Quick tip, should you ever find yourself alone in the interview room at the police headquarters of Prince George’s County, Maryland: don’t go to sleep. The officers will see you through the peephole and assume you’re guilty. Anyone innocent finding themselves in that windowless, 8ft by 8ft room paces around, bounces on their toes and sobs. Only the guilty snooze there. It’s known as the ‘felony nap’.
Del Quentin Wilber learned a lot as he tailed the PG homicide squad during February 2013. His account of the experience is a non-fiction version of faction, the genre in which novelists incorporate real people into their stories. Coming at it from the opposite end of the spectrum, Wilber presents his facts as if in a novel. It makes for an eminently readable book. A drug dealer drives slowly past a cop ‘delivering a blatant eye-fuck’. Another cop is suspicious of someone’s confession: ‘This has been too easy … this is a world in which people lie, and then lie about their lies.’ Equally Wilber knows when he should let the facts talk for themselves, as with the 15-year-old boy who
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.
We all love a good murder, but don’t expect any Agatha Christie-style cosiness here. PG is one of America’s poorest counties, where cigarettes are sold in singles and a favourite drink is Sprite mixed with cough syrup. Tear-mark tattoos under the eye are often ‘a memorial to a slain gang brother or the “tally mark” of a kill’, and autopsy doctors no longer take an absence of track marks on the arms or between toes as a sign that the victim wasn’t on heroin — the drug is now so pure that addicts are snorting it.
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