Chapter 6 Dominic
Dominic
Hannah May closes the door behind us and clicks the locks into place as I jog down the concrete steps.
I can tell Shane’s tongue, currently strangled by a cat, is fighting a valiant battle for freedom as he follows me to the car and climbs in the passenger side with a smile.
When both our doors are closed and the engine is cranked, he lets it all fly. “I fucking love this job! Phone sex girls and women in towels and ladies thinking I’m badass Gibbs from NCIS? It’s never boring, Dom. Never. I swear I’ll cry if that ever changes.”
Leave it to Shane to be excited about everything that just happened with Hannah and Sherry. I admit, at first I was amused, too, but after hearing the struggle in Hannah’s voice over her mom’s Alzheimer’s, I’m having a hard time thinking any of it is funny.
I suppose, though, I have way more perspective than Shane after watching my grandma Harriet experience dementia at the end of her life, and giving him shit over a completely normal reaction to the cacophony we’ve faced today isn’t going to win me any prizes.
“You watch that show, NCIS or whatever it’s called?” I ask instead, and he looks at me like I’ve grown two heads.
“Who doesn’t watch NCIS?” he retorts, his voice amped up like he’s ready to put on a suit of armor and go to war.
Silence escalates between us as the answer to his rhetorical question becomes obvious.
“You’re kidding me, Dom! It’s been one of the most popular shows on network television for years, and you’ve never seen it?”
I shake my head, snorting. “I’m more of a mover and a doer. I don’t spend a lot of time at my place when I’m not sleeping.”
I watch my mirrors as I execute a K-turn in the driveway, carefully avoiding the white Civic parked in front of the garage.
“You don’t even watch TV while you’re falling asleep? Lull yourself with the sound of gunfights and crime jargon?” he asks, hyped on the ecstasy of what is very obviously his routine.
“No.” I laugh. “But how about you put in a call with the prosecutor? Get your mind off your celebrity guy crush?” I flash a dry smile at him.
“At least I know things other than corpses and coffee,” he retorts. “All work and no play makes Dom a dull boy.”
I roll my eyes and hit the gas hard on purpose, squealing the tires a little as I pull onto the empty bypass.
Shane chuckles. “You’re such a fucker.”
When I don’t say anything, he restarts. “Okay, Detective. Give it to me. What exactly do you propose I say when I make this call? What are you thinking?”
“Well, if Hannah just started today”—I dive in without hesitation—“I think we need to make a trip to CMA headquarters and do some digging around there. Talk to this Margo Mavis she mentioned. And getting that kind of access is going to take paper permission from our upper management.”
“Warrant? Wiretap? What are you thinking?”
“Probably both.” I shrug. “We need access to their employee files, and we need to know who’s calling that line. I’m not sure how it’s all linked yet, but I know we’ve got two dead women connected to this company at this point, and that’s enough for me.”
“But is it enough for a judge?” he asks.
I give him my handsomest smile. “Well, sweetheart, I think that’s where you come in, yeah?”
He sighs. “All right, I’ll put the call in.”
I take a right onto the road that leads to the highway that gets us back downtown. Born and raised in Nashville, just like Shane, I know this route like the back of my hand. Hell, I know just about every road, bypass, and highway in this city.
While I take the entrance ramp onto the highway, the light from Shane’s phone shines in the dark of the interior. I wait for him to put it to his ear or for the call to connect, but when nothing happens, I lose patience. “Shane. Put the call in.”
“What, now?” he asks, and I sigh.
“Yes, now.”
“It’s after nine, Dom.”
“Yeah, well, murder investigations don’t normally follow a set shift.”
“He’s going to be pissed,” Shane mutters.
“I don’t give a shit!” I snap, making Shane laugh.
“Okay, okay, I’m calling now. But I’m putting it on speaker so we both suffer.”
“Hello?” the husky, already-annoyed male voice answers, making Shane flip me the finger.
“Hey, Uncle Benny. It’s Shane.”
“Why in the hell are you calling me this late, Shane?” the grumpy voice on the other end asks without any fucks given.
Shane’s uncle is tough as nails, but when you’re the lead prosecutor for the city, you have to be.
Benedict “Benny” Maddox is Shane’s late father’s brother, and a man who has been a father figure in Shane’s life for well over twenty years.
Even though Shane’s worked with the department for nearly a decade, Benny still treats him like a newborn-baby recruit.
Shane hates it, but it’s part of my weekly entertainment.
“Need a couple of court orders,” Shane answers, already cringing in anticipation. “A search warrant and a wiretap order for a business by the name of Call Me Anytime.”
“On what grounds?” Benny huffs.
“The murder investigation we opened this morning on Heather Turnwat and the open case on Gwen Bridges from eight months ago both have a connection to it. Gwen was employed there, and this girl, Heather, has their number littering her phone records for the last seven months. The day of her death, she had over forty-one calls from that number. We need employee records and, possibly, to get a monitor on their lines.”
“And what? You think this is fucking TV? I need real shit if the judge is going to move on this.”
Shit.
Shane flips me the middle finger again before answering. “I’ll send you the files for both Gwen and Heather, along with the call records we pulled from Heather’s phone at the scene today. The circumstances of their murders are too similar to deny, Benny. We should have enough.”
“You’d better have,” Benny nearly growls. “I’m fucking disowning you if you send me into the judge’s chambers looking like a fool.”
“By the way, Uncle Benny, just curious . . . which judge do you think you’ll be chatting with about this?” Shane asks, his tone light and airy.
“Why?” Benny sounds so irritated I can picture a vein popping out in the center of his forehead.
“I mean, it’d be nice if it was someone like Judge Belk,” Shane says. “He’s always pretty good at knowing when—”
“Shane, I swear to fuck. Is this your way of telling me your shit isn’t ironclad enough for someone like Judge Hopkins?”
“I mean, Hopkins is a bit of a bear . . .”
Truth be told, Judge Hopkins is one of the youngest and hardest judges in the city.
He’s not old-school like Judge Belk, and in our case, we need the leeway Belk’s traditional thinking provides without crossing a legality line.
Shane might spout bullshit from time to time, and I might make smart-ass remarks, but integrity is at the core of everything we do.
“You’re a real pain in my ass, you know that?” Benny sighs. “Anything else you want to annoy me with tonight?”
“We also . . .” Shane pauses, showcasing an amused grimace. “We really need it this week.”
Benny guffaws. “And I need a million fucking dollars.”
“C’mon, Uncle Benny. We have two girls dead, and we’d really love to give their grieving families some closure. Not to mention the whole whoever-murdered-them-is-still-out-there thing.”
It’s never easy breaking the news to someone that their loved one has been killed. It wasn’t easy when we told Gwen Bridges’s boyfriend and mother eight months ago. And it sure as shit wasn’t easy when we had to tell Heather Turnwat’s father and grandmother this afternoon.
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important, Benny,” Shane adds, underlining our current desperation to get some leads on this case as neutrally as he can.
“We’ll see, Shane, we’ll see.”
The line goes dead as downtown Nashville’s skyline comes into view, the bright lights of the city’s nighttime traffic streaking by us in both directions. I glance over at Shane. “That didn’t sound good.”
Shane chuckles. “No phone call with Benny ever sounds good. But he didn’t tell me to fuck right off, so I’d say we’re in decent shape. He’ll come through with the orders.”
I sure hope so. If we’re going to get a break in this case, we’re going to need access to CMA—and Hannah May’s calls—as soon as we can get it.