Free 1 Blood Price by Tanya Huff Page B

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 ioar 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 any one 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