Chase or not chase? Chase or not chase? The battle wagon is nearly out of view. Shit. Exhaling a plume of smoke, Crowell stomps the brake, bringing the cruiser to a full stop. He watches the car vanish down a side street.
Shaking his head, he pulls out his phone again and checks his in-box.
Come on! Where are you?
The next hit suggests that the suspect is still making his way toward the DC line, so Crowell heads in that direction, motoring through a blur of neighborhoods. He jacks up the volume of the car stereo when he hears his favorite song, “Figured You Out,” by the rock band Nickelback. “I like your pants around your feet,” the singer belts. “And I like the dirt that’s on your knees.”
When the song ends, Crowell switches to a rap station, and soon angry lyrics and a thudding bass line are pulsing from the speakers. The detective’s taste in music is eclectic—he likes everything from classical to rock to heavy metal to hip-hop. But when he’s chasing suspects, rap seems best, and now the detective pumps his balding head to the heavy beat.
As he checks his phone for the next hit, Crowell hears a gravelly voice crackle from the police radio in a pocket of his bullet-resistant vest: “I’ll be in the AO in five mikes.”
It’s Sean Deere, Crowell’s squad mate and the lead detective on this case, the investigation into the murder of an innocent seventeen-year-old named Amber Stanley. Crowell chuckles and keys the microphone: “Command post copies.”
Fucking Deere, acting all military, thinks Crowell. Deere is definitely not military. A former undercover narcotics investigator, he is as laid-back as Crowell is aggressive, as methodical as Crowell is impulsive. And because he is chronically late, Deere’s nickname is “Detective En Route.”
Crowell and Deere are friends, though earlier that morning there had been a testy exchange that highlighted their differing approaches to police work. Deere had obtained a court order compelling a communications company to provide Jeff Buck’s phone records and the data the detectives needed to track his phone. The department has a cell-phone-locating truck, a technological marvel that can pinpoint a phone in continuous real time by zeroing in on its signal. But to the great frustration of the PG homicide detectives, the truck has been out of service for six months, meaning they have to rely on other agencies to help them track fugitives. Crowell and his partner, Joe Bunce, had arrived early that morning to begin the search for Jeff Buck and wanted to catch the suspect quickly. After a string of grueling weeks, the two men had hoped to enjoy some time on a quiet Friday evening with their wives, Beth and Debbi.
“Beth said she would be waiting upstairs for me,” Crowell told Bunce, egging his fellow detective into calling the head of the DC police department’s phone-truck squad. “They’ll find the guy a lot faster than we will.”
“But Sean wants us to grab Buck ourselves—quietly,” Bunce said.
“Fuck it,” said Crowell. “I want to get some ass tonight.”
When Deere finally walked into the office, at 11:00 a.m., he scowled at Bunce’s mention of the DC request. “I don’t want them involved right now. I don’t want a bunch of guys on the street scaring this guy,” said Deere, adding he would prefer to rely on the less precise tracking method of hopscotching from e-mailed location to e-mailed location. “I want to take him nice and quiet.”
“Sean, they do this all the time,” Crowell said. “They don’t cause a scene. They are good.”
“No, I want to do this my way,” Deere insisted. “And that is nice and quiet.”
Crowell wasn’t happy with the decision, but he said nothing further. This was Deere’s case, so Deere’s word was law.
* * *
WITH A CIGARETTE dangling from his lips, Sean Deere drives toward the AO—the area of operations—zigzagging through Capitol Heights, a 4,000-person town of single-family homes, town houses, and apartment buildings squeezed into less than a square mile next to the DC line. He, too, is dressed casually: black boots, blue jeans, long-sleeved black T-shirt, black police jacket. Country music blares from the stereo of his loaner, a car so beat-up that its glove box is secured by duct tape. His usual ride, a blue Impala with 121,000 miles on the odometer, is getting a tune-up at the department’s maintenance shop. Six months into his investigation of Amber Stanley’s murder—the most difficult case of his career—the detective feels as rundown as his Impala and as rickety as his loaner.
Deere regrets having snapped at Mike Crowell and Joe Bunce earlier, but he had his reasons. For one, the stakes are high, and he can’t afford to take the risk that another department’s officers will screw up his investigation. For another, the warrant he has for Jeff Buck’s DNA is rather thin. To emphasize this point to the ever-impatient Crowell, Deere that morning had waved his hands over the document like a wizard. “It’s all rumor and magic,” he half-joked to Crowell, “and it might get tossed by a judge. So I want to keep it in my pocket. I want him to consent.”
In the heart of Capitol Heights, Deere drives slowly down avenues and up side streets. He scans sidewalks but sees no one who matches the description of his target. As he cruises through another alley, he feels his smartphone vibrate. He pulls the cruiser to a stop and reaches for his belt holster. Scrunching his eyes, he studies the e-mail on his smartphone. He smiles.
“You see this?” Crowell blurts over the radio.
Deere keys his mike and tells Crowell that the hit has a variable radius of only about a hundred feet. “He must be out in the open.” Deere knows that hits get more precise when suspects are on the phone and outdoors.
Placing his radio back on the passenger seat, Deere enters the longitude and latitude into a mapping program on his phone, and out pops the location: a half mile away near Eastern Avenue, a dividing line between PG County and the District. The detectives were right: Buck has been moving toward the line. If they’re lucky, they will catch him with a gun or drugs, giving them leverage in the interrogation room.
Deere slams the accelerator, and the battered cruiser roars to life. The detective races up Southern Avenue and swerves onto Eastern Avenue, a blur of town houses, vacant lots, squat apartment buildings, and parked cars flashing past his window. A moment later, he spies a tall man in a leather jacket sauntering down the sidewalk, a grocery bag in his right hand. It’s Jeff Buck—no question.
Got you, thinks Deere, grabbing his radio and relaying Buck’s location. “Sixty-second and Eastern.”
“On my way,” says Crowell.
Hanging back a bit, Deere watches Buck stride into an apartment complex’s parking lot. A moment later, the detective pulls into the lot, comes to a quick stop next to Buck, and leaps from the car. “Put your hands on the hood!” Deere shouts.
Buck spins toward Deere, his dreadlocks flailing under a dark ball cap as his eyes search for an escape route. Deere knows from having read reports and spoken to fellow officers that Buck is not afraid to run from the police.
“Don’t,” says Deere. “Don’t!”
Buck and the detective lock eyes for a moment, both men utterly still. Finally the suspect frowns and gently sets the grocery bag on the ground. Swiveling, he places his hands on the car’s hood.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for a little bit,” Deere tells Buck, running his hands up and down the man’s sides and over his legs, checking for weapons. Finding none, he pats Buck on the back, prompting him to spin around.
Over the past two months, Deere has often eyed Jeff Buck’s mug shot, and now he is not surprised by what he finds in front of him. The twenty-three-year-old has a long, sloped face, a flat nose, and a goatee. A Pittsburgh Pirates cap covers his thick dreadlocks, and he’s clad in camouflage pants and a clashing red-and-black leather jacket. Leaning back against the car, Buck jams his hands into his jacket pockets and sneers, clearly unhappy about being stopped and frisked in public.
“I have to take you back to the office,” Deere says. In his peripheral vision, he catches Crowell’s Impala pulling into the lot. A m
oment later, his fellow detective stands at his side.
“What the fuck? I’m just bringing these things to my baby’s momma,” Buck says, nodding toward the plastic bag at his feet.
Deere glances at the bag and sees that it contains cleaning supplies and diapers. Off to his right, he hears a door open, and a woman in a blue bathrobe emerges from a ground-floor apartment. The woman briefly surveys the scene before taking a few angry steps toward the investigators. She must be the baby’s mother, Deere thinks, so he holds up his right hand, a signal for her to halt.
She complies, puts her hands on her hips, and begins to scream.
“You can’t take him!” she shouts. “You need a warrant! You need a warrant! Let him go!”
“No, I can,” says Deere.
“Is he going to be all right?” the woman asks. “Give me your card. What is your badge number? Give me your badge number!”
“We’ll give it to him,” says Crowell. “He’ll be fine—he’s with the police!”
“Fuck you!” the woman yells. “Fuck you all! Jeff, don’t say a word! Fuck you all!”
“He’s an adult,” Deere says, too quietly for the woman to hear, as he opens the front passenger door of the cruiser.
“You can come with us if you like,” he says to Buck. Then he grabs the man’s left arm with his right hand and guides him around the door. Before his suspect can object, the detective spins him into the passenger seat and slams the door.
* * *
THE PHONE CALL that ushered Sean Deere into a personal hell came six months earlier, at 11:10 p.m. on August 22, a warm and muggy Wednesday. Deere was at home; half-asleep on his couch, he was watching the late news. When he answered his cell phone, the midnight-shift detective told him a teenage girl had been slain in her own bedroom. The murder, the detective said, had occurred in Kettering, a suburban subdivision featuring tree-lined streets with genteel names like Burleigh and Princeleigh and Wimbleton.
A neighborhood of ramblers, split-levels, and colonials built in the 1960s and 1970s, Kettering was east of Washington’s Beltway—which in PG County is generally considered the highway’s “good side”—making it a somewhat unusual venue for a homicide. But after having spent five years investigating murders all across the sprawling county, Deere was keenly aware that even the most placid neighborhoods can hold deadly secrets. As he drove toward Kettering, his mind ran through the typical reasons a teenager might be killed in such a place: she was a prostitute, a gang member, the girlfriend of a drug dealer, or the resident of a narcotics stash house. All were grounds enough to be slain in PG County.
Deere arrived in Kettering just after midnight and soon turned onto Chartsey Street, a curving road lined with homes on small but neat grassy lots. He passed a dozen PG patrol cars and evidence vans before stopping in front of the victim’s house, a split-level with beige siding, burgundy shutters, and a red mailbox. The investigator got out of his car, ducked under police tape, and found Andre Brooks—the midnight-shift detective who had called him an hour or so earlier—chatting with Deere’s sergeant, Joe Bergstrom. The investigators told him what they knew: someone had kicked in the front door of the house, climbed to the second floor, and fatally shot Amber Stanley in her bedroom.
Brooks told Deere that Amber Stanley’s mother, older sister, and foster sister had already been taken to the homicide office, where investigators were quizzing them. The older sister, Brooks said, reported being in her basement bedroom with her four-year-old son and hearing Amber scream; she then heard a gunshot, more screams, and more gunshots. The sister ran to the first floor and dipped her head around a corner. Looking up the stairs to the second floor, she saw a man leaving Amber’s room. He was wearing a dark sweatshirt and a dark mask; in his right hand he was holding a semiautomatic pistol. Before the gunman could react, the sister dashed downstairs to her room and slammed the door. She blocked it with a filing cabinet, snatched her son, and climbed out a back window.
Deere jotted down some notes, then walked to the front door of the house. It had clearly been smashed in—the dead bolt was extended, and the jamb was cracked—but he saw no evidence of shoe or boot imprints. Shifting his gaze, he spotted a mangled bullet three feet in, on the entryway’s hardwood floor; five feet beyond that was a shell casing.
Deere stepped into the house and took the stairs on his right to the second floor. Amber Stanley’s room was just off the landing; slipping across the threshold, he found the murdered girl. Clad in a baby-blue sleeping T-shirt, looking tiny and delicate, she lay crumpled over a pillow on her bed. Under her face was a pool of congealing blood. A jarring mix of scents—perfume, hair spray, gun powder—filled the small white room.
On the bed’s bright green comforter, Deere noticed several shell casings; he also saw a casing was on the floor to his right. Nearby were a pile of clothes, a small dresser, and a set of white shelves filled with books and pink baskets containing hair spray, brushes, mousse, and creams. Pink curtains covered the far window. In one corner of the room was a jewelry box, in another an electronic music keyboard. On the wall was a dry-erase board with a to-do list: “book reflection, two essays, binders, sheet protectors.” Under it was a calendar; in the box for Monday, August 20, bracketed in blue and red marker, were the words “First Day.”
Deere’s stomach clenched. His victim was not involved in the drug world; a dirtbag’s girlfriend does not highlight the first day of school, and certainly not with enthusiasm. In her bedroom and then elsewhere in the house, Deere studied photographs of the girl, every one of which was striking. With soft, round cheeks and glimmering brown eyes, Amber Stanley had been beautiful—later, Deere would learn that she was a part-time model and an honor student who dreamed of becoming a geneticist.
A stream of investigators and evidence techs came and went from Amber’s room. There was no banter at the victim’s bedside; to the officers present, this girl could have been a sister or a daughter. Deere was as hardened as any of them, but as he leaned close to the girl he felt a surge of sadness, his thoughts drifting to images of his four children, two of them girls.
Working deliberately, Deere noted several wounds to Amber’s head and face, the position of her body, the type of shell casings, the lack of other physical evidence. This didn’t feel like a robbery: a plastic bag of cash, apparently Amber’s, lay at the foot of the bed. It didn’t seem like a domestic dispute, either. It felt like an execution, which made no sense. Nobody executes honor students, Deere thought. Not like this.
While searching the rest of the house, Deere was momentarily puzzled by a black footprint on the door of a second basement bedroom, this one normally occupied by the foster sister. The door had been kicked in, but Deere quickly realized that the damage wasn’t the work of the killer. Instead, the footprint had been left by the shoe of an officer frantically hunting for the gunman or any survivors. When Deere entered the foster sister’s rather plain room, he found a twin bed, a dresser, and a desk covered with journals and diaries. He collected the brightly colored volumes as evidence, but nothing else in the room caught his attention.
Deere spent the next few hours working closely with evidence technicians and forensic investigators. It was his responsibility to make sure they did their jobs properly; he observed them photographing the victim and the scene, collecting potential evidence, and, finally, placing the body into a zippered bag. Just as the sun rose above Chartsey Street, Deere left the house and drove to the office, where he would spend much of the next forty-eight hours. Already, he was deeply worried; this was not a typical homicide. He could feel it in his bones.
* * *
OVER THE NEXT several days, Deere reviewed the autopsy results, the evidence collected by the techs, and the interviews with the victim’s family members. He soon put together a plausible scenario of what had happened in the house that night: the gunman had kicked in the front door and startled Amber Stanley, who was standing just ten feet away in the front hallway. The killer fired his first
shot; the round struck the teen in the left arm, breaking it. Chased by her assailant, Amber fled upstairs and ran to her bedroom. There she took refuge on her bed, next to her stuffed animals. The gunman followed her into the bedroom, stood over her, and fired several more times, hitting her in the face and head. Then he raced back down the stairs and out of the house.
But the killer’s motive—not to mention his identity—remained a mystery. Within hours of Amber Stanley’s murder, the case had begun to attract a huge amount of attention from both the PG police department’s higher-ups and the media. It was a classic “red ball”: a high-profile murder that must be solved, and solved yesterday. (The police took the nickname from the railroad business; red balls were trains carrying priority items.) As Deere knew, the gunman had killed more than just a pretty teenager: Amber Stanley—an honor student with a bright future—was a living emblem of hope in a county too often defined by shattered dreams.
Under intense pressure to find her killer, the PG police department hurled plainclothes officers, drug investigators, and dozens of detectives into the case. Days became weeks, but still the case remained unsolved. Now, six months after the murder, Deere struggles to believe that he’s making any real progress. He often feels like a lifeguard being dragged under by a drowning swimmer.
With thinning brown hair, sallow cheeks, and puffy bags under his eyes, Deere looks a decade older than his forty-four years. He has put on at least thirty-five pounds since catching the case, erasing the gains of a months-long diet that combined a strict vegan regimen with the regular consumption of appetite-suppressing cigarettes.
Possessed of an innate curiosity and a superb memory, Deere is a whiz at trivia contests and an enthusiastic student of history. The son of a DC firefighter, he grew up in Prince George’s County, did well in school, and attended junior college with the idea of going into real estate. But public service was in his blood, and he quickly grew bored with his studies. Changing course, he applied to the PG police department and became an officer in 1990, at the age of twenty-one. Like all rookies, he started in patrol before spending a decade as an undercover narcotics investigator—a job that taught him patience, since complicated drug probes can take years to build. In 2008, looking for a new challenge, he won an assignment to homicide, policing’s most dynamic and intellectually challenging assignment.
A Good Month for Murder Page 2
