WHEN THE MUSIC DIES (MUSIC CITY MURDERS Book 1) (32 page)

Hogue sat slumped over.

“So tell me, how is it the blood test showing the alcohol level in your blood at 0.04, is a misunderstanding?”

Hogue kept his chin on his chest and said nothing.

“Your actions have limited my options. You have embarrassed me, yourself and the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department for the last time. As of today, you are suspended pending an Office of Professional Accountability investigation into your most recent reckless behavior, including drinking on duty and driving while drinking on duty. You’d best prepare for the end of your career and pray you won’t lose your pension over this.”

“Captain, I didn’t drink while on duty.”

“Oh, really? I’ll concede no one saw you take a drink while on duty, but you came to work after you’d been drinking. It’s the same damn thing, Jack. According to the trooper who finally got you to pull over, your breath smelled of alcohol. Granted, with a pocket full of mints in you, you smelled more like peppermint schnapps, but we know you’d been drinking. The blood test confirmed it.

“Trust me, the best thing you could do for yourself right now is to glue your tactless lips together and buy yourself a subscription to a fishing magazine. Now get out of my office and report to Lieutenant Burris. I don’t want to see or hear about you again until I get the results from the OPA. Understood?”

Hogue nodded.

White Tail Lodge

Hubbard County, Tennessee

Wednesday Evening

“Where is Mullins being held?” Brad asked.

“The county jail,” Garrison said. “Harlan thinks the best opportunity we’ll have of getting to him is during a move.”

“Can you find out when and where he might be moved?”

“I’m sure Harlan could find out. He told me today that Jimmy Dan is scheduled to give his deposition on Friday, and we don’t need that to happen. I know that boy will tell everything he knows to save his ass.”

“He’s in a good position to bargain knowledge for a reduced sentence,” Brad added.

“If he’s successful, I’ll be thrown under the bus for the guns at his house, the ones in the armory at the lodge and then into prison for the rest of my years. Most importantly, TARPA and all our goals for the future would be thrust into turmoil. I just can’t let that happen.”

“Let’s focus on step one,” Brad said. “Where is the deposition to be held? Do we know yet?”

“Harlan said he suspected it would be in the Kefauver Federal Building on Broadway,” Garrison said. “He has contacts that say they can find out things.”

“Then we’ve got to get busy.” Brad stood. “That’s less than forty-eight hours away. I have to know the time of the deposition; the sooner you can tell me the better.”

“I’ll get it from Harlan. They have to tell him. The problem is they may not tell him until Friday not long before the deposition,” Garrison said.

“That’s not good, but it’s all we’ve got. Call my cell the moment he tells you. Okay?”

“Trust me. I will.”

Brad pulled his truck from the shadowy woods surrounding the complex and out onto the highway. He headed home to pick up a few things. If he was going to consider doing this and collect the generous compensation Garrison promised him, he was going to have to find an elevated position where he could get the angle on the Federal Building.

Hillcrest Apartment

Nashville, Tennessee

Wednesday Evening

Jorge Alvarez, resident manager at Hillcrest Apartments, made his facility rounds nightly between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. He didn’t look for trouble or expect to find it, but he made sure he always carried his .380 Ruger semi-automatic in his hand, concealed in his pocket, as he walked through the sixty-five unit complex. Seeing the apartments at night gave him a different perspective on the facility. The darkness somehow made the aged place seem more capable of hostility.

As he approached Building 10, he remembered that earlier in the afternoon he received a call from his assistant manager who’d spotted one of the building’s tenants packing an SUV. Since the three men living in the apartment had moved in only a few months earlier, the assistant told the manager he was suspicious of what appeared to be a move-out.

Alvarez intentionally made his pass close to the door of the darkened apartment. His curiosity, as well as his concern for his cash flow, forced him to knock. He stepped back from the door, placing himself in front of the peephole and under the light so he could be identified. He waited. Receiving no response, he knocked and stepped back again. Still no response.

He stepped to the door. “Manager,” he announced, prior to knocking a third time. He waited again. With still no response from inside the apartment, he reached for his master keys. He didn’t like entering residents’ apartments without prior notice, but under the circumstances, this was called for. He located the key and pushed it into the lock.

“Manager,” he yelled even louder this time, making sure he was following his own rules for entering occupied apartments.

His twelve years as an apartment manager taught him to be respectful of his tenants, but his instincts were driving his actions tonight. He sensed these renters were gone. As he pushed the door back, he remained outside the threshold. He reached inside and flipped the light switch. The typically messy sight he had seen so many times over the years, and that he expected to see following any move-out, would have been pleasant compared to this.

In all his years as an apartment manager, in Nashville and even in Guatemala, he’d never experienced a scene like this.

It took only seconds for him to make the call to 911, but he knew that it would take years, if it was possible, to purge from his memory what he had seen. Before the emergency operator answered, he had already turned out the light, closed and locked the door. None of his residents needed to see this.

He paced the parking lot outside the entrance to apartment 10-D, his hand was on the Ruger and his mind was on how much it was going to cost to clean up the dreadful mess inside.

Davidson County Morgue

Nashville, Tennessee

Wednesday Evening

Dr. Elaine Jamison was a home grown product of Nashville’s public school system, Vanderbilt University and its Medical School. And, she was exhausted.

She knew she should be at home nursing a cool glass of Chardonnay and attempting recovery from the five autopsies she’d completed since 05:30 this morning. But, that wasn’t an option. Sadly, the workload for the Davidson County Medical Examiner was keeping up with Nashville’s population explosion. For some reason, Dr. Jamison’s operating budget was losing the race.

The morgue was at half staff, and she had been pulling double shifts since Monday. The draining sixteen-hour days were beginning to catch up with her.

Mike pulled on his scrubs, gloves, shoe covers and safety glasses. He was positioning his mask over his nose and mouth when he pushed open the door to the large autopsy theatre.

“Dr. Jamison,” Mike scarcely got her name out before the twin stench of death and formalin seized his nose and tried its best to turn his stomach. He had breathed this foul-smelling mixture on too many occasions and each time it took him back to the nauseating night in ‘94 when, on the way home from the airport, his Dad asked him to identify Connie’s body. His Dad couldn’t do it. Mike wished he could get to the level where the smell didn’t remind him of that night—fat chance.

She looked up from the corpse currently under her knife and eyed Mike through her face shield. “Hello, detective. How are you?”

“I’m okay I guess, considering.” Mike walked closer to the stainless steel table where the M.E. was harvesting organs. “I took Norm to St. Thomas Emergency this afternoon with a heart attack.”

“No.” She stopped with both hands inside the deceased man’s thoracic cavity.

“I’m afraid so.” Mike nodded. “He’s doing okay though. They gave him a couple of stents. I guess he’ll get an extra vacation this year.”

“If you want to call it that.” She continued to work as she spoke. “I hate to hear that, Mike, but I’m sure he’ll be fine. St. Thomas has some of the best cardiac teams in the world.”

Mike followed her movements, and considered the irony presented by the dead man’s motionless heart in her hand while she sang the praises of the cardiac physicians. She laid the organ in the scale pan, stated the weight into the microphone and set the organ aside for dissection. Mike tried his best to keep his eyes up, and not look too closely at the doctor’s work.

“I heard you’re about to hang a ‘No Vacancy’ sign out front.”

“That might become necessary,” she said, “if we can’t get a few light days where the people of Nashville take a break from killing each other.”

“Believe me, we could use some of those days in Homicide too.”

“My assistant is back from bereavement leave tomorrow and the autopsy assistant will be home from her Cancun vacation on Monday. Maybe then we’ll get caught up.”

“I wish you luck.”

“So—you’re here to talk about which of my guests?”

“Daran Hamid. He’s the young Kurdish man who was stabbed and his throat was cut.”

“Oh yes. I completed his exam a short while ago.”

Dr. Jamison peeled off her gloves, removed her face shield and snatched a file folder from a rack of similar folders.

“I’ll be right back,” she said over her shoulder as she pulled the handle and swung open the large stainless steel door to the cold room.

Moments later, as Mike was focused on anything that would keep him from looking into the open chest cavity of the doctor’s current project, the gurney with the body of Daran Hamid separated the plastic strips of the cold room curtain, and Dr. Jamison trailed it into the autopsy room.

“I sent prints and nail clippings to TBI. You should have the prints back in a few weeks, but the DNA will likely take months. As you know, TBI is still backlogged, particularly with all I’ve been sending them lately.”

“That won’t help us. The Chief wants this one cleared before Friday.”

“Friday? Good luck. He’ll have to pull some strings.”

“I think that’s what he’s doing now,” Mike said. “Do you think we’ll ever have our own crime lab?”

“Keep praying detective.”

She began to read from her report. “The right hand showed two significant defensive wounds and the left had scratches. I would assume the victim was taken by surprise and killed rather quickly, before he could offer much resistance.”

“Yes, the VHS tape we retrieved from the garage confirmed that.”

The M.E. lifted the sheet and pulled it back to expose the upper half of Hamid’s body.

“I’m sure you noticed that Mr. Hamid lost most of his blood in the car,” she said. “The throat laceration was quite deep, severing the right carotid seventy-five percent and the trachea almost completely. This was the most severe of his injuries and the chief cause of death due to the resulting accelerated exsanguination.”

Mike looked at the throat wound. After years of examining serious wounds, he still became queasy.

Dr. Jamison retrieved her camera from the shelf. “I haven’t had time to print these yet, but as you can see here in these digital shots I took prior to opening Mr. Hamid’s chest, there was some bruising across his upper chest that I believe to be consistent with the height of the upper door jam of the victim’s car.” She held up the digital camera’s viewer as she tapped the button to scan through the images. “That’s a guess, and I’ll have to defer to you for confirmation of that measurement.”

“I’ll verify it,” Mike said.

“Help me turn him onto his side.”

Mike helped the doctor roll the body.

“The stab wound to the victim’s lower right side was executed with a significant amount of force. The hilt bruise was substantial. The wound was deep; 22.8 centimeters and the entry was 6.9 centimeters across. Based upon the pointed ends of the wound and the significant width, it is characteristic of a wound from a sharp double-edged knife. A single-edged blade can produce a wound with two pointed ends, mimicking an injury from a double-edged blade. But, I have seen few wounds like this one in my years that turned out to be single-edged.

The internal damage indicated the blade was curved between twenty and thirty degrees from hilt to tip.”

“That part is a match,” Mike said.

“Oh?”

“The security tape from the garage allowed us to see what we feel certain was the murder weapon. The wound you described is consistent with the shape of the weapon we saw on the tape.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes, but your analysis suspecting a double edge is inconsistent with our findings at the home of our suspect. He owns a number of large knives, many with curved blades. These curved blades are butcher’s knives; the kind they use in meat markets for de-boning and such.”

“Okay.”

“We found none of them with double-edged blades.”

“None?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Sorry, Mike.”

“Well, until coming here, I hadn’t thought about it. But, your opinion together with seeing the stab wound, reminds me of a weapon I saw while I was in the Middle East.”

“Really?”

“Have you ever seen a Jambiya?” Mike asked.

“I’ve heard the word. Remind me what it looks like?”

“Jambiya is Arabic for ‘dagger’. The ones I saw in Iraq and Turkey all had around seven to ten inch double-edged blades. The blades were curved upward to differing degrees, some dramatically, and they had a central rib along both sides of the blade from the hilt to near the point.”

“Interesting,” Dr. Jamison said. “You
could
be describing the murder weapon.”

Murfreesboro Road

Nashville, Tennessee

Wednesday Evening

With his cell on speakerphone so Cris could also hear, Mike asked Lieutenant Burris, “What makes you think they’re connected?”

“This victim is also Middle Eastern,” Burris said. “His throat was cut in the same manner as Hamid’s. According to the officers at the scene, this victim’s neck was laid open with considerable force. There’s more than enough similarity to suspect the same killer.”