Makeovers Can Be Murder

Chapter 28

It was Sunday morning at eleven a.m., the time of day when many people in Durham were dressed up in their Sunday clothes, heading to their places of worship to bow their heads in prayer.

Inside Durham County Jail on East Main Street, a much less reverential scene was taking place. Antoine Hurley, accused murderer of Jana Miller, was sitting across from me in the inmates′ visitors room on the opposite side of a plastic partition. He was dressed in the orange scrubs of a county inmate, and his head was bowed. But not in prayer. Antoine was just eighteen years old, and he didn′t look like a murderer. He looked as scared as hell.

Antoine′s lawyer, Miles Goldberg, had arranged for me to bring a videographer to shoot some video of his client. We weren′t allowed to talk through the plastic partition-the lawyer would do all the talking later.

To hear Luke or any other cop describe Antoine, the boy was nothing but a gangbanger who′d killed Jana for easy money. Luke had called Antoine a ″scumbag.″ But that description didn′t jibe with what I was seeing through the divider between us. Antoine had the soft, studious features of a mathlete, right down to the rimless glasses. We sat opposite each other without speaking, which felt supremely weird. In fact it felt almost invasive, like Antoine had been trucked out to be videotaped like some kind of zoological specimen.

Antoine sat motionless for several moments, staring down at the graffiti-scarred desk in front of him. Then abruptly, he shifted to the side and reached into his pocket for something.

I felt a surge of alarm, even though there was a plastic partition between us. Then I realized that the object that Antoine was pulling from his pocket was a piece of paper, not a weapon.

Staring at me with large, liquid brown eyes that were rimmed with black lashes, Antoine held the paper up to the plastic. He flattened it out so that I could read the writing.

In careful, square-edged lettering, the paper said:

When you see my mama, please tell her that I love her.

And please tell her that I′m sorry.

An hour later Frank and I were riding in the broadcast truck, on our way to interview Antoine′s mother. They lived in the Centerville projects in east Durham. If you want to get an idea of what the projects are like, take any bad section of town you′ve ever seen, and then quadruple it. Then add streets patrolled by sociopaths carrying automatic weapons. That gives you the flavor of Centerville. It′s the worst of the urban worst. I knew from Jonathan that the cops donned full-body Kevlar armor and brought plenty of backup whenever they responded to an incident in the projects. They always had to be prepared to deal with the M Street Crew gang, which controlled the streets. Allegedly, Antoine was a gunman for that gang.

I had to find out whether that was true.