Blood Price

it true?"

    The more formal syntax returned. "I hadn't realized you were involved in the case?"

    "I'm not, exactly. But I found the first body."

    "Tell me."

    So she did; information exchange was the coin of favors among city employees even if she no longer exactly qualified.

    "And in your professional opinion?" Brandon asked when she finished, his voice carefully neutral.

    "In my professional opinion," Vicki echoed both words and tone, "based on three years in homicide, I haven't got a clue what could have caused the wound I saw. Not a single blow ripping through skin and muscle and cartilage."

    On the other end of the line, Brandon sighed. "Yes, yes, I know what happened and frankly, I have no more idea than you do. And I've been dealing with this sort of thing considerably longer than three years. To answer your original question, the newspaper story was essentially true; I don't know if it was a vampire or a vacuum cleaner, but Neal and Jones were drained nearly dry."

    "Drained?" Not just massive blood loss, then, of the kind to be expected with a throat injury that severe. "Oh my God."

    She heard Brandon take another swallow.

    "Quite," he agreed dryly. "This will, of course, go no further."

    "Of course."

    "Then if you have all the information you require. . . ."

    "Yes. Thank you, Brandon."

    "My pleasure, Victoria."

    She sat staring at nothing, considering implications until the phone began to beep, imperiously reminding her she hadn't yet hung up, jerking her out of her daze.

    "Drained . . .", she repeated. "Shit." She wondered what the official investigation made of that. No, be honest. You wonder what Mike Celluci made of it. Well, she wasn't going to call and find out. Still, it was the sort of thing that friends might discuss if one of them was a cop and one of them used to be. Except he's sure to say something cutting, especially if he thinks I'm using this whole incident as an excuse to hang around the fringes of the force.

    Was she?

    She thought about it while she listened to the three-year-old upstairs running back and forth, back and forth across the living room. It was a soothing, all-is-right-with-the-universe kind of sound and she used its staccato beat to keep her thoughts moving, to keep her from bogging down in the self-pity that had blurred a good part of the last eight months.

    No, she decided at last, she was not using these deaths as a way of trying to grab onto some of what she'd had to give up. She was curious, plain and simple. Curious the way anyone would be in a similar circumstance, the difference being that she had a way to satisfy her curiosity.

    "And if Celluci doesn't understand that," she muttered as she dialed, "he can fold it sideways and stick it up his. . . . Good morning. Mike Celluci, please. Yes, I'll hold." Someday, she tucked the phone under her chin and tried to peel the paper off a very old Life Saver, I'm going to say no, I won't hold, and send somebody's secretary into strong hysterics.

    "Celluci."

    "Morning. It's Vicki."

    "Yeah. So?" He definitely didn't sound thrilled. "You complicating my life with another body or is this a social call at . . ."

    Vicki checked her watch, during the pause while Celluci checked his.

    ". . . nine oh two . . ."

    "Eight fifty-eight."

    He ignored her. ". . . on a Thursday morning?"

    "No body, Celluci. I just wondered what you'd come up with so far."

    "That's police information, Vicki, and in case you've forgotten, you're not a cop anymore."

    The crack hurt but not as much as she expected. Well, two could play at that game.

    "Come to a dead end, eh? A full stop?" She flipped over pages of the newspaper loud enough for him to hear the unmistakable rustle. "Paper seems to have come up with an answer."
    Shaking her head, she held the receiver away from her ear in order not to be deafened by a forcefully expressed opinion of certain reporters, their ancestors, and their descendants. She grinned. She was definitely enjoying this.

    "Nice try, Mike, but I called the Coroner's Office and that report was essentially correct."

    "Well, why don't I just read my report to you over the phone. Or I could send someone over with a copy of the file and no doubt you and your Nancy Drew detective kit can solve the case by lunch."

    "Why don't we discuss this like intelligent human beings over dinner?" Over dinner? Good God, was that my mouth?

    "Dinner?"

    Oh, well. In for a penny in for a pound as Granny used to say. "Yeah,