1 Blood Price (3 page)

Most of the blood on her hands had dried to reddish brown flakes and the little that hadn’t the tissue merely smeared around. She scrubbed at it anyway, feeling rather like Lady MacBeth.

“Destroying the evidence?”

Celluci,
she thought.
They had to send Celluci
.
That bastard always walked too quietly.
She and Mike Celluci had not parted on the best of terms but, by the time she turned to face him, she managed to school her expression.

“Just trying to make life more difficult for you.” The voice and the smile that went with it were patently false.

He nodded, an overly long curl of dark brown hair falling into his face. “Always the best idea to play to your strengths.” Then his eyes went past her to the body. “Give your statement to Dave.” Behind him, his partner waved two fingers. “I’ll talk to you later. This your coat?”

“Yeah, it’s mine.” Vicki watched him lift the edge of the blood-soaked fabric and knew that for the moment nothing existed for him but the body and its immediate surroundings. Although their methods differed, he was as intense in the performance of his duties as she was—
had been,
she corrected herself silently—and the undeclared competition between them had added an edge to many an investigation. Including a number neither of them were on.

“Vicki?”

She unclenched her jaw and, still scrubbing at her hands, followed Dave Graham a few meters up the platform.

Dave, who had been partnered with Mike Celluci for only a month when Vicki left the force and the final screaming match had occurred, smiled a little selfconsciously and said, “How about we just do this by the book?”

Vicki released a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Sure, that’d be fine.” Taking refuge from emotions in police procedure—a worldwide law enforcement tradition.

While they talked, the subway train, now empty of passengers, pulled slowly out of the station.

“. . . responding to the scream you ran down onto the southbound platform, then crossed the tracks in front of a northbound train to reach the body. While crossing the tracks . . .”

Inwardly, Vicki cringed. Dave Graham was one of the least judgmental men in existence, but even he couldn’t keep his opinion of that stunt from showing in his voice.

“. . . you saw a man-shaped form in what appeared to be a loose, flowing garment cross between you and the lights. Is that it?”

“Essentially.” Stripped of all the carefully recorded details, it sounded like such a stupid thing to have done.

“Right.” He closed the notebook and scratched at the side of his nose. “You, uh, going to stick around?”

Vicki squinted as the police photographer snapped off another quick series of shots. She couldn’t see Mike, but she could hear him down in the tunnel barking commands in his best “God’s gift to the Criminal Investigations Bureau” voice. Down in the tunnel . . . The hair on the back of her neck rose again as she remembered the feeling of
something
lingering, something dark and, well if she had to put a name to it, evil. She suddenly wanted to warn Celluci to be careful. She didn’t. She knew how he’d react. How
she’d
react if their positions were reversed.

“Vicki? You sticking around?”

It was on the tip of her tongue to say no, that they knew where to find her if they needed further information, but curiosity—about what the police would find, about how long she could remain so close to the job she’d loved and not fall apart—turned the no into a grudging, “For a while.” She’d be damned if she’d run away.

As she watched, Celluci came up the stairs onto the platform and spoke to the ident man, sweeping one arm back along the tracks. The ident man protested that he needed a certain amount of light to do his job, but Celluci cut him off. With a disgusted snort, he picked up his case and headed for the tunnel.

Charming as ever,
Vicki thought as Celluci scooped her coat off the floor and made his way toward her, detouring slightly around the coroner’s men who were finally zipping the body into its orange plastic bag. “Don’t tell me,” she called as soon as he was close enough, her voice carefully dry, almost sarcastic, and hopefully showing no indication of the churning emotions that had her gut tied in knots. “The only prints on the scene are mine?” There were, of course, a multitude of prints on the scene, none of which had been identified—that was for downtown—but the bloody handprints Vicki had scattered around were obvious.

“Dead on, Sherlock.” He tossed her the coat. “And the blood trail leads into a workman’s alcove and stops.”

Vicki frowned as she reconstructed what had to have happened just before she reached the platform. “You checked the southbound side?”

“That’s where we lost the trail.” His tone added,
Don’t teach Grandpa to suck eggs.
He held up a hand to forestall the next question. “I had one of the uniforms talk to the old man while Dave was dealing with you, but he’s hysterical. He keeps going on about Armageddon. His son-in-law’s coming to pick him up and I’ll go see him tomorrow.”

Vicki shot a glance across the station where the old man who had followed her off the bus and down the stairs sat talking to a policewoman. Even at a distance he didn’t look good. His face was gray and he appeared to be babbling uncontrollably, one scrawny, swollen-knuckled hand clutching at the constable’s sleeve. Turning her attention back to her companion, she asked, “What about the subway? You closed it for the night?”

“Yeah.” Mike waved toward the end of the platform. “I want Jake to dust that alcove.” Intermittent flashes of light indicated the photographer was still at work. “It’s not the sort of case where we can get in and out in a couple of minutes.” He shoved his hands into his overcoat pockets and scowled. “Although the way the transit commission squawked you’d think we were shutting it down in rush hour to pick up someone for littering.”

“What, uh, sort of case is it?” Vicki asked—as close as she could get to asking if he, too, felt it, whatever
it
turned out to be.

He shrugged. “You tell me; you seem to have gone to a great deal of trouble to land right in the middle of this.”

“I was here,” she snapped. “Would you have preferred that I ignore it?”

“You had no weapon, no backup, no idea of what was going down.” Celucci ticked off an identical litany to the one she’d read herself earlier. “You can’t have forgotten everything in eight months.”

“And what would you have done?” she spat through clenched teeth.

“I wouldn’t have tried to kill myself just to prove I still could.”

The silence that fell landed like a load of cement blocks and Vicki gritted her teeth under its weight. Was that what she’d been doing? She looked down at the toes of her boots, then up at Mike. At five ten she didn’t look up to many men but Celluci, at six four, practically made her feel petite. She hated feeling petite. “If we’re going to rehash my leaving the force again, I’m out of here.”

He held up both hands in a gesture of weary surrender. “You’re right. As usual. I’m sorry. We’re not going to rehash anything.”

“You brought it up.” She sounded hostile; she didn’t care. She should’ve followed her instincts and left the moment she’d given her statement. She had to have been out of her mind, putting herself in this position, staying in Celluci’s reach.

A muscle in his jaw jumped. “I said I was sorry. Go ahead, be superwoman if you want to, but maybe,” he added, his voice tight, “I don’t want to see you get killed.
Maybe,
I’m not willing to toss aside eight years of friendship. . . .”

“Friendship?” Vicki felt her eyebrows rise.

Celluci drove his hands into his hair, yanking them through the curls, a gesture he used when he was trying very hard to keep his temper. “Maybe I’m not willing to toss aside four years of friendship and four years of sex because of a stupid disagreement!”

“Just sex? That’s it?” Vicki took the easy way out, ignoring the more loaded topic of their
disagreement.
A shortage of things to fight about had never been one of their problems. “Well, it wasn’t just sex to me, Detective!”

They were both yelling now.

“Did I say it was just sex?” He spread his arms wide, his voice booming off the tiled walls of the subway station. “It was great sex, okay? It was terrific sex! It was . . . What?”

PC West, his fair skin deeply crimson, jumped. “You’re blocking the body,” he stammered.

Growling an inaudible curse, Celluci jerked back against the wall.

As the gurney rolled by, the contents of the fluorescent orange bag lolling a little from side to side, Vicki curled her hands into fists and contemplated planting one right on Mike Celluci’s classically handsome nose. Why did she let him affect her like this? He had a definite knack for poking through carefully constructed shields and stirring up emotions she thought she had under control.
Damn him anyway.
It didn’t help that, this time, he was right. A corner of her mouth twitched up. At least they were talking again. . . .

When the gurney had passed, she straightened her fingers, laid her hand on Celluci’s arm and said, “Next time, I’ll do it by the book.”

It was as close to an apology as she was able to make and he knew it.

“Why start now.” He sighed. “Look, about leaving the force; you’re not blind, Vicki, you could have stayed. . . .”

“Celluci. . . .” She ground his name through clenched teeth. He always pushed it just that one comment too far.

“Never mind.” He reached out and pushed her glasses up her nose. “Want a lift downtown?”

She glanced down at her ruined coat. “Why not.”

As they followed the gurney up the stairs, he punched her lightly on the arm. “Nice fighting with you again.”

She surrendered—the last eight months had been a punitive victory at best—and grinned. “I missed you, too.”

The Monday papers had the murder spread across page one. The tabloid even had a color photograph of the gurney being rolled out of the station, the body bag an obscene splotch of color amid the dark blues and grays. Vicki tossed the paper onto the growing “to be recycled” pile to the left of her desk and chewed on a thumbnail. Celluci’s theory, which he’d grudgingly passed on while they drove downtown, involved PCPs and some sort of strap-on claws.

Vicki didn’t buy it and she knew Mike didn’t really either, it was just the best model he could come up with until he had more facts. His final answer often bore no resemblance to the theory he’d started with, he just hated working from zero. She preferred to let the facts fall into the void and see what they piled up to look like. Trouble was, this time they just kept right on falling. She needed more facts.

Her hand was halfway to the phone before she remembered and pulled it back. This had nothing to do with her any longer. She’d given her statement and that was as far as her involvement went.

She took off her glasses and scrubbed at one lens with a fold of her sweatshirt. The edges of her world blurred until it looked as if she were staring down a foggy tunnel; a wide tunnel, more than adequate for day to day living. So far, she’d lost about a third of her peripheral vision. So far. It could only get worse.

The glasses corrected only the nearsightedness. Nothing could correct the rest.

“Okay, this one’s Celluci’s. Fine. I have a job of my own to do,” she told herself firmly. “One I can do.” One she’d better do. Her savings wouldn’t last forever and so far her caseload had been embarrassingly light, her vision forcing her to turn down more than one potential client.

Teeth gritted, she pulled the massive Toronto white pages onto her lap. With luck, the F. Chan she was looking for, inheritor of a tidy sum of money from a dead uncle in Hong Kong, would be one of the twenty-six listed. If not . . . there were over three full pages of Chans, sixteen columns, approximately one thousand, eight hundred and fifty-six names and she’d bet at least half of those would have a Foo in the family.

Mike Celluci would be looking for a killer right now.

She pushed the thought away.

You couldn’t be a cop if you couldn’t see.

She’d made her bed She’d lie in it.