Free The East Avenue Murders (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 1) by Linda L. Dunlap Page A

but Maude felt it keenly. Her brother was two years younger and had always blamed her for their father’s departure from the family. She had kept quiet about the old man and his perversions choosing instead to let the boy believe the best about their father. She wished later that she had told him the full story.
    There were two other cases on her desk from the past week’s line up of the poor and the dead. One was a homeless woman found strangled in City Park with a piece of electrical cord still wrapped around her neck. Her face was familiar to most of the downtown cops. Diane Jones was often seen pushing a grocery store cart along the edge of the street picking items from trash dumpsters. She would later take the stuff to the Thrift-for-Profit store on Ninth Street where the proprietor would pay a few pennies for Jones’s treasures.
    The woman had smoked cigars of any kind but didn’t pass up a long cigarette butt if there was one on the ground. Several times before, Maude had seen the woman sleeping on a makeshift bed just inside the park entry near the cops’ beat. Jones had felt it was safe to close her eyes with the patrolling officers nearby.
    The morning that Jones was found dead was rainy; the clothing that covered the woman’s body and the mangled sheets and cardboard that was her meager bed were all drenched. It appeared that Jones had been sleeping just before she died. Another of the homeys found her lying there and called to the cop who was returning from a patrol of the park.
    The H omicide desk was notified, and Maude made a quick trip by the crime scene. After the evidence-gatherers left she made some notes then left the scene, aware that the case would have to wait for her and Joe till Monday morning.
    The cop who found the woman said that more than one homeless man had been present when he arrived and found Diane Jones, bla ck female approximately thirty-seven years old, lying dead in the fetal position near the park entrance. The cop was the initial investigator and Maude needed to talk to him before she could get too far into the case. The officer ran a beat between Ninth and Baker most of the time. His hours presently were six to six, four days a week. Shouldn’t be too hard to locate him, she thought.
    The other case had been open for two weeks. An old man named Clyde Davis had removed his clothing, climbed upon his sister’s roof and began shouting, naming his sister as a captor who never let him get away from the house. He also said she had stolen his money.
    The next morning the man was found on the lawn of the same house , his neck broken and the bent end of a crowbar stuck firmly in his back. No prints were found on the crowbar but a red bandana was located on the ground about ten feet from the victim, as though dropped by someone in a hurry. The lab had the bandana. DNA tests were often slow to return after the information was sent out to another agency for processing, meanwhile the owner of the red kerchief probably couldn’t be positively identified.
    At the time of his death the victim was being treated for a mental disorder . He had previously lived in a halfway house until the facility released him to his physically handicapped sister. The woman was able to get about her property using an electric wheel chair thus the State in its fogged wisdom believed she could care for her brother as well as herself. She drove a van with an electric lift, managing without help from others, only adding to the belief that she was more than capable.
    The sister told the officer who questioned her that she and her brother had been arguing before he climbed to the roof of her house. She said his behavior had gone from bad to worse after his release from the halfway house because he refused to take the medicine his doctor had prescribed.
    Maude made a mental note to go see the sister herself and get a feel for the relationship between the siblings. Maybe she just got tired of his tantrums and fixed his