and confident that they hadn’t been followed, Urda activated his lights and siren.
He exited the highway east of downtown and navigated through a low-income neighborhood of weed-infested yards and houses that were falling apart. Flashing blue lights and the powerful white lights of evidence lamps two blocks up told Harvath they were in the right place.
Urda showed his credentials to a Nashville PD patrol officer, who waved them through, and he grabbed the nearest parking place they could find. Yellow crime scene tape blocked off one of the houses, and crowds of onlookers were being held back across the street.
Walking up to one of the detectives, Urda identified himself and asked for a man named Hoffman.
“Hey, Mike!” the detective shouted. “You’ve got a visitor.”
A muscular man in a tight suit stepped away from a group of evidence technicians and came down the walkway. Urda shook hands with him and then introduced Harvath.
“Detective Mike Hoffman,” he said, shaking Harvath’s hand.
“Mike works with the FBI’s Nashville office on a lot of our cases,” Urda explained. “He’s the detective who agreed to be at the airport to follow Tommy Wong.”
“Except we ended up with somebody even worse,” he replied.
“What exactly happened here?”
“Follow me,” said Hoffman. “I’ll show you.”
After they signed in, with Harvath giving a fake name and agency, they were issued paper booties and told they could go inside. The techs were done collecting samples and everything had been photographed. The body had not yet been removed.
Hoffman stood back as he approached the front door and allowed Harvath and Urda to go in first. More portable evidence lamps crowded the living room, bathing it in hot, white light. The scene was horrific. Blood was everywhere. The FBI man stood with the Nashville detective as Harvath did a circle around the body and studied the room.
“Somali?” he asked.
Hoffman nodded. “Wazir Ibrahim. Thirty-one years old. He was a political refugee who moved to Nashville a couple years ago.”
“Is there a big Somali population here?”
“We’re not Minneapolis, but we’ve got our share.”
Ibrahim was in a kneeling position, slumped over forward, with his throat cut clean through.
“Any idea what the murder weapon was?” Urda asked.
“We’re thinking it was possibly a straight razor,” replied Hoffman.
“Or a garrote wire,” said Harvath as he bent down and studied the wound.
“He really bled out, didn’t he?” stated the FBI man as he looked at the large pool of blood across the carpet. “What’s he kneeling on? A prayer rug?”
Harvath nodded. “It looks like the killer came up behind him and did him while he was in prayer.”
“Which we’re assuming means that Wazir Ibrahim knew his killer. He knew he was in the house, and was comfortable enough to pray in front of him, or maybe even with him.”
“Big mistake,” Urda replied.
“No kidding.”
Harvath stood behind the body and mimicked garroting Ibrahim, in order to get a feel for how everything went down. “So what’s your connection to all of this?” he asked Hoffman.
“One of the task forces I’m on is focused on child sex crimes. We’ve been working a child prostitution ring run by a Somali network. Ibrahim’s name had come up, but we didn’t have enough evidence to charge him. A couple days ago, he got popped for beating his wife.
“I got called in and we tried to sweat him for details about the sex ring. As soon as we started talking about it, he clammed up and asked for a lawyer. He got his bail hearing, but couldn’t afford to bond out, so he sat in lockup.”
“Where’s the wife?” Harvath asked.
“She has family south of here in Shelbyville. The social worker recommended she stay with them for a while. Her brother-in-law came back up to get some more of her things. He’s the one who discovered the body. And before you ask, the wife and the brother both have airtight alibis.”
“Okay, so how do we know this is connected to our guy?”
“Because when officers collected statements, the next-door neighbor, a Mr. Enrique Vasquez,” said Hoffman, referring to his notebook, “stated that an Asian man had come looking for Ibrahim earlier today. The man claimed to be from the warehouse Ibrahim worked at. Said he was here about an insurance claim. I spoke to Ibrahim’s boss. Wazir never filed any insurance claim and the company carrier never sent anyone out.
“The guy gave the neighbor a business card, but it was bogus. Obviously, something’s going on, so I started thinking. What are the odds that two Asian gentlemen switch boarding passes