“You said the woman, Eve Devine, bought a ticket to Bisbey, and boarded the train yesterday morning. Right?”
“Yep. She came in early, hung around the desk afterwards, talking about her sister in the rehab place. Said she would be back on the 6:10.”
“Did you know her, I mean before yesterday? Ever seen her before?”
“I don’t recall. She looked kind of familiar, but can’t say if I ever saw her before, or maybe she reminded me of someone.”
“I guess that red hair, you wouldn’t forget that,” Maude said casually.
“Yeah, now that I recall, she might have been a redhead,” Henry said, getting busy again. He shrugged both shoulders, sorry he had to cut his answer short.
“Thank you, Henry. Nice talking to you,” she said, lighting up her second unfiltered of the day as she left the room, headed for the train tracks. All the passenger departures had been done for the hour, and even though a freight might pass through at any time, Maude figured it was okay to go about her business, searching for evidence missed by the crime scene techs, as long as she was alert to train whistles.
So far there was little to go on, other than a bloodless woman had lain across the tracks, waiting for the 6:10 to arrive after she boarded that same train early in the day. If it wasn’t for the macabre punch line, the riddle would have been humorous. Maude could only wonder at the piece of humanity who put it all into play. There seemed to be no logic to the crime, no purpose. Eve Devine was, in her boss’s opinion, a dedicated clerk at a grocery store, nothing more. Not even a mother, as far as he knew, even though a kid had claimed her as his mom. Maude wished Joe was available for his insight. She had come to rely on his opinions about aberrant behavior in humans. Another thing for Monday.
The switch was twenty car lengths away from the station, give or take a car, allowing for more than one set of wheels traveling on the same tracks. Passenger trains off schedule often waited patiently on aside tracks as fast-moving freight cars passed by the dozens. It was the way of the railroad. Keep on schedule and you get to go first, but woe to the engineer who lost his place in line. On the day that Eve Devine made her own history, Engine 99 was strictly on schedule. The overall trip was one hundred eighty-seven and a half miles, one way, taking eight and a half hours of travel, plus an hour at the stations. Ninety-nine left the station on schedule then picked up five minutes on the way to Wilk, stopping at MacArthur, Bisbey, and Johnson’s Corner, to pick up and drop off passengers. Samuel Blevins and the conductor, Kale Pittsford, sat down in the dining car, and ate a quick lunch as always, before turning the circle to head back to Madison. The wait at the Wilk station was longer than most, allowing time for the engineer to break for lunch. It was a schedule a person could depend on, even down to the pork chop sandwich that Samuel had for lunch every Friday.
Back at the station, Henry Fonda thought about his memory. He was pleased to be a step ahead of most of his friends, who couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag in the dark. Seemed to Henry the years had been kind in that respect, even though there were some dark shadows on his future. The oncologist told him three months ago that they would watch the spot, see if it changed any. He coughed, and felt with his hand along the middle rib, where sometimes it hurt to breathe. Doctor Mueller said it might be nothing, but Henry knew he could feel it growing, getting bigger, and before long it would take over his whole chest. Sometimes life didn’t treat a man just right. Here he had such a good memory, but wouldn’t be around long enough to use it. He didn’t tell the lady detective about the spot, or about his memory, but he intended to bring her up to date on his perspective, the next time he saw her.
That woman Eve Devine had brought a powerful stink on the station. Why she wanted to get cut in half on his watch was beyond Henry’s understanding. He took a minute or two to step outside for a few puffs, before getting back to his duties of selling tickets, answering the phone, and making reservations for people traveling. The whole sorry mess was troubling him; there was plenty about the situation with the dead woman that gave him the willies.
That Friday morning had been busy; seemed like every Tom, Dick, and Harry was taking a trip somewhere, looking for connections to California or New York. He remembered seeing the woman come through the door, her small red purse on her arm, red hair shining in the early morning light.
She had pretty brown eyes—he remembered well the way she had watched the clock on the wall, and the line of people ahead of her. Like she was afraid she might miss the train. He had rushed through the line, making sure that he got to her before she turned and left. He wondered why she hadn’t brought anything with her, until she volunteered that her sister in Bisbey was in the rehab place, and she was going for a visit, but would be back when the 6:10 reached its final destination. Her ticket was for a round trip. She had acted like there was no problem with money, pulling out a fifty-dollar bill he had to return change for, but her clothes said different. Looked like discount store buys to him. He couldn’t remember exactly what she was wearing, because the window didn’t give him a view all the way to her feet, but he recalled a bright green skirt or capris. When those britches were loose, they kind of looked like a skirt.
“Train boards at 8:15, but won’t leave until 8:30,” he’d told her. “Got plenty of time, rest yourself. Looks like you’ve been running.
Her composure had slipped for a minute. “Leave me alone, old man. Stay out of my business.”
Henry had been taken aback by the attack on his pleasantry. He certainly never meant any harm, just being concerned for her. But you can bet he stayed away after that, paid her no never-mind. Did seem strange, though, what with the help he had given, she would turn on him like that. Shows to go you, can’t tell a book by its cover.
Chapter 2
Maude looked the scene over again, taking notes, noticing a few things she’d missed the night before. The marks on the tracks showed the engineer had forced an emergency stop, which took at least fifty feet to come to a complete standstill. According to Samuel Blevins, the engine’s speed had already been cut to almost a crawl. She made note of the position of the body in its gory state, relative to the drag marks on the rails. God, what a way to go, she thought.
Grass and weeds grew high on the section of land along the tracks across from the station and down toward the crime scene. The ragged adjacent pavement was a small road, once providing a thoroughfare to some houses farther south, but now the road was down to gravel in several places where the base had worn through. The closest neighborhood had a few old trailers, several three-room clapboard houses, and potholed streets, with rusted signs hanging askew. Maude had known the neighborhood as one Mayor Denise Royale had tried to recreate and gentrify, but the people who lived there didn’t want to be reclaimed.
There were tire treads in the gravel near the end of the pavement—a car had been there recently. The technicians would have made molds of the tires, for, as usual when murder was involved, the questions piled up, needing answers that came from evidence. Maude knew the woman’s death wasn’t suicide, even though the coroner hadn’t formally put out the word. Theodore Hollingsworth, Holly to the detectives of the Cop Shop, was the stand-in coroner, a former FBI man who worked part-time for Edward Keller, the medical examiner, or ME. Holly was good man to have around, but his ego sometimes got in the way of his knowledge, making him testy when he wasn’t properly respected. Maude knew when to kowtow, to save hours of wasted footwork when Holly already had the answer to her questions. She thought about calling the morgue, wondering if he was on duty. The phone extension rang three times, before it was answered by a gruff, no-nonsense voice.
“Hollingsworth, County Coroner’s Office.” Great, she thought, he’s on duty.
“Maude Rogers here,” she said. “I know it’s early, but I’m puzzled by this train death. I didn’t see any blood last night. What do you think?”
“Detective,” he said, “I don’t make assumptions. I wait for the evidence t
o tell me what I need to know.”
“Yes, I know that. But you usually have an early opinion.” She was groveling, and he knew it.
“Well,” he said, “if I had an early opinion, it would be that the victim died eight to ten hours before the train bisected her. She had no blood and was in rigor.”
“Any idea what killed her?” she asked him.
“Um, yes, but it isn’t official, you understand.”
“I do understand,” she replied, “it’s an early opinion.”
“Maybe more than an opinion—just not official.” Maude could hear in his voice that he needed her to plead a little.
Biting her tongue, she offered up, “Theodore, I appreciate anything you can tell me off the record. It would help immensely.”
“Well all right, detective—the cause of death is exsanguination, with the point of origin the aortic valves. Your victim had her heart cut out while she was still alive. She was dead for some time before the train hit her. Seems a lot of trouble to go to kill a person, but it takes all kinds.”
“Wait, did you say her heart was removed?” Maude croaked. “Her heart? This woman had no heart?”
“Detective, are you all right? You sound distressed.” Holly was concerned, for he was accustomed to Maude’s acceptance of the facts of death and murder without any emotion.
“I’m fine, just surprised. Was any other organ missing?” she asked, taking a deep breath, knowing there wasn’t.
“No, just her heart. I must say, too, that it was done quite expertly. No peripheral damage to tissue, clean cuts. Now I really must go, I have work to do. Remember, detective, off the record.”
“Yeah, I got it. Unofficial,” she said distractedly, and disconnected the phone call. Her second unfiltered for the day was early, the demand for nicotine made strong by Holly’s revelation. What earlier appeared to be a difficult case had morphed into a bizarre set of circumstances, with no logical continuity. “The woman was on the train, for heaven’s sake,” she said to no one.
Sitting near the tracks, smoking, her thoughts were jumbled. Dread lived there too. Maude shook her head, refusing to believe there was another monster out there copying Robert Dawson. Some time had passed since she had seen a serial murderer with as little conscience and as much imagination as the convicted killer. Cautioning herself against jumping to conclusions, Maude finished her cigarette and went back to considering the facts and the evidence.
Chapter 3
The medical carts were stationed up and down the hallway, awaiting the return of the dispensing nurses, and the guards who carried the keys to the rooms. The cart’s drawers were secured with strong locks, especially the ones containing tranquilizing drugs or mood-altering medications. A room door would be opened by the guard, and the nurse would enter, carrying the medication needed by the patient. They would dose him or her then leave quickly, getting on to the next room. As usual, the hospital was short-handed, staffing the absolute minimum number of employees needed for maximum amount of coverage. In other words, the nurses were overworked, underpaid, and under-appreciated. Their jobs were hard; sometimes just handling the mental patients took all their energy, then there were hundreds of pills to be sorted—sometimes thousands, depending on the size of the population. The nurses fortunate enough to keep their jobs worked twice as fast to compensate for fewer employees. Sometimes they got careless.
Ellen Goodbody was a medium-sized woman with a medium description: hair jet black from a Walgreens box color, mottled skin, and hazel eyes under rimless tri-focal glasses. She had worked for the hospital since it opened, and knew every patient on the medication list by name. Her back was stooped from years of passing cups of pills, but she liked her job—had loved it, in fact, until recently, when management cut staffing by thirty percent. Ellen knew that each time a new operations manager came on board, there would be changes made, and sure enough, the recent OM had been on board for three months, then started moving people around, and laying others off. The honeymoon period never lasted very long. Sometimes promotions came to loyal employees during that waiting period. Ellen had hoped she would finally make charge nurse, but it didn’t happen. Too old, she figured. Management liked young people. She guessed she was lucky to still have a job, what with all the ones who got laid off, now visiting the unemployment office every day.
From the first minute Ellen smelled the “bad ones” coming in the front entry; she catalogued them by their odors. That was why they put her up on twenty-two, the floor with all “bad ones,” because they had tested her, and said she was right, she could smell out the ones who had really enjoyed killing people. Taking her cart down the hallway that day brought the strong smell to her sensitive nose, making her wish once again she wasn’t always assigned to twenty-two. Truth was, the charge nurses knew they had a good thing going with Ellen, because she could tell if one of the maximums was being transported somewhere, or was in the wrong place. A person might think that kind of benefit to the hospital would be rewarded, but Ellen knew her supervisors kept it quiet, with no one knowing except for the other nurses. Possibly some of the past managers had been told, but she figured they scoffed at such a thing, so no mention of extra money was ever made.
When she was a little girl, her uncle had come round the house a lot, visiting her parents, but he always had an eye for the kids, giving Ellen the creeps. She was the middle one, with an older sister and a kid brother still just a toddler. The boy Marsh, short for Marshall, was the light of his daddy’s eye; after waiting so long to get a boy, he finally had one. Marsh was a sweetheart, never giving his mama a minute’s trouble, just being sweet and lovable. He loved hugging and being kissed. The two girls liked that about the little boy, because they could play with him and pretend to be romantic, with Marsh as the husband in the family. Little guy didn’t know anything about it, but, being the sweet boy he was, they could pretend he was grown up, and loved his wife and family.
Somehow they made it work. Ellen had asked Deen, her sister, short for Geraldeen, about it since then, and they couldn’t figure out how they’d made a toddler into a husband. That was the nature of kids and their imagination, she guessed.
The uncle, who was her mama’s brother, and some said he had been a little off all his life, always wanted to play with the kids, but they didn’t like him much, except for Marsh, who liked everybody. One terrible day, twenty-five years earlier in the month of August, Ellen remembered, the red wasps buzzed outside the house, and around the ripening figs on the trees, just as loud as anyone could imagine. They always showed up in the hottest part of summer. She, Deen, and Marsh were in the playhouse that Daddy had built; a small building big enough for three kids, a small table, and three chairs. Little Marsh took the opportunity to wander outside the playhouse after seeing a kitten scoot by. Deen and Ellen were busy with their usual roles as Mama and daughter, and forgot to pay attention to the boy. They both failed to notice he never returned after chasing the kitten.
When the wasps started around the playhouse, the girls ran outside, worried Marsh might get stung, and then Mama would bust their butts for not keeping an eye out. The yard where they all played was a big grassy area with trees at the edge forming a wall between the grass and the bottom land below. Beyond the trees, the land stepped down several feet, much of it becoming clay rises and rocky ledges above the slow-moving water of Bradley Creek. Daddy had strong orders that no child would venture beyond the first level of trees, or the penalty of his belt would quickly follow. The girls couldn’t see Marsh anywhere on the grass under the trees, but figured he had gone in the house, toddling through the open door looking for Mama. They went back to their playing, glad to be rid of the little guy, even though he was fun to play with sometimes, but didn’t always want to be the husband.
About an hour later, the best that anyone could figure, Mama came outside the house, looking for them to come in for supper, and asked, “Where’s Marsh?”
Deen looked at Ellen, and they both got al
l goggle-eyed and answered they thought he was in the house. That began a search that lasted for several hours, with her and her big sister Deen crying, and calling for Marsh to come back. But he didn’t come, and that made them cry even more. Later on, the sheriff’s deputies and Daddy went down to the river, and found the boy lying on a big rock, his head bashed in, and his little body naked as the day he was born.
Mama went hysterical, and never did come out of it like she should have for the rest of the family. Daddy went on a warpath, saying he would kill whoever did it to his boy, and cut their head off when he was done. Said he would put the head up on a post, and look at it every day until he died. The deputies were really sad, and some of them cried when they found little Marsh, but after a few days, they said they didn’t have any real clue about who had killed him. About that time, Daddy noticed Uncle Jake hadn’t been around during the tragedy, and began to get suspicious, telling the deputies to go find him and lock him up, because he did it. When Mama heard that part was when she truly went hysterical. Up to then, she had been crying, and nobody could comfort her. The deputies knew that they should question Uncle Jake, and they found him, but he said he had an alibi that day, and was innocent. Daddy knew different, he told his family.
Uncle Jake was at his own house, scared to come over, because of Daddy, but wanting to come and see Mama, his sister. When Daddy went to Jake’s house and found him there, he didn’t wait for anything to dissuade his belief that Jake had been the killer of his boy; he showed the hatchet he had brought in from his truck, screaming at him, ”Why did you kill my boy, you pervert?” The coroner had said little Marsh was sexually assaulted as well as killed.
“I didn’t, I swear,” Jake said to Daddy, who had gone deaf, and didn’t want to hear the denial. He got a tighter hold on the hatchet, and went toward Jake, who stumbled over a chair, falling across the porch, where he had run at first sight of the weapon.
The Maude Rogers Murder Collection Page 55
