiting for her. Actually he could not have cared less about her. The slob was so wrapped up in his own pathetic little life that he wouldn’t even hear Mary Eileen when she walked through the front door of her — not his — apartment.

  As she was locking the front door, Mary Eileen thought back to the morning, more than seventeen hours ago, when she was opening the door of the boutique coffee and bakery. Again, she was thinking about her life and how she wanted it to change when her purse got caught between her hip and the door.

  The Beretta .22-caliber pistol inside the bag poked her in the side. Mary Eileen couldn’t help smiling.

  Christina, one of her employees, had been opening the Coffee Shoppe with Mary Eileen. She bumped into her boss and looked at Mary Eileen with a raised eyebrow as if to ask what was wrong.

  “Oh nothing,” said Mary Eileen, who didn’t need to hear the words to understand Christina’s question,”absolutely nothing.”

  Indeed, nothing was wrong.

  Mary Eileen’s plan was finally coming together.

  She had a good life. But it wasn’t perfect, yet. However, the thirty-four-year-old woman with shoulder-length auburn hair and an hourglass figure had been feeling better the past week. She had a new lover.

  He wasn’t perfect. But Mary Eileen thought he was certainly better than her ex-husband, David Van Holt.

  “What a loser,” Mary Eileen muttered to herself as she angrily rattled the front door to make sure the Coffee Shoppe was locked tight before she went upstairs to her two-bedroom apartment.

  Her life wasn’t perfect yet. Actually, it pretty much sucked. But now Mary Eileen had created a plan. And, like the business coaches said, she was ready to work the plan. And Mary Eileen was confident that once she worked her plan better days would be ahead.

  The plan?

  First, David had to go.

  David was worse than a loser, as far as Mary Eileen was concerned.

  He was a lazy, ugly, scheming bully.

  “You stupid bitch,” he yelled more than once. David was berating her this time for burning a dinner. “And you can’t even apologize correctly.”

  Mary Eileen had tried to stammer out a request for forgiveness. But her Irish accent got in the way, just like it always did. Others thought it was beautiful. David did not.

  “You live in America now, stupid. You need to learn to speak American,” David had demanded more than once. “You sound like a shanty Irish chambermaid off an old PBS TV show.”

  It is true, Mary admitted to herself. I really should learn to speak like the Americans.

  She had come to the United States alone, tired of the strife of her hometown, a village of bombed out buildings in Northern Ireland. Mary Eileen was Catholic to the core, through and through. She loved Ireland. She loved the people and of course, she loved her family.

  But Mary Eileen had hated the violence.

  As a child, in the 1970s, she would walk to school being looked down upon by British soldiers who patrolled the village with giant German Shepherd dogs. At least they looked like giants, or at the very least, horses to Mary Eileen and her third-grade classmates.

  She dreamed of an escape every day until she was sixteen years of age and could flee on her own.

  Mary Eileen had signed up as a foreign exchange student her last year of school. The air flight was free. Once she landed at LaGuardia in New York all she had to do was to run, and run she did.

  Making her life in New York as an attractive, blue-eyed, freckle-faced teenager was easy. There was always an old man — middle-aged really — but old to Mary Eileen, who was willing to pay her money for a favor.

  She had saved her money for more than sixteen years as she traveled west before landing in St. Isidore, Michigan. There were plenty of Catholics. It was a small, slow town; at least compared to New York. And the people who lived there, Mary Eileen found, were very charitable.

  In fact, they were more than charitable and they didn’t ask for anything in return.

  Mary Eileen had found a home.

  She was able to find an apartment through a group called Liz’s House by inventing just a slight lie about being abused by her boyfriend; a boyfriend that she never had. But she knew how to spin a tale and this one worked well enough for room and board.

  Mary Eileen finished high school through a GED program, got her diploma and then went on to St. Isidore Community College where she learned the basics of running her own business.

  But she never lost her brogue, her Irish accent. If anything, Mary Eileen refined her accent. It worked wonderfully with the first people she met who fell in love with her and her stories of Ireland.

  She spun her Irish heritage into the Coffee Shoppe, using it to her advantage, to make her business different from the dozens of other coffee shops that lined South DeVos Avenue in St. Isidore’s Heartside District.

  Mary Eileen was on the poor end of town. But that was okay. The downtown office workers who spent their days on the other side of Fulton Street seemed more than happy to spend their money with her.

  They would listen to her stories about Ireland, eating her baked goods, drinking her coffee, and not working on their laptops. They even seem to get a little bit of a thrill stepping over the homeless bums who seemed to always be sleeping on the Coffee Shoppe’s doorstep.

  “Gives the place atmosphere,” Christina had said to Mary Eileen a few mornings before as they tried to push one of the sleepers off the steps with their feet.

 
Mary Eileen had punctuated her disgust with the absurdity of that optimism by giving the bum a swift kick in the back, hoping she got his kidneys.

  Mary Eileen knew her own mind. That’s why no one worked on their laptops in the Coffee Shoppe. As far as Mary Eileen was concerned, coffee shops were for talking, making friends, or even staring out the window thinking about life. She had very few rules. But one thing Mary Eileen insisted on was that nobody in the Coffee Shoppe would spend their time with their bodies bent like question marks pecking away on their laptops or smartphones.

  That worked too. It made the Coffee Shoppe different.

  And Mary Eileen was different. That worked for everyone but David.

  All of her customers spoke American. The maintenance people who were constantly working on the pipes in the cellar of the ice cream shop spoke American. There were some accents, but none as thick as hers. There didn’t seem to be anyone in St. Isidore who didn’t speak the language of America.

  So, David was right about the language.

  But, David was wrong about Mary Eileen being stupid, and he knew it.

  Mary Eileen just sounded like she was shanty Irish. She was smart as a whip, razor sharp.

  But she was also needy. She was very needy.

  Mary Eileen would lay awake at night with David snoring beside her wondering when her Prince Charming would spirit her away from this miserable existence.

  Most nights, she fell asleep dreaming about her new love, Hans Mueller. He was a forty-eight-year-old ice cream machinery salesman. If there was anyone in St. Isidore who had an accent thicker than hers, it was Hans .

  He was German and never apologized for his ancestry. Like Mary Eileen, he was an immigrant. He had come to St. Isidore because it had such a large German-American population. St. Isidore also had a reputation as a city that welcomed refugees.

  And while Hans was anything but a refugee, he sensed that he could build a life here.

  Hans wasn't anything special. Yet, he was so much nicer than David. Of course, he was a salesman; it was his job to be nice.

  But still, Mary Eileen felt Hans would be a step up from David.

  He might not be the prince she dreamed of as her rescuer, but he was still a damn sight better than the lumbering ox who was laying beside her snoring the night away.

  And why was he still in her bed anyway?

  “You are divorced, aren’t you?” Christina asked.

  That might seem an intrusive question to be coming from most employees. However, their relationship was more than just that of a boss and an employee. Working as closely as they did for eight to sometimes twelve hours a day, the two women couldn’t help but develop a friendship.

  Mary Eileen had to admit that what Christina said was true.

  They had divorced in 2008. But David refused to move out of their apartment even after Mary Eileen made it clear she was sleeping with a new lover. And there had been several before Hans .

  ”But he won’t go. He just sits up there all day long, while I am working, playing games on that stupid computer of his.”

  “While you pay for the internet.”

  “Yes, while I pay for the internet.”

  “But you are divorced.”

  “We are divorced.”

  “Then what the fuck is he still doing in your apartment,” Christina said, pointing with one finger toward the ceiling

  Mary Eileen didn't say a word. She just smiled and pulled her Beretta out of her purse.

  Christina stepped back. Her eyes bulged out of her head and her jaw would have fallen if not for the limits of human anatomy.

  Mary Eileen looked to the right and then the left before she brushed Christina’s ear with her red lips and whispered, “Maybe I will just kill him.”

  Both women laughed and shook their heads in unison as the bell on the front door rang announcing new customers.

  Three girls had breezed into the Coffee Shoppe with as much carefree energy as only teenagers a few years removed from childhood and a lifetime away from the troubles of being adults could possess.

  They bounced and laughed all the way from the front door to the counter ready to order something with enough caffeine and sugar to have them bouncing off the walls.

  Mary Eileen turned away from the door so she could slide her pistol back into her purse.

  She dreamt about being as happy as those girls, those girls who had never had to walk by soldiers who hated her, who never had to grin and literally bare it for a middle-aged fat man, those girls who didn’t have an ex-husband slumping in front of a computer 24/7.

  Mary Eileen had never been as happy as those girls. But she would be.

  Now as Mary Eileen and Christina finished closing up the Coffee Shoppe for another night, Mary Eileen was happy that she wasn’t going home right away this night. That made her feel better. And the thought of what was ahead in the next few hours brightened Mary Eileen’s mood even more.

  Two

  The sound of the Beretta firing, even coming through the heavy ear protection Mary was forced to wear at the St. Isidore Gun & Rod Club, thrilled her.

  She was popping round after round at the black outline of a person; the target of a man hanging about ten yards in front of her.

  When Mary Eileen emptied her clip, she pushed a button that brought the target up to her face. The sight of the bullet holes was icing on the cake, and just as she did when she finished putting the icing on the coffee cakes at the Coffee Shoppe, Mary Eileen would lick the tip of her tongue across her lip.

  It was a special moment.

  The targets made it obvious that the class was learning how to shoot at a human being. That bothered some of the other women at first. But it never fazed Mary Eileen Sullivan.

  “How can we be expected to shoot at another living, human being?” said one of her classmates, Amanda, about ten years younger than Mary Eileen, a reporter for the local paper, the St. Isidore Chronicle.

  That was the same place where David worked, or better put, the Chronicle was his one and only customer for IT work. He probably didn’t want any other customers. The Chronicle paid him enough to take care of their social media from his (her) dining room table that he could work two or three hours a day and play games until David collapsed in his (Mary Eileen’s) bed.

  “This class is about self-defense,” Mary Eileen explained. She had noticed Amanda still flinched at the sound of the gunshots on the range. It was not a surprise she had a problem with even the thought of shooting a person.

  Mary Eileen sipped from her steaming white chocolate mocha, licking some white cream from her upper lip with the tip of her tongue and set the ceramic mug down softly.

  Her blue eyes followed the mug to the thick wooden table top and then rose to meet the questioning eyes of her classmate.

  She pushed her thick auburn hair back over her shoulders. Her hair was naturally thick and almost curly but the auburn hue came from a drugstore bottle. Mary Eileen was thinking going back to being an Irish redhead might soon be a good move.

  “Don’t you wonder what it would be like to actually shoot someone?” Amanda said with a visible shudder. “I couldn’t do it. I can even think about it.”

  “That target is the guy who is trying to rape me or steal from me,” Mary Eileen whispered. “And nobody’s ever going to do that to me again. That’s all I think about.”

  One round after another. Pop. Pop. Pop. The first three shots went into the body of the targeted silhouette.

  "Right where the bastard’s heart would be,” Mary Eileen whispered to herself.

  Pop. Pop. Pop.

  The next three went right into the face of her target.

  Those shots felt even better.

  When she first brought the gun home, still in the box and set it down on the kitchen table, putting the box of ammo she had purchased alongside it; David’s eyes had widened.

  His slumped shoulders actually squared for a moment. Mary Eileen might have been impressed if it hadn’
t been for the flesh of his stomach popping out below the t-shirt that was about a size too small for the belly it covered.

  David pushed his combed-over hair back in place and patted it down.

  They were almost exactly the same age, chronologically, but Mary Eileen felt she was so much older than him in other ways that she had lost respect for David long ago.

  “This is what?” he asked rhetorically, sweeping his hand over the table to make sure Mary Eileen knew what he was asking about. It was also a sign that he was in control, still.

  Even though she knew David could read as well as she could, Mary Eileen wanted to tell him exactly what was in the boxes. She wanted to say it. Mary Eileen would enjoy every syllable of the answer.

  “This is the 21A Beretta Bobcat,” Mary Eileen answered with a smile on her face, sweeping her hand over the table just as David had done a minute before.

  “It is user-friendly, durable, reliable and accurate, while with its snag-free lines is can be tucked in any kind of holster or pocket for deep concealment. Available in .22 LR or .25 ACP, it is perfect for concealed carry — on its own or as a backup pistol — and it keeps besting all pistols in its class for quality, value and design,” Mary Eileen said.

  None of that was on the box of course. Nor was it original. She had memorized the one-paragraph sales pitch from the company’s website. Mary Eileen had been dreaming about this purchase, for a long time.

  David was speechless. His mouth had gone dry. He tried to moisten his lips with his tongue. It only made him seem more useless to Mary Eileen and even less like the man who she could depend on for rescue.

  She swept the Beretta and the box of ammo off the table into her large purse and walked out the front door of her, not ‘their,’ apartment, and left David with the grace of a ballerina.

  Mary Eileen nearly collapsed when she got down to the alley. She couldn't breathe for a few moments after pulling off the performance of her life. Somehow she had stumbled down the stairs that ran from the apartment’s back door to the alley.

  “Oh God, that was good,” Mary Eileen said aloud as she opened the back door of the Coffee Shoppe and collapsed inside her tiny office.