Blood Price

of the hundreds of women who came through the area every day and he was neither expected nor encouraged to stop all of them. She certainly wasn't the press-the guard had grown adept at spotting the ladies and gentlemen of the fifth estate and herding them off to the proper authorities. She didn't look like a cop, and besides, cops always checked in. She looked like she knew where she was going, so the guard decided not to interfere. In his opinion, the world could use a few more people who knew where they were going.

    At 2:30 in the afternoon, the underground parking garage was empty of people which explained pretty much exactly why Vicki was there at that time. She stepped off the elevator and frowned up at the whining fluorescent lights. Why the hell don't they have security cameras down here? she wondered as the echoes of her footsteps bounced off the stained concrete walls.

    Even without the scuffed and faded chalk marks she could tell where the body had fallen.
    The surrounding cars had been crammed together, leaving an open area over three spaces wide, as if violent death were somehow contagious.

    She found what she'd come looking for tucked almost under an ancient rust and blue sedan.
    Her lower lip caught between her teeth, she pulled out her knife and knelt beside the crack. The blade slid in its full six inches, but the bottom of the crack was deeper still. The red-brown flakes that came up on the steel had most certainly not dropped off the wreck.

    She sat back on her heels and frowned. "I really, really don't like the looks of this."

    Fishing a marble from the bottom of her bag, she placed it on one of the remaining chalk marks and gave it a little push. It rolled toward the wall, moving away from the crack at almost a forty-five degree angle. Further experiments produced similar results. Blood, or for that matter anything else, could not have traveled from the body to the crack in any way that might be called natural.

    "Not that there's anything even remotely natural about any of this," she muttered, tucking this third sandwich bag of dried blood in beside the others and crawling after her marble.

    Rather than go back through the building, she climbed up the steeply graded driveway and out onto St. Clair Avenue West.

    "Excuse me?"

    The attendant in the booth looked up from his magazine.

    Vicki waved a hand back down the drive in the general direction of the underground garage.
    "Do you know what's under the bottom layer of concrete?"

    He looked in the direction she indicated, looked back at her, and repeated, "Under the concrete?"

    "Yeah."

    "Dirt, lady."

    She smiled and eased around the barricade. "Thanks. You've been a great help. I'll show myself out."

    The chain link fence protested slightly and sagged forward under Vicki's weight as she peered down into the construction site. It was, at the moment, little more than a huge hole in the ground filled with smaller holes, filled with muddy water. All the machinery appeared to have been removed and work stopped. Whether because of the murder or the weather, Vicki had no way of knowing.

    "Well," she shoved her hands down into the pockets of her coat, "there's definitely dirt." If there was any blood, it was beyond finding.

    "No problem, Vicki." Rajeet Mohadevan tucked the three sandwich bags into the pocket of her lab coat. "I can run them through before I head home tonight with no one the wiser. Are you going to be around the building?"

    "No." Vicki saw the flicker of sympathy across the researcher's face but decided to ignore it.
    Rajeet was doing her a favor, after all. "If I'm not at home, you can leave a message on the machine."

    "Same number?"

    "Same number."

    Rajeet grinned. "Same message?"

    Vicki found herself grinning back. The last time the police lab had called her at home had been in the worst of the fights between her and Celluci. "Different message."

    "Pity." Rajeet gave an exaggerated sigh of disappointment as Vicki headed for the door.
    "I've forgotten a few of the places you told him to stuff his occurrence book." She sketched a salute-a reminder of the old days, when Vicki had been an intense young woman in a uniform-and returned to the report she'd been filling out before the interruption.

    Walking down the hall, the familiar white tiles of the corridor wrapping around her like an old friend, Vicki considered heading through the tunnel to headquarters and checking to see if Celluci were at his desk. She could tell