By Blood Written Read Online Free PDF Page A

shift end when the call came in on the two murdered girls at Exotica Tans. He could have passed the case along to another detective, but had chosen to stay on as the primary. He’d been at the crime scene most of the night, then at the lab waiting for the autopsy and the results from the dozen or so tests that had been performed on the victims. Now Bransford watched as Gilley wearily sat down in a folding chair, eyes swollen and red from lack of sleep, stale air, and cigarette smoke. Bransford knew that if Gilley’s stomach was anything like his, it was already burning from too much charred squad-room coffee and too little decent food. Bransford intended to order Gilley home to sleep as soon as the briefing was over.
    Bransford stepped to a worn wooden podium in front of a dusty chalkboard and cleared his throat loudly.
    “Let’s go, folks,” he announced. “Let’s take our seats and get rolling on this one.”
    “This better be good, Lieutenant,” Maria Chavez—
    Music City’s first Hispanic female homicide investigator—
    announced. “You know how my mom hates me to miss Sunday dinner.”
    “I know,” Bransford said, his voice guttural and strained.
    “I hate to call you all in on a Sunday, but this one’s a no-brainer. Had to do it.”
    To Bransford’s left, near the door, a well-dressed, neatly groomed man in a dark suit stood with an almost military bearing. Clasped in his hands was a leather-bound, three-ring portfolio bulging with papers. Seated in a folding chair next to the man was Howard Hinton, the homicide investigator from Chattanooga.
    Bransford rapped his knuckles on the wooden podium and cleared his throat again.
    “Okay, folks, listen up. As most of you know, we had a double murder last night down on Church Street near Baptist Hospital. Little place tucked away in an old strip mall called Exotica Tans.”
    Two of the younger investigators in the back row whooped at the mention of the tanning salon.
    “As you might have guessed, there was a lot more going on in those tanning booths than the simple nurturing of melanomas.”
    More hoots followed as Bransford held up his hands, palms out, for silence.
    “Yeah, real funny, you clowns, except for the fact that two coeds from MTSU were literally slaughtered and set out on display.”
    Bransford looked down at his notes. “The first victim was a nineteen-year-old Caucasian female, one Sarah Denise Burnham. No sheet, no warrants, no record. The second was Allison May Matthews, twenty-two years old, also Caucasian female. No file on her, either.”
    Bransford looked back up, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and forced his eyes to focus on the now silent faces in the squad room. “What we’ve got here are two young girls who we figure were picking up some extra cash to get through school. We’re trying to track down someone from the MTSU
    registrar’s office to get their school records, but this being Sunday, we haven’t had much luck.
    “Gary’s taking primary on this one, and he’ll be assigning chores after this briefing is over. The entire Murder Squad is on task force for this one. Even though these two girls were working their way through school at a hand-job joint, they still came from regular families, and believe me, folks, there are some mothers and fathers out there right now demanding to know when we’re going to catch the animal that did this. Even the mayor called the chief’s office on this one.
    And you all know what that means.”
    “Yeah,” a voice called out from the back of the room.
    “Shit flows downhill.”
    Amid the ensuing laughter, Bransford turned to his left, caught the eye of the man in the dark suit, then nodded to him.
    “This is the real reason, though, that we’re putting all we got into this one,” Bransford announced loudly, “and it’s not the mayor’s phone call. It appears from the crime scene and the results of the lab investigation that we may have a celebrity at work. Seems that our tanning