City of Prey: An Ava Gold Mystery (Book 1)

by Blake Pierce

  “What brought Lester into your care?” Ava asked.

  “Well, Lester came in a little over five years ago when he beat his sister half to death. He beat her because she refused the gift he had made for her: a dead rabbit, roughly gutted, stuffed with ribbons and bows. He later revealed to me that he had killed three other rabbits, two cats, and a stray dog in an attempt to practice making the gift. We also later came to find out, thanks to the mother, that Lester was also guilty of sneaking into his sister’s room at night and pleasuring himself as he watched her sleep. The mother and sister both caught him doing this on multiple occasions.”

  “Was there any history of him trying to beat his mother?” Ava asked.

  “None that the mother told us about. There were a few times Lester claimed that his mother abused him. He said one time after he was caught in his sister’s room, his mother held a lit match to his genitals.”

  The imagery was gruesome, but the matter-of-fact way Huffman talked about it was somehow worse. She did her best to seem undaunted and continued. “Did he ever mention wanting to kill her?”

  “Quite the opposite,” Huffman said. “Lester Stubbs adored his mother. The screaming fits he had usually consisted of him screaming at her for forgiveness. And even when I would try to make him say something against his mother, he never did. Instead, he would inflict harm on himself. He bloodied his own nose a few times, knocked a tooth out.”

  She did not like the manner in which Huffman was telling her these things. Again, it was too jovial—the sort of funny stories he might tell some of his friends on a weekend at the lake.

  “And despite all of this, he was allowed to leave?”

  “Yes. He started to think with more clarity. He passed all of the cognitive tests and the screaming fits subsided. Whenever there were conversations about his sister, the rabbit, or what he would do in his sister’s room, there was true regret and sorrow. He prayed to accept Christ as his Lord and Savior and after that, he was like a new man.”

  “And when, exactly, was he discharged?”

  “It’s been about four weeks ago. Maye a bit more.”

  “And he was here for five years?”

  “Yes. Lester came to us when he was eighteen.” He hesitated here for the first time and eyed Ava with worried eyes. “I’m sorry…but has Lester had some sort of a relapse?”

  “We don’t know. We are currently trying to find a suspect for a particular crime and Lester fits some of the details.”

  “I see. I don’t think Lester would…well, he seemed put-together when he left here. I would say I doubt it’s him but you can never be too sure about these things.”

  “Do you know if he and his family always lived around here?” Ava asked.

  “Yes. His father died when he was very young, right after he had purchased a place in the city. Once Lester was placed in our care, I believe his mother moved to Boston. His sister married and moved elsewhere, too, though I don’t know where. As I’m sure you can understand, we don’t really keep up with that sort of thing once they’ve been discharged.”

  “I understand that,” she said. “But is there any chance at all you have an address for where Lester might be staying?”

  “I do,” he said. “And I’m fine giving it to you, but I have to suggest that you mention nothing about this conversation. It could easily trigger him and cause him to relapse if someone other than myself approached him about those topics. So if you truly must speak with him and ask questions, keep them simple and veiled.”

  She nearly said the next comment that passed through her head, but she kept it to herself: That’s a lot of caution—enough caution to make me wonder why the hell he was discharged in the first place.

  “Thank you, Dr. Huffman,” she said. “I’ll approach him with the utmost care. Now…can I have that address?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  When the cabbie dropped her off a block away from the address Huffman had given her, she paid and dismissed him. She wasn’t too surprised to find that it was a slum. Hell, it was the sort of neighborhood that made a slum look good. There were a few houses, all of which looked to have been slapped together with cheap wood and slabs of concrete. There was litter in the street and a smell in the air that was not too dissimilar from what she had experienced back at Baker Asylum.

  She walked the block to the address and found what she was quite sure was a flophouse. She’d heard of them before but had never had the displeasure of actually visiting one. Clarence had told her about them and how gross they were, how fortunate he realized he was after coming back out of them—to have a home and a stable roof over his head.

  The building looked like an apartment complex someone had started building and then abandoned near the end. She’d heard the places described as a sort of transient hotel where there were few rooms, even fewer beds, but upwards of a dozen or more men slept in one single room. It made perfect sense that a man fresh out of a mental institution with no family to go to would end up somewhere like this.

  As she approached the derelict porch, she spotted a lone man standing against the side of the building. He was relieving himself against the side wall and making absolutely no attempt to hide what he was doing. When she reached the front door, she had no idea if she should just go in unannounced or knock. It seemed like the sort of place where devious deeds went down and she did not want to knock and give anyone any sort of warning. On the other hand, she didn’t have Clarence’s gun on her so just bursting in without any kind of protection was likely an invitation to get seriously hurt.

  In the end, she decided on a mix of both. She knocked on the door, waited a second, and then tried the knob. Not only was the lock not engaged, but the knob felt like it might fall off in her hand. She opened the door a bit and slowly edged her head in.

  “Hello?” she said. And after that, the smell of the place hit her. She smelled piss, sweat, hard liquor, and what she could only assume was the smell of countless men passing gas whenever the hell they felt like it. It was atrocious to say the least, all backed by a simmering scent of garbage.

  The door opened into a large room with wooden floors, a torn rug, and an assortment of trash. Two men sat on the floor, paying cards. They both looked at her as if someone had just brought them an exquisite meal to eat.

  “Looks like our lucky day,” the one closest to her said. “Hot damn, sweet thing, you look good enough to eat.”

  Disgusted and not at all in the mood to be eyed like food, Ava glared at him. “Pretty hard to eat anything when you don’t have teeth.”

  The second man snickered at this while the first man got to his feet. He was wearing clothes that looked like they had not seen suds for weeks. Maybe ever. As he stepped toward her, Ava rolled her eyes.

  “Don’t bother,” she said, showing him her sad little whistle hanging from her neck. “I’m with the NYPD Women’s Bureau. You so much as touch me and I’ll have half a dozen dicks in here in five minutes.”

  This stopped the would-be Romeo in his tracks. He peered beyond her shoulder, to the porch and the dead yard behind her.

  “Lady, we ain’t done nothing,” he said.

  “I doubt that. But I don’t care. I have it on good authority that a man I’m looking to question has been staying here. A man by the name of Lester Stubbs. You know him?”

  The man in front of her didn’t have to answer. The reaction of the second man, who had remained quiet and timid during the exchange, told her all she needed to know. His eyes went wide and he got to his feet right away. Their card game went skittering across the floor as he went running to the back of the house.

  Either this man was Lester Stubbs or he was going to warn Stubbs for some reason.

  Ava started rushing forward and noticed right away that the other man—the one who had considered her good enough to eat—was purposefully standing in her way. There was a creepy smile on his face that told her two things: he had no intention of moving and he probably wanted her to push
him down just to get some action.

  Ava elected not to push him. She let out some of her anger in a well-placed right hook that landed squarely in the man’s chest as she went running forward. She heard him gasp and saw him start to stumble backward, but did not get to see him fall. She was already halfway across the room and heading down the back hallway in the direction the second man had gone.

  All along the hallway, she saw partially opened doors. There were several men in a few of them and she was vaguely aware that they were coming to their doorways to see what was going on as she blasted by. Ahead of her, the suspect took a left and she soon heard a door being opened. Ava kicked her legs into another gear, the whistle beating against her breast as if reminding her it was there. She figured if the man had a decent lead on her when she went out the back door, she would blow on it for assistance. For now, all it would do was rattle off these dingy walls.

  She came to the end of the hallway and took the same left. She saw the man just a bit outside of the door, running across the rocky back lot. Ava threw the door open and could see that the man was already slowing, already winded. She did not relent, though. She ran out after him, her feet kicking up dust and her body surging with adrenaline. She was closing in on him quickly, and the man seemed to know it. By the time she had closed the distance and reached out with her right arm, the man had all but stopped. He dropped to his knee and placed his shaking arms in the air.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, so sorry.”

  “What’s your name, sir? Are you Lester Stubbs?”

  He nodded and looked up at her with sad eyes. “I swear, there are no more bunnies. I thought about it, but I didn’t do it…I swear. I’ve been good, so good. My mother would be proud, I’ve been so good.”

  She nearly felt terrible for accosting him in such a way when he clearly wasn’t completely mentally sound. She also found herself at a standstill because—whether on purpose or not, she wasn’t sure—the precinct had not yet provided her with handcuffs, summonses, and certainly not a revolver yet. All she had was the ridiculous whistle.

  “Listen,” she said. “I need you to come with me. We have a walk to make, you and I. I need you to walk right in front of me and listen to my directions.”

  “No. I don’t wanna go. I’ve been good, I swear it. Don’t make me…don’t make me go back…”

  “If you don’t listen, I’m going to blow my whistle and male officers are going to come. And they won’t be nearly as nice and as understanding as I am. Do you understand that?”

  Crying, Lester Stubbs nodded and got to his feet. “I understand. I’ll be good.”

  “Go back to the street and take a left,” she said. “You run, and I’ll catch you. You try anything stupid, and I’ll blow my whistle. Understand?”

  Again, he just nodded. And when his back was to her, Ava finally allowed herself to relax. And beyond that, she allowed herself a moment of triumph, feeling certain she’d nabbed the hatchet killer.

  ***

  “Are you out of your ditzy little mind?”

  Minard barked this at her from behind his desk, leering at her. He was madder than she had ever seen him and was torn between utter confusion and fear of her job.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Lester Stubbs is a better match for the killer than Tony Two ever was. It doesn’t seem you’re even interested in questioning him.”

  “Oh, he’ll be questioned,” Minard said. “That’s why I’m wasting an interrogation room on him right now. But at the same time, I’m going to have to figure out a way to make it not look absolutely fucking terrible that one of my rookie officers bullied a simpleton! Speaking of which…if it comes up, you need to claim that Stubbs attacked you and that’s why you gave chase.”

  “So you want me to lie?”

  “Yes. You lie about it if you have to.”

  “But I—”

  “Shut up. You either do as I say on this or you can kiss this job goodbye.” He slammed his fists on his desks to stress the point. But then, as if shifting some mental gear, he stood ramrod straight and sighed.

  “Sir, should I—”

  “Gold, here’s the truly messed up part. Here’s the part that makes me want to toss your pretty face out on that street. The move to search in the asylums after finding out this killer has been muttering about his mother…that was brilliant. A good move, even if I do hate to admit it. And I was that thinking that saved your behind on this. Half an hour ago, I was ready to fire you. But…this was a smart move. Just carried out sloppy as hell.”

  “How, sir?”

  He glared at her and some of the anger came back into his eyes. “Because Stubbs was recently out of an asylum, there had to be very hard evidence against him for these murders. Let’s say he is the killer. If you don’t find something that absolutely nails him to either one of the victims or the scene, he’s going to walk. And to make matters worse, that flophouse you found him in probably has as many as thirty men hunkering down. If even two of them claims Stubbs was at that house the night of the murders, he walks—even if they’re lying.”

  Damn, she thought. She felt like a fool, not having thought about any of this. “I’m…I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Not only that,” he went on. “But being there by yourself while you have a partner was reckless. A stupid rookie mistake. You could have been killed.”

  “I…I didn’t—”

  “I don’t want to hear sorry, Gold. I want it fixed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And another thing,” he said with a sneer. “I’ve gotten two visits from reporters that want to talk with you. Not to mention Frank Wimbly and Frances downstairs singing your praises. Whether you like it or not, eyes are on you. And if they’re on you, they’re on the entire precinct. Keep that in mind the next time your gut tells you to do something like this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now get out of here. You can question Stubbs if you want, but it’ll be with another cop to supervise. But honestly…I wouldn’t bother. I already have two dicks out at that flophouse. I fully expect proof of his innocence to come back to me within a few hours. And besides…we still have Tony Two who still could be our killer.”

  “But what if he’s—”

  “We just went through this, Gold. Now…get out of here. My patience only runs so deep.”

  She turned and made her exit right away. When she closed the door behind her, she felt exposed. Pretty much every set of eyes was on her as she made her way across the bullpen and to the hallway. Some men were laughing, and very few of them were trying to stay polite about it. A jobbie on the other side of the bullpen stood up and made a dramatic act of stretching as he said: “Hey, Gold, want to race?”

  Ava hurried away, feeling her defenses come up, as well as a barbed response. She hurried to the stairs at the end of the hall and retreated to the WB office with the laughter of countless officers pushing at her back. When she opened the door and stepped inside, she saw that most of the women were there. They all looked to her with a mix of expressions on their faces.

  Lottie approached her slowly with a sympathetic look and said, “I am far above making jokes at your expense because you ran down a mentally disabled man. And because of that…I should probably not talk to you for the remainder of the day.”

  She ended this with a mischievous smile as she headed back to her desk. It made Ava feel slightly better but when she looked over to Frances and saw the look of disappointment in her eyes, it hurt Ava more than she expected.

  “Do you think Stubbs is really the killer?” Frances asked.

  “If you’d asked me ten minutes ago, I’d have said yes.”

  “But I didn’t ask you ten minutes ago. I’m asking you now.”

  It hurt to say it, but Ava managed to push the words out and it was like spitting out her own teeth. “I just don’t know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  Ava headed upstairs to look for Frank, figuring it would be best to t
alk over the morning’s events with him now rather than later, when the entire precinct knew about it and had enjoyed a good laugh. She did not find him at his desk, and when she inquired about his whereabouts at the front desk with Wayne Gibb, she got no answers there, either. She couldn’t help but wonder if he was avoiding her and the precinct altogether, trying to stay away from the drama she had caused this morning. That had made her wonder another thing, something that made her feel guilty, though she hated to admit it: would Minard partially blame Frank for this, seeing as how he was the one who had gone to bat for her?

  She was about to leave a note on his desk when she heard her name called from across the bullpen. It was Wayne Gibb, hollering to her from the front desk.

  “Gold! There’s a call for you!”

  Ava wasn’t sure how to respond. Should she head down to the WB office have the call directed there? Did she need to find a candlestick phone and have Gibb transfer the call? No one had ever called the precinct looking specifically for her, after all. However, Gibb held his receiver out to her, the cord gently pulling at the cradle sitting on his desk. She hurried over and took it from him.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  Gibb said nothing, only smiling. She liked Gibb quite a bit. She recalled that he had been only slightly jarring on the first day but now, unless she was mistaken, it seemed he was something of a supporter.

  “Hello, this is Ava Gold,” she said into the receiver.

  “Ava, it’s Hank Armstrong. You remember me?”

  She did, and her face lit up. She hadn’t seen Hank is years, not since she’d first started to grab shows here and there in the smaller clubs. He was a jazz expert and, the last she heard, was helping to organize concerts for some of the bigger clubs in the city.

  “I sure do! But…how did you know to reach me here?”

  “Are you kidding? Your name is all over town. There are people whispering that the wife of the late Clarence Gold is hunting down deranged killers. Your name has popped up in the papers a few times, too. Didn’t you know?”