“Think about it this way,” Eckrich says. “You only have to wait twenty-four more murders until you get one you can solve.”
“Fuck you,” Flores says. “I have to solve his murder. I gotta solve this case.”
Flores cannot sit still. Even at this late hour, he yearns to get back to work: more than anything, he wants to make a name for himself as a detective. His zeal stems from his upbringing as the child of hardworking Salvadoran immigrants in Montgomery County, another Maryland suburb adjacent to Washington, DC. His parents, who operated a janitorial company, made no secret of their wish for their son to prosper, an ambition that in their minds would be fulfilled when he took a job that required him to wear a suit. Growing up, Flores had watched lots of crime shows on television; early on, he’d decided that becoming a police detective would not only satisfy his parents’ aspirations but also be fun and interesting.
At twenty-one, he applied to the PG force and was soon patrolling the county’s streets. Four years later, he was promoted to district-level detective and began handling everything from assaults to burglaries. Fourteen months after that, he was assigned to a centralized robbery squad; only two years later, he was tapped to join homicide.
Some homicide detectives grumbled that Flores’s rapid ascent was the result of affirmative action. It was true that to keep pace with the county’s changing demographics, the department had been making a concerted effort to boost the number of Hispanic officers. When Eckrich joined the force, in 1994, about 3 percent of the police department’s officers were Hispanic, which was in line with the county’s relatively small Hispanic population. Nearly two decades later, PG’s Hispanic population has surged to more than 16 percent of the county’s nearly 900,000 residents. And while the department has done its best to be more reflective of PG’s changing demographics, its 142 Hispanic officers account for just 8.6 percent of the force.
Creating a police department that mirrors its community is a familiar challenge in Prince George’s, which has long struggled to keep pace with societal changes. In the 1970s, as African Americans began moving from the District to the county to take advantage of its affordable housing while remaining in close proximity to Washington and its jobs, the department was 95 percent white and had a reputation for relying on brutal forms of street justice far too often. In the early 1990s, thanks in part to the leadership of then-chief David B. Mitchell, the county police force became increasingly diversified. Today, its ranks are evenly divided between whites and blacks—45 percent to 43 percent—and minorities account for 55 percent of its 1,645 officers, though the department still falls short of mirroring the county’s overall minority population, which comprises 81 percent of its residents.
Over the years, the Homicide Unit’s makeup has fluctuated. Currently, of thirty detectives and sergeants, eight are black, two are Hispanic, and the rest are white. Though commanders insisted that ethnicity played no role in Flores’s assignment to homicide, the fact was that a Spanish-speaking detective had just been promoted out of the unit. And with so few Spanish speakers in the five squads, the supervisors obviously felt pressure to find someone who could handle murder investigations and also help interrogate Latino gang members, interpret for witnesses, listen to Spanish speakers on jail calls, and translate social-media postings and text messages. They quickly settled on Flores, who had a solid reputation for solving robberies. Though he’s been on the job for only three weeks, so far he has impressed his colleagues with his eagerness to work.
* * *
WITH HIS FIRST case at a standstill, Flores gets up, walks around the row of desks, and takes a seat next to Eckrich. “I have to solve this murder,” Flores says again.
Eckrich studies his young charge and chuckles. He has cautioned Flores that many first murders never go down. In fact, Eckrich’s own first murder remains wide open. In January 2008, a drug dealer was shot at 2:00 a.m. on a deserted street; recently, Eckrich showed Flores the thick case file that documented five years of fruitless work.
“It’s all in what case is given to you,” Eckrich says. “What’s more important is that you try to solve it. Either way, you will always remember the one that popped your cherry.”
Indeed, that is how the unit’s clerk tagged Flores’s first homicide: following long-standing tradition, she drew two cherries on a stem next to his name in the logbook. The unit had recently added an unprecedented five newcomers, and it was the fourth time in less than four weeks that she had drawn a pair of cherries. And the murders caught by the four rookies had so far proved the validity of Eckrich’s observation: only one had been solved. A bizarre slaying that included the abduction of an alcoholic liver-transplant recipient, it was deemed a “fair catch” by veterans. The case had been easy to crack because the identity of the killer was known before detectives even arrived on the scene.
The remaining three, including Flores’s, are far more challenging. In one, a Jamaican drug dealer was executed in a garage in an industrial park. Members of Jamaican criminal gangs have a reputation for being ruthless and efficient killers who rarely leave behind evidence or witnesses; the rookie working the case had no clues and had been told by veterans to hope that a gang member would be eager to trade information for a more lenient sentence. The second, caught by Jamie Boulden, in the M-40 squad, is equally arduous, in part because his victim was widely despised. The dead man, who was shot to death in his town house complex’s parking lot late one night, was a twenty-three-year-old drug dealer who had intimidated his neighbors by brandishing an AK-47 and burglarizing their homes. Boulden clearly stood little chance of finding a witness who would risk his or her life to help solve the murder of such a frightening figure. “Thank God he was killed,” one male neighbor told a detective. “Karma’s a bitch, right?”
Eddie Flores knew all about the other two unsolved cases. He had spoken with Jamie Boulden about the drug dealer’s murder, and he agreed that it would be difficult to solve. But at least Boulden had the one crucial piece of information that every homicide detective relies on at the beginning of a case. He knew his victim’s name.
4:00 p.m., Monday, February 4
Sean Deere and Mike Crowell fall into rolling chairs in the homicide office’s conference room and drop their notebooks on its large wooden table. It’s their first day of a week on the evening shift, which runs from 3:00 to 11:00 p.m., and they are meeting to discuss their next steps in the Amber Stanley investigation. They also want to sort through the information that came out of their extended interrogation of Jeff Buck on Friday and review the details provided by another witness they interviewed into the early hours of Saturday.
“Every time we bring someone in here, we get five or six more names to dig into,” Deere complains, frustration lacing his voice as he looks over the new people on his list of witnesses and potential suspects. The detective unconsciously rubs his hands, as if he were outside in the cold. He may as well be: the room is frigid due to an engineering snafu involving the air-conditioning in a neighboring office and its computer servers.
“No kidding,” says Crowell.
Deere looks up at Crowell and grins. “You get any?” he asks. He’s been wondering whether Crowell managed to patch things up with his wife over the weekend after botching their scheduled liaison on Friday.
“You know it!” Crowell says, smiling broadly.
The two detectives have been fast friends since Crowell joined the Homicide Unit two years ago. Like Deere, Crowell grew up in Prince George’s County; for a few years after high school he worked as a utility marker, making sure construction crews knew precisely where power and water lines were buried. But the job was dull, and he yearned for excitement. At one point he considered joining the PG police force, but he had heard it was in the midst of a hiring freeze. Then, one afternoon in 1993, Crowell and two friends were pounding Coors Lights and flipping through a newspaper when they spotted an advertisement for the Baltimore police force. Crowell challenged his friends to see which o
f them could pass the Baltimore PD’s fitness test the next day. Crowell made the cut—his buddies did not—and he was soon patrolling what some called Charm City.
In 1996, when the chance came to transfer to his home turf and join the PG force, Crowell took it and quickly earned a reputation as an aggressive patrolman. Mere months after joining, he got into a shootout with a suspect and was wounded in the left shoulder. At the hospital, he refused to be taken to surgery until he could call his wife: he had warned her to expect the worst if a bunch of “white shirts”—commanders—appeared at her door, and he didn’t want her to suffer such a shock.
A five-foot-seven dynamo with a penetrating gaze, a beer belly, and a hankering for cheeseburgers, Crowell loves the challenge of working murders. He also runs a fifty-employee private-security business on the side and is the father of two teenagers who cause him never-ending angst. He talks about sex constantly, rarely misses a Washington Redskins game, and parties hard. Nearly obsessed with playing practical jokes, he recently signed up squad mate Joe Bunce for tryouts with the Washington Redskins’ cheerleading squad, and for several weeks he has been waiting for the right opportunity to superglue a bumper sticker to his Bunce’s wife’s car that says, I LOVE TO MASTURBATE.
Crowell has been working with Deere on the Amber Stanley case for the past two months. Just before the murder, Deere’s partner learned that he was being promoted to sergeant, so for the first three months Deere largely worked the case alone. Ever since the night of the murder, in fact, Deere has focused exclusively on this investigation—he was banned from homicide scenes and removed from the rotation for catching new cases. But the investigation soon became stalled; worried that Deere needed help, in November commanders assigned the hard-charging Crowell to join Deere as a temporary partner, providing the case with an immediate jolt. When Crowell’s stint with Deere is finished, he will return to working with Bunce, his regular partner.
Deere has also regularly received help from other detectives in the M-40 squad. At the beginning of most homicide investigations, several members of the squad will either visit the scene or assist the lead detective by conducting interviews, serving search warrants, and writing reports. But after a few days or a week, the other detectives peel off to handle their own cases, leaving the lead investigator and his partner to work the murder. The Amber Stanley investigation is different: the stakes are so high that the usual approach has been jettisoned and Deere’s squad mates, particularly Crowell, have continued to assist him.
After chatting about their weekends and the Super Bowl, Deere and Crowell rehash what Jeff Buck told them during the interrogation on Friday and what they now know about the man. Buck said he had heard a rumor that his own enforcer had been involved in the murder; he knew Amber had been shot in the face; his cell phone had pinged a tower in the vicinity of the murder scene at the time of the killing. Although he denied having raped Denise, Amber’s troubled foster sister, Buck clearly knew her well.
They also discuss another interview, one that started just before midnight on Friday. After letting Buck go, Deere and Crowell had picked up another potential suspect: David Norris, the grocery clerk who was a close friend of Denise’s. The foster sister had reported being raped while walking home from Norris’s house, and comments she made later that night suggest that she no longer trusted him. Because Buck admitted during his interrogation that he knew Norris and helped supply him with drugs, the detectives felt they couldn’t afford to wait to question the clerk—there was a good chance that Buck would call Norris soon after being released. Within an hour of driving Buck home, they tracked Norris to his workplace and hauled him into homicide. Crowell and Bunce took the first shot at the twitchy young man, but they made little progress beyond causing him to sob uncontrollably for a good ten minutes.
When Deere took Bunce’s place in the box, he initially handled Norris gently. But he grew frustrated when Norris claimed to have barely known Denise. Finally Deere jumped up from his plastic chair, sending it crashing into the wall. “You guys were best friends!” he shouted. “Every swinging dick in Mitchellville knows that!”
Norris froze, his face a mask of fear. Mitchellville is just north of Amber Stanley’s neighborhood; Deere was making it very clear that he knew a lot about his witness’s life. But Norris still wouldn’t admit to being friendly with Denise.
“Get the fuck up!” the detective said. Pointing to the comfortable rolling chair in which Norris was sitting, he screamed, “Get out of my fucking chair!”
Norris stood up, and Deere smashed the rolling chair into the wall.
“You must just think this is going to go away,” Deere sneered, his face an inch from Norris’s, his spittle spraying the suspect’s forehead.
Norris quivered, slumped his shoulders, and again convulsed into tears. He finally admitted that he had been tight with Denise and that she had even confided in him about the rape. He agreed to undergo voice stress analysis, and he failed just one question: his denial that he suspected anyone in the sexual assault appeared to be false, which Deere took as an effort to protect Jeff Buck. Norris also told them that Denise was being pimped out by two of his friends, the twenty-one-year-old driver of an illegal taxicab and the cab driver’s high-school-aged girlfriend.
In addition to those two new suspects, Norris gave Deere yet another: Gerry Gordon,1 a friend who was caught spying on a young woman through her bedroom window. Norris told Deere that Gordon also had a crush on Denise and was upset that she had spurned him.
Now, after concluding the review of the interrogations of both Buck and Norris, Deere maps out their next steps. He tells Crowell he would like to scoop up Jeff Buck’s potential alibi witness, the man Buck said he might have been hanging with on the night of the murder. The detective wants to track down as many of Buck’s friends as possible, and he’s especially eager to talk with this witness. He would also like to interview Gerry Gordon, the Peeping Tom.
But first, Deere says, he wants to find the unlicensed taxi driver and his girlfriend. They have firsthand knowledge of Denise’s prostitution clients, and Deere has a hunch that the foster sister spoke to them about the rape. Besides, Deere points out, taxi drivers see and hear everything.
Crowell needs no persuading. Smiling, he looks at his partner and says, “We’ll grab them tomorrow, first thing.”
* * *
AT 2:50 P.M. THE next day, Mike Crowell and Jamie Boulden take seats across the table from Jason Murray,2 the twenty-one-year-old taxi driver. Murray has a diamond-like stud in each ear and is clad in a bright orange T-shirt and grubby blue jeans.
Crowell removes a pen from his shirt pocket, clicks it furiously, and eyes Murray for a moment before introducing Boulden and himself.
Murray smiles, saying nothing. His eyelids are droopy, and he seems completely at ease, as if sitting in the box across from two homicide detectives is the least worrisome thing in the world.
Is this guy retarded or just high? wonders Crowell.
Crowell and several other members of the M-40 squad had started their shifts early and spent the morning looking for Murray and his girlfriend. They had finally located the taxi driver about twenty minutes earlier in the parking lot of his girlfriend’s high school. Murray didn’t protest when Crowell told him to get in his Impala and then drove him to homicide; he also gave them permission to inspect the contents of his phone. Deere, who had been reviewing his case notes in the office while the others hit the streets, decided to look through Murray’s phone rather than interview the taxi driver, so Boulden joined Crowell in Interview Room 1.
The girlfriend, whom detectives picked up as she left her school, was anything but cooperative. Since being brought in and deposited in another interview room, she has been protesting her detention so loudly that she has drawn the attention of officers and detectives passing through the outer hallway.
Crowell starts the interview with Murray by asking for his biographical information, including his date of birth and f
amily history. Soon Murray is providing details of his interactions with key players in the neighborhoods near Amber Stanley’s home. Surprisingly, he is completely forthcoming: he readily acknowledges that he’s an unlicensed taxi driver, known in Maryland as a “hack,” and he admits that his girlfriend pimped for Amber Stanley’s foster sister, Denise.
A few minutes into the interview, Murray leans back in his chair, lifts his hands and folds them atop his head. An acrid stench fills the room—the man has perhaps the worst body odor the two detectives have ever encountered. The smell prompts Crowell to ask Murray about his living arrangements; Murray says he resides in his beat-up Honda. He then says he spends his days shuttling friends and others around the county and the District to earn money for gas, as well as for marijuana and synthetic marijuana, a relatively new product marketed as incense and sold at gas stations and convenience stores. His needs are simple, he tells the detectives: keeping up his car, smoking pot, and having sex with his girlfriend.
“How do you sleep, especially now, in the cold?” asks Crowell.
“I just turn the heat on for fifteen minutes, cover up with blankets, push back the seat, and sleep. Not a problem.”
After gathering a bit more background, Crowell questions Murray about his relationship with Denise. The man says his eighteen-year-old girlfriend is a friend of hers and began arranging sex clients for her shortly after they met, the previous spring. Their deal was simple: the girlfriend collected three dollars from every fifteen-dollar blow job Denise performed. Crowell asks Murray whether he has ever seen Denise with clients or lovers and under what circumstances. Without hesitation, Murray provides the names of five men who have slept with the foster sister. When Crowell asks whether Jeff Buck has had sex with her, Murray says he’s not sure.
The taxi driver also tells Crowell that a twenty-year-old friend of his was “burned” by Denise, meaning that he caught a sexually transmitted disease from her. Murray provides the name of this man as well.
A Good Month for Murder Page 7