A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  So Ebaugh waits. For the second time in two minutes, he checks the wall clock: it’s now 4:03 p.m. and Bull is still not here. Ebaugh opens his thick case file and flips through his notes and evidence reports, again running through his facts. Nicoh Mayhew—a key witness in the looming murder trial of his friend Kenan Myers and his nephew Brian “Block” Mayhew—was gunned down in the vestibule of his mother’s apartment complex on December 19. Ebaugh strongly suspects that Myers and/or Mayhew ordered the hit on his victim, but he has been unable to find a link between either of them and the crime. He even paid a visit to the two men in jail and tossed their cells, hoping to intimidate them and perhaps prod them to talk about the murder over a recorded phone line. But neither of them mentioned the visit in subsequent phone conversations, or in letters that jail officers intercepted on Ebaugh’s behalf.

  Ebaugh hears a commotion to his left and looks over to see Jeremy Bull bullshitting with Joe Bunce by the interview rooms. Ebaugh signals Bull to come over, and the skinny sergeant rolls up a chair and sits down.

  “Let me show you this,” Ebaugh says. He clicks Play on his computer, and a video clip of the apartment complex where Nicoh Mayhew was killed fills the monitor. Ebaugh clicks and clicks—freezing the tape, allowing it to run, freezing it again. A small hourglass pops onto the screen as the computer seizes up, unable to keep pace with Ebaugh’s frenetic commands.

  “Jesus, Ebaugh, just let it play,” says Bull, scratching the thin beard on his round, youthful face. Finally the clip continues; two minutes later, Bull shakes his clean-shaven head.

  “Again,” he says, leaning close to the monitor.

  Ebaugh plays the clip twice more.

  After the second replay, Bull shrugs and slaps Ebaugh on the left shoulder. “Sorry, man.”

  “Fuck a duck,” says Ebaugh.

  “What else you got?” Bull asks.

  Ebaugh provides a brief update on his investigation and mentions the mother’s recent tip about the two brothers, John and Stan, at least one of whom had supposedly committed armored-car robberies.

  “I’ve reached out to robbery and the feds on it, but I haven’t heard back yet,” Ebaugh says. “It’s probably nothing. Man, I have dick—just dick.”

  Bull purses his lips, rolls his eyes, and chuckles. “John and Stan? Armored-car robberies?”

  “Yeah, John and Stan.”

  “Dude,” Bull says, “come on. Really? Do some fucking police work, Ebaugh. John and Stan, as in Jonathan and Stanley Winston. Stanley Winston got locked up for some armored-car robberies—not that long ago, I think.”

  “Aw, shit,” Ebaugh says, immediately grasping the significance of Bull’s comment. He actually knows Jonathan Winston very well. Early in the investigation, a witness told Ebaugh that Mayhew had feared that Winston was going to kill him for cooperating with the authorities. Winston had a long rap sheet of arrests on charges ranging from gun possession to assault; he had even beaten a murder rap. But Jonathan Winston couldn’t have killed Nicoh Mayhew—at the time of the murder, he had been in jail on federal firearms charges.

  When Ebaugh mentions this to Bull, the sergeant isn’t impressed.

  “True,” Bull says, “but his brother Stan only got locked up in December—I think not too long after your murder. He and some other dudes were robbing armored cars, really violent. So Mom might be right about that. It makes sense.”

  Ebaugh makes fists with both hands, wondering how he’d failed to put this together. John and Stan, the brothers grim.

  “These guys are not afraid to kill,” Bull says.

  * * *

  WITHIN MINUTES OF finishing his chat with Bull, Ebaugh races over to the Robbery Unit and pesters the investigators there until he confirms Bull’s information about the armored-car robberies and gets a solid contact at the FBI, an agent by the name of Richard Fennern. Before he goes home that night, Ebaugh calls Fennern and sets up an appointment.

  A few days later, Ebaugh is sitting at Fennern’s desk in the FBI’s PG County offices. A slim thirty-one-year-old former accountant who is an expert at analyzing databases and tracking cell phones, Fennern is the lead agent in the federal investigation into a string of violent robberies. After Ebaugh provides a quick summary of the Nicoh Mayhew case, Fennern gets on his computer, and five minutes later he determines that the phones belonging to two of his eight robbery suspects were hitting off a cell tower near Cynthia Mayhew’s apartment at the time of Mayhew’s murder—and that the suspects had been in that area only once before during the preceding three months. Ebaugh and Fennern know what this means: the two suspects almost certainly played a role in killing Mayhew.

  Fennern also has access to Stan Winston’s cell-phone records, so the detective and the agent scan Winston’s text messages and discover several exchanges between Winston and a woman who uses Brian Mayhew’s nickname, Block, when referring to someone in jail; at one point, she specifically asks Winston to put money in a jail-phone account so Block can call them. In another text, she tells Winston that “Block is going to call later—make sure you answer the phone ’cause he wants to talk to you.” A further inspection of Winston’s cell-phone records reveals dozens of calls received from the jail’s outgoing number.

  Block had not been using his own jailhouse account to call anyone except a relative. Ebaugh and Fennern are not surprised—inmates know that their calls are recorded, and the smart ones avoid talking about anything sensitive on their own accounts. To stymie investigators, they purchase other inmates’ phone codes or swap codes.

  The day after they first meet, Ebaugh and Fennern continue their digging, this time in the homicide office. The detective and the agent are sitting knee to knee at Ebaugh’s desk when Ebaugh logs into a jail-call database. He enters Winston’s cell number, clicks the Search button, and a moment later the program spits out the jail account that had been calling Winston’s number. More sleuthing reveals that the account is assigned to a twenty-seven-year-old being held for violating his probation in a handgun and robbery conviction.

  Ebaugh navigates to the account’s list of calls, utters a silent prayer, and clicks on a call made to Stan Winston just after Nicoh Mayhew was killed on December 19. The detective clicks Play, leans close to the small speakers on his desk, and turns the volume up as loud as it will go.

  “Hello?” asks an inmate in a nasal voice that Ebaugh recognizes as Brian Mayhew’s from the mundane calls he has already reviewed.

  Ebaugh hits Pause. “That’s definitely Block,” he tells Fennern before pressing Play to continue the call.

  “Hello, my nigga,” replies a voice that Ebaugh feels certain must belong to Stan Winston, a fact he will later confirm.

  “What’s happening with you?” asks Brian Mayhew.

  “Enjoying this beautiful day. Wonderful morning. Hell of a morning.”

  “What part?”

  “Your man lost his mind out of that bitch. He was going crazy—all over the place. Shot out the cannon.”

  Ebaugh hits Pause and eyes Fennern. They touch elbows. Both believe Stan Winston and Brian Mayhew are speaking in sloppy code about the slaying of Nicoh Mayhew, whose brains were literally blown out of his head. Not only that, but one of Stan Winston’s armed robbery accomplices is a twenty-three-year-old named Anthony Cannon. Perhaps, Ebaugh thinks, Stan Winston is telling Brian Mayhew that Cannon was the gunman.

  The detective clicks the mouse, and the recording continues. Winston begins to sing: “Six-four one.” The first number—64—is the county police radio code for a homicide, and Ebaugh hears a revolver spin in the background.

  “Maybe I’m coming home, man!” Brian Mayhew says.

  Ebaugh is elated. He and Fennern have just discovered a link between one of Ebaugh’s prime suspects and one of the two men who may be the actual killers of Nicoh Mayhew. Now the investigator just needs evidence that Brian Mayhew played a role in planning the murder and wasn’t simply informed of it.

  Ebaugh clicks on a second call, made
the night before the homicide. It is clear from the conversation that Brian Mayhew is annoyed that his uncle wasn’t killed that morning. He tells Winston that it’s “showtime tomorrow.”

  Brian Mayhew asks to talk to Cannon. Winston adds Cannon into the call, and Mayhew provides the duo with details about his uncle’s schedule and whereabouts the next morning.

  “You have to get some sleep tonight,” Mayhew says, reminding his hit men that the job is scheduled for between 9:30 and 10:00 a.m. He also mentions a “white girl named Kia,” code for his uncle’s car, a Kia.

  “You have twenty-two hours to make sure what I want done, you hear me?” Mayhew tells Winston and Cannon.

  Ebaugh leans back in his chair and for a moment tries to take in the importance of the trove of evidence he has just uncovered. But he’s too excited to sit still, so he plunges back into the calls. After listening to a few other incriminating recordings, Ebaugh returns to the call made just hours before the homicide; he wants to catalog exactly what was said. He puts his ear next to his desktop speakers to better pick up the scratchy voices.

  “Listen,” Mayhew says to Winston and Cannon. “Remember that junk that you said got in the way? That might be with him.”

  The words swirl in Ebaugh’s head. Clearly Mayhew appears to be discussing an earlier, aborted attempt to kill his uncle. But what does he mean by “junk”? And then it hits the detective. Mayhew is probably talking about his uncle’s two-year-old son, who must have “got in the way” during the aborted attempt. Mayhew doesn’t seem to care if the boy is there or not, Ebaugh thinks. He just wants the job done, no matter the collateral damage.

  “What about it?” asks Cannon.

  “Nothing,” Mayhew says. “You just have to go all the way up in there.”

  And that’s exactly what the killers had done.

  7:55 p.m., Thursday, February 14

  Andre Brooks navigates through the growing crowd, shaking hands, patting backs, caressing women’s arms, until finally he reaches Geraldine McIntyre’s front yard. Ascending the steps to her house, the detective turns and surveys the scene he helped orchestrate. It is a cold night, but the throng has grown to perhaps forty people, a sizable number given that it’s Valentine’s Day, and Brooks is especially pleased to see a television news crew and a radio reporter setting up. Perfect, he thinks.

  Eyeing a makeshift memorial constructed by neighbors on McIntyre’s front lawn—Christmas lights strung along a retaining wall, a rocking chair decorated with stuffed animals—Brooks wishes he had found a better photograph of his victim. Grim and unsmiling, her driver’s-license visage adorns not only each of the fifty flyers in the stack tucked under his left arm but also the four-foot-tall poster board festooned with four red heart-shaped, helium-filled balloons to his left. But there is nothing he can do about the photo, certainly not now.

  The detective checks his watch; the vigil is scheduled to start in five minutes, so he descends the steps and again joins the crowd, shaking more hands, touching more shoulders. He hands out a flyer here and there. Having somehow banished his gruffer, old-school self for the occasion, he is empathetic, flirtatious, kind, caring.

  “I hear you have a lovely voice,” he tells a neighbor who will sing soon after the vigil begins.

  “You have a nice yard,” he tells another.

  “I hear you are quite the cook,” he compliments a woman who made McIntyre Thanksgiving dinner a few years back.

  The third neighbor grins ear to ear and blushes a bit. “Why, thank you, Detective.”

  Brooks asks her what she knows.

  “Nothing,” she answers, saying that she hasn’t even heard rumors about who killed her neighbor or why.

  “Nothing at all?” Brooks asks gently.

  “Nope,” she says, all smiles.

  “You know who to call if you hear anything, anything at all,” he says.

  She grips his right biceps and winks. “Of course. I have your number in my phone.”

  It has been five days since Geraldine McIntyre’s murder, and if Brooks is going to solve his case, he needs the help of these friends and neighbors. That is why he prodded McIntyre’s family to hold this vigil. When friends gather to sing hymns and pray for a loved one, the shared experience can be cathartic. But vigils can also be a useful investigative tool. Brooks hopes the event will cement his bonds with McIntyre’s relatives and friends by proving that he cares enough to pay his respects, even on Valentine’s Day. The vigil also affords him the chance to catalog the face of every person in attendance. Brooks knows from experience that sometimes a killer or a witness wants to see the grief caused by the crime.

  Brooks also needs help from reporters and the press. Even when working on a red ball, PG detectives can never count on media attention. The DC area serves up a steady diet of violent crime, and stories about a gruesome homicide often lead the evening news and fill the Washington Post’s Metro pages. But as the days pass, it gets increasingly difficult to persuade a reporter to run a follow-up article about the case, even a major one. That is why Brooks asked the police department’s media-relations office to alert the press to the McIntyre vigil, and the detective even worked a few contacts of his own. Not only will coverage of the event remind potential witnesses that the case remains unsolved, it will inform the public that there’s a sizable reward—up to $25,000—for information leading to an arrest.

  The key to this case, Brooks knows, will be finding McIntyre’s stolen television and tracking it back to the killer. The detective remains convinced that he’s looking for a drug-addicted handyman, and he’s spent the last five days interviewing such men. Most had alibis or didn’t seem capable of such a brutal act. One appeared to be a plausible suspect, but Brooks and Delaney were not able to crack him. As Brooks’s investigation continues, the detective is being careful not to focus too intently on any particular person. Tunnel vision is an occupational hazard, and it has ruined many an investigation.

  Just as Brooks expected, the assistance provided by the police department had been lackluster. Extra patrol officers and detectives hit the streets for a few days, but they turned up no serious leads and quickly returned to their regular jobs, leaving Brooks and Delaney to spend a significant portion of each day sitting in parked cars in a nearby gas station lot to disrupt the neighborhood’s open-air drug market.

  As he makes his way through the crowd, which now numbers more than fifty and includes several pastors, Brooks approaches an older woman wearing a thick coat and a gray cap and gives her a big hug. She is sixty-seven-year-old Barbara Stewart, Geraldine McIntyre’s youngest sister; when she asks Brooks about his progress on the case, he tells her he still doesn’t have much.

  Their conversation is interrupted by one of McIntyre’s neighbors, who begins singing “I Won’t Complain,” a gospel song about God’s healing power. The crowd goes quiet, mesmerized by the woman’s beautiful and mournful voice.

  I’ve had some good days

  I’ve had some hills to climb …

  As the song ends, the neighbor dips her head. The mourners clap and issue a chorus of heartfelt amens. Someone hands Brooks a lighted candle, and soon everyone has one.

  Holding his candle in his left hand while protecting the flame with his right, Brooks maneuvers through the crowd, checking each face and occasionally scanning nearby yards and the street to see if anyone is watching the ceremony from a safe perch.

  As he moves past a clutch of mourners, Brooks spots a man half-hidden by a parked SUV. The man, who is wearing a mangy dark coat and blue jeans, sees Brooks and scuttles into a nearby house. Brooks thinks he recognizes him, and he makes a mental note to return the next day to scoop him up.

  Just as Brooks finishes circling the mourners, the pastors begin their preaching.

  “Dear Lord, mend the hurt that is there,” prays one. “Jesus, come in and help the family right now. Help them heal.”

  “The spirit of Geraldine McIntyre will live through each and every one of you
,” proclaims another.

  “Dear Lord, we pray that the demonic person who decided to take vengeance into his own hands does not have a comfortable sleep,” declares a third. “None of us feels safe tonight because we know a devil is amongst us, a thief is amongst us, there is a murderer amongst us. Dear Lord, we pray right now not to let them sleep peacefully. I want you to fix it so that everything they do is so uncomfortable, they might have to come tonight and no later than first thing in the morning, so that they come in and say, ‘I am the guilty one! I did it!’”

  Amen, thinks Brooks.

  As the neighbor with the beautiful voice delivers another gospel ballad, Brooks is pleased to see a television cameraman and the radio reporter recording the singer. He hopes that after the vigil, McIntyre’s family and friends will make a direct appeal to the public. Earlier that evening, he explained to two of McIntyre’s sisters exactly what they needed to say to encourage witnesses to call the police.

  As Brooks continues to scrutinize each face, he listens to McIntyre’s friends and neighbors speak to the crowd, extolling her gentle and caring nature. A bus driver describes how McIntyre had become more than a rider. “She was my friend,” she says. Another recalls McIntyre’s “beautiful hair and smile.” An older woman, holding her candle in trembling hands, notes simply, “She was a quiet woman killed in a horrible way.”

  Barbara Stewart, McIntyre’s sister, steps forward and thanks everyone for being such good friends. She looks at Brooks and then turns to the television camera. “If anyone knows anything that can solve this heinous crime, please contact the Prince George’s County police,” she says.

  Excellent, thinks Brooks.

  Thirty minutes after it began, the vigil ends. The neighbors trudge back to their homes, the relatives and friends begin piling into their cars. Brooks approaches Stewart and gives her another hug.