A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  Outwardly, Flores appears professional and ready. His ears are protected by a black headband, and not a single strand of his carefully coifed dark hair is out of place. His hands are casually thrust into the pockets of a black overcoat, known among the detectives as a “murder coat,” and his steno pad is jammed expertly under his right arm. He looks as if he, too, has done this many times before.

  But Martin sees it right away: the nervousness, the fear. It’s there in Flores’s eyes. They look as big as half-dollars, and they are dancing. Martin decides to take it easy: no jokes. This is Flores’s first murder, after all.

  “You have a whole lot of nothing right now, buddy,” Martin tells the rookie. “A black male with apparent head trauma.”

  Flores drops his gaze to the dead man at his feet. Lying faceup on bloodstained dirt, the victim is a slight man clad in a black sweatshirt and blue jeans. His face is caked with drying blood that must have gushed from his nose and mouth; his left eye is bulbous, as though swollen from a vicious punch. A half-open right eye stares into the steel sky. Flores feels a pressing weight on his shoulders—he had not expected the intensity, or the intimacy, of this moment. Realizing that he is about to begin an investigation into the violent death of a human being, he suddenly imagines the victim’s sobbing mother.

  Fuck, he thinks. This is no training exercise. This is a real murder.

  Shaking the vision from his head, Flores swivels to check the park’s access road for the maroon Impala driven by his veteran partner, Jeff Eckrich, who is on his way to the scene from the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Attracted by the relatively inexpensive real estate and the distance from their day jobs—“You don’t want to eat where you shit,” one detective explained—eleven of Eckrich’s neighbors are in local or federal law enforcement. But having a large house, a pool, and a nice yard on a cop’s salary in the DC region comes with a trade-off: an hour-long commute over the traffic-clogged Bay Bridge. At rush hour, it can take two.

  Where are you, Jeff? Flores wonders. Hurry up, man.

  Flores doesn’t want to be alone when his hulking, gritty-as-a-rusty-nail sergeant appears. Sergeant Kerry Jernigan is not only gruff, he truly understands the job, having spent fifteen years as a homicide investigator before being promoted to the supervisory position in December. Flores knows he cannot snow Jernigan.

  “The body was found by a guy walking his dog,” Flores hears Martin saying, and the rookie again focuses on the corpse at his feet. “The guy says he’s out here every day. There were no reports of gunfire, and no witnesses. No ID on the victim, or of him, as far as we can tell. We haven’t rolled him yet, obviously, so he might still have something in a back pocket.”

  Crap, thinks Flores, a John Doe in the park.

  There’s a good chance the body was dumped, in which case the actual murder scene is elsewhere, possibly trampled or torched, like the car from the murder his partner caught in July. Given the early hour, Flores’s victim was probably killed or discarded in darkness, perhaps during the Super Bowl, which had been played the night before. This increases the odds that there are no witnesses: who in his right mind would be spending time outside, hanging around in the cold in this dangerous neighborhood in the middle of the night? For a moment, Flores wonders if the dead man might be a San Francisco 49ers fan who lost a bet—the Baltimore Ravens won the tight game, which included a freakish power outage.

  Unlikely, Flores decides, but then again, this park, Oxon Run, is in the northern corner of Hillcrest Heights, a 2.4-square-mile patch of violence on the DC line. The neighborhood recorded four homicides the previous year, plus scores of other violent crimes. Any motive was possible.

  Flores should be groggy, exhausted even. He and Eckrich are in the midst of a seven-day tour on the midnight shift, and the rookie had just climbed into bed when his cell phone rang with the news of this killing. But Flores is wired, running on first-case adrenaline, and he is eager to get started.

  A moment later, he sees Sergeant Jernigan’s Impala sweep down Oxon Run Drive, pull onto the park’s access road, and roll into the lot. Fuck, Flores thinks. Hurry up, Jeff. Hurry up.

  As if in answer to Flores’s silent plea, Eckrich’s maroon cruiser tears down the access road and comes to a hard stop next to Jernigan’s car. The investigators get out of their Chevys and shake hands. The two men chat for a moment before Eckrich makes a beeline for his rookie partner, while the bearlike Jernigan lumbers to the outer edge of the crime scene. Flores feels an intense jolt of respect for his new boss, who as a detective openly disdained meddlesome supervisors. In taking his place next to a nearby tree, Jernigan is sending a clear message: I’m not going to intrude, but I’m here if you need me.

  Eckrich ducks under the tape and comes to a stop a foot from Flores’s left side. The veteran detective is PG’s version of Joe Friday—utterly ordinary, a forty-one-year-old of average height and weight, with a round face and thick black hair speckled with gray. Clad, like Flores, in a black overcoat, Eckrich sighs, creating a plume of condensation. He rubs his burning eyes; he has done the job for too long to be energized by a case, even a big one, and he is exhausted from the midnight shift. Actually, his fatigue runs much deeper: he hasn’t slept well in years due to a mangled back, which he injured in 2005 in an on-duty car crash. To make it through each day, Eckrich consumes at least a half dozen Coca-Colas; he has already chugged two bottles on the drive to the scene.

  “How’s it going, Eddie?” he says, smiling wanly. “That sure was a great night of sleep, right?”

  Flores grins but quickly reaffixes his “case face,” a serious expression worn by all the unit’s detectives when working a crime scene. Nobody wants to get caught by a news photographer smiling over a corpse—not that there are any television cameras or newspaper photographers recording the first minutes of this investigation. Though reporters were told about the discovery of a body when they made their morning checks, the department’s PR office has not disclosed that police suspect the man was murdered, creating enough ambiguity to keep inquisitive journalists away.

  “Like I was telling you, I always get my cases on midnights,” Eckrich says, shaking his head. “Fucking midnights.” Eckrich, who has been a member of the unit since 2008, has caught at least four murders on the graveyard shift.

  Feeling more confident now that Eckrich is here, Flores watches his partner step closer to the corpse and bend down as far as his sore back will allow.

  “Shit, Eddie—you see how it looks like he was making a snow angel?” he says, pointing to winglike patterns in the dirt near the man’s arms. “That means he had a very slow, painful death.”

  Flores nods, his mind conjuring an image of the man’s arms flapping as he died.

  “It looks like he was kicking the dirt, too,” Eckrich observes.

  Flores sees that the soil around the victim’s feet has been disturbed; his right sneaker has come off and lies on the ground a few inches away. Flores speculates that the man got into a fight and lost.

  “Probably got bashed in the head,” Eckrich says, studying the swollen eye.

  “Jesus,” says Flores.

  Eckrich tells the county’s evidence technicians to “bag the guy’s hands”—the killer’s skin or DNA might be under his fingernails. Next he summons the state medical examiner’s forensic investigator to roll the body to see what is under it and to inventory the dead man’s pockets before she carts him away to the morgue.

  As the investigator begins her work, Eckrich leans to his right and inspects Flores’s empty notebook. “Write down what he was wearing, his exact tattoos, who the forensic investigator is, and who the lead evidence technician is,” Eckrich says.

  Flores jots a description of the scene, noting that the man is lying faceup and is clad in a black hooded sweatshirt, a Blue Jays ball cap, blue jeans, red socks, and Nike Air shoes.

  The forensic investigator—a tiny woman in her mid-forties wearing latex gloves and a thick black jacket over her gray M
E polo shirt—lifts up the man’s sweatshirt. After recording the fact that his victim is also wearing a white undershirt and a gray T-shirt, Flores leans closer to the corpse to better read a tattoo scrawled across the man’s stomach. “Departed But Still United” frames the number “1400.”

  The rookie mulls over its meaning and then says, “Probably a gang sign. Maybe the block he hung out at.”

  “Possible,” says Eckrich.

  Flores also spots a tattoo of a teardrop under the victim’s left eye, often a memorial to a slain gang brother or the “tally mark” of a kill. Later, after the body is fully disrobed at the autopsy, he will learn that the man has two more tattoos on his arms: “Murder” and “ABK,” which stands for “A Bloods Killer.” Only a member of a serious gang would risk antagonizing the ultraviolent Bloods with such artwork.

  The forensic investigator grabs the victim’s left shoulder and hip and gently lifts the body toward Eckrich and Flores. As the man rolls over, Flores sees a bloody mess of dried leaves and prickly sweet-gum pods sticking to the back of his sweatshirt—and a nickel-sized hole at the base of his skull. Even Flores can tell that the large amount of blood on the ground strongly suggests his victim was killed, not dumped, here. And this was no fight: it was an execution.

  “He’s been shot,” Eckrich says, a note of surprise in his voice. Turning to Flores, he says, “Make sure you write ‘defect’—don’t say gunshot wound or entrance wound if he looks like he’s been shot. Just say ‘defect.’”

  Eckrich has already explained the importance of this to Flores: you don’t want to mistake an exit wound for an entrance wound in your notes. It will only cause problems if the case goes to trial. It’s best to let the autopsy report speak for itself.

  Flores dutifully writes, “Defect: rear of head.”

  The two detectives examine the bloody ground but see no shell casing. Either the man was shot with a revolver, which doesn’t eject casings, or the killer picked up the casing before running. It’s also more than possible that it has been trampled by responding officers and is now hidden under the park’s detritus of leaves and seed pods. “Better sweep the area with a metal detector,” Eckrich tells an evidence technician, who heads to her van to retrieve the equipment.

  As Flores watches, the forensic investigator searches the man’s clothing. She comes up empty except for a folded piece of paper that she plucks from the right rear pocket of his jeans. Gently cradling it in her gloved hand, she holds it out to the detectives.

  Flores and Eckrich huddle over the paper, which is damp and seems to be smeared with bodily fluid. Flores is able to make out the words “www.coachusa.com” and what appears to be a reservation number.

  A bus ticket, he thinks.

  “Does it have a name?” Flores asks, watching eagerly as the investigator flips the paper back and forth.

  “No,” she says.

  Flores sighs. He might as well have caught a pile of bones.

  * * *

  AFTER FINISHING HIS work at the murder scene, Flores drops by the nearby community center. With the help of the center’s manager and another police officer, he quickly determines that the center’s security cameras couldn’t have caught anything that took place in the park; they aren’t aimed at the right places. Flores gets in his Impala and cruises up and down Oxon Run Drive, which borders the park, hoping to find a house with security cameras aimed toward the street. On his third pass, he spots a camera under the awning of a house; in front of it is parked a colorfully decorated light blue van advertising a clown business.

  The detective knocks on the door, which is answered by a cheerful black woman with blond highlights in her hair. “How can I help you?” she asks, tugging at the hem of her thick black-and-white striped sweater.

  Flores explains his interest in her video footage. The woman says she installed the security system to ward off vandals targeting her van, which she uses in her work as a clown. A minute later, Flores follows her into a bedroom that is littered with piles of clothes and clown costumes.

  As the woman clicks a computer keyboard and presses buttons on a remote control while trying to access the video monitor atop a dresser, Flores’s eyes begin to water. A tear streaks down his left cheek. At first, he thinks fatigue has caught up to him. Then he feels something brush against his left leg. Looking down, he spots a large cat. It’s an allergy attack.

  I can’t catch a break, he thinks.

  “We’ll have a crime-scene technician come pull the video,” says Flores, fleeing the room and heading off to regroup with Eckrich and his squad’s other investigators.

  By 2:30 that afternoon, Flores, Eckrich, and Detective D. J. Windsor, a squad mate, are at the evidence lab, inspecting the piece of paper found in the dead man’s pocket. It’s a day-old receipt for a bus ticket from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Washington, DC. Windsor plugs the reservation number into the carrier’s website, which he has loaded on his smartphone, but no personal information appears.

  Flores and Eckrich yawn—they need rest before returning for the midnight shift, which starts at 11:00 p.m. But Flores insists they don’t have time to sleep.

  “It’s going to be a marathon, Eddie, not a sprint,” Eckrich says. “Remember, things will kick off tomorrow. You’ll be begging for five minutes to do nothing. Cancel any plans you have for your private life for the rest of the week.”

  * * *

  PG COUNTY’S HOMICIDE Unit is broken into five squads, each comprised of a sergeant and five detectives, and further into pairs of detectives. Though mathematics dictates that each squad has one loner—which can be an advantage, given the idiosyncratic personalities of some detectives—most investigators believe that it’s better to be assigned a partner. Pairs of detectives can share duties, divide work by skill set, and cover for each other when one has to spend all day in court or take an hour’s break to attend to some personal business. Over time, partners develop a keen sense for how their counterpart handles everything from interrogating a suspect to consoling a grieving mother.

  Pairing detectives is particularly helpful when one is more experienced than the other, as in the case of Flores and Eckrich. A rookie detective can attend every training session offered by the department, but he will never understand the job until he shadows a veteran. Flores is thankful that he’s been assigned such a good partner, someone truly interested in the craft of police work, an investigator who cares about getting things right and is willing to offer guidance and advice. After less than a month in homicide, Flores has already learned that not all detectives in the unit are so friendly or helpful.

  The real test for any rookie comes when he catches his first murder. In other police departments, homicide detectives handle whatever murders happen to fall on their shifts, but some years ago PG County adopted a system to ensure that murders were evenly—and randomly—distributed among the investigators. It works just like a baseball batting lineup and cycles through all twenty-five detectives in the unit. At any one time, the officer due to take the next homicide is “at bat,” the investigator behind him in line is “on deck,” and the third on the list is “in the hole,” their last names written on a dry-erase board next to the door to the unit’s office. The next murder might be a smoker or a red ball; most detectives simply accept the unpredictable nature of their work and attribute the sequence of cases to fate, the homicide gods, or the random nature of life and death in a violent place like PG County.

  Flores had been at bat for seven days when the call came and he learned that his first murder victim had fallen. Now, fifteen hours later, with the clock approaching midnight, he sits at his desk, facing Eckrich in the squad room’s first row of workstations. Except for the two detectives, the room is empty; the evening shift has long since departed. Surprisingly, Flores and Eckrich feel somewhat rested. Flores went home, took a nap, had a shower, put on a new suit, and stuck his omnipresent Bluetooth headset into his right ear. Upon returning to work, he decided that he needed another nap
and grabbed one in the driver’s seat of his Impala in the headquarters’s most remote parking lot. He tried to sleep longer, but his eager mind refused to relax.

  The details of the case are still whirling in his head. He’s trying to turn nothing into something, but he has no witnesses, no shell casings, no security video (the clown’s feed proved useless), and no clues. He doesn’t even have the victim’s name. The one good piece of news is that he has been able to obtain an approximate time of the killing: two residents near the park reported hearing a single gunshot between 11:00 p.m. and midnight. They hadn’t bothered to call 911, they told the police, because gunshots are so common in the neighborhood that they’ve become background noise.

  Despite catching the new case, Flores and Eckrich get no respite from midnight duty. The unit’s workload is too heavy. PG County’s homicide detectives do much more than investigate murders: each year they respond to scores of suspicious deaths, suicides, and police shootings. Not infrequently, they have to waste valuable time investigating hoaxes involving text messages sent to strangers suggesting that someone has just buried a body. Up to a dozen of the unit’s detectives work during the day and evening, but the midnight shift is handled by either a single detective or a pair of them.

  While awaiting the shift’s inevitable callout, Flores assembles his thin case file and inserts a few pages of notes into the left flap of the file’s jacket. He types a “continuation report,” a short synopsis that updates his progress on the case, and places that, as well as the 911 call logs, in another part of the file. When finished, he looks across the row of desks and spies Eckrich chugging a Coke.

  “Jeff,” Flores says. “What do I do now?”

  “Nothing, brother.” Until they pick up the victim’s fingerprints from his corpse during the autopsy and run them through the FBI database, Eckrich says, they’ll have to spin their wheels. Once they get a name, they’ll have a place to start.