“Wait a minute ...” Officer Kutch chimes in, his twenty-four-year-old newbie face scrunched up in confusion. “Dunn Coffee?” He meets my eyes. “That’syourfamily?”
It is, in fact, my family’s business. My grandpa Louie and uncle Patrick started it over fifty years ago, and since then, it’s become a bit of a global phenomenon. “I need a Dunn” is practically a pivotal part of modern-day communication.
“You didn’t know, Kutch?” Shane says, stirring the pot as always. “Our precious Dominic here could be sitting behind a cushy desk and running the Dunn Coffee empire, but instead, he’s chosen to slum it with us regular folk.”
Officer Roddy Kutch looks at me in the same way everyone looks at me when they find out my relation to the popular worldwide coffee chain—like I’m a foreign prince, set haughtily among my jewels.
While my family’s legacyisthe reason I’m able to afford a twenty-two-hundred-square-foot apartment in Nashville’s pricey West End on a Tennessee homicide detective’s salary, I’ve never been the type of guy to take the easy road. I have a hefty trust fund, but I rarely utilize it, and I sure as shit couldn’t sit on my ass and live off my family’s money—even though they ask me to every chance they get.
I need a challenge, a reason to feel like I’m doing something with my life. Something that gives me a purpose and makes a difference to this spinning ball in space.
Coffee beans don’t give me any of that.
But being a homicide detective is the kind of job that keeps you on your toes. It’s fast paced, it’s important, and it almost never happens the way I expect it to. When I got accepted into Vanderbilt University, declaring myself a criminal justice major wasn’t as much a choice as the only viable option.
My family wasn’t all that thrilled with my selection and kept goading me to switch to a business major well into my sophomore year, but I was sure of my path. And now, at the age of thirty-five, with more than seven years of street-cop experience and five years of being a detective under my belt, I know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
“I don’t know about you guys,” I interject, more than ready to cut the bullshit small talk and get this show on the road. “But now that my coffee has kicked in, I think I’m ready to, you know,investigate.”
“Oh,nowwe’re in a rush to get things moving,” Shane retorts, but I just gesture toward the door.
“After you, sweetheart.”
Shane chuckles, but he also ducks under the yellow tape in front of the door. I follow his lead, stepping behind him into the ritzy suite, where our CSI team is in the process of dusting for fingerprints and taking photos. With a living room area and marble dining table in view from the door, along with dark wood floors and windows that stretch the entire length and height of the walls, this hotel room has an expansive and expensive setup. It has to run for three grand a night, if not more.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve never seen a murder before, especially after watching the puppy dog behind the front desk shake like a leaf just trying to tell me how to get up here.
“Damn.” I whistle. “Nice digs.” Something tells me the fancy guests who normally frequent this room are going to be considering other establishments for a while once this murder hits the news—because the media sure as shit loves to go with the whole “if it bleeds, it leads”sentiment these days. Something about the luster of presidential suite luxury becomes a little dimmer once there’s a corpse involved.
I look around the living room, surprised by the pristine state of the sofa and accent chairs. Not every murder scene involves blood and guts, but most present with at least some kind of mess. “Where’s the body?”
“She’s in the bedroom,” Shane replies, leading the way around several of our guys as they take photographs of every aspect and object of the room, capturing its layout from multiple angles. It doesn’t matter that nothing seems out of place. Scientifically, every part of this space is important.
Shane and I enter the bedroom and squeeze in beside our buddy Dr. Booth as he does basic analysis of the woman’s body. Her long black hair spills over her face, partially covering the blindfold still secured over her eyes, and her body lies motionless, limbs slack and haphazardly sprawled across the bed. Her short blue dress and matching strappy heels are still in place, and her breasts are still set high in her bra.
She didn’t see this end to her night coming at all.
“She’s young,” I comment solemnly, looking around for signs of blood staining the pristine white comforter and coming up empty.
“Yep.” Dr. Booth, Metro Nashville PD’s medical examiner, nods, pushing back from the bed to stand up straight. He wipes the sleeve of his shirt over his forehead while being careful to keep his gloved hand well away. “Twenty-three.”
I glance out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, which give a nice view of the Cumberland River, and sigh. I fucking hate it when they’re young.
“She’s been dead for well over thirty-six hours. Other than a little trauma to her fingertips, I don’t see any overt signs of a struggle,” Booth updates us. “There is a peculiar site at her neck that looks like it could be a needle injection, and based on the stiffness and blue hue of her lips, I’d venture her death was caused by an overdose. My guess is heroin or fentanyl, but we won’t know until we run the tox.” He looks betweenShane and me. “Though, by the looks of this scene, I think we can all agree there was foul play involved here.”
Shane brings up exactly what I’m thinking. “The location of the injection site combined with the blindfold make it pretty clear to me that she didn’t inject herself.”
As Booth swabs the skin of her fingers and her mouth, I turn back from the window and start looking around. The bed is still made, with her on top of the covers, and the space by and large seems untouched. The only thing that appears disturbed is the display of celebration on the nightstand.
When people overdose on their own, it almost never looks like this—with them perfectly laid out on a bed, dressed to the nines in a sexy dress and heels, and with a silk-scarf blindfold across their face.
“What about this?” I ask, noticing the tray of chocolate-covered strawberries and bloodred roses in a simple silver vase. A memory niggles at the back of my mind as I search for where I’ve seen it before. “Looks familiar, doesn’t it, Shane?”
“Could be coincidence, but yeah.” He nods, shrugging. “It’s the same setup as the woman from the Grand Azure Hotel, what ... six months ago?”
“Eight,” I correct him, remembering perfectly now.
Shane laughs. “Excuseme, Mr. Photographic Memory.”
