Free Blood Price by Tanya Huff Page A

Her right foot slid forward half a step. The worst thing you're likely to run into is a TTC official and a trespassing charge. Her left foot moved up and passed the right. Good God, you're acting like some stupid teenager in a horror movie. Then she stood on the first step. The second. The third. Then she was on the narrow concrete strip that provided a safe passage along the outside rail.

    See. Nothing to it. She wiped suddenly sweaty palms on her coat and dug in her purse for her flashlight, then, with the satisfyingly solid weight of it in her hand, flooded the tunnel with light. She would have preferred not to use it, away from the harsh fluorescents of the station, the tunnel existed more in a surreal twilight than a true darkness, but her night-sight had deteriorated to the point where even twilight had become impenetrable. The anger her condition always caused wiped away the last of the fear.

    She rather hoped something was skulking in her path. For starters, she'd feed it the flashlight.

    Pushing her glasses up her nose, her gaze locked on the beam of light, Vicki moved carefully along the access path. If the trains were on schedule-and while the TTC wasn't up to Mussolini, it did all right-the next one wouldn't be along for another, she checked the glowing dial of her watch, eight minutes. Plenty of time.

    She reached the first workman's alcove with six minutes remaining and sniffed disapprovingly at the evidence of police investigation. "Sure, boys," she muttered, playing the light around the concrete walls, "mess it up for the next person."

    The hole Celluci's team had dug was about waist level in the center of the back wall and about eight inches in diameter. Stepping over chips of concrete, Vicki leaned forward for a better look. There was, as Celluci said, nothing but dirt behind the excavation.

    "So if he didn't come in here," she frowned, "where did he. . . ." Then she noticed the crack that ran the length of the wall, into and out of the exploratory hole. A closer look brought her nose practically in contact with the concrete. The faint hint of a familiar smell had her digging for her Swiss army knife and carefully scraping the edges of the dark recess.

    The flakes on the edge of the stainless steel blade showed red-brown in the flashlight beam.
    They could have been rust. Vicki touched one to the tip of her tongue. They could have been rust, but they weren't. She had a pretty good idea whose blood she'd found but brushed the remaining flakes into a plastic sandwich bag anyway. Then she squatted and ran the blade up under the crack at the top edge of the hole.

    Even as she did it, she wasn't sure why. Most of Ian's blood had been sprayed over the subway station wall. There could not have been enough blood on the killer's clothes to have soaked all the way through a crack in six inches of concrete even if he'd been wearing paper towels and had remained plastered against the wall for the entire night.

    When she pulled out the knife, mixed in with dirt and bits of cement, were similar red-brown flakes. These went into another bag and then she quickly repeated the procedure at the bottom edge of the hole with the same results.

    The roar of the subway became a welcome, normal kind of terror for the only explanation Vicki could come up with, as the alcove shook and a hundred tons of steel hurtled past, was that whatever killed Ian Reddick had somehow passed through the crack in the concrete wall.

    And that was patently ridiculous.

    Wasn't it?

    As the largest producer and wholesaler of polyester clothing, Sigman's Incorporated didn't exactly run a high security building. Since the murder of Terri Neal in the underground parking lot, they'd tried to tighten things up.

    In spite of four and a half pages of new admittance regulations, the guard in the lobby glanced up as Vicki strode past, then went back to his book. In gray corduroy pants, black desert boots, and her navy pea jacket she could have been