A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  Cosby doesn’t answer; she’s too tired. With her elbows on her thighs, she stares vacantly at the dead man’s scalp.

  Boulden checks his notebook to be sure he has all the facts he’ll need for his report: the man’s name, age, circumstances of death, ailments, potential recent drug use, and a summary of Cosby’s observations.

  Satisfied, he closes the notebook and winks a thank-you to Cosby, who returns the gesture with a slight smile. Then he glances at Bunce, who says they can go.

  As the detectives move toward the open door, Boulden turns and pauses for a moment. He is sure he is forgetting something. When nothing comes to mind, he eyes the dead man a final time and gives him a wink, too.

  2:00 a.m., Thursday, February 7

  Before he even enters the box, Eddie Flores knows that his witness, Harvey Brandon “B-Gutter” Gunter, is a lying piece of shit. It’s that simple, and now Flores must decide how to proceed. Does he press hard right off the bat, or does he go nice and slow, allowing the man to build a matchstick house of lies that Flores can then smash to bits?

  Finding Gunter hadn’t been difficult. Eight hours ago, after Robert Ofoeme gave him Gunter’s phone number, Flores queried a couple of databases and soon came up with Gunter’s home address, in the Maryland suburb of Silver Spring. Flores’s next stop was Gunter’s town house, where he and other detectives scooped up their witness. One of Flores’s squad mates, Detective Mike Ebaugh, questioned Gunter on the car ride to homicide and then spent a few minutes with him in the box.

  Predictably, the witness’s story was pure fiction. Gunter told Ebaugh that he hadn’t spoken to Slug—a.k.a. Salaam Adams, the victim—in days. He also said he’d spent Sunday night at a bar in College Park, sixteen miles from the murder scene. But once again, Flores had sent off a fax to the appropriate cell-phone carrier, and its records had revealed that not only had Gunter exchanged texts with Adams on the day of his death but his phone had pinged a tower in the vicinity of the murder scene at the time Adams was killed.

  Flores enters Interview Room 1 and takes a seat next to Gunter at the table, hoping his proximity to the witness will help him get a better read on the man. A moment later, as Jeff Eckrich slips into a rolling chair across the table, Flores inventories the witness. A slim man clad in a gray sweater, Gunter has a slight mustache, tightly cropped hair, and a flat nose. Flores remains unsure how to proceed until he focuses on the witness’s eyes: they are wide open, as if dilated, and they are darting all around the room.

  He’s nervous, thinks Flores. He’s mine.

  Flores begins by gathering some basic information: Gunter is twenty-six, and he lives with his sister. Next Flores turns to his left, puts his right arm firmly on the table, and looks Gunter in the eye. After a brief pause, he goes in for the kill.

  “We know you are lying to us,” Flores says.

  His eyes whirling, Gunter bites his lower lip as the detective retrieves two pieces of paper from his steno pad. Flores unfolds the two documents, smooths them out, and places them on the table. One contains information about Gunter’s calls and texts, as well as the locations of nearby cell-towers; the other is a map depicting the murder scene and the surrounding neighborhood.

  “See this?” Flores says, pointing to a spot on the map. “This is where you placed the text from.” The detective is fudging—the cell tower is close to but not at the murder scene.

  “We know you were here,” Eckrich says, jumping in. “These records are precise. This is where you were standing.”

  Gunter picks up the papers, which rattle in his hands.

  “I know you’re scared, but this is your time,” says Flores. “If you don’t come clean, the next time I will have done more homework and you won’t be given this opportunity. You will be in handcuffs.”

  For a long minute, Gunter’s eyes remain glued to the list of calls. Finally he says, “Okay, you got me.” He reaches across the table for a bottle of water and slowly unscrews the lid. He takes a tiny sip, then another, then a third. His eyes open and close with each swallow.

  “Come on,” Flores says.

  When Gunter looks up, his expression is slack and defeated.

  Goose bumps ripple up Flores’s arms. Holy shit, he thinks, this case is about to break wide open.

  Gunter clears his throat and says yes, he knows Salaam Adams—in fact, he had been a witness to his murder. With only a bit more prodding from Flores, Gunter provides a detailed account of how it happened.

  The night started when he got a call from a friend named Brandon Battle, who said Gunter should come into DC to hang out with him and their mutual friend Slug Adams. Gunter tells Flores he hopped on the Metro and got off at Gallery Place, a hip area of town that includes the Verizon Center sports arena, Chinatown, and dozens of bars and restaurants. Not long after he settled into a seat at a bar, Battle and Adams picked him up in Battle’s Ford Mustang, Gunter says.

  With Gunter sitting in the middle of the back seat, they drove randomly around town until Battle and Adams began arguing about a $2,000 drug debt. Battle asked if Adams had a gun, Gunter says, and Adams lifted up his shirt, revealing the butt of a pistol poking from his jeans. The three men drove for a while longer, finally pulling up to the Oxon Run park, at which point Battle asked Adams to get out of the car.

  Gunter says he watched and listened—a window was cracked open enough for him to catch some of the conversation—as Battle told Adams, “It’s fucked up. I looked at you like a brother.”

  “I agree, it’s fucked up,” said Adams.

  Next Battle threw an arm over Adams’s shoulders, and they headed down a hill. A minute or two later, Gunter says, he heard a gunshot and saw Battle running back to the car, holding a gun in each hand.

  “What’s going on?” Gunter asked.

  “I was tired of that shit,” Battle replied.

  His story complete, Gunter slumps in his chair. “I nearly shit my pants,” he tells the detectives.

  Throughout Gunter’s narrative, Flores has been carefully taking notes, but he’s also been hearing the blood pulsing in his ears. Now, as he looks up at Gunter, an electrifying thought races through his mind: My first murder is going down.

  Flores has Gunter repeat the story a second time and a third. The detective asks questions and looks for inconsistencies, but the witness’s account seems solid. Flores learns more about Brandon Battle, a drug dealer who had been a friend and associate of both Gunter’s and Adams’s. Gunter tells the detective that after the shooting, after he and Battle left Adams to die in the park, they drove to Battle’s apartment, where the dealer stashed the two guns in a safe above his refrigerator. Hungry, they went in search of food; Battle devoured a Philly cheesesteak, Gunter a tuna sandwich.

  A half hour after hearing Gunter’s account of Adams’s murder, Flores is sitting with another detective in an Impala in the parking lot of a PG apartment complex; Gunter is scrunched in the back seat. The witness nervously points to a door on the second floor of a six-story building and identifies it as the entrance to Brandon Battle’s place. With that, Flores has enough to obtain an arrest warrant for Battle and another warrant that will allow the police to search his apartment in an effort to find the two guns the drug dealer had in his hands after killing Adams.

  It’s now past 4:00 a.m.; the long night is almost over. After dropping the other detective off at the office, Flores drives Gunter home to Silver Spring and admonishes him to lie low until they catch Battle; he also tells his witness to call him if he needs anything. Gunter mumbles, “Sure,” shuffles to the front door of his sister’s town house, and slips inside.

  For a moment, Flores sits in his car, staring at the town house and then at the dark and cloudy predawn horizon. He is bone-tired: he’s been running on adrenaline for hours, and this is the first chance he’s had to be alone with his thoughts. He envisions the speechless body of his victim, Salaam Adams; he turns over the stories he has heard from Gunther and Robert Ofoeme. He wonders what he missed
during their interrogations and what he is still missing.

  A notion, absurd to anyone but a homicide detective, passes through Flores’s mind: This has been too easy.

  Gunter has been too helpful and too consistent, especially for a witness in PG County. As Flores knows, this is a world in which people lie, and then lie about their lies. It usually takes far longer to dig out something approximating the truth; yet with little more than a nudge, Gunter rolled over like a cocker spaniel.

  There’s got to be more to this, Flores thinks. How did this murder really go down?

  * * *

  A COLD DRIZZLE prickles Eddie Flores’s face as he and Jeff Eckrich stride up the short walkway to Gunter’s sister’s front door and ring the bell. It is just before noon on Friday, February 8, about thirty-two hours after Flores dropped Gunter off at this very spot. Flores is smiling and happy, perhaps as much for having slept twelve straight hours as for having officially closed his first murder.

  But this is no courtesy call. Since the strength of Flores’s case largely depends on this one witness, the detective knows he must thoroughly vet the man’s story. Today he and Eckrich want to search his room and ask him a few more questions.

  The two investigators would have visited Gunter sooner, but they had been busy the previous day arresting twenty-six-year-old Brandon Battle on first-degree murder charges. Flores had been told by his evidence technicians that the bullet fragments in Adams’s head were likely too mangled to compare to a potential murder weapon, perhaps even to definitively determine its caliber, so he knew that to build an airtight case he would need Battle to confess. But the alleged killer said little during his brief interrogation beyond casually answering yes or no and providing some basic information. Within minutes, he clammed up.

  Shortly after interrogating his suspect, Flores combed Battle’s apartment and discovered a sizable stash of marijuana but only one handgun. This presented a problem, especially for Gunter, who had reported that Battle had deposited two guns in the safe above his refrigerator. That fact, and Gunter’s willingness to betray his friend, have led Flores to feel somewhat skeptical about the account provided by his star witness.

  The rookie rings the doorbell a second, third, and fourth time. Finally, the door opens, revealing a young woman with frazzled hair wearing a tan bathrobe.

  “Is Harvey around?” Flores asks, using Gunter’s first name.

  “No,” the sister says, rubbing her face. “He’s in North Carolina.”

  “North Carolina?” Flores feels a flash of panic. It is never good when your key witness skips town.

  “He’s scared,” she says.

  That makes sense to Flores—after snitching, Gunter has every right to be frightened. Even so, the unexpected departure is cause for concern. He shouldn’t have left town, the detective thinks, not without first alerting us.

  “You need to get him on the phone,” Flores says firmly. He would call Gunter himself, but he’s concerned that his witness might not answer if he sees an unfamiliar number pop up on his phone’s screen. The sister disappears and returns with her cell. She dials, and Gunter is soon on the line. She hands the phone to Flores.

  “B-Gutter, what the hell?” Flores says. “North Carolina?”

  The witness explains that he left the city because he was scared for his life. Flores tells Gunter that it was wrong to leave town without notifying him; Gunter promises to do better and says he plans to return to the DC area in three days. Flores hears something in Gunter’s voice that suggests there is more to this story, but the detective cannot afford to scare his witness into fleeing more permanently; he also needs Gunter’s permission to search his room. After getting it, Flores hangs up and has the sister sign a consent form to make sure everything is nice and tight.

  With that, Flores and Eckrich step inside the gloomy town house. No lights are on and every curtain is drawn, making it difficult even to discern the color of the living room carpet or the furniture. The detectives head upstairs and find Gunter’s room. It’s a mess—papers and dirty clothes on the floor, the bed unmade, the white walls bare. Both men snap on latex gloves and dig through a mostly empty closet that contains three black plastic trash bags stuffed with dirty clothes.

  “This is disgusting,” Eckrich says, picking up a stiff white T-shirt and tossing it back on the floor.

  After rooting through scraps of paper and food wrappers, they become satisfied that the room holds no evidence pertaining to the killing. Soon they’re back in Flores’s Impala, parked across from the sister’s town house. Gunter’s flight is still on the detective’s mind; he decides to call his witness again so he can reiterate the importance of returning to PG County.

  Gunter answers on the first ring. Flores calmly informs him that he and Eckrich have not trashed his room but left it just the way they found it. After delivering a stern warning about the importance of returning as soon as possible and informing him of any future trips, Flores goes silent for a moment. He can’t decide whether to press Gunter for more information now or wait until he returns. But Flores can’t help himself; he’s too curious.

  “Is there anything else you need to tell me?” Flores asks Gunter as gently as possible. “Don’t lie, don’t hide anything. Why did you run?”

  The line goes so quiet that Flores checks his phone to make sure he is still connected.

  A second later, Gunter clears his throat. “There is something,” he says.

  Shit, the detective thinks. I knew it.

  “Robert is the one who set all of this up.”

  “What?” Flores asks. “Wait—Robert?”

  For a moment Flores is confused, his mind spinning through the case file, but then he realizes Gunter is referring to Robert Ofoeme, the witness they brought into homicide just two days earlier.

  “A couple of weeks ago,” Gunter says, his words coming in a rush, “Robert called me to say he wanted Slug dead. But I was too scared to do it, so he told me he would get me in touch with Brandon.”

  Fuck, Flores thinks, no wonder he ran to North Carolina.

  Gunter hesitates, clearly worried that he has said too much. Flores assures him that’s it safe to continue.

  Gunter explains that he and Robert Ofoeme are friends and partners in the drug trade. Slug Adams owed money to Ofoeme, who was Adams’s supplier. Adams was a difficult person, Gunter says, and Ofoeme had grown tired of him. The plan was simple: Ofoeme would lure Adams to Maryland on the pretense of a “leak”—an armed robbery—that would net them $10,000. Gunter tells Flores that Ofoeme was confident Adams would travel north because he knew Adams had committed robberies and had even shot a man during a holdup. After talking with Adams on the phone and persuading him to come to Washington, Ofoeme instructed Gunter to coordinate the hit.

  When Gunter expressed reservations about killing Adams, Ofoeme enlisted Battle, his enforcer. Gunter says that Ofoeme’s plan took shape over the next few days and was executed with precision. Gunter met Adams after he got off the bus near Union Station. They walked a short distance to Battle’s Mustang—which was parked in an area where there were no surveillance cameras—piled into the car, and drove around looking for a quiet place to kill Adams. But the streets were teeming with Super Bowl fans, so they continued on, finally coming upon the deserted park in Prince George’s County. Then, Gunter tells Flores, Battle walked Slug Adams deeper into the park and shot him dead.

  After finishing his story, Gunter says, “I should have told you that earlier, I know.”

  “Jesus,” Flores says. “You definitely need to come back on Monday. Everything will be fine. But you have to come back.”

  “Okay,” says Gunter.

  Flores hangs up the phone. Frowning, he ponders how his once straightforward investigation has suddenly become so complicated. One thing is clear: Gunter played a direct role in the murder of Salaam Adams, so Flores’s star witness is actually an accomplice. The man may not have pulled the trigger, but Gunter lured Adams to his death
and was in the car during his final hours, fully knowing what would transpire.

  With his eyes focused on the town house in front of them, Flores grips the wheel and recounts his conversation with Gunter for Eckrich. The investigators agree that they need to speak to a prosecutor and strategize about whether to handle Gunter as a witness or a suspect. Most likely it will be the latter.

  “He fucking lied,” Flores says.

  “They all lie, Eddie,” Eckrich replies.

  Flores puts the Impala in gear and stamps hard on the accelerator. Within seconds, the county is blurring past his window. He can’t get to his desk soon enough—he has notes to write, prosecutors to brief, decisions to make.

  Back in the office, the word CLOSED is emblazoned in red next to Flores’s two cherries in the homicide log book. But the label means nothing now, and the rookie knows that his work is far from done.

  CHAPTER 3

  11:05 a.m., Friday, February 8

  Mike Crowell sits at his desk, thinking about how best to shake Jeff Buck’s tree. He and Sean Deere now have the names of several associates of Buck and his crew, but Crowell is particularly interested in one of these men: Gerry Gordon, the Peeping Tom. At age thirty, Gordon is older than most of the people around Buck; perhaps, Crowell thinks, Gordon is mature enough to realize that it’s better to help the police than to lie to protect his buddies.

  But Gordon is intriguing for other reasons, too. For one, Amber Stanley’s foster sister refused to have anything to do with him; as far as Crowell and Deere can determine, Gordon is the only man who has ever been rejected by Denise, the kind of slight that might spark a killer’s rage. For another, the detectives recently determined that Gordon rented a room in a house that has been mentioned more than once during their investigation. Located in Mitchellville, it’s one of several party houses frequented by Buck, a place where he and his crew hung out with women, drank liquor, and smoked weed. The fact that Gordon lived in the house means that he must have been trusted by those close to Buck; he also might have overheard loose talk.