He does have other leads to track down. In January, he asked PG hospitals for the identities of people treated for stab wounds in the hours and days after Denise was raped, the premise being that her attacker might have sought help for the knife injury that left blood on her shirt. After getting a mass of hospital records, Deere selected 125 likely patients and ran their names through law enforcement databases. One individual stood out: three days after the rape, doctors treated a twenty-two-year-old man for a cut and an infection. The man had been a suspect in a previous sexual assault and had ties to a group of armed robbers known to kick down doors of houses, storm inside, and rob their victims at gunpoint—an MO that seemed similar to the one used the night Amber Stanley was killed.
Though this new angle looks promising, it hurts Deere’s brain to contemplate going down another investigative wormhole. After putting out his cigarette, Deere walks back to his desk, grabs a copy of a report he’s written for Hamlin, and heads to the copy machine. He presses a button; the machine says it’s warming up. He waits two minutes, then smacks the copier. When nothing happens, he smacks it again.
“Come on,” he says. The machine is temperamental and tends to eat reports. Detectives have heard rumors for the past two years that the department has ordered new copiers, but no one is holding their breath. They’ve also been told that they are moving to a new headquarters building, but given that the county is chronically strapped for cash, everyone is deeply skeptical that the move will ever happen.
The machine finally hums to life, and Deere makes a copy of his report. As he sits down at his desk again, his eyes fall on a printout of his recent e-mail exchange with Amber Stanley’s older sister. He had shown the e-mails to his supervisor, Joe Bergstrom, so that the sergeant would be up-to-date with his ongoing effort to maintain good relations with Amber’s family.
Keeping in touch with a victim’s relatives can be a surprisingly vexing part of the job. It’s a tough balancing act: a detective has to provide family members with meaningful progress reports while also withholding details that could harm a case if they leaked. Over the years, Deere has come to prefer e-mail to phone calls when dealing with relatives, for a host of reasons. E-mail is more efficient; more important, there tends to be less drama. When he carefully composes an e-mail, he’s less likely to slip up and make a mistake. And it’s often useful to have a record of his interaction with families. When progress on a case is slow, relatives sometimes get upset, and they have been known to falsely complain to commanders that a detective hasn’t been in regular touch with them.
In this case, Deere has mostly dealt with Amber’s older sister, thirty-seven-year-old Gevalle Gaither. She has always been polite but firm when attempting to find out how her sister’s case is progressing. Over the course of the past several months, Deere has come to expect fairly regular e-mails, phone calls, and visits from her.
He printed out the most recent message from Gaither three weeks ago, but it has remained here, sitting on his desk next to a stack of notes and reports that he needs to file in one of his big binders. It’s a reminder that the personal toll on Amber Stanley’s family is far greater than his frustration at failing to solve the case. Whereas other detectives are sometimes annoyed by calls and e-mails from a victim’s relatives, Deere doesn’t fault Gaither. He admires her tenacity, because he knows he would be just as persistent if he were in her shoes.
“I haven’t heard from you in quite some time,” Gaither wrote. “I don’t feel comfortable with you always saying that you don’t have any information. It’s been nearly six months and it’s becoming more frustrating than you can imagine. There are a lot of people relying on your team to resolve this tragic event. I do continuously pray that Jehovah guides you to the necessary things that will help you solve my sister’s case. Please don’t take this the wrong way. I really need closure.”
Deere spent several hours thinking about how to respond and then another thirty minutes composing a careful reply. His e-mail revealed nothing substantive about the ongoing investigation but offered Gaither every assurance that her sister’s case remained the department’s highest priority. He closed by thanking Gaither for her prayers and promising to remain steadfast in his attempt to achieve a prompt resolution of her sister’s case.
Now, sitting alone at his desk, Deere organizes his paperwork, and the printout vanishes into the stack of notes and reports waiting to be filed. Though he is satisfied enough by his response to Gaither’s e-mail, ultimately he feels that it’s utterly inadequate. Only one reply would truly satisfy Amber Stanley’s family, and it’s a message that Deere worries he will never get the chance to send:
We solved it. We know who did it. We got him.
CHAPTER 6
1:15 p.m., Friday, February 22
The homicide office is empty except for Detective Victoria Bracey, a very pregnant investigator on M-30 who is catching up on her paperwork before going on maternity leave. On Fridays, a single squad of detectives usually works the day and evening shifts, which often means that no one is actually in the office, leaving it dark and quiet except for the ringing of unanswered telephones. But today Bracey happens to be at her desk when a uniformed patrol officer appears at the open door.
“Can I help you?” asks Bracey, looking up from her computer in the second row of workstations.
The officer, who is lean, has a slight mustache, and wears a Russian-style winter hat, smiles and introduces himself as Michael Powers of District 3. “I’m looking for the detective handling the old-lady murder,” he says.
Bracey mentally scrolls through a long list of homicide victims before hitting upon Geraldine McIntyre. “The one down in Capitol Heights?” she asks, trying to remember when it occurred. “Maybe two weeks ago?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“That’s being investigated by Detective Brooks.”
“I have an informant who approached my patrol car today,” Powers says. “He claims he knows who has her television.”
“Her television was missing?” asks Bracey.
“That’s what he said.”
Bracey assumes Brooks will want to hear about this tip, so she picks up her desk phone, checks a list of cell-phone numbers taped to her cubicle wall, and dials. When Brooks answers, Bracey tells him what Powers has told her and hands the phone to the officer.
Powers gets on the line but isn’t given a chance to say anything beyond “Hello.”
“Go get your informant and bring him in,” Brooks says. “I’m on my way.”
Thirty minutes later, Brooks walks into the homicide office and, without greeting either Bracey or Powers, puts his eye to the peephole of Interview Room 2, where the informant—a thin man in blue jeans and a thick black coat—has been deposited. Brooks turns, thanks Powers for his help, and asks how he came across the man.
Powers says the informant, a known drug addict and thief, approached his squad car at about 12:30. The officer was parked in an alley three blocks from Geraldine McIntyre’s house, and after chatting with the hustler for a minute or two, Powers asked the man if he’d heard anything about McIntyre’s murder.
“He wanted to know if we had found her TV,” Powers says to Brooks. “I told him I didn’t know her TV was missing. And he was like, ‘Yeah,’ and then he tells me the names of the guy who sold the TV and the guy who has it, but they meant nothing to me.”
“What were the names he gave you?”
Powers tells him, and one of the names causes Brooks’s natural scowl to turn into a smile. For the past two weeks, Brooks has been bitching nonstop about the lack of initiative and hustle by PG County’s patrol officers. Now a patrolman has given him a huge gift, one that has the potential to break open his case.
“Nice work,” the detective says.
Without another word, Brooks turns and takes four long strides to the box, opens the door, enters, and slams it shut. He sits down across the table from the informant, whose black coat still glistens from the remn
ants of a cold rain.
Beyond recording the man’s first and last names, Brooks doesn’t bother asking for basic information. He gets straight to the point. “Who has the old lady’s television?” he asks. “Who sold it?”
The informant gives him the same names he passed to Powers. Brooks doesn’t know the purchaser, but he is well acquainted with the seller, a street peddler named James Alphonso Ward, who goes by the nickname JuJu. A heavy heroin user and neighborhood handyman, Ward was an early suspect in Brooks’s investigation into McIntyre’s murder. Just ten days ago, in fact, the detective questioned Ward in this very room.
In that interview, Ward seemed strung out; when questioned, he told Brooks that he had taken heroin a number of hours earlier. Clad in a gray sweatshirt and black shorts over a pair of grubby long johns, he had recently shaved his beard and roughly cut his hair. Looking at the black-and-gray tufts covering the man’s scalp, Brooks wondered if he had intentionally altered his appearance. Ward could not provide an alibi for the time of the murder and admitted that he had walked past McIntyre’s house that day; he also said he considered her a friend and had once eaten dinner at her house.
Yet despite a marathon interrogation session, Brooks could not break Ward, and the suspect vehemently denied any involvement in the murder. The fingerprint lifted from the windowsill had also not come from him. Unable to prove that Ward was involved in McIntyre’s murder, Brooks sent him to the PG jail to be held on unrelated burglary charges. The detective then turned his attention to other burglars, thieves, and addicts, but so far all of them either had alibis or for other reasons didn’t seem good for the crime.
Now, sitting across from Powers’s informant, Brooks cannot believe his luck. “I’m Detective Brooks, with homicide,” he says. “I want you to know that I appreciate you coming to talk to us.”
The informant nods and frowns. “That was really wrong what he did to the old lady,” he says. “Killing that nice old lady.”
“I know,” says Brooks. “That’s why we’re working this so hard.”
Brooks asks for more information about the informant’s conversation with the man who purchased the TV.
“Did he say what kind of TV it was?” the detective asks.
“A flat-screen,” says the informant.
Brooks allows himself a quick smile; in their briefings about the crime, the police have not mentioned this detail. He asks for more information about the buyer, but the informant has only a first name, and he doesn’t have a phone number. “But I do know where he lives,” the man says.
“Okay,” says Brooks. “If I put you in a car right now and drove you around, could you point out where he is?”
“Think so.”
“Good,” the detective says. “Let’s go.”
Brooks can barely contain his excitement. To build a case and charge a suspect, he needs the television; as far as he knows, it’s the only piece of tangible evidence that can link the killer to the crime. He also needs the man who bought the TV, since the purchaser can testify against the thief who sold it to him.
Brooks and the informant leave the box and are joined by Brooks’s partner, Mike Delaney. But when the three men reach Brooks’s Impala, the witness refuses to get inside, explaining that he doesn’t want to risk being spotted in a police car.
Brooks hurries back inside and returns with the keys to homicide’s battered Dodge minivan. Fifteen minutes later, he is driving through Geraldine McIntyre’s neighborhood when the informant points to a house belonging to the purchaser of the TV. Brooks knocks on the door; a woman answers and tells him that the man he’s seeking isn’t home. But she gives the detective his phone number, so Brooks calls the man and tells him to get to homicide right away.
* * *
AN HOUR LATER, Brooks is waiting outside the front door to the criminal investigation division when a blue van pulls into the visitors’ lot. A thickset man wearing a gray fleece pullover and blue jeans gets out of the van and saunters up to Brooks, and the detective briefly explains why he has been summoned. But the man says there has been a mistake: he didn’t buy the television and doesn’t have it. Then he smiles, and with the flourish of a salesman offering an irresistible deal, he tells Brooks that he knows who does.
Brooks doesn’t like the man’s attitude but says nothing as he leads him inside and takes him to the box. They sit down across the table from each other, and the man drapes his arm casually over the back of his chair. Joined by Delaney, Brooks asks for some basic information and learns that the man is sixty-one and operates an illegal taxi.
With the preliminaries over, Brooks tells the man that he would appreciate his help. “I need this TV,” the detective says, “like yesterday.”
“That’s why they call me—they all confide in me,” the taxi driver says, presumably referring to the neighborhood’s addicts and hustlers. “This whole scenario is all fucked up.”
“It is,” Brooks agrees.
“Comes with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward?” asks the witness.
Brooks and Delaney exchange a glance—detectives are always suspicious of witnesses eager for cash.
“Up to twenty-five thousand,” Delaney says. In a careful bit of marketing by the department and a nonprofit program called Prince George’s County Crime Solvers that provides the funding, all rewards are “up to $25,000.” Few tipsters get close to that kind of cash.
“So who told you they had it?” asks Brooks. “How did they get it?”
“I can tell you how—they got it from JuJu.”
“How do you know that?” asks Delaney.
“That is what the person told me. He was pressed for money.”
“JuJu was?”
“Yeah,” the taxi driver says. “He had a bag, too, with something else in it. But my man didn’t know what else was in the bag.” He folds his hands across his stomach, a satisfied look on his face.
“Can you tell me who this guy is?” asks Brooks.
“I cannot. I gave my word. But I can get you the TV if you let me go, and I’ll come back with it.”
“What do you want?” Brooks asks.
“The reward,” the taxi driver says with a grin.
“We don’t just have a big bag of money to give you—there is a process,” says Delaney.
This won’t do, thinks Brooks. “Tell you what,” he says, pushing both hands hard on the table, shoving back his chair, and motioning to Delaney. “Let me step out for a minute.”
The two men excuse themselves, and Brooks closes the door and flips the lock. He has lost all semblance of patience; he doesn’t understand how anyone can turn the murder of a seventy-one-year-old woman into a business deal.
“Fuck him,” Brooks fumes. “We need the TV and the dude. Motherfucker—this guy thinks he doesn’t have to give us the guy?”
Brooks steps back, forward, back. Shaking his head, pursing his lips, he breathes hard through his nose. He tries to speak but can’t find the words. Finally, he sputters and says, “Fuck him.” He says it again and again before growing quiet and turning to Delaney.
“We have to go old-school on his ass.”
A little anxiously, his partner smiles; he has seen Brooks get worked up before, but never like this. “Could be trouble, Andre.”
“Fuck him,” says Brooks. “Old-school.”
Delaney nods, and the two detectives reenter the room. Brooks stomps to his chair, yanks it from under the table, and drops into the seat like a wrecking ball. He rolls the chair close to the taxi driver and pins the man with his eyes.
“I need to talk to the guy with the TV,” Brooks says, his voice a furious whisper.
The witness’s bravado evaporates in an instant; suddenly he is too scared to speak. His chest rising and falling rapidly, he scoots his chair back as far as he can, until he is pressing against the gray wall.
“Now,” says Brooks.
“Um, ah,” the taxi driver says. “Um, um.” His eyes dart between Brooks and Delaney.
“Give me a few minutes to go talk to him.”
“No, no,” Brooks says, leaning forward, his face now less than a foot from the witness’s. “You are not listening; you are not hearing me. I cannot let you go talk to him, not unless we are there, too. I don’t need the TV. I need the guy and the TV.”
“I feel you,” says the taxi driver.
“You feel me?” says Brooks, thinking, Did this asshole really just say that?
For a moment, Brooks considers yelling, breaking a chair against the wall, and letting his witness stew in the box for a few hours. Instead he glares silently at the taxi driver, his scowl growing more intense by the second.
The witness looks at Brooks, at Delaney, back at Brooks. He is cornered, and he knows it.
“It wasn’t right what he did to the lady,” the taxi driver says, in a tone clearly meant to convey empathy.
Brooks has seen this before: his witness needs a way out that doesn’t signal disrespect or defeat, and feigning compassion does the trick. After all, doesn’t everybody feel bad about the murder of an innocent old lady? Doesn’t doing good always outweigh the reward? Brooks watches the man convince himself that he isn’t surrendering, that he’s doing the right thing for the right reasons.
“I feel so bad for that old lady,” the taxi driver says. “I’ll take you to his house. That’s what I’ll do.”
* * *
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Brooks and Delaney, still in the Dodge minivan, are trailing the witness’s van when it pulls up to a ranch-style house just a few doors down from McIntyre’s home. The taxi driver knocks on the door, and a woman answers; they talk for a bit, and the witness hustles back to his van. He phones Brooks and says that his friend is on his way home. The detective calls three waiting police officers on his radio, gives them the address, and a minute later their cars screech to a halt next to Brooks’s. Leaping from their vehicles, the two detectives and three officers sprint for the front porch.
A Good Month for Murder Page 22
