A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  Trailed by Hill, Watts walks into a dimly lit living room where ten or so Hispanic men and women are sitting and standing around a card table. When the detective asks if anyone speaks English, the teenage girl raises her hand.

  Watts asks what she and her family witnessed, and the teen says that earlier that night they heard their neighbor screaming at the people upstairs. “She was yelling really loud, bad words, names, calling them lesbians,” the girl says. “She has done this before. She talks to herself a lot in the middle of the night, yelling. I guess she was yelling at herself—we never hear anyone yell back. We’ve never had a problem with her.”

  “How did you know the police came?” Watts asks.

  “They started knocking on the door and saying, ‘Police!’ and ‘Put your hands up!’”

  “They were saying, ‘Police’?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long were they saying, ‘Put your hands up’?” asks Watts.

  “A lot of times.”

  “Did she say anything?” Hill asks.

  “No, she was quiet.”

  “How many gunshots do you think you heard?” asks Watts.

  “Five or six.”

  Watts asks the girl if she or others in her family knew the dead woman. The girl replies that although they occasionally saw her, they weren’t friends and rarely said more than hello.

  After thanking the teen and the family for their time, Watts explains that he and Hill will be back the next day to take a formal statement. “It will only take a few minutes—okay?”

  The detective gives the girl his card. As the two investigators turn to leave, she touches Watts’s sleeve. “What happened to the woman?”

  Watts considers holding back some details but decides that the neighbors deserve to know. “She was shot,” he says. “Ultimately, she was taken to the hospital, and she didn’t make it.”

  The girl frowns, turns to the others in the room, and translates Watts’s reply into Spanish. They all frown and shake their heads. “That is very sad,” the teen says.

  Watts and Hill leave the apartment and return to the dead woman’s front door, which is still open. Just beyond the threshold, the floor is smeared with blood. Watts pokes his head inside and determines that the place is empty—the evidence techs are gone.

  “Let’s see if we can find any medications, anything that might point to a mental illness,” Watts tells Hill. “If she has any, we can call the doctor listed on the prescriptions. We should also try to find an ID, something with her photo and information.”

  A more experienced detective than Hill would probably have been annoyed to have the mission spelled out so explicitly for him. But Hill is a rookie and has yet to prove his worth. Watts and his partner, Ben Brown, have been training Hill for the better part of a month, and the veteran investigators are not yet convinced that he will make a good homicide detective. Though Hill is extremely intelligent and has an excellent pedigree—he is the son of one of the first black officers in the DC police department—the thirty-four-year-old has spent the last six years in the Sexual Assault Unit, where detectives are known for working their shifts and going home; there are few nine-to-five days in homicide. Hill’s quirky personality also hasn’t helped his cause: he’s a bit of a goofball and such an obsessive fan of Star Wars that his computer screen saver is the face of Darth Vader and his phone’s ringtone is “The Imperial March.” In sum, he could not be more different than the ultraserious detectives training him.

  Short and stubby, Watts is a gruff forty-year-old with a generous belly who wears department-store suits and has his blond hair cut long. Married, with two teenage children, he suffers from high blood pressure and possesses so much nervous energy that his leg often pumps like a jackhammer under his desk. Watts is intense about everything, whether it is interrogating a suspect or drinking beer. A fan of the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, Watts wears a purple shirt and tie on the Friday before every football game, and on fall Sundays he relaxes in the parking lot at his “command post,” a pop-up trailer he has transformed into a tailgater’s dream, complete with a big-screen TV, a grill, and other essential supplies. On the job, Watts does not suffer fools gladly and expects a lot from those around him—even rookies.

  Watts and Hill enter the dead woman’s living room, which is furnished with a dresser, a tall cabinet, a green throw rug over brown wall-to-wall carpet, and a pullout bed. Watts finds an address book on the dresser and then turns to a small stack of books lying on the bed. He picks the books up and flips through them; one is a Bible and two are diaries. He hands them to Hill, who examines a few of the diaries’ pages.

  “Writing is very cramped,” Hill says. “Just gibberish—run-on sentences.”

  “That’s a sign of mental illness, maybe schizophrenia,” Watts says. Thus far, the case has all the hallmarks of someone struggling with a serious mental disorder.

  Watts and Hill next visit a study just down the hall, where the shelves are lined with books and magazines, most with Christian themes. The magazines are carefully filed in boxes labeled by publication and year.

  Hill glances at several newsletters and pulls a book of scripture from a shelf. After telling Watts that the woman seems to have been a Jehovah’s Witness, he cracks, “She should have been used to people knocking on her door.”

  Watts is too focused to laugh, but he gives Hill a thin smile. Maybe there’s hope for the rookie after all, he thinks. Only a homicide detective could come up with a joke like that.

  The investigators turn down a short hallway and enter the kitchen, where Watts opens the fridge. It’s empty except for a bowl of rice on the middle shelf. He inspects the sink: not a dirty dish in sight.

  Watts pivots and walks to the bathroom. He checks the medicine cabinet and finds it empty—not even a bottle of aspirin. With that, they are done. Having turned up no medications and no ID, they head into the living room, where Watts collects the address book and Hill the journals.

  Holding up the address book, Watts says, “I’ll use this to see if we can find next of kin. And you should go to the hospital to confirm the ID.”

  “Got it. I’ll get her MVA photo,” Hill says, referring to the leaseholder’s driver’s-license picture.

  As they head toward the door, Watts notices two photographs on top of the tall cabinet. One is of a large family dressed in Sunday finery. The other appears to be of a mother and daughter, both smiling for the camera. Watts feels Hill at his side.

  “Shame,” says Hill, breaking the silence. “Real shame.”

  Watts thinks he hears genuine sorrow in his rookie’s voice. By contrast, Watts feels no emotional distress of any sort. It’s not that he is coldhearted, although he is unquestionably jaded from having seen so many corpses and speaking to so many grieving mothers. But, in truth, his detachment runs deeper: it’s about the job itself. Watts works so hard and so doggedly that he leaves no room for sentiment. It would just get in his way.

  Saying nothing, Watts leads Hill to the entryway. Stepping over the chips of plaster and wood left by the evidence techs—they had cut bullets out of the walls—and then over the dead woman’s blood, Watts motions for Hill to go on ahead. Then he fiddles with the door’s lock, steps into the hallway, and shuts the door hard behind himself.

  * * *

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Jonathan Hill arrives at Prince George’s County Hospital Center. On his smartphone he has the leaseholder’s driver’s-license photograph, which he will compare to the dead woman in the morgue. So far, Watts and Hill have no reason to doubt that their victim is the leaseholder—the woman clearly lived in the apartment, and the detectives have learned from an apartment manager that the leaseholder was the only occupant listed in the manager’s records. But if there is a cardinal rule in homicide, it is that a detective must never make a mistake when identifying the dead.

  Hill enters a hallway just off the trauma bay and finds detectives Mike Delaney and Mike Barnhardt, as well as Trasee Cosby, the forensic
investigator. Cosby asks if they’re ready to head down to the hospital’s basement to visit the morgue. Hill nods and mentions that he and Watts found no ID or medications in the apartment.

  “That’s probably why she was acting all crazy,” quips Barnhardt, a tall detective with the face of a bulldog and the unit’s driest sense of humor.

  “It sounds like it went down crazy,” says Delaney, who responded to the shooting and took statements from several witnesses, including the two women living upstairs in apartment 4. The residents all reported that the older woman living in apartment 1 was a loner, that they didn’t know her very well, and that she had been acting strangely for a long time.

  Joined by two evidence techs, the three detectives and Cosby walk down a hallway to a bank of three elevators. They file into the middle one and descend a level. When the doors open, they walk straight toward a doorway with a faded blue sign: MORGUE. They enter a short hallway, make a left, and stop at a wooden door with a piece of paper taped to it: PLEASE MAKE SURE DOOR IS CLOSED. To the right is a red phone for calling an attendant to open the locked door.

  “Anyone have a knife?” Cosby asks.

  One of the techs hands one over. Cosby opens the blade, jams it between the door handle and the jamb, and jiggles it. The door pops open. She smiles. “That did not happen,” she says, handing the knife back.

  Cosby strides to a large refrigerator door, opens it, vanishes, and returns pushing a gurney with a body bag on top. Once the detectives have gathered around, she unzips the bag about halfway, revealing a small black woman whose body is covered by medical tape and electrodes. She has what appear to be several bullet holes in her left arm and abdomen.

  Moving to the head of the corpse, Hill pulls out his phone and holds it next to the woman’s face. The photo on the phone looks similar to the dead woman’s, but it’s not a perfect match.

  The detective frowns. The woman on the table seems younger and thinner than the woman in the photo. And her hair isn’t right—it’s too stringy. “Shit,” says Hill.

  Delaney, clad in a black jacket with the word HOMICIDE emblazoned on the back, leans over and looks back and forth between the photo and the woman. By now all three detectives are frowning.

  “Does she have a wig on in the photo?” asks Hill. “Is that a Jheri curl wig?”

  “That’s no wig,” says Barnhardt, his eyes glancing from the photo to the face.

  “Yes? No? Maybe so?” asks Cosby. “Guys?”

  The three detectives bend farther over the corpse. They agree that the woman in the photo looks heavier and older than the woman on the table. The leaseholder is sixty-three. The dead woman on the slab appears to be in her mid-forties. But everyone looks different after death.

  “This is a tough one,” Delaney says, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose. “Jonathan, pick her up and stand her against the wall.”

  Hill may be a rookie, but he’s experienced enough to know that Delaney is joking.

  “Does she look five-six?” Hill asks, referring to information on the leaseholder’s driver’s license.

  “No,” say Barnhardt and Delaney.

  “She seems five-two,” says Barnhardt.

  To this point neither of the two techs has participated in the discussion about the woman’s identity. But now one of them moves closer to the table and grabs Hill’s phone. Holding it a few inches from his eyes, he peers closely at the photo.

  “There’s a distinct mark, a freckle, in the photograph,” he says. Then he turns to the dead woman and studies her face. “But this one doesn’t have any such mark.”

  The room grows quiet.

  “Well, it goes up as an unknown,” says Cosby. “It goes up as a Doe.”

  Hill hates the idea of sending the body to Baltimore for an autopsy as a Jane Doe, especially on his first case. He wants to help the woman’s family and conduct a proper death notification. He also realizes that he will now have to figure out why this Jane Doe isn’t the leaseholder on her apartment.

  Hill sighs and looks at the body again. “Must be a sister or a daughter or something,” he says. “They look alike.”

  The other detectives nod in agreement.

  “Damn it,” Hill says, scowling in frustration. “A Jane Doe.”

  The room grows quiet as Cosby rezips the bag and wheels the gurney into the morgue. A moment later, she emerges and shuts the cooler’s steel door.

  As the detectives turn to leave, Hill hears the sound of someone crooning. The voice is Delaney’s:

  Doe, a deer, a female deer …

  “That’s a musical,” Barnhardt says helpfully.

  “You know it?” Hill asks Delaney.

  “I’m a Renaissance man,” says Delaney, smiling and continuing to sing:

  Ray, a drop of golden sun …

  As they head for the elevator, Hill, Barnhardt, and Cosby cannot resist. They join in, becoming a motley choir:

  Me, a name I call myself

  Far, a long long way to run.

  CHAPTER 4

  4:30 p.m., Saturday, February 9

  Detective Andre Brooks walks into the living room and halts at the blood-smeared hardwood floor. Tapping his left leg with his notepad, he stares at the crimson smudge for a full minute before shifting his gaze to the sun setting behind patterned window shades. He blinks to clear his vision of the golden glare and steps back to better scan the cluttered room. Against the far wall is a leather couch with a split seam; on the opposite wall is a twin-sized bed. The room is littered with open boxes, food containers, a portable toilet, a tilting bookcase. Jesus, thinks Brooks. Figuring out if anything was stolen from this place is going to be a bitch.

  Returning his attention to the floor, Brooks wonders how such a violent death spilled so little blood. He feels a surge of anger over the slaying of his victim, an innocent seventy-one-year-old homebody named Geraldine McIntyre, whose corpse is already on its way to the morgue. Two hours earlier, a visiting relative had found the woman bleeding and unconscious in this very spot, not three steps from the front door. Stabbed numerous times in her torso, she was rushed to the hospital, where she died in the emergency room.

  Brooks scowls. He cannot understand why someone would kill an elderly lady, let alone in such a horrible way. McIntyre wasn’t just old, Brooks has learned—she was defenseless. Partly paralyzed from a stroke, McIntyre somehow had been caring for her disabled forty-six-year-old daughter, who slept on the bed in the living room. Fortunately, the daughter wasn’t home today; she was at a nearby hospital being treated for bedsores.

  After walking through a small hallway, Brooks enters McIntyre’s bedroom, where evidence technicians are taking photographs. On the unmade bed are a TV remote, a plastic bag filled with prescription bottles, a stack of mail, and a DVD case; next to the bed is a small table covered with personal items. In the left corner of the room is an overstuffed white armoire. Clothes are scattered across the floor, and a woman’s brown hat rests on a plastic fan.

  Brooks’s attention turns to an upside-down black milk crate on a knee-high white stand. Pressed against the far wall, the crate is perfectly positioned for someone watching television in bed, but there is no TV. The detective steps closer, and an evidence technician points to the floor. Brooks dips his head and sees a severed coaxial cable.

  Brooks has no doubt about what happened here: McIntyre’s television has been stolen.

  Pivoting, the detective finds his partner, Mike Delaney, standing behind him. “You know what kind of set she had?”

  Delaney has just finished speaking to McIntyre’s relatives; following his earlier survey of the scene, he had asked them this very question. “Flat-screen GPX,” Delaney says, referring to an inexpensive brand sold at local convenience and discount stores. The relatives, Delaney adds, are certain it must have been stolen, because McIntyre would not have sold or given away the thirty-two-inch set without mentioning it to them.

  “Fucking crackheads,” Brooks mutters, using his prefe
rred street term for anyone addicted to cocaine, heroin, or some other drug.

  Within minutes of getting the call about the murder, Brooks figured that McIntyre was killed in a robbery gone bad. The detective knows the dead woman’s neighborhood well: Capitol Heights has a plethora of addicts—both of crack and heroin—who mow lawns, paint houses, and practice minor carpentry to earn money to finance their habit. Many of them are notorious hustlers and thieves, willing to do or steal anything to get their next fix.

  Shortly after arriving at the scene, Brooks learned that investigators had already interviewed a neighborhood boy who’d spotted someone who might well be a neighborhood handyman outside McIntyre’s house earlier that day. The youth reported seeing a grubby older man wearing a black cap and dark clothes; carrying a black bag and a hammer, the man entered the house about 9:30 a.m.

  Brooks guesses that the killer stopped by McIntyre’s house and offered to perform an odd job. The handyman likely knew McIntyre, and either he was allowed inside after knocking or he simply walked right in—Brooks has been told that McIntyre often left her front door unlocked to facilitate food deliveries. As Brooks imagines it, once the intruder got into the house, he went straight for the bedroom and snatched the television. On his way out, the thief encountered McIntyre in the living room; when she put up a struggle, he pushed her to the ground, jumped on top of her, and stabbed her several times with a small knife. Or maybe, Brooks thinks, the murder was even more cold-blooded than that. It’s entirely possible that the thief killed McIntyre after taking her television simply because she knew him from around the neighborhood and would be able to identify him.

  “Fucking crackheads,” Brooks says again, attempting to leave the bedroom but finding the hallway too crowded with police officers to squeeze through. Tall and broad-jawed, the forty-five-year-old detective is so rotound that his shirttails constantly pop from his pants. Waiting impatiently for the traffic to clear, he is oblivious to the fact that his salmon-striped white shirt hangs below the bottom of his suit jacket.