A Good Month for Murder

by Del Quentin Wilber

  “Yeah,” Watts groans.

  “You know I wouldn’t call unless I needed your help.”

  As Watts expected, it’s Brown. His partner tells him they’ve caught a tragic case: not an hour earlier, a fire swept through a single-family home not far from the office. Brown says that three people have died and a fourth is “circling the drain.” He has also called their rookie, Jonathan Hill, but Hill can’t make it to the office because he has a court date later that morning.

  “Shit, you would think he would want to learn how to do this stuff,” says Watts, frustrated that the rookie doesn’t yet understand the importance of helping his partners out, even if only for an hour or two before court.

  Watts hangs up and trudges to his closet, where he retrieves a dark suit, a light shirt, and a striped purple tie. He showers, dresses, and gets in his Impala, cursing his luck during the drive to the scene. He had looked forward to seeing his teenage son and daughter over breakfast that morning; now not only is he sick and exhausted, but he’ll be investigating a fatal fire. Fire deaths suck—he thinks his colleagues would agree that there’s no other way to put it. The scenes are often gruesome, and afterward the smoke clings to your nostrils, skin, and clothes. Worse, they’re inevitably a slog of delivering death notifications, supervising evidence technicians, and filing reports. There’s no adrenaline rush, no chasing down suspects.

  An hour and fifteen minutes after being awakened, Watts is standing next to Brown and a county fire investigator on the melted fake grass that covers the front steps of the burned house. As the men look into the blackened remains, the investigator points to a spot a few feet inside the doorway where firefighters retrieved a thirty-six-year-old man who later died at a local hospital. Two of the man’s four young daughters were pulled from the house and declared dead at Prince George’s Hospital Center; the girls’ mother and another daughter are being treated for serious injuries in the same hospital. The fourth daughter is dying at a DC hospital. All told, Watts and Brown are looking at four deaths—a father and three of his daughters—in a single blaze. That makes a total of six bodies for the partners in just two days.

  The three men step back from the rubble. The fire investigator says it’s too early to say for sure, but he doesn’t think the blaze was intentionally set; the house had been under renovation, and the fire was most likely sparked by faulty wiring. “No smoke detectors, though,” the investigator says.

  Since Brown was the first at the scene, he will take the lead on the case and ensure that the investigation is properly handled. He huddles with Watts, and they agree that Brown will head to the office to gather more information from fire investigators and get started on the reports while Watts visits the hospitals.

  Twenty minutes later, Watts is at Prince George’s Hospital Center for the second time in two days. In a cramped examination room a dozen yards from the trauma bay, the detective is once again standing between two bodies—this time a four-year-old girl and her eight-year-old sister. In speaking further to firefighters, Watts has learned that the father may have bled to death, perhaps after severing an artery when he punched out a window and threw one of his daughters to safety. The details are murky, but Watts is convinced that the dad is a hero for saving one child and trying to rescue the others before collapsing from blood loss.

  Joining Watts in the examination room is a forensic examiner, Angie Turcotte. A former paramedic, Turcotte sits in a plastic chair against the far wall. She is dressed casually in a blue sweatshirt, blue jeans, and boots, her long brown hair pulled back with a clip. She and Watts chat for a minute, and then the detective nods, signaling that it’s time for the examination to begin.

  Turcotte stands and steps up to the gurney bearing the smaller body. She pulls off the sheet, turns, and takes the sheet off the second girl. The room instantly smells of smoke and char. Watts holds back a sneeze as he watches Turcotte check the girls for signs of foul play. The four-year-old—a breathing tube still extending from her mouth, her eyes half open—is clad in a child’s hospital gown decorated with blue penguins and whales and bearing the phrase “Splish splash I was taking a bath.”

  Watts leans close to read the adult-sized name tag on the girl’s tiny right forearm. Suddenly his impassive expression softens, his face sags, and he sighs. More than any other kind of death, Watts hates investigating child fatalities. Some are easier to keep in perspective than others. This is not one of them.

  “Sad,” he says, shaking his head.

  “No matter how long I do this,” Turcotte says, “I will never get used to child deaths.”

  Watts blinks but says nothing, still staring at the four-year-old’s oversized name tag.

  Turcotte follows his gaze and says, “They didn’t have any little ones.”

  Turcotte rolls the girl’s body onto its side and studies it for a few moments. She points to skin slippage on the girl’s bottom and tells Watts that it suggests she had been sleeping on her stomach as the fire raged. “She probably never even woke up,” Turcotte says.

  Next the examiner checks the child’s eyes. “Blisters,” she says. “It was very hot.”

  Watts dutifully takes notes as Turcotte examines the girl’s face and opens her mouth. There is soot on her tongue and in her nose. “Probably died of smoke inhalation,” Turcotte says.

  The two are silent for a moment, and Watts retreats to the far wall.

  “God, I hate child deaths,” Turcotte says again.

  She pulls the sheet over the little girl and turns to the older sister, finding the same soot on the tongue and nose, the same blisters on the eyes. She observes skin slippage on the child’s front and back and small cuts on her feet. “She may have been awake,” Turcotte says. “She was walking around. There was broken glass in the room?”

  “The father threw one of the other girls out that window,” Watts replies. “That explains the glass.”

  They exchange a few words about the father and then go silent again. For two full minutes, neither speaks.

  Finally, Watts breaks the spell and says he should try to find a family member. In the hallway, he encounters one of the girls’ grandmothers. Her cheeks are streaked with tears; she seems to look through Watts as he introduces himself and asks how she and her family are holding up.

  The grandmother doesn’t respond to his question. Instead she says, “They had an evacuation plan and practiced it.”

  Watts nods.

  “They knew how to get out of the house.”

  “Okay,” says Watts. He pauses, trying to think of what he can say that will ease her pain. “We don’t think there was anything suspicious,” he says finally. It’s the best he can do.

  “It’s God’s time,” the grandmother says. “It’s God’s plan.”

  “I’m sorry.” Watts usually doesn’t struggle in such situations, but this time he feels a knot in his stomach. He hands the woman his card and heads back to the examination room, his steps heavy and slow.

  Turcotte has finished her work and placed both bodies in white bags for the trip to the morgue. She and Watts talk briefly about another problem: at the hospital where the father was taken, a nurse entered an incorrect birth date into the medical record. If it is not fixed—with official documentation—the father will be transported to the morgue as a John Doe. That could cause administrative headaches and possibly delay the release of the body to the family.

  Watts grits his teeth, frustrated by the loose end. Another detective might go home and leave the problem to someone else, but Watts feels duty-bound to correct the mistake, especially given his respect for the heroic efforts made by this father. “I’ll head over there,” Watts says.

  The detective winds his way through the emergency department, goes out a side door, and walks past three ambulances before getting into his Impala. Behind the car’s tinted windows, his face loosens, his chest deflates, and he coughs into his hand. As he thinks about the two little bodies in the antiseptic examination room, he briefly
loses his battle with fatigue and sorrow.

  During his six long years in the Homicide Unit, he has mostly handled the murders of drug dealers and gang members and people who have been the unfortunate victims of robberies. Most of these killings have taken place in rough neighborhoods, and he has coped with this steady stream of violence by remaining intensely focused on the work at hand and doing his best to keep his job separate from his family life. He has convinced himself that his wife and two children are entirely safe: they live in a nice home in a nice neighborhood in an ultrasafe suburb. They aren’t going to get hit by stray bullets during a drug robbery gone bad or a shoot-out in a dangerous apartment complex.

  When he goes to work, his duty is to gather evidence, find witnesses, and solve murders. He’s a homicide detective, and as he drove away from the Penn Mar apartment complex two nights ago, he promised himself to do his absolute best to arrest the person responsible for killing Aaron Kidd and Andre Shuford. That’s the job, and that’s what he owes the victims, the families, the county, the department. He doesn’t owe them grief or tears.

  But something about this fire has struck a chord. Maybe his psychological defenses have been worn down by a tough week on the midnight shift, a double homicide, and a bad cold. Maybe it was two trips to the hospital in two days; maybe it was the sight of that oversized name tag on that little girl’s arm. Whatever the reason, his heart races as he sits in his dark car and thinks about the dead father he’s about to visit at a nearby hospital.

  Checking his watch, Watts is shocked to realize that it’s nearly 8:30 a.m. Afraid that he’s missed the chance to talk with his children before they leave for school, he unlocks his phone and punches the speed-dial icon for home. It rings once, twice; on the third ring, his wife picks up. He greets her and asks to talk to their son or daughter. He hears Shari call out to them.

  Finally his thirteen-year-old boy comes on the line.

  “Hi, Dad,” the boy says.

  The detective exhales. His shoulders relax, and he smiles. Now everything is okay, even if it’s not.

  1:50 a.m., Friday, February 22

  Sean Deere stares at the corpse on the hospital gurney, wondering how such a tiny stab wound brought down such a hulking man. The hole, which is dead center in the man’s chest, is the diameter of a pencil. The doctors said the killer had delivered a lucky and devastating blow—though it had penetrated less than two inches, the knife had clipped a major artery. With that, the six-foot-three, 250-pound man was done.

  Deere records the official time of death for Charles Blyther Jr., age fifty-one, as 12:35 a.m. Then he notes what Blyther was wearing, down to his New Balance sneakers, and what he had in his pockets: a small bag of suspected crack and $25.30. While evidence techs take photographs, Deere finds a quiet spot near the ER to call his squad mate Allyson Hamlin, who is the lead detective on the case. When she answers, he relays what he has learned.

  Hamlin tells Deere that she and her rookie, Jamie Boulden, have things under control at the crime scene, which is in a nearby apartment complex. She expects to wrap up there in an hour; meanwhile, two witnesses and a suspect have been taken to homicide for questioning by Mike Crowell and Joe Bunce. The murder, she says, seems to be relatively straightforward and involves a dispute between the victim and his ex-girlfriend’s daughter.

  “It was a lucky wound, and you got lucky, too,” says Deere. Hamlin had been out sick with the flu for a week, and she’d returned to work only the day before. She could not have asked for an easier case.

  “You know it,” Hamlin says. “See you back at the office.”

  Hanging up, Deere heads to the ER to make sure the techs got what Hamlin needed. Half an hour later, he walks to his Impala, pulls out of the hospital’s parking lot, and begins the drive back to the homicide office. But he doesn’t get far; almost immediately, he stomps on the brake. Does he dare visit the crime scene? He very much wants to, and it’s only a mile away.

  Six months ago, the question wouldn’t even have occurred to Deere. He is a homicide detective, after all; when one of his squad mates catches a murder, he almost always visits the scene. But the Amber Stanley investigation has scrambled everything. To keep him focused on that murder and that murder only, his commanders have barred him from visiting homicide scenes. Two weeks ago, in fact, Deere was reprimanded by Major Michael Straughan for going to Geraldine McIntyre’s neighborhood to knock on doors and pass out reward flyers. But Deere misses crime scenes and the easy camaraderie between detectives as they try to sort out how a murder happened, and he is growing weary of working exclusively on a single, very frustrating case.

  He checks his watch—it’s 2:30 a.m. Drumming the steering wheel, Deere decides that there can’t be any harm in swinging by the apartment where Charles Blyther was killed. Besides, there is little chance that he will get caught: it’s the middle of the night, and no commander will visit the scene of a domestic murder in Oxon Hill, a fairly rough neighborhood in the southern part of the county and a sixteen-mile drive from police headquarters.

  Deere turns south, guns the engine, and five minutes later is standing at the doorway of the second-floor apartment where Blyther was found dead. For a moment he watches the small crowd of detectives and evidence techs working to craft order out of chaos; it feels almost absurdly good just to be here. Then he walks across the beige carpet to where Joe Bergstrom is sitting at a small kitchen table. When he taps his sergeant on the shoulder, Bergstrom looks up, surprised. Deere shrugs as if to say, Give me a break—I was next door.

  “Don’t worry,” says Bergstrom, patting the crime-scene log in his left hand and smiling broadly. “You were never here.”

  Deere grins and steps over to Hamlin, who is studying a sweatshirt, a towel, and some personal belongings scattered on the floor. He leans over and notices a couple of spots of blood and maybe some vomit on the sweatshirt and the towel.

  “Not much blood,” says Hamlin, whose short and chic haircut and puffy North Face vest make her seem younger than her thirty-six years.

  “Small wound,” says Deere. “Internal bleeding.”

  Hamlin tells Deere that they have already demolished the first story concocted by the mother and two daughters who live here. The women told the officers that Blyther, the mother’s ex-boyfriend, must have been mortally wounded before arriving at their door; they claimed that he had entered the apartment, collapsed, and died. But Hamlin and Boulden had carefully examined the stairwell and the apartment’s carpet and found no blood. That meant that Blyther could not have been stabbed outside the apartment, since he would have dripped some blood on the landing or on the carpet inside the front door.

  The mother and her younger daughter, Hamlin says, have since provided a more plausible scenario to Crowell and Bunce while being interviewed at the homicide office. The ex-boyfriend had been drinking heavily earlier that night, and soon after arriving he and the mother had gotten into a raging argument. The woman’s older daughter, twenty-eight-year-old Kimberly Smith, got involved and tried to persuade Blyther to leave. He refused; they tussled. Smith grabbed a small kitchen knife and stabbed Blyther once in the chest.

  “He is a huge dude, and she is just tiny in comparison,” Hamlin says. “I feel for the daughter. She certainly got thrown into a mess.”

  “You thinking second-degree?” asks Deere, referring to a charge for murder that is not premeditated or deliberate.

  “I don’t know,” Hamlin says. “It’s close to self-defense—very close.”

  As the two detectives discuss the case, Deere notices his squad mate massaging her right knee. He feels for her: Hamlin has had a tough time of late. In November, she led a complicated investigation into a drug-related execution. In December, after weeks of pressure from the unit’s commanders, she closed a year-old stabbing case involving Hispanic gangs. In January, she began working out twice a day and preparing to lead her semipro all-female football team as its star quarterback and captain. Then, in early February, she w
as served with a baseless lawsuit—it was later dropped—alleging that she had violated the rights of two witnesses in a homicide case. The stress finally took its toll. On Valentine’s Day, Hamlin caught the flu, and the illness sparked an arthritic attack in her knee, which has been battered by years of playing sports, swelling it to the size of a pineapple.

  After missing a week of work, Hamlin could have swapped spots on the board with one of her squad mates, but Deere knows that is not her way. Not only is she dedicated to the job and her squad, she’s superstitious. Every PG detective knows that it’s bad luck to skip your turn in the rotation, and Hamlin wouldn’t dream of risking it, since the homicide gods would surely punish her by making certain that she’d be assigned a nearly impossible case.

  For another few minutes, Deere watches as Hamlin and Boulden scurry about the scene, taking careful notes, debating the significance of a candle, some blood on the wall, men’s shoes in the mother’s room, cleaning supplies on the floor, blood in the bathtub. They are in the zone and treating what seems to be a smoker as if it were a real case. Perhaps he’s jaded after six months of investigative hell, but to Deere the murder seems routine. There was an argument; the mother’s older daughter stabbed the ex-boyfriend; he died; she goes to jail.

  But this is not his case, and he will leave the resolution of it to Hamlin. It’s time to head back to the office, where Amber Stanley and the vengeful gods await him.

  * * *

  IT IS AFTER 6:00 a.m. and Sean Deere—alone in the old evidence bay and taking a final drag on a Camel—is lost in thought. Frustrated almost to the point of madness, he has spent the past three weeks racing in circles, and his investigation of Amber Stanley’s murder is exactly where it was when the month began. He has grown increasingly pessimistic about the chances that his prime suspect, Jeff Buck, had anything to do with the crime. He and his squad have tracked down a number of people in Buck’s circle and questioned them hard, yet he hasn’t uncovered a single piece of corroborating evidence that points to Buck as the killer. The DNA test results, which Deere expects to receive next week, may surprise him, but his guess is that they’ll prove that the blood on Denise’s shirt isn’t Buck’s. There is still a chance that Buck did it, or more likely knows who did it, but Deere’s instinct is that his investigation has hit a wall.