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

business so to speak.
    Holly, as he was christened by the lab, was a man in his seventies with no sense of humor. He worked Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, allowing Doctor Keller to take time away from the office o r appear in court to testify in local, state or federal. Today being Monday, Holly was in the office finishing up a dictation that he and the doc had done while autopsying a hit and run victim from a week earlier.
    Because the victim had been involved in a political scandal during the last mayoral election, his family had demanded the autopsy believing the man might have been drugged before walking across the street from a local restaurant and bar and being run down by an automobile. The man’s family was disappointed at the results. No drugs of any kind were found in the man’s stomach or in his blood.
    Holly glanced up from his notes with a frown on his face. “You’re late,” he said.
    Maude look ed down at her watch and agreed with him. “Yeah,” she said, “ten minutes past. Sorry.”
    “Doctor Keller is not here today. What did you want?” he said.
    Maude told him that she needed to know about time and cause of death in both of the two women who were found on East Avenue. He reminded her that the autopsy hadn’t been done yet. She told him she knew that but wanted his professional take on what might have happened. Maude knew that the county had a gold mine of information in Hollingsworth. The man had spent an extensive amount of time in the federal labs, working with the forensics teams of Quantico, the hub of the Federal Bureau of Investigations research and training center. She also knew that the man had a large ego that he kept under wraps when Doctor Keller was on duty.
    Hollingsworth muttered under his breath but took up the case notes and began looking them over. He had not misunderstood the admiration in Maude’s voice, the salute to his ability to read the tell -tale signs from a victim’s injuries without cutting them open.
    “Well, now this is not official because we won’t know for sure until after the autopsy but all signs point to a short blade with a curved end in the manner of a saber, the depth of the fatal injury appears to be over two and a half inches deep, almost severing the head from the body internally. The lack of trauma at the entry wound indicates very little force was used, therefore the blade would have been extremely sharp, possibly  new steel or a very well cared for older blade.
    “ There was circular bruising evidence at both victims’ ankles, indicating some type of restraint was used on them. As to time, we haven’t changed our ruling there: death occurred four to six days prior to the finding of the body. The decay of the soft tissue and damage caused by the maggot infestation indicate our previous estimation was correct.”
    Maude thanked Holly for his help, agreeing with him that the results of the autopsy would be the official word but now she had a direction to go, an arrow on a sheet of paper saying “start here” pointing to a trail to follow. The man seemed pleased that she appreciated his skills and after muttering under his breath, he went back to the transcription he had been previously absorbed in, a tiny smile at the corner of his mouth.
    Maude and Joe left the basement of the building with its cold sterile smells and returned to her patrol car.
    “You should really insist on a better car.” Joe said. “This one must be ten years old.”
    “Seven, and it still runs, a little shaky no doubt but it gets us there,” Maude said.
    “So what do you think, Maude, are we going to get him?” he asked.
    Maude thought for a minute, wondering how much she should tell her partner. The man deserved to know the truth, but she didn’t know whether he could accept the idea of a killer from over eight years ago beginning all over in a small town where she worked as an investigator. The thought seemed to be egocentric on her part, a grab for notoriety by