Once the crowd thins out, Brooks moves into a chilly bathroom, where he watches a technician apply black fingerprint dust to a window jamb. The tech tells Brooks that the window was found open, unusual for February. Brooks steps forward, leans over a big bathtub, and sticks his head out the window. Directly below him, after a drop of five or six feet, is a patch of bare earth.
Maybe he threw the television outside or jumped from the window, Brooks thinks.
He turns and sees Delaney standing in the doorway. “Why not just carry the TV out the front door?” Brooks asks, as much of himself as Delaney.
“He was trying to be careful,” Delaney says.
“But he could have broken it tossing it out the window,” Brooks replies. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Brooks fixes his eyes on the evidence tech, who is dressed in a black jacket and black fatigues.
“Get any?” Brooks asks.
“We might have one,” the tech says. “Good but not great.”
“I don’t care if you have to cut out the window to get it,” Brooks says, leaving the bathroom and returning to the living room. A moment later, he spots a tan leather purse under the daughter’s bed. Kicking it into the room with his left foot, he bends and dips a pen between its folds, prying it open. The purse is empty except for a pile of mice droppings. Brooks looks up, sees a laptop computer sitting on an overturned wastebasket, near the couch, and briefly wonders why the killer didn’t steal that, too. No, he thinks, the guy was too busy with the TV.
The detective walks back out the open front door and onto a wooden porch that extends into a wheelchair ramp. He grips the railing, squints against the dying sun, and studies three houses across curving Chapel Oaks Drive: one is blue, another is red brick, and the third is white. It’s a working-class block in a rough neighborhood, and Brooks hopes it’s the kind of street where people keep an eye on one another and are not afraid to call the police.
The detective trudges down the ramp, turns left, rounds the corner of the house, and heads into a backyard darkened by the home’s long shadow. He stops below the open window, where he is joined by Delaney, their sergeant, Trevel Watson, and Lieutenant Brian Reilly. The four men study the window and the patch of earth below the window; they also look over a nearby pile of dirt and a small trench at the base of the foundation. The mound of dirt isn’t fresh—it has sprouted weeds and moss and is layered in decaying foliage—suggesting that the job being done here was abandoned long ago.
Brooks scans the ground beneath the window once more. “I don’t see any shoe prints,” he says, “but we need to come back in the daylight and see if there are any. Cigarette butts, too.”
“No cameras?” asks Reilly, wondering if a nearby house has a surveillance system that might have captured the burglar coming or going.
“Not yet,” says Brooks. He checks his watch: 5:15 p.m. It will be dark soon.
Watson asks if the killer would have thrown the TV out the window, given the risk of breaking it.
“Maybe he dangles it out the window by the cord and just lets it fall,” says Delaney.
“Could be,” says Reilly.
They walk back to the front of the building. After Watson and Reilly head for the warmth of the house, Delaney tells Brooks that he will dispatch their rookie, Paul Mazzei, to conduct a quick canvas of neighbors.
“Let’s make Mazzei get the pizza tonight,” Delaney adds.
Brooks likes this idea—it is always best to make the rookie pay—but he suggests that they avoid a certain restaurant. “It gave me the shits last time.”
Delaney mentions another pizza place.
“Didn’t that give Mazzei the shits last time?” Brooks asks.
“Mazzei gets the shits from everything,” Delaney says.
The two chuckle. They have an easy rapport that goes back two decades, to when Brooks trained the rookie Delaney on the streets; Delaney returned the favor by training Brooks when he joined homicide, in 2005. They are so close that they act like a married couple, sharing everything and sparing nothing, not even their mothers. At a recent crime scene, the whine of an electric saw sparked Delaney to quip to a dozen detectives, techs, and officers, “That sounds just like Andre’s mother’s love call!”
Delaney slaps Brooks on the back and says he is going to find Mazzei. Brooks turns and looks back at Geraldine McIntyre’s house. Jamming his left hand into his pants pocket, he jiggles a fistful of change.
He’s got to be from around here, the detective thinks. Someone knows this guy.
* * *
A FEW MINUTES later, Brooks is looking up and down the block when his gaze settles on a woman bundled in a gray winter coat who is standing in front of a bright green house a few doors away. Peering through the twilight, he sees that the woman is glaring at him.
Brooks walks toward the woman’s house but stops before passing through the gate in her chain-link fence. Standing five feet apart, they eye each other for a few seconds.
The woman, her curly hair protruding from under a thick winter cap, breaks the silence.
“What happened?” she asks.
“She was murdered,” Brooks says.
“She was handicapped,” the woman says.
“I know,” Brooks answers sadly.
The woman says nothing and shoves her hands into her coat pockets, obviously wary of engaging with a homicide detective.
“Do you know if there were any handymen who went over there? To do chores, cut grass?”
“I cut my own grass.”
“No, over there,” Brooks says, jerking his right thumb toward the McIntyre house.
“I cut my own grass.”
“As you say, ma’am, she was handicapped—did anyone help her?” Brooks asks, trying not to let his frustration show.
“No. Sometimes people would deliver stuff to her.”
“Who?”
“I never looked that closely.”
“Any crackheads? Crackheads doing handiwork in the area?”
“Not that I know of.”
Clearly the woman is not eager to be helpful. Such intransigence is common, and Brooks no longer finds it frustrating or insulting. It’s just part of the job.
He thanks the woman for her time and heads back up the street. As he nears McIntyre’s home, he spots another woman, this one entering a squat house a few doors down in the other direction. Brooks walks quickly to the woman’s front door and knocks. A skinny cat with mangy gray fur brushes against the detective’s right leg, then purrs and opens its eyes. The left socket is empty; in the porch light, the right one glows gold.
“Ghetto tabby,” Brooks says softly. “Nice ghetto tabby.”
The woman answers the door. She hasn’t yet taken off her coat, but as soon as she sees the detective, she grins. Brooks returns the gesture, his first smile of the day.
“I’m Detective Brooks, with the county police,” he says. “You knew I wouldn’t be talking to all the other neighbors and not to you.”
She smiles again and steps aside to let him enter. Brooks settles into a chair at the kitchen table, and she takes one across from him. The room is quiet and dimly lit—Brooks still cannot tell if her coat is dark blue or black.
The woman clasps her hands together on the table. “How can I help you?” she asks.
“Did you know Ms. McIntyre?” Brooks asks.
“I saw her a few times. She was very quiet.”
“Any problems with burglars?”
“Last year—last summer—I left a window open and someone stole a computer and a television.”
She cranes her neck to see what Brooks is writing in his notepad, then returns her eyes to the detective’s face.
“Was that a break-in?” she asks, pointing in the direction of McIntyre’s house.
“Yes, and it turned violent. She’s dead.”
“Oh, no,” the woman says, gasping and putting a hand to her mouth. “How did they get in?”
“We think sh
e might have left the front door unlocked.”
“Oh, my. The reason I ask is because I sleep in my basement, and last night somebody was at my back door trying it, pulling it,” she says, banging the table to re-create the racket.
Brooks asks to see the door; they step outside and walk around to the side of the house. A large tree blocks the view of the door from the street. Perfect door for a burglar, Brooks thinks.
He makes a note to have evidence techs dust the door for prints, thanks the neighbor for her time, and heads back up the street.
Delaney and Mazzei are standing on the sidewalk in front of McIntyre’s house, and Brooks can tell by the smiles on their faces that they have good news. Delaney reports that they just interviewed a neighbor who lives behind McIntyre. The neighbor told them that he heard rustling in McIntyre’s backyard between 9:30 and 10:00 that morning. When he looked out his rear window, he saw a man, clad all in black, carrying what looked like a large board toward the front of McIntyre’s house.
“He just assumed the rectangular item was wood,” Mazzei says.
Mazzei, a stocky investigator with an oval face who doubles as the goaltender on the police union’s hockey team, looks to his right; Brooks and Delaney do likewise. Down the street, a man is shuffling away from them into the gathering dusk. To the three detectives, he appears to be a drug addict.
“Nobody eats until this is solved,” says Brooks. His meaning is plain. The police will crack down on this neighborhood so hard that drug dealers will not make a penny and their clients will not get their fixes—not until Geraldine McIntyre’s killer is in handcuffs.
* * *
BROOKS DROPS INTO the chair at his desk and dumps his notebook on top of the computer keyboard. Over the past few hours, he recanvassed the neighborhood and supervised the collection of evidence; he also fruitlessly chased a police bloodhound as it investigated the surrounding blocks. The dog eventually led him and other detectives to a tightly boarded-up house that clearly hadn’t been occupied in months.
He checks his watch: it’s just after 9:20 p.m. He realizes that he won’t get any sleep for at least another eight hours; as happens all too often, he has caught a murder while working the midnight shift. Because PG police use a rotation system to assign murders, detectives don’t get to choose the timing of their cases. Whenever your murder falls, whether you’re in the middle of a shift, eating dinner at home, or dead asleep, you go to work. If necessary, you investigate your homicide all day and straight into the evening, and then you still show up at 11:00 p.m. for graveyard duty.
Brooks exhales, squints, and rubs his weary eyes. The new case is the least of his reasons for feeling so exhausted. After twenty-three years on the job, he is eligible to retire, but he has a son in college and another in preschool, so he needs a steady paycheck. But it’s not enough: to make ends meet, he moonlights as a security guard at a cemetery. Sometimes he finds himself mulling a life without callouts and corpses, but in truth he still loves the job. It’s in his blood.
The son of a DC police officer, Brooks was drawn to the notion of going into public safety from the time he was young. In the late 1980s, his father—who moved to a desk job after heroically taking a bullet for his partner in 1971—said he could help get Andre hired by the DC police. But he warned his son that “some of the same guys we locked up are getting hired here now.” That was only a slight exaggeration: when the District was swamped by a wave of crime in those years, the police department junked its hiring standards. The DC police classes of 1989 and 1990, for instance, became two of the most notoriously corrupt and troublesome in U.S. policing history.
Instead of working on his father’s turf, Brooks joined the PG County police department. He’d always admired the way PG police officers carried themselves—they took no crap. In Brooks’s youth, it was widely understood that if you were going to screw around, you didn’t do it in PG; if you did, you were going to get your ass beaten by the cops, who ruled the streets. Brooks and many other African Americans believed that county officers were abusive and discriminated against minorities, a perception fueled by the department’s lack of diversity and its racial insensitivity. Still, Brooks felt that the rewards of working as an officer would outweigh the department’s legacy of intolerance, and he has never regretted the decision.
Brooks soon fell in love with the street and garnered a reputation for being tough. He built sources, made arrests, and earned the respect of criminals—he did not tolerate bad behavior on his beat. But the grueling nature of the work and his own impatience occasionally led him to be confrontational with suspects, some of whom complained. Particularly vocal were several johns he arrested. They weren’t upset with Brooks for arresting them; they were angry that he called their wives to report that they’d had sexual contact with prostitutes who might have HIV or AIDS.
In time, Brooks was promoted to investigative assignments and, finally, to homicide, and if his aggressive approach sometimes landed him in trouble, it also often worked in his favor. A few months back, he’d grown so frustrated with the inability of the county’s crime-scene technicians to find forensic evidence in one of his homicides that he’d insulted them by commandeering a key piece of evidence—a minivan in which he believed a woman had been strangled—and trucking it to a federal lab. The lab’s investigators discovered the victim’s blood in the back of the vehicle, ensuring the killer’s conviction.
Now, as he sits at his desk and gathers his thoughts, Brooks feels Delaney brush behind him and take a seat at his workstation, two down the row. Delaney reports that their sergeant, Trevel Watson, has been promised help from patrol, the district-level detectives, and drug squads. Brooks frowns at his partner, and Delaney nods back with a knowing look.
Both detectives are skeptical that the aid will amount to much. In particular, they doubt the patrol officers can be counted on to dry up the drug market in Geraldine McIntyre’s neighborhood. Brooks and Delaney often complain that today’s officers are soft. They don’t own the streets, they don’t develop sources, and they don’t view a murder on their beat as a personal affront. Sounding like the battle-hardened cops who trained them back in the 1990s, the two men say that the younger generation of officers lacks motivation. Today’s cops don’t see their work as a calling; to them, it’s just a job. So once again the detectives will be shouldering the load.
It is nearly 10:00 p.m. when Sergeant Watson swings by and tells Brooks and Delaney that it’s time to meet and review the case. After gathering their notebooks, the partners trail Watson to the freezing conference room, where Brooks slides behind a couple of chairs and takes his seat at the head of the table. Delaney and Watson sit next to him, and soon they are joined by the three other detectives from the M-20 squad: Paul Dougherty, Dave Gurry, and Paul Mazzei. The last to arrive are Lieutenant Brian Reilly and Captain George Nichols.
Ordinarily the unit’s captain wouldn’t attend this sort of post-scene meeting, particularly on a Saturday. But this is a high-profile case, and Nichols will soon have to brief the major, the assistant chief, and the chief. Having just appeared at a community event, the captain is in uniform, giving him an added aura of command. Easygoing and quick to laugh, at forty-two Nichols has a boyish manner that can cut against his authority, making it difficult for some detectives to take him seriously. But this is hardly a moment for levity, and tonight he is all business.
Brooks runs down what he knows, which isn’t much. He reports that their current theory is that a local drug addict killed McIntyre, either after or while stealing her television. By tomorrow, Brooks says, he expects to receive a list of known burglars and thieves in the neighborhood; once he has that in hand, the squad will start shaking the trees. Next Brooks points to Gurry, who visited the hospital to check on the corpse.
“We stopped counting the stab wounds at eleven,” Gurry says. “Left side, face, neck, arm.”
The detectives shake their heads in disgust.
“What happened with the
bloodhound?” asks Nichols, taking a sip of McDonald’s coffee.
“It took a shit,” says Brooks.
The detectives laugh, but no one is surprised. They rarely find bloodhounds to be helpful.
“The print?” Brooks asks Gurry. “The one on the sill?”
Gurry reports that he spoke to the fingerprint lab and learned that apparently the print isn’t good enough to enter into a national database, though it may still be of some use, since examiners will be able to compare it to a suspect’s print. “It looked good, I thought,” Gurry says.
“I thought the same thing,” says Brooks.
“So evidence-wise, we don’t have anything—just the print?” asks Watson.
Brooks nods and then glances down at his notes. “Ms. McIntyre only had thirteen hundred dollars in her bank account. The way that house looked, I can’t see she had a stash of cash somewhere. This is just senseless.”
The room grows quiet, except for the humming of the always-running air conditioner.
Captain Nichols leans forward, elbows on the table, his smartphone clutched in both hands. “Just so you know, this case has the chief’s attention.” He holds up his phone, turning its screen toward Brooks and displaying an e-mail from Assistant Chief Kevin Davis to the top commanders in the department. The message from Davis says that he’s looking forward to tomorrow morning’s conference call about “this red ball murder.”
“There is some good news and bad news,” Nichols continues. “The good news is we will get a reprieve from Amber Stanley. The bad news is we have Ms. Geraldine McIntyre.”
By invoking the case that hangs over the entire unit, Nichols has delivered a clear message that this murder of an elderly lady must be avenged. The department will spare no expense in seeking justice, the captain says, and every available resource will be at Brooks’s disposal in the morning.
A Good Month for Murder Page 15
