Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

Sully rolled his eyes and nodded. “I won’t attribute it to you. Just a law enforcement source.”

“Good, good. Well, see, the blood will only match by type, so it won’t say it was him, just indicate if it was somebody with the same type. It’s good for excluding people, but not for positive ID. The shoe-now, that’s better, but without the blood, it could have just washed up from when he was swimming. If we can match the blood, though, that, with the shoe, then I’m feeling good about saying he got popped right here.”

“Sure.”

“Yeah, but even then? We got a decedent and we know where he went down. Hooray for our team. But we got no wits, we got no weapon, we got no ballistics worth having, we got no prints.”

“What about the ticktock? When was the last time somebody saw him?”

“That we know about right now, Sunday night. At his mother’s. Leaves and then it’s just into the void. Doesn’t go to classes Monday. If that gunshot, the one that got called in? If that matches up with him, which I’m thinking it does, then he got popped about a quarter of midnight Monday.”

“So he was dead when he went in the water?”

“Yeah. No water in the lungs, no aspirated anything.”

“Any idea how long he was dead before he got tossed in?”

A shrug. “Long enough not to be breathing no more.”

“Toxicology?”

“Not back yet.”

“Jesus.”

“I told you. You want to boost your closure stats, you catch a domestic with six wits and the dumbass still standing there with the knife. You catch the shooting at the McDonald’s, the one on Pennsylvania right by the bridge over the Anacostia? You remember that, last year? The whole thing on video, the license plates, and we look it up, and they still got the Big Mac wrappers in the car?”

Sully, nodding, thinking to himself that what you really didn’t want to catch was the competently carried-out drug crew execution, particularly when the victim was then tossed in the channel, which then buggered the autopsy.

“This thing, it’s a bad case,” Sully said.

“It’s a bad case,” Weaver said. “But, now, look here. We had another decedent right over there on the edge of the park, last week. Thursday, to be exact. Four days before the Ellison thing.”

“Hunh,” Sully said. “Didn’t hear about it.”

“This kid’s momma wasn’t rich,” Weaver said, “so who did? One Demetrius Allan Byrd, twenty-two, known to law enforcement.”

“For?”

A sigh. “Dee Dee was a regular in the M Street Crew, the Hall brothers’ outfit. Tony and Carlos. The twins. Not exactly what I’d call a major player, but he wasn’t selling no dime bags, either. More a runner to the runners, that level right in there. He starts acting up a month or so back. Telling people what to do, using product like he paid for it.”

“Uh-oh.”

“You fucking-A, uh-oh. And so Dee Dee, he gets to instigating with the South Caps, beefing for no reason. The way it breaks down, South Capitol Street runs north to south, right? And M Street intersects, east to west. Now. That South Cap-M Street intersection, about a block around it, that’s open turf. It’s the DM-fucking-Z. Otherwise, South Cap runs their avenue, M Street runs theirs, and the world spins.

“But Dee Dee, he goes up to that McDonald’s on South Cap? Clear South Cap territory. Clear. He moves a little product out of his car, strolls on inside, gets, I don’t know, a burger and fries and then gets his whip cleaned up right next door at Splash. Sitting out front, chewing on a toothpick, talking shit with the Mexican ladies, the ones that dry off the car, do the detailing. That’s just asking for it.”

“What happened?”

“The car came out of the wash clean and had three bullet holes in the side by the time he made the light at P.”

“So his demise a few weeks later was not unexpected.”

“Dee Dee was moving new product. Clean, nearly uncut. Would take the top of your head off. Plus, the way he was dealing it, the way he was acting-”

“Says that he was trying to start up his own operation.”

Weaver nodded.

“So, the connection here,” Sully said, “if there’s any, is that Billy Ellison was what, picking stuff up to sell back in Georgetown? To his gay buddies up there on O Street?”

Weaver looked up at him then, the chin coming up a tick, the eyes holding.

“So you got that, too. The gay thing. Let’s just say the investigation is wide open right at this point here.”

“But, I mean, the Bend is M Street’s turf, the Hall brothers?”

“Yeah. For years.”

“Who’s running South Caps these days? I don’t even know.”

“Terry Mungo. T-Money.”

Sully, thinking it out, thinking that the issue was that D.C. didn’t have proper gangs, like the Crips and the Bloods in L.A. or the Folks and People alliances in Chicago. Those were big-city crime organizations and what they did made a certain business sense.

D.C. was a small town and the drug business was run by neighborhood-based affiliations, crews, guys who had grown up together and had known one another since childhood. It was, in its own way, a brilliant business model: an enterprise that incubated for years of shared existence before the doors ever opened for customers. It was impervious to infiltration; if you weren’t in when you were six years old, you didn’t get in. Likewise, if you ever got busted and thought about flipping, testifying for the state? All your former friends knew where your momma lived, your sister and her baby lived… Somebody in your family would be dead because of you. But the flaw in this business model was that since it was guys who had known each other since Head Start, shooting wars would take off from shit that happened fifteen years ago, and it would never make sense to anybody outside.

“You guys braced the Halls?”

Weaver snorted. “This morning. For what it was worth. Tweedle Dee and Dum. Didn’t say shit.”

“Which one of them runs the show, you think?”

“Tony does a lot of the business, can figure the profit margin on three keys of coke while he’s snorting a line for the test. Carlos, he’s not quite so bright like that, but the boy ain’t simple, either.”

“You-”

“They was looking-this was a couple years back now, I’m gonna say ninety-six-looking for this dude from Brookland who had stiffed them on a payment. They staked out his place but it was the dude’s girlfriend what came home first. Jalinda. Girl’s name was Jalinda. They grab her, throw her in the back of a van, drive her all over, take turns slapping her around, then, when she wouldn’t tell them when the dude was going to be home, they rape her in the back there while they drive around the Beltway. She kept begging them to let her see her baby before they killed her-she had a one-year-old, over at her momma’s-and they didn’t take that, obviously. After they got tired of fucking her, they beat her to death with a pair of garden shears they had in the back of the van. Threw her body in a trash dumpster on the back end of Capitol Hill. So, you ask me, which one of them does what, I say to you, this is a distinction without a difference.”

“Jesus,” Sully said. “But, I mean, how do you know that?”

Weaver took a bite of his sandwich. “Driver. Dude driving the van.”

“Good god, he talked?”

“I mean he talked to me, and he talked to me ’cause he went to Eastern High, two years before my little brother. I been knowing him since he was five.”

“So why didn’t you charge the Halls?”

“Cause Driver Man, he said he’d rather do the time for what we pinched him on, possession with intent, than flip. He wanted me to know why he wasn’t flipping, and that was ’cause he had a sister.”