The Menace: A Thriller

Chapter 8

Chief Blake Cutter pulled his Dodge Challenger up in front of an old five-story brick building in the middle of a wire-fenced-off block marked for demolition. With him was Detective Janet Hodges, on loan from the Buford PD. Janet had been working the phones, running down leads and gathering information.

The once proud building had a ragged hole in its face on the second floor. The structure to its left had several greater holes in its facade, but the work had apparently been stalled, and the two buildings to the right hadn’t been touched yet. All of them bore the ghosts of a once vibrant retail block — store windows long-ago boarded up, signs faded and splintered, neon letters gone with their painted outlines on metal backing remaining... skeletons of commerce. In a lettering painted on the bricking between the second and third floors, the building with a hole in its face said, in very faded white, LEE & SON FURNITURE.

Cutter was off his beat, but not very far off — Timber Lake, Georgia, population 17,000, just north of Peachtree Heights and perched along the Chattahoochee River. A shopping mall, stables and golf courses kept the town alive.

Earlier that day, Buford PD Detective Janet Hodges — a pretty, bouncy brunette in her forties with a boy and a girl in high school and a husband who managed a convenience store — had corralled Cutter at the Peachtree Heights PD, in the chief’s glassed-in office in back of the modest bullpen of desks and the counter where citizens could bring a beef or request or even report a crime.

With Cutter behind his desk, Janet took the chair opposite him and her bright eyes and cocky expression said she had something, really had something. She wore big-framed wire-rim glasses and a red pants suit with a yellow frilly blouse — a woman whose brains were matched only by her enthusiasm and girl-next-door attractiveness.

“Two of the three doctors our menace apparently murdered,” she said, her voice a chirpy second soprano, “were somewhat controversial.”

“How so?”

She leaned back in her chair, chin up, proud of herself and rightly so. “Samuel Carter was a pediatric surgeon who got himself in trouble a few times with the AMA — he used devices to straighten limbs, a painful and questionable procedure at best.”

Cutter sat forward. “And we have a crazed killer who is apparently burdened with physical deformities.”

Janet nodded. “We do indeed. And it’s a similar situation with Lee Meyer, also a specialist in pediatrics, who isn’t on the AMA’s Outstanding Physicians of the Year list either — he invented his own version of something called a hexapod ring fixator, intended to try to lengthen legs.”

Cutter’s eyes widened. “A pattern emerges.”

“Doesn’t it, though? Now, our dead obstetrician, Vernon Petersen, doesn’t seem to have anything particularly negative or controversial in his past. But he did deliver a child named Dennis Chandler Lee.”

“A deformed child?”

“The records don’t indicate that, but Dennis and his grandparents, Efram and Rosemary Lee, turn up in the files of both Doctors Carter and Meyer, and always the same Timber Lake home address. Carter worked with the patient starting about two years after the boy’s birth, and Meyer seems to have taken over perhaps ten years after that. Both physicians billed considerable hours ‘helping’ little Dennis Lee.”

Cutter was nodding. “So if Dennis Lee was seeing a couple of quack doctors, thanks to his loving grandparents, he may well have been put through pain and misery and...”

“A living hell,” Janet finished. “And as for the obstetrician, Petersen may not have been part of this torture team, but there is one other possibly significant fact — Lula Lee, the mother of Dennis Lee, died in childbirth.”

Neither officer said anything for several moments.

Then Cutter said, “So... our killer’s grudge appears to involve specific doctors, as we speculated. Does Dennis Lee turn up in Dr. Roy Ryan’s records?”

She shook her head. “No. But we’ll want to ask him if the name Dennis Lee means anything to him — don’t you agree?”

“Oh, I agree, all right. Let me ask you something, Janet. Did you refer to our murderer as ‘the menace’ because his name is Dennis?”

She grinned. “I’ll never tell. What now?”

“See if the Efram Lee family still has a Timber Lake address.”

She was on her feet already. “You got it, Chief.”

When finding a Lee family address in Timber Lake proved a dead end, Detective Hodges had called Chief Wynn Sturgis, who had been evasive at first but eventually told her to round up Chief Cutter and come on down to his friendly little town. The demolition-targeted block Cutter’s Challenger pulled up to was the address where Sturgis had requested they meet.

Cutter had been to Timber Lake a few times, as a citizen enjoying the boating and fishing, but not as a public servant from a nearby community, so he didn’t know much about the place and had never met the local PD’s chief. This block, off the town square, had obviously once been a retail center before devolving into an eyesore.

Chief Sturgis was stepping out of his own pulled-over police vehicle as they rolled up. Pushing retirement age hard, the beefy six-footer had a gut challenging the bottom buttons of his blue uniform shirt and two bushy white eyebrows that mimicked his old-fashioned white handlebar. He had big dark blue eyes and an endless smile in a walrus face, the kind of cheerfulness cops grew if the daily tragedies in this work didn’t defeat them.

Next to Sturgis was a fit-looking Hispanic uniformed officer with a military bearing — that was the kind of haircut you got at an army base — and steady dark eyes in a deceptively boyish face. Cutter didn’t know the officer, but the Timber Lake chief — after shaking hands with his visitors — introduced the younger cop as Sgt. Harry Lopez.

“First thing I gotta tell you, Chief Cutter,” Sturgis said, as the four cops grouped between the two cars parked along the wire fence, “is we haven’t advertised this thing. It’s not a cover-up, mind you, but we don’t need our little town getting a black eye.”

“Understood,” Cutter said. “We’re dealing with a tricky situation ourselves in Peachtree Heights.”

“I heard rumbles, but just rumbles.” Sturgis’s hands rode his hips, his right above the butt of a big revolver. “How much do you know about Timber Lake?”

“It’s along the river on one side and the lake on the other. It used to be a lumber town but that was a long time ago. A textile mill went belly up a while back. That’s about it, I’m afraid.”

Sturgis’s eyes narrowed. Good-naturedly accusatory, he said, “You’re not a Southern boy, I understand. You’re one of those flatland foreigners.”

Cutter grinned. “You’ve been misinformed, Chief. I was born and raised in Georgia. After the war I landed a job in NYC and spent a lot of years there. Lost my accent, I’m afraid.”

“Won’t hold it against you.” Sturgis’s head went back. “So you don’t know anything about the Lee family?”

“Not even Robert E.’s.” Cutter glanced at Janet. “Officer Hodges here said you were good enough to invite us down after she realized this might have something to do with the problem we’re facing.”

This being the building with a hole in its face.

Chief Sturgis thought for a moment, then gestured across the way. “Just around the corner, on the square, is a little coffee shop. Let’s take a short hike over there and I’ll fill you in.”

“Lead the way.”

They took a booth in back and a friendly gal in a pink uniform with a white collar brought everybody black coffee — not a sugar or cream in the bunch. Four tough coppers, Cutter thought.

Sturgis jumped right into it, like Andy Griffith selling breakfast food.

“The Lees,” he said, “were wealthy and influential for generations, going back to the lumber days. But the family fell on hard times or, if not hard times, easy times was damn well over. Zachariah Lee, right after the turn of the century, started a furniture business with what was left of the family loot... well, they started out with caskets and moved into furniture. Any event, they came roarin’ back. He and his wife Mildred had lost their fancy mansion on the bluff, but they lived like royalty on the upper three floors of that building you pulled up in front of, the one with the hole knocked into it.”

Janet asked, “They didn’t just build a fancy new place, with all that new casket and couch money?”

Sturgis shook his head. “No, ol’ Zachariah feared losing everything again, and even before that he’d been a stingy cuss. When the Depression come, he felt justified and let everybody know he’d been right to pinch pennies. And he was richer than God — a director of the lumber mill, owned pretty much all the downtown, including that block you’re parked in front of. Plus, he was the president of the Lee Savings and Trust Bank, which was not an institution known for its generosity of spirit.”

“Not much, then,” Cutter said, “for Christian charity?”

“Not hardly.” Sturgis sipped coffee. “Oh, Zachariah was a Christian all right, or least ways called himself that. But more an Old Testament-type Christian. Quit the Baptist church because it was too loose in its ways and started up his own sect. That died with him, I’m afraid, in the mid-’40s, during the war. People needed religion, but not such a harsh, unforgiving variety.”

Janet asked, “Any children?”

“Yes, him and Mildred, who looked like she walked out of that American Gothic painting, had three — two girls, who Zachariah ignored, and a boy, Efram, the youngest, who he adored. But Efram, who towed the line when his father was alive... kissed his butt, they say... had his own way of doing and seeing things. He was in high school when his daddy died and he inherited everything. Prided himself on a good head for business and handpicked the folks he put in charge while he went off to college in the east. Some say he bought off the draft board to stay out of the war, but people talk. Anyway, he came back with a law degree and a very beautiful bride, only she was an east-coast society gal, full of herself.”

Janet said, “Surely she didn’t want to live over a furniture store.”

“I don’t suppose so,” Sturgis admitted. “But one of those smart boys Ef put in charge of the bank kinda helped himself to unsecured loans, shall we say, and the bank went under. Folks knew Ef had been swindled and didn’t hold it against him. Anyway, it didn’t hurt his furniture business any. People were setting up house after the war and business was booming just the way babies were.”

Cutter said, “But not booming enough for the Lees to stop living over the furniture store.”

Sturgis nodded. “That’s probably so, though Efram wasn’t stingy like his papa, and they lived just fine. Traveled some. Cottage on the lake. That snooty gal of his, though, was a real social butterfly. Not that there was any ‘Four Hundred’ in Timber Lake... probably not even Forty. But Rosemary, that was her name, was a beauty and refined, and headed up every charity and such. They had one child, a girl, a pretty thing, but wild. She got herself pregnant.”

For the first time, the younger officer spoke. “Now that is just talk. Like the rumor Lula Lee ran off with somebody her parents didn’t approve of, or the sightings of her reported by vacationers over the years. But everything else the chief has said can be vouched for.”

Sturgis added, “And her folks always claimed their daughter married back east. If so, nobody remembers her coming back home for a visit.”

Janet said, “One rumor is true, anyway. The records confirm that Lula Lee died in childbirth. Her son was named Dennis. Do you know of a Dennis Lee connected to the Ryan family?”

“No,” Sturgis said, shaking his head.

“No,” Lopez agreed. “But... I think we’re at the next stage of our story.”

Minutes later they were again standing before the partially demolished row of weathered brick buildings.

Sturgis, gesturing to the Lee Furniture structure, said, “This block of buildings was condemned and scheduled for demolition about a month ago. The owner, retired attorney Efram Lee, had not been heard from locally, or anywhere else for that matter, for over a year, his little office shut down. And the furniture store had been out of business fifteen years.”

Indicating the building farthest left, Lopez said, “That partially demolished building was where the crew started, and early in the process the crane operator’s grip slipped and the wrecking ball swung too far right and punched that hole in the adjacent structure. A bad, stupid slip, but since that building was set to come down as well anyway, it wasn’t considered a big deal.”

“But as work resumed,” Sturgis said, “a stench rising from that accidental hole had the demolition crew refusing to work. They should have called us in, or at least put on masks before going in. But some wiseacres went ahead and battered their way in with sledgehammers and, for their trouble, got hit with a smell that cops like us know all too well.”

“Death,” Lopez said.

Cutter exchanged glances with the female detective, then asked, “What did they find in there?”

Sturgis said, “On the third floor, where the residence began, three bodies. Two middle-aged adults, in their late fifties, and a woman about forty. Battered to death and then dismembered.”

Janet gasped.

Cutter asked, “Dismembered for disposal?”

The local chief shook his head. “No, the body parts were all there, scattered around willy nilly. It was more a random, savage display — somebody attacking the dead bodies after making them that way, maybe because killing them had simply not been enough. Because his rage was not fully spent.”

“My God,” Janet said.

Lopez said, “We identified the dead as Efram Lee and his wife Rosemary, and a practical nurse named Loretta Dornan — unlicensed and with a wretched record.”

Sturgis flipped a hand toward the building in question. “We can go in and take a look... oh, it’s pretty well aired out, and the deceased carted away. We can provide crime scene photos if you want the full effect.”

“I should have those,” Cutter said, damn near shuddering. “But for now, we better take the tour.”

The first two floors were empty of anything but dirt, dust and detritus. The second floor, of course, had the gaping, sunlight-bleeding hole a slip of the wrecking ball had created. An old service elevator at the rear was not functioning, not that anyone had been tempted to use it; stairs at the back took them up a flight to where a musty odor of murder awaited.

The stench of death may have been gone but the bouquet lingered. Janet covered her face with a handkerchief, and Cutter was tempted to do the same. But something made him want to embrace the sense that death was still in the air. He had seen things on the job in NYC that would haunt him forever — every cop working in that city, in that job, did.

But somehow he already knew he hadn’t seen anything yet...

The living room furnishings had been expensive once, early American and really high-end maybe twenty years ago, not surprising considering these living quarters were atop what had been a furniture store and its warehouse. Yet the upholstery was threadbare, the wood nicked and gouged, much of it knocked over. Framed family portraits of long-gone Lees hung askew as if offended by what they saw, a large one apparently of a mutton-chopped Zachariah Lee himself ruled sternly from over a fireplace. Perhaps some of these pricey if neglected furnishings could have still been salvaged, but Cutter saw them as representative of a pervasive decay running throughout this entire structure.

This was where the attack had taken place.

Chalk outlines were everywhere on a parquet wood floor that had once been lovely and now was now scuffed and nicked and home to a bizarre jigsaw puzzle in the shape of body parts. Torsos with ragged joints and truncated necks were the closest these came to actual chalk body outlines, and big ameba-like brown bloodstains were splashed not just on the floor but on the wallpapered walls and even the ceiling.

Scattered here and there were weapons of a barbaric variety — an ax, a club, a butcher knife, stained with blood turned brown and even black.

Janet said into her hanky, “It’s a slaughterhouse.”

“Yes,” Cutter said. “And this is the killing floor.”

The other rooms on this level lacked the macabre melodrama of the space ironically designated a living room — no sign of anything suggestive in the kitchen except the open drawer where the butcher knife had been acquired. The appliances were relatively modern, again dating perhaps twenty years ago. Time had stopped here. Among other things.

The bedrooms were on the second residence level, rather austere but nothing remarkable or sinister about them. Faded framed landscapes and more family photos lent a haunted house effect. The closet of one bedroom belonged to a man, the closet of the other a woman. That husband and wife had no longer slept together was no surprise — Cutter hardly saw this domicile as consistent with enduring romance.

Another room on that floor was a home office with a roll-top desk and a row of wooden file cabinets; also a wall of legal books. The aura of this space was decades out of date. Another was a TV room with a couch and several chairs and a low-slung color TV console with a large screen, 24-inches anyway, and a built-in stereo for records and radio. Here was, apparently, where this little group allowed themselves some entertainment.

The top floor was something different. Half of it was storage, boxes and trunks and so on, and like the other two floors there was a bathroom, though this was not as nice or spacious as those below.

But the rest was divided between the nurse’s quarters and that of her charge.

The nurse had a nicely appointed, cozy space with her own radio, television, refrigerator, hot plate, sink with running water, space heater, and a bookcase with popular novels. A doctor’s bag on her dresser was filled with bottles of drugs and several hypodermic needles.

Janet checked the drug vials and reported to Cutter: “Sedatives.”

Across from the quarters of the live-in help was a steel reinforced door that had been knocked off its hinges, powerful dents left behind. Sturgis led Cutter and Janet into the room with Lopez trailing after.

These apparently had been the quarters of the nurse’s sole patient, though “cell” would describe it better. The dominant piece of furniture was a sagging metal-frame bed with a bare mattress where a heavy weight had lain night after night, an outline suggesting perhaps a heavy flat stone had rested there... again, if “rested” is the word. The bed was affixed with chained shackles arranged for the wrists to be held in place, at about shoulder-level. Chains led to shackles attached to the framework at the foot of the bed, apparently to reach ankles that were a distance away.

This room lacked the smell of death, but it retained the terrible perfume of excrement. Even now, a bucket in the corner buzzed with flies. The only window was bricked up. A pile of children’s clothes, clean — XL labels on shirts, 4T on pants — were on the floor by a wall. Whether the patient could change into these or, after sedation perhaps, would get changed into them by his keeper remained a mystery.

But then so much did.

Sturgis said, “Somebody was kept in here, probably for years. That nurse was looking after the... well, prisoner... What else would you call him?”

“I’d call him,” Cutter said, “somebody who finally got loose.”

Lopez agreed. “I’d call him a captive who tore through that door, got downstairs, and ripped apart the monsters who made him a monster.”

Janet, knowing the attacker at the Ryan compound was powerful but small, asked, “Wouldn’t what happened downstairs take a big, brawny individual?”

“Brawny, yes,” Sturgis said. “Not necessarily big. Take a look at the impression on that mattress — I make him three and a half feet and maybe a hundred-and-fifty pounds.”

Lopez said to Cutter, “Take a look at this,” and knelt at a place on the floor mid-room. Cutter wondered what that was about until the officer plucked out a fat knothole.

Cutter dropped to a knee and had a look. The view was onto the TV room. From here a slanted view of the screen could be had and certainly the sound easily heard. Any talk between the people below would carry as well.

“Imagine,” Lopez said, “getting an education through a knothole — imagine listening and seeing and learning all about modern life on a TV tube, knowing what you are and who was keeping you that way...”

“And then suddenly,” Cutter said, “you get free.”