Not wanting to press too hard in this informal setting, Deere decides to move the conversation toward lighter topics. Crowell picks up on the tactic, and soon the three men are chatting about the neighborhood, basketball, the Redskins, and the upcoming Super Bowl. Deere and Crowell talk in circles, leading Buck away from the murder and then returning to it.
After a while, Buck seems to forget that he is being interrogated and begins talking freely about the neighborhood drug trade. Deere takes advantage of the opening and asks him about the alleged triggerman, the friend and enforcer suspected of killing Amber Stanley.
Buck nods and then smiles; he seems to be enjoying himself. He mentions that he heard a rumor that the enforcer had killed the girl. “I even asked him about it, and he said he heard the same thing.”
Deere and Crowell are stunned. Is Buck really passing along a rumor, or is he trying to cover up something by claiming it’s a rumor? Or perhaps the cigarette break has lowered his defenses and he’s providing a partial confession.
“Why didn’t you tell us that before?” Crowell asks. “We talked about this! You ain’t fucking dumb.”
“You were being an asshole,” Buck replies, glaring at Crowell. “And you didn’t ask me.”
“We have to ask you precisely the right question?” Deere asks, frustrated.
Leaning back in his chair, Buck smiles again and says nothing.
“I just want you to do the right thing,” Deere says. “I need to know these things.”
“I’m letting you get my DNA, the swab thing, and even letting you go through my phone,” Buck says. “What else do you want from me?”
“I need to know what happened,” says Deere. “I need the truth.”
Buck shrugs and holds his palms up in the air. The detectives stare at him in silence, finish their cigarettes, and wait for Buck to take his last draw.
When their suspect flicks his butt to the floor, Deere taps him on the left shoulder. “Let’s go,” he says.
Buck slowly rises from the chair. The detectives escort him back to Interview Room 2 and lock the door after him. For the next hour or so, they will let him stew.
* * *
BY 6:45, DEERE and Crowell agree it’s time to press Buck hard. The games are over: they’re convinced that Buck knows something. He may have actually played a role in the rape or the murder, but at the very least has heard things on the street.
Back in the box, Deere sits down next to Buck, and Crowell takes the chair across the table. They start in on him right away, hoping to throw their suspect off balance, asking him again and again about his whereabouts the previous night and earlier this morning. Buck continues to claim he was with a friend and his baby’s momma. The detectives don’t believe him but can’t shake his story.
Shifting gears, Crowell asks Buck about a friend of Denise’s named David Norris3 who works as a grocery clerk. On the night of the rape, Denise said she had been attacked after leaving Norris’s house; at the hospital, she told a nurse that she had been assaulted while “walking home from a friend’s house, or at least I thought he was a friend.” The statement suggested that Denise was angry at Norris, perhaps because he had played some role in the rape. Early on, Deere had speculated that Norris might have pimped for Denise and arranged a trick with Buck; it was even possible that the assault had occurred in his house. And in mid-January, when Deere finally got Buck’s cell-phone records, his interest in the grocery clerk was piqued further: the records showed nearly a dozen calls between Buck and Norris in the days before and after the rape and murder.
But now, when asked about Norris, Buck says he never hung out with him, barely knows him, and certainly never called him.
Crowell shakes his head; he places a set of cell-phone records on the table and points to a column of numbers. “Outgoing, from your number to his number,” Crowell says.
Buck leans over and looks at the records. “Someone else probably used my phone.”
Crowell points out that Buck told them earlier that his phone had never left his possession. Growing stern, Crowell says, “These records don’t lie. We have discredited some of your stuff. And we are going to keep discrediting your stuff.”
Someone knocks on the interview room’s door, and a moment later Joe Bunce enters and hands a stack of papers to Crowell. Bunce tells his colleagues that he’s been reviewing the complete phone records and looking for other calls between Buck and Norris. “There are tons of calls,” Bunce says.
“You want to keep doing this, man?” Crowell asks, leaning across the table and staring hard at Buck.
“Oh, my man, I have gotten myself in some shit,” Buck mutters.
“You did, buddy,” Crowell says. “We have come to a fork in the road. You are at the point where you are going to possibly affect the rest of your life. This is way bigger than calling someone. Do you know what we are investigating?”
“A real live murder,” Buck says, sounding resigned.
Crowell nods; Deere leans forward in his chair.
“You told us some shit, and we proved it wrong,” Crowell says. “Don’t play with us.”
Crowell and Buck spend several minutes arguing back and forth about the calls and their meaning. Clearly perturbed that someone would suggest that he was buddies with the grocery clerk, Buck insists that he was only returning Norris’s calls, never initiating them. Ultimately he admits that Norris was calling him because he wanted to smoke marijuana and Buck knew how to get it for him.
“So, you hooked him up?” asks Deere.
“That’s basically all it was,” he replies. “I just know where to go get it.”
Bullshit, thinks Deere. He is all but certain that Buck is actually Norris’s drug supplier.
“You have me nervous as shit in here,” Buck says, his tone increasingly anxious.
Deere exchanges a glance with Crowell, who picks up the cue. It’s time to drop their best piece of evidence: the records showing that on the night of the murder, Buck’s phone was in Amber Stanley’s neighborhood, not in his normal hangout a bit farther north. The records also revealed that he was speaking to his enforcer, as well as two other men, just before and after the homicide. The detectives know that phone location data can be misleading: it’s possible that Buck was merely driving through the area or sitting in the park smoking weed when the tower grabbed his cell signal, but they won’t tell Buck that.
“Let me show you something, son,” Crowell says. Pulling out a map that displays an icon of a cell tower and an outlined, cone-shaped area, he explains that the cone indicates where Buck’s phone was located on the night of the murder.
After using a pen to draw a circle around Amber Stanley’s neighborhood, Crowell says, “Your cell phone is in this area at the time of the murder. How do you explain that?”
Buck becomes confused about which neighborhoods appear on the map, so Deere stands up and begins pointing out the various roads and landmarks.
“I might have been there,” Buck says, gesturing to an area outside the cone.
“You couldn’t have been,” says Crowell. “Do I think for a second you pulled the trigger in this house? No. Do I think you have some involvement in this? Absolutely.”
“I don’t even know what I’m looking at,” Buck says, becoming agitated. “This is crazy.”
“It is,” Crowell says.
“You are trying to get me to lie. I ain’t going to go like that.”
“Then explain it to us,” says Deere.
“You tell me my phone is hitting here,” Buck says angrily. “I don’t remember what I was doing at the time of the murder.” Yelling now, he argues with the detectives about the names of towns on the map, in an attempt to prove that he wasn’t in Amber Stanley’s neighborhood on the night she was killed.
Finally Buck takes a deep breath and leans back in his chair. “This don’t make no sense,” he says.
“How would you spell this out logically?” Deere asks.
“I really thi
nk I’m going to go down for a murder,” Buck says, his tone a mix of resignation and exasperation.
“He just said he doesn’t think you are the one who pulled the trigger or nothing like that,” Deere notes, as calmly as possible. His hope is that Buck will point the finger at someone else. If he can get his suspect to snitch on his enforcer, he’ll be snitching on himself, too.
But Buck won’t take the bait. Soon the interrogation devolves into another sparring match over town locations and postal designations on the map. At one point Crowell uses his pen to point to the area where Buck’s cell phone pinged off a tower. “There is no question you are here,” the detective says.
“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” Buck replies.
“Tell the truth,” Crowell says.
Buck is silent for a moment, and then his face contorts in anger. Deere sees immediately that he’s had enough.
The suspect thrusts his chair back against the wall. “You are blowing me!” he yells. “I’m trying to answer your shit, and you are blowing me. I’m not answering any more questions. Get the fuck out of my face. Take me to jail then. Prove it. Fuck it! Take me to jail!”
* * *
DEERE KNOWS HE can’t hold Buck much longer, much less take him to jail. Eager to cool things off, he declares that it’s time for another break. He and Crowell take Buck into the old evidence bay again, but this time Deere asks the squad’s rookie, Jamie Boulden, to join them. Boulden has spent part of the past couple of hours watching the interrogation on a video monitor located in a closet-like space in the Homicide Unit that houses a number of computer servers.
Buck takes a seat on a swivel chair and looks down at the floor. Deere slumps into a hard plastic chair. Crowell is too fidgety to sit; instead he paces in circles while throwing a ball made of rubber bands against the wall. Boulden scoots a rolling chair up to Buck’s knees and hands him one of his Newports; he knows it’s Buck’s brand, too. All four men light up and begin puffing. For a minute, the tired detectives and their suspect say nothing as they savor their cigarettes.
Boulden is acquainted with Jeff Buck from his days as a street cop patrolling the neighborhoods not too far from Amber Stanley’s home. Earlier, during one of the interrogation’s breaks, Boulden told Deere he would be happy to take a crack at the suspect, and now he has his chance. Right away it’s clear that he and Buck have a mutual respect and rapport. Clad in a wrinkled, ill-fitting suit, Boulden casually crosses his right leg over his left, leans back in his chair, and reminisces with Buck about their epic foot chases, as if he were bullshitting about an old high school basketball rivalry.
Buck relaxes; he even laughs at a couple of Boulden’s lines. But just when he starts arguing playfully with Boulden about his foot speed, the detective leans forward again and suddenly turns serious.
“This ain’t about playing craps, and this ain’t about selling drugs,” Boulden says, sitting knee to knee with Buck and looking him straight in the eye. “This is about a fucking murder. We need to know where you were that night. No bullshit.”
“I was smoking,” Buck says, meaning he was getting high. “I don’t know. Listen, I understand what you are trying to do.”
“We want the truth,” says Boulden.
“I told you the fucking truth,” says Buck. “I am not making anything up.”
When Boulden doesn’t reply, Buck turns to his left and stares Deere down. Then he asks, “Where were you on September twenty-second?”
“Probably here,” Deere replies.
“See, you don’t know for sure. So how can I be sure about where I was on August twenty-second?”
If I’d killed an honor roll student, thinks Deere, I’d know exactly where I was.
For the next few minutes, all three detectives pepper their suspect with questions. They go round and round, rehashing the same questions raised earlier—questions about calls to and from the grocery clerk, the cell phone pinging off the tower the night of Amber’s murder, Buck’s friend passing along the gruesome rumor.
“We discredited your shit,” says Crowell.
“Stop lying to us,” says Deere. “We just want the truth.”
“This ain’t about drug dealing,” Boulden points out again.
But Buck just shakes his head. “If you have me, take me to jail,” he says, his voice flat now. “Just take me to jail.”
“Doesn’t work that way,” says Deere. “Why would you want to go to jail?”
“Sleep—and I can watch ESPN.”
Deere, taking a deep drag on his third cigarette, stretches his legs and rests them on an upside-down desk. Boulden leans back in his chair and stares at the white ceiling. Crowell fires the rubber-band ball against the wall.
How do we keep him talking? Deere wonders to himself.
“Listen, we know you didn’t kill her,” Deere says. “Maybe—”
“I’ll take a lie detector,” Buck interrupts. “Give me a test. I pass, and I can go home. Promise me I can go home if I pass it, and I’ll take one.”
The words strike the detectives like lightning. Deere takes his legs off the desk; Boulden leans forward in his chair; Crowell turns to Buck and flubs a rebound, the rubber-band ball falling to the floor and rolling under a cabinet.
Deere can’t believe what he’s just heard. Did he just say that? Can we be that lucky?
“Fuck it—I’ll take a lie detector test,” Buck says. “Give me one!”
“Sure, we can do that,” says Deere. “We can do that right now.”
* * *
DEERE BRISKLY ESCORTS Buck back to Interview Room 2, locks the door, and goes to find Joe Bunce.
Bunce, a stout forty-three-year-old former bartender with a receding crew cut, comes from a police family. His father was an air force investigator, his grandfather was a New York City police officer, and his younger twin brothers are also on the PG force. For the better part of his fifteen-year career, Bunce labored to reach the Homicide Unit, a goal he finally achieved about a year earlier. He is a solid investigator and a decent interrogator, but he is truly gifted at mining computer databases for clues. He’s also been trained to use the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer and has more experience with the technology than anyone else in the squad.
Not fifteen minutes after Buck’s unexpected request, Bunce is sitting across from the suspect in the box. Bunce pulls a laptop from a bag and places it on the table, attaches a microphone cord to the laptop, and clips the microphone to Buck’s shirt, explaining that the device is a “next-generation” lie detector; it works by measuring stress in a person’s voice as he answers yes-or-no questions.
Because lie detector results are not admissible in court, the detectives mostly use the machine to try to scare people into telling the truth. Its success depends on a detective’s ability to sell its infallibility, and Bunce is a very good salesman.
“This machine is one hundred percent,” Bunce tells Buck. “It does not fuck up.”
Once Bunce has loaded the appropriate program into the computer, he begins asking Buck basic questions. Is this the month of February? Is today Friday? Bunce tells Buck to lie in response to queries about his name and his birthdate, to help calibrate the machine. Then come the real questions.
“Did you kill Amber Stanley?” Bunce asks.
“No,” Buck says.
“Do you know who killed Amber Stanley?”
“No.”
“Do you suspect someone of killing Amber Stanley?”
“No.”
After running through the same questions a second time, the detective takes a minute to study the results displayed on the laptop’s monitor. He sighs dramatically and shakes his head.
Buck is leaning forward across the table, eager to learn the results.
Bunce swivels the laptop around so Buck can see the monitor. He points to one of its fourteen charts.
“This is what the truth looks like: up and down like a Christmas tree,” Bunce says. Using a finger, the detective tra
ces the graph’s jagged lines, which rise sharply to a peak before abruptly descending.
Buck nods.
“See, this is what it looks like when you lie,” Bunce continues, pointing to a second graph, this one depicting one of Buck’s intentional lies. It resembles the jagged hairdo of the cartoon character Bart Simpson.
Buck nods again, but he’s becoming wary.
Bunce scans the remaining charts and purses his lips. He points to another jagged graph. “That looks like a lie, too,” he says, shaking his head sadly. “I can already tell that something is not right here.”
“What question is this?” Buck asks, pointing to a third jagged graph.
Bunce swivels the laptop to better see the image. He frowns. Then he leans forward and stares Buck in the eye.
“‘Do you know who killed Amber Stanley?’”
CHAPTER 2
8:35 a.m., Monday, February 4
Bracing his shoulders against a stinging wind, Detective Eddie Flores slams shut his car door. He walks fifty yards across worn grass and past three barren trees, then slips under police tape and takes his place at the head of the corpse. The sky is overcast and the neighborhood is quiet, except for the distant, riverlike rush of highway traffic whispering through a copse of trees.
Flores scans the scene, a community park, from left to right. He notes a picnic table, a barbecue stand, several green trash cans, and a plastic and metal playground set. He surveys the landscape again, hoping to spot a security camera. Nothing.
The investigator steps to his right and greets Wayne Martin, the first detective at the scene. A nine-year veteran of the Homicide Unit, Martin is cool and low-key; he’s been to dozens of scenes like this one. Blowing into his hands, Martin turns and nods at Flores. His eyes missing nothing, he quickly assesses the twenty-eight-year-old rookie, who joined the unit only three weeks earlier.
A Good Month for Murder Page 5
