A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  After his fax goes through, Flores wanders back to Eckrich’s desk. “I hope he’s alive,” the rookie says.

  Eckrich smiles sympathetically. “Me, too, Eddie.”

  * * *

  THE GREENHORN GODS are generous: five hours later, Flores and Eckrich enter the box to question the cell phone’s owner. He was tracked to a classroom at Bowie State University, which is not far from the homicide office, and grabbed by the fugitive squad. As the two detectives take their seats across the table from the student, they try to assess him, but his head is buried in his arms and covered by the hood of a blue-and-green striped Polo sweatshirt.

  Flores nudges the student’s arm; the man slowly lifts his head, his eyes barely rising to meet the detectives’. Flores introduces himself and Eckrich and asks for the spelling of the man’s name and his date of birth. The man mumbles that his name is Robert Ofoeme; he is twenty-nine, and he lives in the DC suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland. He is an African immigrant, a citizen of Sierra Leone, he says, and he’s taking classes at Bowie State in information technology.

  Ofoeme’s response is indifferent, if not disrespectful. His attitude strikes Eckrich as cocky.

  “Hey, buddy man,” Eckrich says, “we brought you in here because of a phone call you may have made to somebody.”

  No response. The man’s eyes drop to the table, and his head descends back into his arms.

  “Look, man, sit up,” Eckrich says, his voice hardening. He taps the man on the left shoulder.

  Again there is no reaction.

  “We don’t know if you have any involvement in this,” Eckrich says, “but you are making me really suspicious.”

  Ofoeme remains silent.

  Eckrich puts his hand on the man’s left forearm. “Come on, man, look up,” he says sharply.

  “Stop it!” Ofoeme shouts, sitting bolt upright. “Don’t beat me! Don’t beat me!”

  Eckrich recoils. Shaking his head, he says, “I’m not going to beat you.”

  “That nigga is going to beat me!” Ofoeme wails, his eyes wild.

  “Ain’t nobody going to beat you, man,” Flores says.

  “If I called you that word, you’d be calling the newspaper, hiring a lawyer,” Eckrich snaps.

  Ofoeme immediately calms down. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles, his face disappearing into his arms on the table, his head again hidden by the hood of his sweatshirt.

  Eckrich sighs, then exchanges looks with Flores. It’s time for the tried-and-true good cop, bad cop routine. The veteran leans back, folds his hands across his stomach, and glares at Ofoeme. After fifteen seconds of eye-fucking the witness, he slams his hands on the table and stands up.

  “You can have him,” Eckrich sneers. He walks out of the box and loudly bangs the door shut.

  Flores allows silence to hang in the room for a few moments. Then he leans forward and places both elbows on the table.

  “I don’t know what his problem is today,” Flores says. “But whatever you’ve got against him, leave it. I’ve treated you with respect, and I expect you to treat me with respect.”

  Ofoeme acknowledges nothing; his head remains buried in his arms.

  “Just look at me while I’m talking,” Flores says gently. “You are a grown man.”

  Ofoeme lifts his head two inches and studies Flores from under heavy eyelids.

  “Now take off the hood.”

  Ofoeme pulls off his hood.

  “Good. The faster we can get this going, the faster you get out of here.”

  Ofoeme jerks up straight and smacks the table. “Let’s do this!”

  Flores suppresses his shock at the instantaneous change in attitude. This dude is either schizophrenic or nervous as shit and having trouble masking it, he thinks.

  Before questioning Ofoeme, Flores takes stock of the room, and he doesn’t like what he sees. The student is not handcuffed, and the way the table is arranged, Ofoeme is closer to the door than he is. Flores doesn’t feel secure in the box unless he is between the door and the witness. He prefers this arrangement partly for security reasons—if he had to, he could prevent a suspect from dashing out the door. But he also believes that it provides him with a psychological advantage. When a detective sits between a man and his freedom, the investigator cannot be ignored.

  Flores motions for Ofoeme to stand up and then rearranges the table and chairs. Once they’ve resettled in their new spots, Flores asks, “Did you have a friend, someone who was supposed to come see you from North Carolina?”

  For just a moment, Ofoeme looks Flores in the eyes. But he soon drops his gaze to the table and yanks his hood on again.

  Jesus, Flores thinks, this is going to take forever.

  “Look at me,” the detective says quietly, as if addressing a five-year-old. When Ofoeme raises his eyes again, Flores asks, “Did anyone come to visit you from North Carolina?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Ofoeme says.

  “Did you exchange calls with someone in North Carolina on Friday?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who?”

  “Slug.”

  “Who is Slug?”

  “I only know him as Slug.”

  The detective presumes that Slug is Salaam Adams and presses Ofoeme to describe their relationship.

  Gradually Ofoeme becomes more talkative. He tells Flores that he and Adams became friends the previous year, and whenever Slug was in town they hung out and smoked weed. Flores asks Ofoeme whether he slings drugs—before Ofoeme arrived in the homicide office, Flores learned that he drives a flashy Mercedes, and he’s also wearing a sweatshirt that would be too expensive for many college students. After several minutes of back-and-forth, Ofoeme admits that he deals.

  “The ladies love the Polo,” he says, smiling and tugging at the logo of his sweatshirt. “I sell enough to get by.”

  Flores asks Ofoeme whether he met Slug when he was in town over Super Bowl weekend. No, Ofoeme says; he knew Slug was coming to town but hadn’t been interested in hanging out with him, so he’d turned off his phone.

  “You had a falling-out?”

  “Just didn’t want to see him.”

  Flores goes silent for a few moments. Ofoeme is difficult to read, and the detective cannot decide whether the man is telling the truth, lying, or playing a mix-and-match game. But even if Ofoeme didn’t see Adams around the time of his murder, he ought to be able to confirm whether his friend Slug is in fact the dead man.

  Flores leaves the box and soon returns with Adams’s mug shot.

  “Is that Slug?”

  Ofoeme lifts his head from his arms, glances at the photo, reburies his head, and mutters, “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “He’s dead,” Flores says, watching Ofoeme carefully. The man doesn’t move; he seems to have no reaction at all. After a while, Flores asks, “Do you know what happened?”

  Ofoeme raises his eyes long enough to say no before putting his head back in his arms.

  Flores picks up the photo and walks out the door. He sits at his desk, closes his eyes, and thinks for a minute. He decides to leave Ofoeme alone for a bit; checking his to-do list, he sees that he has yet to make contact with Adams’s girlfriend in North Carolina. When Flores calls her number, she answers, and he then guides her through a ten-minute conversation focused on her boyfriend’s final days. Late Sunday, she says, Adams texted that he was driving around the Washington area with a friend she knows only as B-Gutter.

  After hanging up with the girlfriend, Flores heads back to the box. He doesn’t bother to sit down.

  “Know someone named B-Gutter?” he asks.

  Again Ofoeme lifts his head just high enough to eye Flores. He grunts, which Flores takes as a yes.

  “Did Slug know B-Gutter?” Flores asks.

  “I think so,” Ofoeme answers.

  “Do you know B-Gutter’s name?” Flores asks.

  “Maybe Wayne,” Ofoeme says.

  “You have B-Gutter’s phone number?”<
br />
  9:05 p.m., Wednesday, February 6

  Jamie Boulden and Joe Bunce enter the hospital’s antiseptic-smelling emergency department and ask a nurse where they can find their dead man. She points to a door to their right, and the two detectives head into a cramped examination room, where they see a corpse on a gurney. A sheet shrouds the body from feet to neck. An uneven gray beard covers the man’s pale, craggy face, which is streaked with dried blood. A breathing tube protrudes from his mouth.

  Almost no one looks good after leaving this life, but it’s obvious to Boulden that the man on the gurney has spent decades abusing drugs and alcohol. Those punishing vices have ground him to dust: he looks eighty, more than twenty years older than his actual age. Clutching his legal-sized notebook against his belly to keep his thick overcoat and bright green tie from touching the corpse, Boulden bends over the man’s face. His eyes are closed, and to Boulden they look peaceful, as if the man is taking a much-needed nap after an exhausting life.

  Boulden steps back from the body and glances at Bunce, who is leaning against a wall, staring into space. It has been another long day for the detectives. Boulden spent the last few hours futilely pursuing leads in his first homicide, the fatal shooting on January 18 of a twenty-three-year-old drug dealer. The rookie has managed to pin down some likely culprits, members of a violent gang of car thieves in northeast Washington, but he doesn’t have enough information to charge anyone in the killing. Nobody is talking, not even the victim’s relatives. Like Flores, Boulden wants desperately to solve his first case, but that’s beginning to seem unlikely.

  Bunce, meanwhile, spent the early part of the evening shift helping Mike Crowell hunt for Gerry Gordon and other potential witnesses and suspects in the Amber Stanley murder. After striking out at six residences and businesses, Bunce and Crowell drove to the PG jail, where they questioned a cousin of Jeff Buck’s enforcer, the alleged triggerman. The inmate had been detained since September on serious robbery charges, and the detectives hoped this might give them some leverage. But despite an intense interrogation followed by direct pleas for his help, the cousin provided little information and ended the session with a comment that hinted at the possibility that he knew something more: “I have too much on my plate right now.”

  Back at the office, Bunce and Crowell briefed Deere on their interrogation of the inmate. As they were finishing, Sergeant Joe Bergstrom strode to the last row of desks and reported that the squad was being summoned to a local hospital to investigate the death of a fifty-eight-year-old man from a suspected heroin overdose. Though speaking to the entire row of investigators, Bergstrom kept his eyes locked on Bunce. His look said everything the detective needed to know: this was his case, and Bergstrom was penalizing him because recently he had cut out of work early a few times, irritating his squad mates.

  After Bergstrom finished, Bunce tilted his head so he could see past his computer monitor and look directly at Jamie Boulden.

  “Let’s go,” he told Boulden. As always, shit rolls downhill, which is how the addict’s death became the rookie’s problem.

  Each week, PG homicide detectives investigate several deaths that aren’t murders. Most often, the person has died from natural causes—a fall, a stroke, a heart attack—while not under the care of a physician. Others succumb to drug overdoses. The purpose of such investigations is relatively straightforward: they are meant to ensure that the person wasn’t murdered. But sometimes they can be tricky, even for a rookie with as much police experience as Boulden.

  An eight-year veteran of the force, the balding and beefy thirty-four-year-old Boulden had dreamed of becoming a homicide detective for as long as he can remember. After high school in Delaware, he worked at a bank and served as a volunteer firefighter. At twenty-one, he moved to Ventura County, California, to become a police dispatcher; within a year, he returned to the East Coast after landing a job as an officer with the U.S. Capitol Police. In 2005, after three years of guard duty, he joined the PG police force. Working his way up, he became a robbery detective and earned a reputation for being both earnest and dogged. Finally, five weeks ago, he attained his dream job. But Boulden understands that he can’t take anything for granted: if he wants to remain in homicide, he’ll have to learn a number of new skills, including the art and science of documenting a human being’s demise.

  Boulden is about to ask Bunce what to do next when a red-haired woman clad in blue surgical scrubs steps into the room. Boulden recognizes her as Trasee Cosby, a forensic investigator for the state medical examiner. They have crossed paths at a few scenes but have not formally met, so Bunce makes the introduction official.

  Cosby smiles, and so does Boulden. There is no shaking of hands: a few minutes earlier, Cosby finished inspecting the body and assessing whether it should be sent to Baltimore for an autopsy. The general rule is that if a death is suspicious, the deceased is relatively young (under fifty), or he or she was a drug or alcohol abuser, there will be an autopsy. In this case, there is no question: the corpse is going to Baltimore.

  Cosby, her hair gathered in a blue scrunchie, shifts her reading glasses to her forehead so she can better eye the investigators. She looks around and frowns.

  “Where’s Crowell?” she asks.

  “We couldn’t find a car seat for him,” Bunce says, never missing a chance to poke fun at his partner’s short stature.

  Cosby snickers and then tells the detectives that she has already interviewed the dead man’s relatives elsewhere in the hospital. Looking down at the man’s weathered face, Cosby says he was a recovering heroin addict who had probably started using again. A resident of western Maryland, he was visiting his ex-wife and daughter when he left their house the previous day to see an old friend, a known heroin user. When he returned to his ex-wife’s place, he fell asleep on the couch. “That was the last time she saw him up and moving,” Cosby says. “By late morning, he was in distress. They called 911, and an ambulance took him here, where he died.”

  Cosby glances at Boulden, who is eyeing the dead man. The rookie looks a bit at sea, so she puts her reading glasses back on, which allows her to better see tiny details such as puncture marks. Then she begins an in-depth explanation of how she conducted her exam.

  First she raises the man’s right forearm. “He has no track marks on his arms or anywhere else, nothing between his toes. But that doesn’t really matter.” Cosby walks around the table and lifts up the left forearm. Track marks are not a guaranteed indicator of heroin use, she says, because the drug has become so pure that many addicts are snorting it.

  Cosby removes the sheet. She lifts the man’s right foot to eye level and then does the same with his right hand.

  “See how the skin under the fingers and fingernails is purple, and how the ankle was swollen?” she says. “That is indicative of someone suffering from a cardiac condition. So it could be heart-related, too. Maybe he took heroin and it was too much for him. Everything being equal, and taking into account what his family said, it looks like a heroin overdose. But we won’t know that for sure until toxicology comes back, maybe in a month or so.”

  Sighing, she sits heavily on a stool and props her glasses on her head again.

  “No trauma?” Boulden asks.

  “No trauma,” echoes Cosby.

  “No trauma, no foul play,” Boulden says, jotting a note.

  “Exactly.”

  Boulden hears the flat tone in Cosby’s voice and says, “You look beat.”

  “It’s been a long two days,” Cosby says, explaining that this is her eleventh corpse over the past forty-eight hours, a particularly rough stretch.

  “You too tired to strip for us?” Bunce asks.

  Boulden narrows his eyes. Bunce must be putting him on. Stripping? In a hospital?

  Bunce chuckles. “She was a pole dancer in her previous life—I swear,” he says, explaining that so many detectives know about her first profession that one of them once dared Cosby to perform after noticing a bronze
pole at a crime scene. To everyone’s surprise, Bunce tells Boulden, she put on quite a show.

  Boulden studies Cosby, who is fifty-three. Carrying more than a few extra pounds, she’s not built like any stripper he’s ever seen.

  “Be careful, or I might even give you a golden shower,” she tells Boulden.

  “What the fuck?” Boulden says.

  “Wish I hadn’t worn underwear,” says Bunce.

  “I’ve even taken a diuretic,” Cosby says, cocking her eyebrows at the rookie. “So be ready!”

  “Oh, shit,” says Bunce.

  Cosby looks at Boulden’s worried face and finally breaks into a smile. “I wasn’t really a stripper,” she says.

  “No, that was just a joke,” Bunce says. “Jamie, seriously. A joke.”

  Boulden isn’t so sure. He’s still trying to find his feet in the Homicide Unit, but everyone he works with seems like a lunatic—Crowell, Deere, Bunce, now Cosby. Yet it’s moments like these when he loves this job: these people may be nuts, but they’re a lot of fun. He also appreciates the way his colleagues cope with the horror of their work, making light of even the ghastliest situation. How else could Cosby’s psyche survive eleven corpses in just two days?

  The trio cracks a few more jokes before returning to the task at hand. Boulden realizes he has forgotten something important: how is he supposed to handle the death notification?

  “So who is his next of kin?” he asks Bunce. “Who do I notify? I can’t notify the ex-wife, right? A brother or sister? Shit. How do I put that in the report?”

  “No, it’s already done,” says Bunce. “Remember, the ex-wife and his daughter were here. His daughter is the death notification. You don’t even have to do it, but you should follow up with them tomorrow.”

  “Anything else I need to know?”