A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  When Nichols finishes, he leans back in his chair. The room again goes silent, and the investigators return their attention to Brooks. This is his case, and he—not the sergeant, the lieutenant, or even the captain—will have the last word. Brooks shuffles his stack of notes and papers as his eyes bounce from his fellow detectives to the sergeant to the lieutenant and finally the captain.

  “We are going old-school here,” he says. “This is a red ball. An innocent old lady was killed. An innocent lady. If anybody has any problems with going old-school, it’s time for you to step off the train.”

  Nobody says a word.

  11:50 a.m., Wednesday, February 13

  Sean Deere and Mike Crowell are beat. They haven’t slept in at least thirty hours, the result of their squad’s having caught a case the previous night at absolutely the worst time: 11:15 p.m., just as they were both getting ready for bed. Receiving the call at 3:00 a.m. would have been better—at least they would have snagged a few hours of shut-eye.

  But the two detectives are more than tired; they’re frustrated. The new case isn’t even a murder. At the very least, a fresh homicide would have taken their minds off Amber Stanley while generating some decent overtime pay. Instead, their squad mate Joe Bunce was assigned a police-involved shooting that sounded about as justified as they come. An off-duty sheriff’s deputy had returned to his home in Fort Washington just before 11:00 p.m. last night to find his front door busted open. He went inside to retrieve his service weapon, which he’d hidden under a pillow on his bed, but the room had been ransacked, and the gun was missing. After grabbing his backup weapon from a locked box stashed in a laundry basket, he saw a man in dark clothing emerge from his basement door and start walking toward him. Figuring the man was a burglar who now had his other loaded gun, the deputy opened fire. The burglar dove back into the basement. A minute later, the man reappeared and charged at him, and the deputy fired several more shots. The burglar managed to escape the deputy’s house, but after running a little ways he collapsed, dead of gunshot wounds, in a nearby yard.

  It was an open-and-shut case. Even so, Deere and Crowell spent the whole night working it—no matter how straightforward, a police shooting must be handled with the utmost care.

  Just as the two detectives were about to pack up their papers and head home for a nap, however, they got an unexpected and unwanted gift: the delivery of three men they had been seeking in the Amber Stanley investigation. An hour or so earlier, the department’s fugitive squad had captured the men and deposited them in the Homicide Unit’s three interview rooms.

  The previous week, when Deere and Crowell had failed to turn up Gerry Gordon and the twenty-year-old who had caught a sexually transmitted disease from Denise, Deere had turned to the fugitive squad for help. Two days ago, he’d given its members short dossiers on the two men; he’d also given them information about a third man, a twenty-three-year-old who was close friends with Jeff Buck. All three were wanted on warrants that charged them with crimes ranging from trespassing to failing to appear in court in a drug case.

  Earlier this morning, realizing that he and his squad mates were too exhausted to conduct meaningful interrogations, Deere phoned the fugitive unit’s sergeant and told him to call off the search, at least for a day. But his instruction was ignored, and now Gerry Gordon was in Interview Room 1 and the STD victim was in Interview Room 2. For good measure, the fugitive squad had also snatched the STD victim’s twenty-six-year-old brother, and he was in Interview Room 3.

  “Assholes—they fucked us,” Crowell tells Deere as they stand by the clerk’s station, munching on stale doughnuts.

  Deere agrees. He would like to believe that this screwup is the result of a miscommunication, but he’s more inclined to think that it’s a genuine “fuck you” to M-40. In recent weeks, Crowell and Bunce have been complaining vocally about the fugitive squad’s abilities, particularly since its detectives have not arrested any of the five suspects that M-40 has recently charged in homicides.

  A month or so ago, the ever-antagonistic Crowell printed out the definition of “fugitive” and made a point of handing it to a fugitive-squad detective who had stopped by the homicide office to say hello. “You aren’t going to find anyone in here!” Crowell yelled. “Go catch our guys!”

  Clearly irked by Crowell’s abusive behavior, the detective left the room in a huff.

  Now Deere and Crowell are paying the price for disrespecting their colleagues. “I’m dying, Sean,” Crowell says. “How do we do this?”

  Deere is not clearheaded enough to conduct intensive interviews, but he cannot let their witnesses—or suspects—go free. He has no idea when they’ll be able to grab them again.

  So Deere decides to perform triage: he and Crowell will do their best to take some basic information from the men and get their DNA. They will start with the twenty-six-year-old brother because he has no apparent connection to the murder investigation, though he might be able to provide some helpful intelligence about the neighborhood’s workings. After that, they will hit the STD victim and the Peeping Tom, Gerry Gordon.

  The detectives eye the clock on the wall—it’s just after noon. Seeing the time makes them feel even wearier. “Let’s get these done as quick as possible,” Crowell says, grabbing his notebook.

  * * *

  DEERE AND CROWELL enter Interview Room 3 and find the twenty-six-year-old brother sitting at one end of the table, leaning back and completely relaxed. He hasn’t bothered to take off his black hat with earflaps or his thick black coat. Crowell lets go of a yawn as he drops into a seat at the other end of the table, next to the wall, and Deere takes a spot just off the man’s right knee.

  The interview starts just fine, as Deere and Crowell pepper the man with questions about his associates, girlfriends, babies’ mothers, and his brother and his brother’s friends. The witness seems like a decent guy; he holds a steady job and asks the detectives politely if he may call his employer, because he will be late for work.

  As Deere is pressing the brother about Jeff Buck and his crew, Crowell’s eyes grow heavy and he gently rests his head against the wall. His eyes close, spring open, close again, and finally stay shut. He snorts and begins to snore.

  The brother is in the middle of explaining that he hasn’t seen Buck for months when he pauses and looks over at the slumbering investigator. Then he turns to Deere, who shrugs as if to say that detectives always catch a nap in the box.

  “Any fights involving your brother?” Deere asks, refusing to be distracted by Crowell’s snoring.

  “No, no fights,” the witness says.

  “In the last few months?”

  “No.”

  Deere asks the brother whether he has ever seen Jeff Buck with a gun; he also asks whether he has heard about the rape of Denise or anything about Amber Stanley’s murder. The brother shakes his head.

  Deere glances at Crowell, whose oversized head has drifted four inches down the wall and has halted on his propped right hand. Saliva bubbles on his lower lip; he is breathing deeply, and his bobblehead-like cranium is pressing awkwardly against his thumb.

  The pain at last snaps Crowell awake. Shaking his head, he blinks wildly, thinking, What did I miss? Was I really asleep? He checks Deere, who hides a shit-eating grin behind his notepad. Crowell furiously clicks his ballpoint pen, trying to loosen his thumb as well as clear his foggy mind. Christ, my thumb hurts, he thinks. Did I dislocate it?

  He squints, then opens his eyes as wide as he can. “So, how did you meet your girlfriend?” he asks the brother, returning to a question he posed earlier.

  The witness seems perplexed. “Like I said before, through Facebook.”

  “Facebook?” Crowell repeats, trying to think of something to say. He eyes Deere, but his fellow investigator offers no help. Watching Crowell scramble is too enjoyable.

  Crowell furrows his brow. He checks his notes but sees nothing that might get him back on track. Well, he thinks, might as well have som
e fun.

  “What is this Facebook?” he deadpans in a sinister tone, emphasizing the word as if it were a heretofore unknown criminal enterprise.

  The brother rubs his hands in his lap. “You know—it’s social networking.”

  Crowell says nothing; Deere says nothing. They stare at the witness, now shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Ten seconds pass in utter silence.

  “So, you read books on it?” Crowell asks.

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s—you, you keep in touch with people,” the man says.

  “Ah, like e-mail,” Crowell says. “I get it.”

  “No—”

  “Ah, like text messages then,” says Deere.

  “No, it’s Facebook,” the brother says. “Facebook! It’s social!”

  “How do you know what people are talking about on this Facebook?” asks Deere.

  The man sighs and drops his head into his hands.

  Crowell decides it’s as good a time as any to get the witness’s consent for a DNA swab, but he doesn’t want him to know the reason he is here—not yet.

  “You spend much time in Laurel?” he asks.

  The detective is referring to a city ten miles beyond the Beltway in a quieter section of PG County. Crowell guesses that his witness, who was picked up twenty miles away, in Mitchellville, has no connection to Laurel and might never even have set foot in it.

  “Not really,” the man says. “No.”

  Crowell pinches the bridge of his nose between his left index finger and unhurt thumb. “We are investigating the theft of twenty-seven cartons of Marlboro Red cigarettes from a gas station up there,” he says, looking down at his pad, flipping a page forward and back as if checking his notes to make sure he has his facts right. Then he raises his head and stares hard at the man. “You didn’t steal those cigarettes, did you? I don’t think you were involved. But we got a tip, and we have to run it down. That’s why you’re here.”

  “No,” the brother says, startled. “I don’t smoke no Marlboros. I didn’t steal no Marlboros.”

  Crowell knows that black guys generally don’t smoke Marlboro Reds; Newports tend to be the preferred brand. But he hopes the witness will be rattled by his questions and, thus, more likely to cooperate.

  “Anyway,” Crowell continues, “we would like to clear you, and if you could give us your DNA, that would help. The guy who stole the cigarettes scraped his hand on the counter, and we are collecting DNA to match it. We just got a bunch of names, and we have to run it down.”

  The brother’s eyes shift from Crowell to Deere and back again. Slowly, the tension in his face eases.

  “Sure, that’s fine,” he says.

  With that, Deere opens the door, signaling the evidence technician to come inside. While she takes photos of the witness and swabs his cheeks, the detectives leave the box and head to the clerk’s counter, where they join detectives Joe Bunce and Allyson Hamlin, who are eyeing the stale doughnuts.

  “I was worried you were going to keep sleeping,” Deere jokes.

  “I was pushing it,” Crowell admits.

  “It’s a scary feeling,” Deere says. There is no shame in falling asleep in the interrogation room. They have all done it. When you routinely work forty-eight hours straight, exhaustion is bound to catch up to you sooner or later—and it’s far better to nod off in the box than while driving home, which has happened to more than one detective.

  “You like the Marlboro Reds line?” Crowell asks.

  Deere agrees that it was funny and then says, “‘Facebook? What is this Facebook?’”

  “It’s like e-mail,” Crowell says, laughing loudly.

  Bunce and Hamlin roll their eyes at their colleagues’ nonsensical banter. But Bunce is too tired to join in, so he shrugs and walks to his desk to finish some paperwork. Hamlin picks up a doughnut, inspects it, and puts it back in the box. Yawning, she stretches her arms toward the ceiling and heads outside for some fresh air.

  “Well, let’s get this one,” Crowell says to Deere, shaking his sore thumb and pointing to Interview Room 2, which houses the man who had sex with Denise in the empty mansion’s garage.

  * * *

  WHEN THE DETECTIVES enter the box, they find a thin twenty-year-old who, like his brother, is open and friendly and answers their questions without hesitation. Yes, he says, he had sex with Denise in the sports car. But he claims he never paid for it and no longer hangs with Buck or his gang. For the second time, Crowell employs the Marlboro Red ruse and gets consent for the witness’s DNA. Pretending to admire the man’s tattoos, Crowell convinces him to partially disrobe so he can surreptitiously check the rest of his body for potential scars from a knife. There are none.

  After obtaining the DNA in near-record time and taking a smoke break, Deere and Crowell enter Interview Room 1, where they find Gerry Gordon. A scrawny thirty-year-old who looks twenty, he is clad in a tight-fitting blue shirt, pajama-style pants, and flip-flops.

  Crowell runs the cigarette ruse again, and Gordon consents to give them his DNA. When the female evidence tech finishes swabbing Gordon’s cheeks, Deere and Crowell press their witness about everything from his sexual habits to his rejection by Denise.

  “She didn’t like me,” Gordon says simply.

  “How did that make you feel?” asks Deere.

  “Bad—mad,” he answers.

  “So how many times did you have sex with her?” Deere asks. “Come on, we know you did.”

  “I never had sex with her.”

  “Bullshit!” Crowell shouts. “I’m calling bullshit!”

  Under pressure, Gordon finally admits that he was approached by Denise’s pimp, the girlfriend of Jason Murray, the illegal taxi driver. The girlfriend proposed a sex act for forty dollars A bit of haggling got the price down to twenty dollars, but then Gordon changed his mind and backed out. Besides, he says, he didn’t have the money.

  Neither detective believes this. Who negotiates a twenty-dollar deal if he doesn’t have the cash? During a break, Deere comes up with a cunning sleight of hand, a fake DNA report that links Gordon to the blood found on Denise’s shirt. They show him the report, and Gordon becomes a sobbing, snot-bubbling mess.

  Returning to the box from a second break, Deere and Crowell find Gordon crying in the corner. After another hour or so of tough questioning, he nearly confesses to Denise’s rape, but he puts the crime in the wrong place at the wrong time. The detectives decide that he is trying to please them with his answers and that, in fact, he had nothing to do with the sexual assault.

  As they leave the box, Crowell is surprisingly hyper for a guy who fell asleep in mid-interrogation a couple of hours ago. He jokes with Allyson Hamlin that he could get Gerry Gordon to confess to anything. “Have any open murders that need to be closed?” he asks.

  When the squad’s rookie, Jamie Boulden, quips that it would be great if Crowell could get Gordon to confess to his tough-to-solve homicide of a despised drug dealer, the detective throws his right arm over Boulden’s shoulders. “We’ll solve that one next, buddy, no worries,” Crowell says. “Once we get this one done, I’ll do everything I can to help you.”

  Deere, meanwhile, heads to his desk and stares vacantly at his notes, pondering the weeks ahead and his race on a human hamster wheel. He’s keeping busy but getting nowhere, and at this point his best hope for solving Amber Stanley’s murder is that Jeff Buck’s DNA comes back as a match with the spot of blood on Denise’s shirt. He checks his calendar—he guesses he has at least another ten days, maybe two weeks, before he gets the results.

  His head is throbbing, but Deere knows that he and Crowell will have to take another crack at Gerry Gordon to gather more intelligence about Jeff Buck’s crew. It’s important work, and they can afford to let Gordon calm down a bit. The greater priority, Deere decides, is to grab a nap.

  Without consulting Crowell or his sergeant, Deere takes his coat from a nearby rack, trudges to his Impala, and drives to the
lower parking lot. He backs into a space, turns the heat up, leans his seat all the way back, and sets the alarm on his phone to wake him in twenty minutes. He puts the phone on his chest and closes his eyes. He is instantly lost in sleep.

  4:00 p.m., Wednesday, February 13

  Detective Mike Ebaugh sits at his desk, waiting. He knows he has done everything in his power to solve his shit sandwich of a case. He has played and replayed the video of Nicoh Mayhew’s murder, spent countless hours poring over his notes and the evidence reports, listened to dozens of jail calls, and exhaustively questioned members of Mayhew’s family and his friends. Not long after receiving Cynthia Mayhew’s tip about the brothers named John and Stan, he left messages with the FBI and with detectives in the county’s Robbery Unit. But so far he has come up with nothing.

  For the past three days Ebaugh has been so busy on other matters that he has barely thought about the case. He spent Monday working with county prosecutors who were gearing up for a trial in an unrelated murder, while also lending a hand to Eddie Flores on the slaying of Salaam Adams. He devoted the previous day to helping his partner, D. J. Windsor, investigate a high-profile murder-suicide that occurred just after midnight on Monday. Even by PG standards, Windsor’s case was tragic: a University of Maryland graduate student had fired on two roommates, a promising junior and a senior. After killing one and wounding the other, the grad student shot and killed himself. Though Windsor’s investigation was mostly a mop-up operation, the case generated intense media interest, in part because the gunman had been found with a fully loaded Uzi in a large black bag strapped to his back, suggesting that he’d planned to go on an even more gruesome shooting spree.

  Late yesterday, as Ebaugh and Windsor compiled reports and briefed supervisors on the murder-suicide, Ebaugh bumped into Sergeant Jeremy Bull. An investigator who specializes in targeting violent offenders, Bull has an encyclopedic knowledge of PG County criminals. Hoping Bull could help him develop some new leads in the Nicoh Mayhew case, Ebaugh peppered his thirty-five-year-old comrade with questions about players in Mayhew’s neighborhood and asked whether he’d picked up any rumors about the murder. Bull said he hadn’t heard anything, but he promised to swing by the office the next day at 4:00 p.m. to watch Ebaugh’s security footage and see if he recognized anyone in the video.