Even after a lot of cases over the years, it's still both amazing as well as extremely frightening how the best laid plans can go all to hell in a matter of seconds. I figured that's about all the time I had, and I hoped I was fast enough. If I wasn't, I'd probably lose a partner I'd grown to like. When I burst through the door of the butchering room, I saw I'd gotten there in time to save my partner, but I was going to have to kill two men to do it and I wouldn't have time for any follow-up shots if I missed.
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This all started with what seemed like a relatively normal 911 call early in the morning. Like most 911 calls, the information the police get is about ten percent of what really happened. It's up to the detectives, in this case me, to figure out the other ninety percent.
The 911 call at four in the morning didn't seem like an emergency. It was just an older woman calling to complain that the kids in her neighborhood were shooting off fireworks. Since it was a couple days before the Fourth of July, that wasn't all that unusual. Some kids just can't wait until the evening of the Fourth and shoot off a few on the nights before. What they were doing out at four in the morning was a question I'd have asked their parents if we could identify them, but they weren't really breaking any laws. Still, the dispatcher sent a patrol car to the woman's house.
When Charlie interviewed the woman, she said she'd heard at least two pops coming from the alley behind her house. She had looked out her window and seen two men or boys standing there. She said she thought they were gone by now since she hadn't heard any more pops, but she'd been afraid to look again.
Charlie went back to his patrol car, drove around to the alley, and turned on his alley lights. He was about even with the woman's house when he saw the body leaned up against a trashcan.
Charlie got out and walked close enough to the body he could tell the man had been shot in the head. He went back to his car and radioed for backup, a detective, and the Coroner and EMTs.
It took me an hour to get to the scene, mostly because I was sleeping soundly when my phone rang. One would think that after being a detective for six years, I'd be used to those early morning phone calls, but I'm not. It's always the same. I answer the phone, get the information about what's happened and where, and then I say I'll be there as soon as I can get there. I have a pad and a pen by my bed so I can write everything down. I know not to trust my memory when I'm still half-asleep.
The only good thing about those early morning phone calls is I don't have to explain to a wife why I got the call and then listen to her bitch that there has to be somebody else they can call. Bev got fed up with me being a police officer while I was still driving around in a patrol car.
I couldn't blame her when she said she was leaving. Like a lot of young cops, I thought she'd adjust to the weird shift hours and wondering if I was coming home every night. Like a lot of young cop's wives, Bev did try, but after two years, she said she either had to leave or go crazy.
Getting there as soon as I can involves me getting up, getting my coffeepot started, and then getting dressed. I'll have half a cup of coffee and pour the rest into an insulated cup because at that time of the morning it's hard to find a cup of coffee anywhere.
When I got to the scene, the EMT's were there and Charlie and Don had the alley taped off. I saw the coroner's van so I knew the guy hadn't survived the shooting, but I'd already figured that. It's rare that a victim gets shot in the head and lives. One of the SUV's the Nashville Crime Lab techs drive was parked behind the corner's van.
Walter Hodges, the coroner, was bent over the body when I walked up. I asked Walt if he had a cause of death and he chuckled.
"Well, without having him on my table, I can't say for sure, but the two bullet holes in the back of his head are a pretty good indication he didn't die of a heart attack or get run over by a truck. The bullet holes look to be a small caliber, like a.22 or a.25. There aren't any exit wounds, so when we get him back to the lab, I'll see if I can get you some bullets to look at.
"Before you ask, I went through his pockets and there was nothing in them except for one gum wrapper and a paperclip."
Well, the small caliber weapon made sense. Small caliber weapons don't make a lot of noise, and since the woman was inside her house, the shots might be mistaken for small firecrackers. That was the only thing that made sense, though.
This was no normal murder. By that, I don't mean I'd consider any murder to be normal, but after a cop has seen a few dozen like I had, some trends become pretty obvious.
Most murders are the result of disputes over money or drugs or some argument between family members. Money and drugs go hand in hand, so those murders usually take place in areas where drugs are sold. More often than not, the victim is left laying somewhere that he'll be found. That's to send a message.
This alley was in a quiet suburb of the city where nothing ever happens more serious than kids TP'ing the trees at Halloween or one neighbor complaining that another neighbor hasn't mowed his lawn for a week. Believe it or not, we get 911 calls about both.
The bodies resulting from family issues are found in one of two places. About half the time, the body is in the house where the victim lived and the family member who reported it is there and waiting on the police. A lot of the time, that person is also the killer, so he or she becomes our prime person of interest. If the victim is married and the spouse is nowhere to be found, well, that speaks for itself. We immediately begin looking for the missing spouse.
In the other half, the body is found somewhere the killer thinks nobody would look, like in the median of an interstate highway several miles from the actual murder scene or out in the woods someplace. The killer is at home with a good story about where they were and why they would never hurt the victim.
This guy didn't check either box, and he was also way out of place. His beard and clothes looked to me like he was Middle-Eastern, and this alley was in an area of Nashville where the people were all as white as the houses they lived in. Then there was the probable cause of death. A double-tap to the back of the head with a small caliber weapon is a classic professional hit. There was a lot more to this murder than just one dead guy in an alley.
The Crime Lab guys and girls were still prowling around with their flashlights. I asked Lacey, a cute little brunette who is the shift supervisor, if they'd found anything. Lacey shook her head.
"We're going to stay until daylight, but I don't think we're gonna find any more than we have so far which is to say nothing. The guy was shot twice, but we haven't found even one cartridge casing. The alley is dirt and gravel, so we might get some shoe prints or tire tracks, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. We'll go over the guy's clothes as soon as Walt gives them to us. Maybe we'll find something there."
I talked to Charlie, but all he knew was the woman told him she'd seen two men or boys in the alley right after she heard the pops. He'd looked out the same window and told me the street light might have cast enough light down the alley she could have seen silhouettes but not much more. All he saw when he drove down the alley was the guy up against the garbage cans.
There wasn't much use in me hanging around, and it was too late to go back to bed, so I drove to the station to wait on Walt and the Crime Lab.
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By eight that morning, Walt had confirmed the guy died from one of the gunshot wounds. He couldn't say which one because either one would have been fatal. He'd also lifted the guy's prints and sent them to the Crime Lab for identification, and he had pictures of the guy, both frontal and profile views. Those pictures weren't pretty and Walt explained why.
"Somebody beat the shit out of this guy before they finally shot him. His face is a mess because he'd been severely beaten, probably with something like brass knuckles judging from all the broken bones. All ten of his fingers are broken as well, and his testicles were basically cooked. I haven't seen that since I autopsied a guy the mob had tortured back in the seventies. They hooked up his testicles to a wall outlet. That's like one of those hot dog cookers they used to sell where you stick the hot dogs on nails and then plug in the cord. In less than thirty seconds, you have steaming hot, hot dogs. Judging from the number of burn marks on his scrotum, they kept doing it in short bursts, over and over.
At nine, I got a call from Lacey.
"I ran the prints through the state and FBI databases and didn't get a hit so I sent them to AFIS. If he's in their system, it'll be about another hour for their computer to find him and for them to make a visual confirmation. If he's not, it'll just be maybe half an hour. I'll let you know as soon as I know."
It actually took two hours before Lacey called me back.
"Got a hit through AFIS. I don't know why AFIS had his prints, but they did. Your dead guy is Jafar Basara, and he's originally from Kuwait. He's also illegal, or at least there's no record of him coming into the country at any port of entry and he doesn't have a Green Card."
So, I had a name to go with the dead guy in the morgue, but that was all I had. Since there was no record of his fingerprints in the FBI database, he probably hadn't done anything that resulted in his arrest. That and the fact he was in the US illegally meant it would be virtually impossible to figure out what he'd been doing that resulted in him getting killed. This looked like one of those murder cases where after a month or so of no leads, I'd pack up everything we did have and put it in a cold case file.
After a week, I was certain that's how this case was going to play out. Thinking that like a lot of illegals, he'd worked for a lawn care company or home repair contractor, we canvassed a six block area around where Mr. Basara had been killed, showed the people his pictures, and asked if they'd ever seen him around. The answer was always no, they'd never seen him in the area.
We checked all the home surveillance cameras in the block where he'd been shot and came up with only one that showed anything. That camera was pointing at a garage that sat back on the alley and did show us three men walking down the alley at three-fifty in the morning. It looked to me like two of the men were basically dragging the third. He was walking, but just barely. They were visible for only about three seconds before they went behind the garage, and three minutes later, two walked back in the direction they'd come from. Those two had to be the killers, but it was still dark and the little LED lights on the camera didn't light up the alley enough to make out any detail.
We checked for any home surveillance cameras that might have had a view of the entrance to the alley and found one that did. At a little before four in the morning, a dark-colored sedan parked on the street and three men got out and started down the alley. Four minutes later, two men came out of the alley, got back into the sedan and drove away. Just like the other camera, the video was so poor all we could tell was the vehicle was a sedan and that it was either black or dark blue.
Our next step was to go to both areas of Nashville and Franklin where most immigrants from the Middle East have settled. Again, we came up empty. Nobody knew anything about Mr. Basara or had heard about the murder. It was likely someone in one of the communities had at least heard about the murder, but no one would admit to that.
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