Read Online Tunnel Vision by Brenda Adcock - Free Book Online

toast for months. Find me a body to work with and if it hasn’t already been pickled, too, I can be more specific unless, of course....”
    “Enough of the anatomy lesson, Frank. We get the idea.” Brodie said.
    “Tell you one thing though. This wasn’t some quickie slice and dice. Whoever separated our friend from his body did some pretty neat work. Maybe not a Harvard-trained brain surgeon, but definitely not the butcher at the local A & P.”
    “Okay. Let me know if you come up with anything else we should know.”
    Cardona shook hands with Brodie and Nicholls, but when he got to Maggie he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. He winked and jogged back to the lab van as a pink blush began to spread up her neck.
    “Now what?” Nicholls asked as they walked
    across the grassy area in front of the building toward their car.
    “Punt, I guess,” Brodie said.
    Following a few feet behind them, Maggie glanced through the notes she had taken and looked at the diagram she had drawn of the scene. Her foot sank unexpectedly into a depression in the grass and she was barely able to catch herself before falling down.
    “What the hell?” she muttered to herself.
    “You coming, Weston?” Brodie called out when she and Nicholls reached their car. Maggie was on her hands and knees, shining a small flashlight on something on the ground.
    Squinting, she answered, “Yeah! Hey, what’s under this grate?” She looked around until she spotted an older man wearing the blue denim workshirt of a university employee. She motioned him toward her and dusted grass from her slacks. The man walked up to her and rested on the rake in his hands. “What’s this grate for?” she asked again. Brodie sighed as she and Nicholls strolled back to where Maggie was kneeling. “What’s the problem?”
    Brodie asked shortly when she and Nicholls rejoined Maggie.
    “I asked what this grate is for,” Maggie repeated as she leaned closer to the grate and cupped her hands around her eyes to see into the darkness below.
    “Oh, that’s part of the old tunnel system the university tried when it first opened,” the man explained. “There’s a vent about every couple hundred yards. It was supposed to let students get from one building to another in bad weather. I think they were used as shelters in case of tornadoes too.”
    “Are they under every building?” she asked, still straining to see what her limited light illuminated.
    “Just the original four or five buildings,” he answered. “They turned out to be better suited for muggings and lover’s lanes than anything else so the university sealed them off.”
    “Is the Biology Building one of the original buildings?” Maggie asked.
    “Yep.”
    “But all the exterior entrances are padlocked,”
    Nicholls said. “We checked them out while we were combing the grounds.”
    Standing up and brushing the grass from her hands and knees, Maggie looked around again. “Who has keys for the padlocks?”
    “Security should, ma’am,” the maintenance
    worker said.
    “Get in touch with security and have them bring their keys, Nicholls,” Brodie said.
    A SHORT FLIGHT of narrow concrete steps led to the basement of the Biology Building. Brodie turned the key in the padlock and slowly pushed the door open, drawing her weapon as she reached inside and felt along the wall. Finding a light switch, she flipped it on and a series of dim overhead fluorescent lights flickered on. The room smelled dank and moldy and dust particles floated through the glow cast by the overhead lights. There were no windows along the walls and a dark green mold appeared to run down the wall from cracks in the mortar. “Clear,” she said as she looked around and re-holstered her gun. Assorted desks and file cabinets were stacked against one wall. Other equipment she was unfamiliar with was pushed into piles along the other walls. Nicholls and Weston followed her down the steps before separating to comb the