The 6:10 To Murder (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 3)

by Linda L. Dunlap

  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 all 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.

  Daddy didn’t care about Jake crying and denying the killing, he just attacked his brother-in-law like a madman, chopping him over and over with the hatchet, until Jake bled all over the porch and died. Then Daddy cut Jake’s head off, and held it by the hair, hollering that he had avenged his only boy. The deputies showed up about that time, and nearly fainted at the sight. They arrested Daddy, who kept saying, “I killed the son of a bitch who took my boy’s life.”

  It was an all-around cluster, with the deputies trying to talk sens
e into Daddy, telling him to put the hatchet down, so they wouldn’t have to shoot him. But the chickens had come home to roost for Daddy, and he knew it. The only thing he hadn’t lost up to then was his girls, and they would surely be taken away. He turned the hatchet around and hit himself across the forehead, opening up a gash four inches long, and two deep, enough that he got to the thinking part of his head. He almost bled to death, but after the doctors worked on him, he lived on with less sense than a carrot. Afterward he went to the small, criminal, crazy-house and stayed there while they were building the big one. Mama was pretty far gone by that time, and took a whole bottle of aspirin one day. They found her down near the water, lying on the same rock where little Marsh was left by the pervert who killed him.

  The deputies came by later, the day Mama died, and told them about finding the person who killed the boy. He was a child molester, just got out of prison, and was traveling the creek to get back to his home. When he saw little Marsh, playing in the yard, and no one watching him, he called the boy over, and, real sweet-like, he offered a hug with his arms out. After that it was the terrible thing; the man assaulted the little boy, who started crying, because the man hurt him. The only thing the ex-con could do was shut the kid up, so he hit him with a big rock. A few years later, the man was executed in the electric chair, and it couldn’t have been a nicer ending, Ellen always thought. She just wished her uncle could have lived on, and Daddy wouldn’t have gone at him with the hatchet, determined to cut his head off.

  When Ellen grew up, after living with her daddy’s kinfolk for a few years, she got her vocational nurse certification and went to work at the insane asylum, so she could be near her daddy all the time. He had a certain smell about him by that time, the bad smell Ellen grew to recognize, not only on him, but on the others in the criminal ward. She knew to watch them really closely. Later, after Daddy died, Ellen applied with the new Madison-MacArthur Hospital, and went to work in the criminally insane section, and her boss recognized her special ability.

  “Fat lot of good that did me,” Ellen was fond of saying. “They never paid me a dime more for it.”

  Ask the management staff about her special gift and they’d shake their heads and say, “She’s worked around the hospital too long; now she acts like one of them.”

  On Friday evening, the day of the train wreck over at the Madison station, Ellen Goodbody felt a twinge hitting her nose, somewhere close to 73’s cell. She didn’t recall smelling his odor very often, even though she knew about the inmate’s history. He had his own doctor to give medication as it was needed, taking some work off the few nurses on the floor. That day she caught the scent more than once, a revelation she felt she’d best keep to herself. 73 was different from the others—his catatonic condition was not a result of medication, but of trauma, from a bad accident. Ellen had always avoided the cell, afraid for some reason she couldn’t explain, even though he was supposed to be harmless as a butterfly; still, he gave her a big case of the willies.

  Inside the cell, behind the protective brick walls of the hospital, where Robert Dawson was kept separate from the rest of the population, he lay in his bunk, enjoying the aftermath of his work. The computer program had been delightful to Ridge, one of Dawson’s alter egos, challenging him to stricter intellectual responses. Doctor Hopkins used a specific retraining program for his patient’s thought processes, titillating his neurons, hoping the result would be a greater jump into reality. Improvement had been phenomenal since the accident, and he was almost back to one hundred percent. Even now, Ridge, the smart one in Dawson’s personality disorder, could outthink the rest of the building’s population, including the new operations manager, who was busy trying to cut costs and line his pockets with a golden glow. Doctor Hopkins warned Dawson against showing any sign of his improved condition to anyone, excluding, of course, his employees. They had to know who was boss in order to maintain security.

  The man the old woman detective called Buzzcut was a distant cousin, a quiet, intelligent young man who knew which side of the bread had the butter on it. Ridge had to laugh at the words as he thought them. They were leftovers from Dawson’s parents. Tomorrow was the big day, the day Ridge would begin realizing some benefit from his last two years of hard work.

  Even the doc was amazed at his recovery, saying, “I never would have believed you could come back from the trauma.” Ridge smiled a little more, his impatience getting closer to the edge, wondering what the good doctor would do if he really knew his patient’s mind.

  Buzzcut would be reporting in after regular hours, with Doctor Hopkins making the allowance for the late-night visit. Ridge wanted to see his cousin, or, that is, Dawson’s cousin, and savor the information he would bring. Funny how things had turned out: Ridge had so much money that anything he wanted done or started could be brought to fruition from inside a mental hospital for the criminally insane.

  “Old man,” he said to himself and the empty room, “what do you think of your loser son now? Here’s hoping there’s a hell and you’re burning every day.” Robert Dawson had been an abused child, neglected by the father and punished physically and emotionally by the mother. There were three personalities in the man: a boy, Bobby; Ridge Roberts, the ego without a conscience; and Robert, the porcelain salesman who tried to make peace among the three. Some time back, Dawson was sentenced, after being found guilty of several murders. He was labeled “the Heartless Killer” by the press, a villain who murdered young women and removed their hearts.

  Chapter 4

  Maude finally went home, undressed down to her underwear then sat in the rocking chair on the back porch. A call to dispatch informed the on duty officer that she was out of service A tall wooden fence stood between her and the neighbor’s back door, lending privacy to the porch, and the yard with its five oak trees. Off to the right was the storage shed on the lot with the rent house, a few peach trees in the yard, and a garden spot in the open area, where some watermelons and tomatoes were growing. She sat outside as usual, enjoying the day with a gin and tonic, the first of the day.. The booze filled some cracks recently opened by the coroner’s off-the-record information.

  Tempted to smoke the vital fourth cigarette, Maude held off in favor of a handful of salted pretzels. Definitely salt helped get her through the need for nicotine, she thought, popping another curly one in her mouth. Anything she could think of, or figure on, was better than the place her thoughts wanted to go. She had to stay away from there, had to figure another angle. Robert Dawson was not the murderer of Eve Devine. She had called immediately, only to find out from the hospital that Dawson’s condition hadn’t been upgraded.

  She had a copycat, a hero worshiper, taking his trip down murderer’s row, intent on making a name for himself. The media would grab it, mold it, and make a new terror for the men and women of Madison. God she hated that. Hated the way vile, evil men played to the press, hoping to gain eternal life in print. Write a book, she thought, if you want to become famous. Kill all the fictional people you want, but lay off the murder business. How she wished it could be that easy.

  Joe, she missed Joe, her partner. He would be able to put a spin on the story that might make her laugh, or at least take away some of the dread. She picked up the phone twice, and put it down, hating to disturb his weekend, but the third time she punched in the number programmed for him.

  “Hello, Maude, is that you? Something wrong? Are you okay?” His questions started coming, just as she knew they would. “Give me a minute, let me throw this blonde out of my house. Be right back.”

  She held on to the connection, hoping there was nothing serious she was breaking up, just needing to run some of the information by him. “Joe, are you back? You’re not taking a dump, are you, with me waiting around?”

  “Hey, Maude, no, but you were close. I had some clothes in the washer and needed to turn on the machine so I have clean clothes for next week. What’s up? It’s not like you to call at night.”

  �
�I know,” she said. “Tried not to, but thought you might shed some light on what’s happening.”

  “What do you mean, what’s happening? Did you get a call-out?” Joe sounded concerned. “Let me get my beer then tell me about it.”

  He was back in a minute, giving Maude time to cover herself with a robe, thinking she had already given the neighborhood peepers a good show.

  “So tell me everything,” Joe said.

  She began telling it with the phone call from the kid, then the scene at the empty house. The incident with the train followed right behind, and Joe was speechless.

  “Maude, are you kidding me? You’re just now calling?” He seemed upset, but surely he understood her reasons for not calling.

  “Well, Joe, it was my weekend in the barrel. I didn’t want to spoil the time for both of us.”

  “Yeah, but heck, Maude, this is a really bad case. You should have trusted me to make the decision, whether I wanted to get involved or not.”

  “Well, no one is sorrier than I am for not calling, but you know how it goes. The department only pays one of us to be on call. The best they would do for you would be to give you some extra days off.”

  “Okay,” he said, “tell me all of it. The part you’ve left out.”

  “What makes you think there’s more? Isn’t it bad enough yet?” she asked him, trying to stall.

  “I can hear it in your voice. There’s more.” Joe was a hard man to fool.

  “Well, it’s like this. I talked to Holly, off record. He thinks the woman bled to death before the train ran her over.”