A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  When she steps back, Stewart smiles and scrutinizes Brooks from bottom to top, her eyes lingering on his haggard face.

  “You work crazy hours,” she says.

  “I’ve been hitting the streets hard,” Brooks replies.

  She flashes him a look that asks, Do you have anything?

  “If I lock someone up,” he says, “I’ll call you—even at three a.m.”

  “You better call,” Stewart says.

  “I’m still shaking the trees,” he says.

  She gives him another close look and smiles sadly. “I know you are.”

  CHAPTER 5

  5:35 p.m., Monday, February 18

  In the fading light of a clear winter afternoon that feels as dry and cold as the inside of a freezer, Detective Spencer Harris walks up and down the sidewalk and across the dead grass, scouting for clues but finding nothing other than the foamy pool of blood where a fifteen-year-old shooting victim collapsed. The tall, well-dressed detective steps back and surveys the broader scene. A normally bustling street is empty of traffic, cordoned off for hundreds of yards in either direction. Five marked squad cars are parked inside the yellow police tape, and a half dozen detectives and officers are milling about, waiting for crime-scene techs to arrive. Detective Wayne Martin, one of Harris’s squad mates, is standing in the middle of Twenty-Eighth Avenue, about sixty yards away.

  Pulling his cap tight over his shaved head before jamming his hands into his coat pockets, Harris heads over to Martin. They nod hello and bitch about the cold, which is only going to get more intense after the sun sets, a few minutes from now. They stare into the distance, their gazes fixed on the nine or ten people from the neighborhood who are standing just beyond the tape and looking over the crime scene, or what remains of it.

  Before Harris can ask Martin what he knows, the two detectives are joined by a robbery sergeant who responded quickly to the report of a shooting and watched paramedics treat the teenager before carting him away in an ambulance.

  “I don’t see how he’s still alive,” the sergeant says. “He looked really bad. I guess if they can bring that boy back, they can bring back anyone.”

  “Yeah, but they took him to Southern Maryland,” says Martin.

  The sergeant nods. “True.”

  The decision to take the teenager to MedStar Southern Maryland Hospital Center and not the better trauma centers at Prince George’s Hospital Center or MedStar Washington Hospital Center, in DC, is a sure sign that he stands little chance of survival. Although the PG Homicide Unit rarely responds to a crime scene until a victim is officially pronounced dead, this is an unusual case for a host of reasons, which is why Harris, Martin, and their squad mates are either on the scene or are racing here, even though the boy may still be alive.

  This isn’t Harris’s or Martin’s case; it has been assigned to Marcos Rodriguez, one of their squad mates. But Rodriguez had taken the day off, and when the call came he was at his house, about thirty-five miles away. He is now on his way to homicide, where he will join Detective Kenny Doyle in interviewing witnesses. So that leaves the scene to Harris, Martin, and a third M-90 detective, which is fine with them. Even more than the other squads, M-90 investigates murders as a team. In some instances, squad mates do so much work—canvassing the neighborhood, questioning suspects, writing up warrants—that the lead investigator doesn’t even have to testify at trial.

  “Any word yet from the hospital?” asks Harris, who, at six foot three, towers over the slight Martin.

  “No, not yet,” says Martin.

  Looking over at the bloody sidewalk, Harris asks Martin what he has learned since arriving at the scene, twenty minutes earlier. Martin says the victim, Charles Walker Jr., had been shot once in the back, or so it appeared, and collapsed facedown on the sidewalk. Though Walker didn’t have a pulse and was not breathing, paramedics detected a faint electrical output from the boy’s body, which meant they had to take him to the hospital. They told responding officers that the teenager stood little chance of surviving—in fact, they said they’d never seen anyone come back from such a dire wound.

  Martin points to the opposite end of the street and says that Walker, a high school freshman, had left his apartment complex and was heading this way on Twenty-Eighth Avenue to catch a bus. According to relatives, he planned to visit his girlfriend and give her a present: the new pink Timberland shoes he was carrying in a plastic bag.

  A witness called 911 to report the shooting and said it appeared that Walker had been thrown or had fallen from a white van. But Martin is skeptical. In his view, it’s far more likely that the van’s occupants spotted Walker on his way to the bus stop and tried to rob him of his bag of shoes.

  “I think he is walking down the street, carrying the shoes, when some dudes see him,” Martin tells Harris. “They pull up in the van, they try to take the bag, something happens, and our boy gets shot.”

  Gesturing to several spots of blood on the street about five feet away, Martin says he thinks the teenager ran a few feet, dropped the bag, and then turned and sprinted about a hundred yards in the opposite direction before collapsing. “He was heading home,” Martin says. “He was running home.”

  For a moment Harris says nothing. He eyes the bag, at the bottom of which he can see the outlines of a shoe box.

  “Fucked up,” says Harris. “Might as well hold up a placard saying, ‘Rob me!’ in this neighborhood. There are some cold-blooded motherfuckers out here, and they take candy from a baby.”

  Harris looks up and down the quiet street, lined on both sides by red-brick duplexes with fake-grass carpet on their steps. Standing at either end of the block are squat apartment buildings; to the south, the detective can see the parking lot for Marlow Heights Shopping Center. It’s a rough neighborhood, and Harris knows that he and his squad mates have their work cut out for them—partly because the residents are so accustomed to violence, partly because they fear being labeled snitches.

  “They don’t call when they hear gunshots,” Martin says.

  “They don’t even call if they see a muzzle flash,” says Harris.

  Harris turns to his right, his attention suddenly drawn by an earsplitting scream at the far end of the street. Holding up a hand to block the setting sun, he sees a woman yelling and crying as she tries to push past several police officers in an attempt to get to the site where young Walker’s blood was spilled.

  “He’s a good boy!” she wails. “He’s just fifteen! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He’s a good boy! He goes to school!”

  Harris, Martin, and the robbery sergeant watch as the woman is ushered from the small crowd, her screams becoming ever more distant until they are drowned out by the siren of a fire engine and the jingle of an ice cream truck.

  Harris furrows his brow. An ice cream truck? It’s fucking February. He shrugs—anything is possible in PG County.

  The robbery sergeant directs the detectives’ attention to a man in a green sweatshirt leaning against a street sign just beyond the police tape, not far from where the woman had been screaming. The man is one of the victim’s uncles, the sergeant says, and he might know what happened. The sergeant provides the uncle’s name, and Harris and Martin roll their eyes. The man is a notorious neighborhood character with a long arrest record.

  “Why is he still here?” asks Harris, surprised that the uncle has remained in the presence of so many police officers.

  The sergeant smiles, reaches into the right pocket of his jeans, and pulls out a plastic card. He hands it to Harris. “That’s why,” the sergeant says. “I liberated his ID. He’s waiting to get it back.”

  Harris studies the ID, thanks the sergeant, and tells Martin he is going to chat with the uncle. A minute or two later, Harris is shaking the hand of the beefy twenty-nine-year-old street tough, and he’s surprised to see that the man’s eyes are red and puffy from crying. Harris hands back the uncle’s ID and asks him what he knows.

  “He was just going to drop off the shoe
s to his girl,” the man says, wiping tears from his jaw. “He bought them for her as a gift. Then he was going to the mall to shop for new school clothes.”

  “How did you hear about it?” Harris asks, nodding back toward the bloody sidewalk.

  “I heard police cars,” the uncle says. “I looked out and saw a man running. So I headed that way, to see what the fuck is going on, and I see him on the ground.”

  Harris asks the man if he can tell him about his nephew’s day leading up to the shooting. The uncle offers a detailed reply and ends by saying that after buying the shoes for his girlfriend and then returning home, Walker left the house at about 4:00 p.m., approximately twenty minutes before the shooting was reported to 911.

  As he finishes his account, the uncle breaks down sobbing. “I mean, Chuck stays inside all the time. He plays Xbox—he doesn’t cause no trouble. I’m hoping God can pull a miracle, but I doubt it. I’ve seen all the TV shows. I know how this stuff goes down.”

  Harris says nothing as the uncle cries.

  Finally the man regains his composure and asks, “You have any witnesses?”

  The detective momentarily considers the irony of the situation—this man, who in his time has surely intimidated more than his share of potential witnesses, wants to know if anyone has stepped forward to offer help.

  “We have a couple, and they’re at the station,” Harris replies.

  The uncle sighs, his gaze drawn to two evidence technicians who are scouring the scene and have begun taking photos of the blood and the shoe box.

  Harris thanks the uncle. As he turns to leave, he feels the man’s hand on his right arm.

  “I know how everything goes,” the uncle says. “Not everybody was raised perfect.”

  “No, they aren’t,” says Harris. “No, they sure aren’t.”

  Harris again thanks the uncle for his time, shakes his hand, and heads back to the crime scene. There he rejoins Martin, who tells him that it’s official: Charles Walker is dead. Martin adds that their squad mate Kenny Doyle has finished interviewing several young men who performed first aid on Walker. The officers were initially suspicious of them, but Doyle is convinced they had nothing to do with the shooting—they really had been trying to help.

  “Really?” Harris says. “Good Samaritans? Over here?”

  Another squad mate, Denise Shapiro, has joined Harris and Martin at the scene, and together the three detectives devise a plan for the rest of the evening. Harris and Shapiro will canvass the block while Martin remains behind to monitor the techs’ progress.

  The sun has fully set. It’s now 6:30, and the temperature has already dropped several degrees. Blowing into his hands, Harris turns to Shapiro and says, “Let’s do this quick.”

  While Shapiro heads for some houses down the block, Harris strides toward a brick duplex across the street. He climbs the front step and knocks on an iron security door. Hearing shuffling in the hallway, he knocks again, harder.

  “County police!” he shouts.

  The inner door opens a crack. Harris makes out a woman in her thirties or forties, her hair done up in curlers.

  “Yes?”

  Gesturing toward the crime scene, Harris explains that they are investigating a shooting that occurred about an hour earlier. The woman looks past Harris, toward an evidence tech who is taking photographs with a bright flash.

  “I didn’t see or hear anything,” she says.

  She starts to shut the door, but Harris reaches through the security gate’s bars and prevents it from closing.

  “Wait—you didn’t hear anything?”

  “No,” she says, pausing. “Just gunshots.”

  What the fuck, Harris thinks. Just gunshots?

  “Around what time?” he asks.

  “I had just come home from work.”

  “Did you call 911?”

  “No. We hear gunshots all the time.”

  Harris taps his pen on his notepad and purses his lips. “When was that, ma’am?”

  “Maybe four or four-thirty,” she says. “Well, I actually didn’t hear the gunshots. I had my earplugs in and was on the phone. The person on the other end of the line heard the shots and was like, ‘Was that a gunshot?’”

  “So you didn’t actually hear the shots?”

  “No, my friend heard the shots and told me about it.”

  “What’s your name, ma’am?” Harris asks.

  “Do I have to give it? I don’t want to be involved.”

  “Can I at least have your phone number?”

  She thinks for a second, then glances over her shoulder into her house. The sweet aroma of barbecue enters Harris’s nostrils, which leads him to wonder if the woman’s evasiveness may have less to do with her fear of being labeled a snitch and more to do with her preparations for the arrival of a dinner date. When she turns back to the door, the porch light hits her face, revealing freshly applied makeup.

  “If I give you my number, you’re just going to keep calling me for information, and I don’t want to give you any information.”

  Harris makes one last stab: “You didn’t see anyone running?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks for your time,” he says.

  Harris heads down the steps and walks quickly toward the adjacent house. After a second interview, he visits the next house and the next, getting mostly the same answer.

  “No, I didn’t hear anything.”

  “No, I didn’t see anything.”

  “No, I didn’t see or hear anything.”

  And so it goes: up and down the block, a whole lot of nothing.

  * * *

  HARRIS ROLLS INTO homicide at 11:30 the next morning, feeling semi-rested despite having left the office at 4:00 a.m. He had worked late for a good reason: around midnight, the squad had received a credible tip that Charles Walker had been killed by a thirteen-year-old boy over a pair of gray Air Jordans. Hours before the murder, Walker and the second teen had been engaged in a conversation on Instagram, the popular social-media site, about the sale of some sneakers. Rumor had it that this exchange suggested that the teen was setting Walker up to kill him for his shoes. As the existence of the Instagram conversation spread among Walker’s friends and neighbors, the first tip led to two more. In the end, though, the rumor proved false—the Instagram conversation would wind up having nothing to do with the murder.

  Late night or no, Harris is sharply dressed this morning: he’s wearing a tailored gray suit, a light blue shirt, and a dark blue tie. The forty-six-year-old detective’s attire has fueled his reputation as a lady’s man. His wardrobe has also prompted his sergeant to insist that Harris question female witnesses, since they tend to offer him more information than they do his partner, Kenny Doyle, whose manner and taste in clothes is on the bland side.

  Harris, a twenty-three-year veteran of the department, spent a decade as a sex-offense detective before joining homicide two years ago. Considered one of the unit’s better interviewers, he used that skill to good advantage in the most recent murder he investigated, that of a twenty-seven-year-old drug user who was shot in a dispute with a friend and left for dead at a firehouse. It took twelve hours of intense questioning, but Harris finally cracked the key witness. The investigator had also gotten lucky: his suspect had dropped his wallet at the firehouse.

  Harris settles into his desk in his squad’s office, which is just down the hall from the larger homicide squad room. During a particularly brutal stretch of homicides a decade or so earlier, commanders had created the M-90 homicide squad and deposited the detectives in this small office. The room is bright and quiet—no rowdies like Mike Crowell or Joe Bunce—and it has its own conference table, chalkboard, dry-erase board, and coffeemaker. Members of M-90 like the space and consider their squad a Homicide Unit unto itself.

  Soon Harris is joined by his sergeant, Greg McDonald. McDonald hangs his gray suit jacket on a coat rack and takes his seat in a row of workstations to Harris’s right. After smoothing a wrinkle
in his shirt, McDonald opens a desk drawer, retrieves a plastic dental pick from a small package, pops the pick into his mouth, and begins chewing it. The habit was formed a decade earlier, and he usually goes through a pick or two a day.

  Tall and broad-shouldered with a shaved head, the forty-four-year-old wears a nearly constant smile and has an infectious laugh that can be heard far down the hall. A former marine who has spent sixteen years investigating homicides in PG County, the sergeant is known as one of the best interrogators in the department. He will do whatever it takes—within the law or while making new law—to get someone to talk. He is a contradiction: at once aggressive and patient, he long ago mastered the art of extracting information from the most reluctant witnesses and the toughest killers. “The first eight hours belong to them,” McDonald is fond of saying. “Then they are mine.”

  Just a few weeks earlier, McDonald had spent two hours verbally sparring with an obnoxious fifteen-year-old boy who the sergeant was convinced had witnessed a murder. Whereas other detectives might have pushed the kid hard, McDonald never lost his cool. At some point during the third hour, he noticed what looked like pain in the teen’s eyes and went silent—for one minute, two, three, four. To a suspect in the box, four minutes can feel like four hours, and soon the teenager began to gaze forlornly at his hands. He sniffled, wiped away a tear, and then convulsed.

  Once he stopped crying, the boy told McDonald about the worst thing he had ever done. After seeing his best friend get shot, he had cradled his friend’s bloody head in his arms and watched as his buddy struggled to breathe. He heard police sirens and grew frightened, at which point he laid his friend’s head on the pavement and ran, leaving his friend to die alone. The teen wept again, and as he wiped his tears away with a shirtsleeve, McDonald gently put a large hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “It’s okay, son, it’s okay. Just keep talking—keep talking to me.” And the boy did.

  McDonald has seen almost everything in his years investigating murders, which may explain why he is never in a rush. He believes in carefully assessing evidence and letting a case develop. That’s why he sent his squad home at 4:00 a.m. to get some sleep, whereas other supervisors might have pressed their detectives to work through the night.