A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  “Are you sure?” asks Crowell.

  “Yes, positive.”

  It’s the same caliber as the pistol used to kill Amber Stanley.

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, Crowell escorts Allen to the men’s room. As he steers the witness through the bathroom door, Crowell spots Sean Deere sauntering down the hallway. “Solving your case for you, Sean,” Crowell jokes.

  Deere chuckles, acknowledging the dig. After taking care of his personal business, Deere had met with a prosecutor about another case. The appointment had gone longer than expected, and he is only now settling in for the evening shift. Deere stands by the open restroom door while Allen uses the urinal. When Crowell and his witness emerge, Crowell motions for Deere to follow them into the old evidence bay.

  “Let’s all smoke,” Crowell says.

  Allen takes a seat, and Crowell hands him a cigarette. The two detectives stand over him as Crowell tells Deere what they’ve learned from Allen. After finishing his summary, Crowell turns to Allen.

  “Did I get all of that right?”

  “Yes, sir, you did.”

  “How did he lose the gun?” asks Deere.

  “I don’t think he actually lost it,” Allen says. “I think he threw it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he got scared, or he did something with it that he didn’t want traced back to him.”

  Deere and Crowell exchange a glance. This could be very good news.

  “Where do you think he tossed the gun?” asks Deere.

  “I don’t know,” Allen says. “But I can help you.”

  “How?”

  Allen offers to work as an informant. “I can ask what happened to it, what they know about the murder, and get back to you. It would be natural for me to ask about it.”

  Deere nods encouragingly but doubts he will ever hear from Allen again. He has the sense that the man will say anything to persuade the detectives to ease up on him.

  At Crowell’s prompting, Allen provides numerous details about Jeff Buck’s drug dealing and how other local gangs sling narcotics. He tells them about another party house that belongs to a friend of Buck’s, where they record music and hang out. It’s the same one Buck had mentioned during his interrogation a week ago. Deere makes a mental note to ask the drug unit to conduct “trash rips” on the house so he can gather evidence of narcotics dealing and get a warrant to raid the place.

  Deere asks how everyone gets around town, and Allen says that whereas Buck often pays Jason Murray for rides, he himself tends to get lifts from a friend who owns a blue Crown Victoria.

  “No shit. Was that you in it the other day?” asks Crowell, naming the street where he spotted the same type of car.

  Allen smirks. “I saw you,” he says. “That was us.”

  “Gun in the car?”

  “No.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Yeah.”

  Crowell slaps his hands together. “I knew it,” he says.

  As they take their final puffs, Deere notices that Allen is gripping his cigarette in a strange way in his right hand. The detective looks closer and spies the scar on his right thumb and wrist.

  “How did you get that?” Deere asks.

  “Punched plate glass in a fight with my baby’s momma,” Allen says. “It was a self-afflicted wound.”

  “No,” corrects Deere. “A self-inflicted wound.”

  4:05 p.m., Friday, February 8

  Sitting with his chin in his left palm, Detective Mike Ebaugh leans forward, squints, and concentrates on the final moments of his victim’s life—for at least the fiftieth time. The video playing on the computer monitor at his desk is time-lapsed and grainy, which is why the investigator has watched and rewatched it, then watched it again, even projecting it onto a floor-to-ceiling video screen at the department’s training academy in an unsuccessful attempt to catch a previously missed detail. Each time, he sees nothing new or unusual—beyond the cold-blooded execution of a father in the presence of his two-year-old boy.

  Ebaugh again replays the silent clip, which begins at 9:51 a.m. on a bright December Wednesday. His twenty-five-year-old victim, Nicoh Mayhew, pulls his white Kia Optima sedan into the parking lot of a nondescript apartment complex in Seat Pleasant, a town of 4,600 not far from the DC line. The security camera recording the video, affixed to the roof of a nearby leasing office, is aimed at the parking lot and shows Mayhew backing his car into a spot in front of the three-story building. The car vanishes behind a sport-utility vehicle, but the video captures Mayhew’s head above the SUV as he walks around the Kia. Mayhew ducks near the right rear door, and a moment later his two-year-old son can be seen walking from the back of the Kia across a short bridge to the apartment complex’s stairs, which are hidden from view.

  As Mayhew retrieves a bag from the trunk, the video shows two men in dark clothing strolling into the lot. They crouch behind a row of cars as Mayhew shuts the trunk and crosses the bridge, bag in hand. Just as Mayhew vanishes into the stairwell, the men bolt after him. Ten seconds later, the men reappear, sprinting toward the street and a dark BMW that has pulled to the curb. They jump inside, and the car speeds away.

  Left behind—out of camera range—was Mayhew, shot dead. He was struck by four bullets, including one to the head. His son, clad in Elmo pajamas and sipping apple juice from a McDonald’s juice box, was wounded in the right arm.

  Ebaugh rewinds the footage and studies it again, starting and stopping, starting and stopping. With his eyes only inches from the screen, he thinks he recognizes the brand of sneakers worn by one of the gunmen—popular Nike Foamposites.

  Removing his wire-rimmed glasses, the detective pinches the bridge of his nose with one hand and rubs his crew cut with the other. Then he puts his glasses back on and clicks Play. He badly wants to solve this homicide, and not just because Mayhew was slain in the presence of his toddler, which unnerves Ebaugh, the father of two young children. No, he is convinced that because this case is so difficult to crack, it will prove his worth as an investigator.

  Mayhew, a marijuana dealer, had been a key prosecution witness in a looming trial involving the execution-style killings of two fellow dealers, one of whom had been a close friend of Mayhew’s. As Ebaugh and all detectives know, murders of witnesses are notoriously hard to investigate. Who would ever agree to serve as a witness in a case where another witness was slain? Nobody in the Homicide Unit—not even Ebaugh’s partner, D. J. Windsor, or his sergeant—thinks he stands much chance of winning investigative glory this time at bat. On the night of the murder, a top supervisor gave the detective a sympathetic pat on the back and said, “Good luck solving this shit sandwich.”

  It would be a tough case for any detective, but it’s especially challenging for a new one. Ebaugh, thirty-one, is still considered a rookie despite having joined homicide two years earlier. And although he attacks the job as if born to it, he wound up in the department quite by chance. A native of Michigan, Ebaugh joined the army after high school, fulfilling his dream of being a soldier. But one day, while pushing hard during a forced march, he wrecked an already battered right knee. After a medical discharge, he became an airplane mechanic, married, and moved with his wife, Krystel, to Prince George’s County, where she was entering the PG police academy. To save money, they lived in a room behind the small office of Freeway Airport, a general aviation airfield where Ebaugh fixed Cessnas and Pipers for $11.50 an hour.

  One night in 2004, while he was having a few drinks with Krystel and her fellow cadets, his wife and the others urged him to join the force. Ebaugh’s stepfather had been a criminal psychologist, and he had long been intrigued by the shrink’s stories of cops and felons. After injuring his knee, Ebaugh hadn’t given law enforcement much thought; now, with his knee fully healed, he decided to apply. He joined the force later that year; ironically, his wife dropped out of the academy, in part because they agreed that one cop in the family was enough.

  A hard and frenetic worke
r, Ebaugh drew the attention of commanders early on and won promotion to specialized units and a robbery squad. In 2011, he was tapped to join homicide and soon solved his first murder, a cold case that another detective had been unable to crack. Even those who sometimes find Ebaugh’s personality grating agree that he’s remarkably dogged. As D. J. Windsor puts it, “Ebaugh may not know precisely what he is doing, because—let’s be honest—he is kind of nuts. But he will work it and work it and work it, and just by doing that, he will solve it.”

  The gangly, six-foot-two Ebaugh knows he’s a strange duck. He obsessively reads self-help books and policing manuals. He downs fifty protein pills a day, which gives his sweat a musty odor. He sprays himself and his car with cologne to mask the scent of the occasional cigarette, telling his fellow officers that Krystel will kill him if she catches him smoking.

  To say he lacks a verbal filter is an understatement—a torrent of words and stories streams from his mouth. He once admitted that he was late for an assignment because a jellyfish had stung his testicles while he was skinny-dipping. He divulged that he euthanized his own dog with a snub-nosed .38 after it had broken its back and because it was a pain in the ass. He brags about having killed a bear so he could obtain a fur rug on which to have sex. When encountering the police department’s psychologist in the hallway, he will sometimes say, “Joe, why do I still cry when I masturbate?” A devotee of herbal erection enhancers, he provides a full-throated endorsement of one he nicknamed the Diamond Cutter.

  His endless chattering can annoy his colleagues, who occasionally accuse him of grandstanding. Particularly galling was an incident that occurred one Saturday night the previous December, when Ebaugh was leaving the homicide office for his long commute home to the Eastern Shore. Hearing a man screaming nearby, Ebaugh pointed his Impala in the direction of the noise. A few seconds later, he came upon an enraged man clubbing another man with a shovel. Ebaugh jumped from the car, stopped the assault, and made an arrest, preventing what surely would have been a homicide a mere block from police headquarters.

  The following Monday, Ebaugh stood next to the clerk’s station in the homicide office and regaled a dozen of his colleagues scattered about the room with the story of his life-saving deed. He complained about having to give an interview to a reporter on television and then read a passage from a congratulatory e-mail sent to him by the major: “Thank you for preventing a murder in these final days of 2012. You have no idea what it means to the Homicide Command Staff.”

  Ebaugh’s braggadocio was met with a chorus of grousing: cops are supposed to grumble about accolades, not revel in them. From the far side of the room, Detective Billy Watts piped up: “Ebaugh did what a normal police officer does every day. Come on!”

  From the opposite corner came the voice of Ebaugh’s squad mate Jeff Eckrich: “I can’t believe the department is risking its image by putting you on television!”

  “Wait until the reporter finds out you murdered your Chihuahua,” said Detective David Gurry, standing to Ebaugh’s left at the fax machine.

  Ebaugh glared at Gurry. “He wasn’t a Chihuahua—he was a Chihuahua mutt! He weighed twenty-five pounds. He had a broken back and a thyroid problem. And he was a real asshole!”

  “Yeah,” Eckrich said, “he was an asshole, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die.”

  Where another detective might have retreated under this verbal onslaught, Ebaugh doubled down. Smiling broadly, he said, “Fuck you, guys! This is going to get me laid for a week!”

  The background chatter ceased. You could hear the unit’s collective thought: Did he really just say that? Of course he did—it’s Ebaugh!

  Sergeant Tony Schartner, who had so far ignored the bullshitting as he worked on a report at his desk, turned around and stared at Ebaugh. He started to speak, stopped himself, and then went ahead anyway.

  “He thinks he’s S-s-super Cop,” Schartner stammered.

  “Poor Krystel,” said Eckrich.

  His face growing red as he stuttered, Schartner said, “I can see it n-n-now. ‘C-c-c-all me a hero, K-k-krystel! C-c-c-call me a hero!’”

  The room exploded in laughter. Detectives launched more zingers. They drummed on their desks with their fists, and a blushing Ebaugh finally held up his hands in surrender.

  * * *

  NICOH MAYHEW WAS killed on the morning of December 19, 2012, just as Police Chief Mark Magaw was about to begin a press conference hailing the year’s substantial drop in homicides. That’s invariably how it goes in PG County: a police official opens his mouth about good numbers and somebody dies. A week earlier, Kevin Davis, the assistant chief, had boasted to an auditorium packed with detectives about their soon-to-be-record-setting year, during which the county experienced the lowest homicide total since 1986. As investigators left the meeting, Detective Mike Barnhardt turned to Dave Gurry, the detective then on deck, and said, “Better be ready to catch your case.” Not three hours later, Gurry was standing in a blood-smeared foyer.

  While Chief Magaw was speaking to the press the following week, Mike Ebaugh and D. J. Windsor were at the PG County jail, interviewing a witness in one of Windsor’s cases. Because cell phones are not permitted in the jail, Ebaugh did not receive word of Mayhew’s murder until more than an hour after it had occurred, causing the superstitious detective to question his decision to interview an inmate during the chief’s media appearance. When Ebaugh finally pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex, at 11:20 a.m., he was confronted by a swarm of detectives, officers, TV trucks, and reporters, most of whom had raced to the scene directly from the press conference.

  Ebaugh and Windsor—a stocky thirty-four-year-old with a crew cut and rosy cheeks—navigated the chaos until they found the investigators holding down the scene. Huddling with the four other detectives in the parking lot, the two homicide cops learned that Mayhew had been shot and killed outside his mother’s door, where his body remained. His mother, Cynthia Mayhew, and his youngest brother, a nineteen-year-old, had been in the apartment at the time of the shooting, but the brother had apparently fled the scene after an ambulance took Mayhew’s wounded toddler to the hospital. The mom was still inside, where she was being interviewed by detectives; she had already told them that she was certain her son had been killed in retaliation for being a witness against his own nephew and a friend in a 2011 double homicide. Ebaugh had heard about the case: two men were found shot dead in a silver Lexus, and the car had been doused with bleach and gasoline.

  Detectives had solved the homicides thanks to an astute observation by Sean Deere: he spotted a unique price tag on a bleach bottle left in the car’s trunk. Deere tracked the tag to a convenience store, and investigators watched hours of security video until they spotted the man who’d purchased the bottle. After more solid police work, the buyer was identified as Nicoh Mayhew.

  Under intense questioning, Mayhew eventually flipped on the killers, telling detectives and, later, a grand jury that a friend, Kenan Myers, had told him to buy some gas and bleach and then head to a meet-up in an out-of-the-way location, the driveway of a closed quarry. When Mayhew arrived at the quarry, he spotted Myers and Brian “Block” Mayhew, his nephew, sitting with two other men in a silver Lexus. As Mayhew pulled up next to the Lexus, he heard four or five gunshots. Moments later, he recognized the two dead men in the car—Sean Ellis, twenty-four, and Anthony McKelvin, twenty-eight. One of the men, Ellis, was Mayhew’s best friend, and both were friends of the two killers.

  Mayhew watched as Myers and his nephew grabbed the gas and the bleach from his car and doused the Lexus; their plan was to destroy forensic evidence and set the vehicle ablaze. But no one had remembered matches, so the two men climbed into Mayhew’s car and all three of them took off. Mayhew said he had feared for his life, telling the grand jury that “they would have shot me” if he had refused to help.

  Such is life in the drug trade—sometimes you have to kill your friends. Thanks to Mayhew’s information, the police
charged his nephew Brian Mayhew, twenty-one, and his friend Kenan Myers, twenty-five, with first-degree murder. But life as a homicide witness can be perilous. Police and state prosecutors urged Mayhew to move to another jurisdiction. Mayhew refused, telling the police he didn’t want to leave his friends, his girlfriend, or his young son. He also preferred to stay close to his customers: he sold a pound or two of marijuana a week.

  After being briefed by the on-scene detectives, Ebaugh and Windsor headed for the mother’s apartment. They crossed the short bridge, passed under the green awning above the entrance to 6812 Seat Pleasant Drive, and climbed six steps to the second-floor landing. Mayhew’s body lay sprawled in front of an open door. Brain matter and blood were splattered against the door jamb, and the floor was covered in blood. Clad in a green windbreaker, black sweatpants, and black high-top basketball shoes, Mayhew lay facedown on the concrete landing.

  As Ebaugh studied the body, he heard a woman wailing inside the apartment. He turned to the female evidence tech cataloging the scene and pointed his chin toward the interior. “Mom,” the tech said. Ebaugh nodded and got down on his haunches to better examine the spatter, which was about three feet above the floor.

  “I don’t get why it’s all down there,” the tech said, pointing to the blood and the brain bits. “Shouldn’t there be some higher, where he would have been standing?”

  “What do you think?” Ebaugh asked.

  The tech hypothesized that the gunmen had started shooting as they were running up the stairs, perhaps striking Mayhew in the lower body. When he fell to the ground, they shot him in the head. A preliminary assessment of the scene, she said, supported that theory: Mayhew had a bullet wound to his right leg, another to his back, and what appeared to be two entrance wounds at the back of his head.

  Ebaugh liked her theory, but he had his own: “Maybe he squatted to protect his kid. He went down like this”—Ebaugh crouched carefully so as not to touch any blood—“and that’s why it’s so low? Or maybe they made him kneel.”