It simply came down to a choice between going to work or committing murder. Homicidal thoughts seemed incongruent on such a day, mild and sunny, unseasonably warm for mid January in the Southwest, but the beautiful weather was no match for the claustrophobic, unbearable domestic situation unfolding before her.

Did he really think he could replace her, she, who had come first in his life for all these years? Did he expect her to passively stand by and watch while he focused all his attention on the girl who was now constantly in their midst? Of course, in her presence, they tried to act though everything was the same as it had been previously, but the palpable attraction between the two was almost a tangible component in the charged air of a house which was suddenly much too small for four people.

For there was the other one, too, the one who was older and wiser, and should have been loyal to her, considering the length and ties of their relationship. But he was worse than useless. If anything, he was enchanted with the girl himself.

She heard their voices rising and falling in the next room, likely planning some type of Sunday afternoon entertainment. She would be invited to join in their plans, of course, but simply to maintain appearances, not out of any real desire for her company. Being with the three of them, watching him and the girl, and the other one, looking on with benevolent approval, was more than she could bear.

It was a relief to decide to take an action. Making up her mind, she gathered the necessary equipment.

Tory Travers grabbed a hardhat, torch, and her cellular phone. She would not spend one more weekend afternoon watching her besotted fifteen year old son, the elfin girl who was now the center of his attention, and his dotingly approving grandfather. If she couldn't control the relationships developing before her very eyes, she could at least investigate the technical questions plaguing her latest engineering project.

A development of over a hundred acres, planned to accommodate three hundred and fifty suburban homes, it was isolated from neighboring subdivisions by the hilly terrain from which it had taken its name--Mountain View. The partially developed, deserted subdivision boasted neatly laid out roads, now cracked and overgrown with weeds, cul de sacs lined with no houses, and curbs intended to complement nonexistent sidewalks and driveways. And there were storm drains. Yes, there were definitely storm drains.

The malfunction of these particular drains had brought the development of Monte Vista Heights to a halt over fifteen years ago. And for the life of her, Tory Travers couldn't understand why.

Before the regulation of subdivision development in the United States, various unethical speculators got rich serving the needs of the ever-expanding suburban population. These individuals acquired tracts of land, subdivided it, put in roads and utilities as cheaply as possible, sold the lots and then moved on, usually dissolving their corporate structure as soon as the last lot was sold.

All across the country, cities and counties found themselves inheriting the problems of substandard construction practices, suddenly responsible for maintaining roads and utilities that had to be immediately repaired, renovated, and upgraded. Frustrated with the economic burden caused by individuals who were no longer around to be held financially responsible, municipalities and counties began to enact codes and ordinances that subdivisions had to meet BEFORE the lots could be sold.

It was a failure to meet these standards that had stopped the development of Monte Vista Heights, and Tory's engineering firm had been hired by the City of El Paso to determine how to rectify the situation. The problem was, the City's project manager didn't choose to believe what Tory had to tell him. She could see the results of their last conversation even before she stepped out of her car, evidenced by the opened manhole covers at every storm drain inlet.

Cal Cortez was a good guy, and a decent engineer; he obviously didn't like what he had to tell Tory on that afternoon a week ago. He had frowned at his copy of her company's engineering report like he hoped it would change the words written there. It didn't.

"Well," he said finally, nervously running his hand over his head to straighten his few remaining strands of hair, "we just can't accept this report."

Tory immediately envisioned her company's invoice to the city, the invoice that would now be in contention, the money that would not be forthcoming, and the paychecks that would have to be shelled out between now and resolving whatever bureaucratic mess was evolving before her very eyes. "What's wrong the report?" she asked, going to some effort to maintain a reasonable tone of voice.

Like most people stuck with conveying bad news, Cal Cortez chose to address her question via a circuitous conversational route. "This tract of land has been sitting vacant for fifteen years, ever since the project was taken over by the City," he said.

"That's right," she answered, figuring it would be good to agree while she could.

"Then the Housing Board got a grant for low income assisted housing. It's a nice fat grant, a chance for real good PR for the City. We don't have to purchase land if we bring Monte Vista Heights up to code and use it for the housing project. No more eyesore of deserted property out there, and deserving low income families get a chance to have decent homes."

"That's right," Tory said again. Actually, it was mainly the City Engineering Department, and specifically Cal's supervisor, who would reap the good PR for this particular brain child, but it didn't seem to be the time to point this out.

"So we went looking for an engineering firm that could tell us what we needed to do to make this land useable for the housing grant," continued Cal, with the unmistakable determination of a man who has a verbal destination in mind, and only one way to get there. "We advertised the job, and your firm was selected to do the study and give the City a report with your findings."

"And that's just what we did," said Tory brightly, in case the problem was that Cal had forgotten the thick report he held in his hands.

"But your report says that it won't take a lot of work to bring Monte Vista Heights up to code," said Cal, sounding like his best friend had failed the Professional Engineer examination.

"That's right," said Tory yet one more time, trying to maintain her bright tone. "And we thought that would be good news, since it helps you stretch your grant dollars even further. You'll have to do some site work, of course, because the original construction is fifteen years old. It's not the best I've seen, but it's not the worst, either."

"Then why the hell did the City condemn the project fifteen years ago?" asked Cal. He leaned forward to look at her intently. He had obviously gotten around to the point he wanted to make.

Tory was stumped. "I didn't know it was condemned," she said. "We were hired to do a visual inspection of current conditions and report the findings. I thought the City owned the property because the developer went bankrupt, or he traded it for some concession on another project." Cal Cortez continued to look at her balefully. "It wasn't our job to determine how the City came to own the property," she added, feeling like Alice disappearing down the rabbit's hole. "It's not my problem."

"Well, it's my problem," replied Cal. "And so it's gonna be your problem, too. This project is politically sensitive," he added, using two words that strike fear into any engineer's heart. "It has quite a history, one that we're not anxious to revisit."

"What history?"

"You don't remember Craig Diaz and his campaign for City Commissioner?"

Tory shook her head. Fifteen years ago she was an engineering student at New Mexico State University, thirty five miles north of El Paso, a relatively new wife, and a very new mother. El Paso, its engineering projects, and its politics, had held no interest for her then.

"Craig was one of the first Hispanic contractors to really hit the big time," said Cal reflectively, "right after affirmative action programs really got rolling. "That was back when establishing some kind of minority program at the local level was the trendy thing to do. There was a big move from some quarters to adopt a local program here, and a lot of state agencies were climbing on the same band wagon. Craig had the golden touch, for a while there he couldn't do anything wrong; he went from being a one man outfit to being a major player in the course of eighteen months or so. Of course, there was a big backlash, there always is, and lots of people attributed his success to being the token Hispanic profiting from a liberal political climate. But I remember Craig; he wasn't a bad guy. I think he just tried to go too far too fast, and got stretched too thin."

"What does this have to do with Monte Vista Heights?"

"It has to do with justifying the fact that the City condemned the project fifteen years ago, with fatal results."

"You mean fatal to the project, right?" It might be devastating for a contractor to end up on the wrong side of the Permitting Department, but Tory hadn't heard of any executions for failing to meet codes. The concept gave a whole new meaning to the City's new buzz word, "One Stop Permitting."

"No, I mean fatal to Craig Diaz," said Cal soberly. "Monte Vista Heights was his landmark project, larger than anything he'd done before. Craig got the financing for the development at the same time he decided to run for City Commission. I have to say this for him, he certainly appeared to practice what he preached. He wanted to establish an independent City program of minority business set asides. The whole affirmative action thing was like a religion to him. He was so busy campaigning that he got overextended, and his work started failing inspections."

"What's fatal about that?" asked Tory. "It can be a nasty wake up call, but it happens all the time."

"Craig kept telling us he was taking care of the problems, but nothing changed. The Permitting Department decided that the situation warranted extra attention, so they made Craig run a water tightness test on his storm sewer system."

"Bummer," said Tory. A water tightness test was a major undertaking. It involved plugging the outfall of a sewer system, filling the drains with water, and recording the water level twenty four hours later. If too much water leaked out during the test period, the system was declared unacceptable. The contractor not only had to fix the problem, he had to find it first.

"His storm drains failed the test," Cal continued. "Craig was blown away by the results. He swore up and down that he'd supervised that part of the construction himself, but I know for a fact that he had his son on the drain construction. Just out of high school he was, poor kid. Craig was so sure that there had been a problem with the test that he got the City to agree to run it again."

"What happened?" Tory could commiserate with anyone who had to make payroll week after week, no matter what else was going on.

"The second set of test results were even worse than the first. The rest of the project was so marginal that the City condemned it, the bank pulled his financing, and Craig went belly up. Transformed from successful contractor and Commission candidate to bankrupt nobody overnight. A few weeks later he drove out there in his pickup in the middle of the afternoon, drank half a bottle of tequila, and put a bullet in his head. They didn't find him til the next day." Tory stared at Cal, trying to keep her mouth from dropping open. "Find that story hard to believe, do you?" he asked. "It's the truth, every word of it."

"Cal," said Tory slowly, "we didn't see a single significant thing wrong with the storm drains." Cal frowned at her. That was obviously not the politically sensitive thing to say, and a heated conversation about storm drains ensued between the two of them.

Drains might not be an exciting topic to the general public, but let them malfunction, and the consequences were both significant and detrimental. Subdivisions had two types of drain systems: storm water and sanitary sewer. Storm drains were intended to convey storm water out of a developed area to prevent flooding, while sanitary sewers collected domestic waste water and transported it to a sewage treatment facility.

Both systems were expected, within reasonable limits, to be water tight. Leaking sanitary sewer lines resulted in the discharge of raw sewage, an aesthetic problem at best and a significant health hazard at worst. A poorly constructed storm drain system could also have catastrophic results; leaking storm water could erode subsurface soils, leading to the sudden collapse of any roads or structures located above the drains.

Like any collection system, storm sewer pipes started out small in the areas where water was first collected, graduating to larger and larger diameter pipe until reaching the discharge point. Only the portions of the system with pipe large enough to accommodate an inspector could be observed directly; the inspection of smaller diameter portions of a drain system had to be accomplished via television cameras traveling the lines, a relatively sophisticated, costly procedure, and definitely outside the scope of the study Tory's firm had been contracted to perform.

The most common causes of leaks in a drain system were cracked pipes, leaky joints, or faulty connections, where the pipe direction or diameter changed. Tory's inspectors had not seen anything that would explain why this particular storm drain system had failed the water tightness test so dismally not once, but two times. She had spent the past week studying the original permit applications, previous test results, and her inspectors' notes and photographs, but she was no closer to being able to explain to Cal Cortez why this project had been condemned fifteen years ago.

The City Engineering Department decided to go looking for their own answers, or justifications, depending on how you looked at it. They decided to run yet another water tightness test. On Monday, the discharge points of the storm drains would be plugged and pumped full of water. In twenty four hours, the field technicians would return, measure the water level, and calculate from the volume of the drains the amount of water that had leaked out. If this volume exceeded the guidelines, the storm drain system would once more be declared unacceptable, and Travers Testing and Engineering Company would be put on the spot to explain how they had missed the problem.

It was a touch of arrogance, perhaps, that had Tory out here alone on a Sunday afternoon, thinking she could find something that had escaped the attention of others. But she had an engineer's curiosity about things that didn't appear to make sense, she had a fifteen year old son at home with a brand new intense interest in a fifteen year old neighbor girl, and she had her father as a house guest. The same father she hadn't seen for the previous seventeen years. When Tory thought about all that put together, it made her decision to do some lone storm drain inspection at Monte Vista Heights seem nothing less than inspired.

And the City had made her job easier by removing all the manhole covers to the drain inlets, obviously in preparation for Monday's water tightness test. As far as Tory was concerned, that was sloppy, dangerous procedure, but the City workers probably reasoned that the subdivision was isolated enough that there wouldn't be a problem. And besides, she was going to be breaking safety rules herself, so she wasn't exactly in a position to quibble.

It was a bright, sunny day, no clouds in sight, and it wasn't like she was planning to crawl into a space that could be full of deadly fumes, she told herself. This was a storm water system, not sanitary pipes with the potential hazard of lethal sewer gas, and not industrial lines conveying chemicals. About the worst that could happen would be to run into unsavory creatures, but it was too cold for rattle snakes to be out, and she was dressed appropriately in boots, blue jeans, and a long sleeved shirt.

Tory resolutely shook off her last misgivings. She only planned to take a look at some random parts of the system, not go too far, and certainly not try make her way through any pipes smaller than what was comfortable, with a hefty safety margin to spare. She would wear her hardhat and she would take her cellular phone with her, along with her torch, clipboard, and camera. Piece of cake.

Tory located the manhole where she was going to enter the system on her site plan of the subdivision. No use being the Lone Ranger of inspection, finding a problem, and then not being able to describe its location. She flipped on her torch and her cellular phone, and lowered herself slowly and carefully through the opening into the drain inlet below.

Although she was not claustrophobic, she had to admit to a healthy dislike of dark, enclosed spaces. As she entered the inlet box, she recalled the rejected report and the invoice for services rendered, now in contention. "It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it," she muttered to herself.

Tory took a moment to get her bearings in the inlet box and take a look at the box itself. That was when she got her first jolt, which later she would tell herself she should have recognized as an omen of bad things to come.

Stamped on the concrete wall of the six foot by four foot inlet box was the name of the manufacturer--El Paso Precast Concrete Company--in large, black block letters. Memories of someone trying to smash a trailer with a wrecking ball while she was in it came back unbidden. Tory took a deep breath and forced herself to think about the matter at hand. "Makes this inlet box a collector's item," she told herself. El Paso Precast Concrete Company had long been sold to another firm, whose name didn't come to mind.

Tory turned her attention from the inlet box to the pipe segments that fed into it. Two sections of pipe, at right angles to each other, took off into the darkness away from the box. One segment was a forty eight inch diameter pipe, the other was a thirty six. Easy choice. Hunched over, Tory began slowly duck walking the dark length of the larger pipe, shining her torch over every inch of the surface, looking for something that could account for the system's water loss. It was slow, uncomfortable going.

After about fifteen minutes, Tory could see a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. The light had to be coming from an opened manhole cover in another inlet box. She told herself that if the pipe diameter stayed the same, and this was simply an inlet for a change of direction, she would walk another length of pipe. But if it necked down to a thirty six inch segment, she was out of there. Smaller diameter pipe would necessitate a mechanic's slide to roll on, and she hadn't come prepared for that.

She heaved a sigh of relief upon approaching the inlet box. It was nice to have some reassurance that the sun was still shining brightly overhead, not to mention the welcome sensation of fresh air as she approached the light. But entering the inlet box gave Tory no relief from the cramped space of the pipe she had just exited, because this inlet box was now accommodating two bodies. Hers, and another lifeless staring one, hanging upside down, stuffed into the access to the inlet, with the face suspended roughly at Tory's eye level.

Never had Tory understood so well what it must be like to be in a claustrophobic panic. She could hear her own ragged breath, knowing it must be her imagination that she couldn't get enough air into her lungs. All she wanted to do was to get out of the enclosed space, and to get out immediately. Instead of giving into the panic, she concentrated on taking slow, deep breaths. To exit the inlet box, she would have to somehow remove the body that was blocking her way. She instinctively knew it would be better if she didn't disturb anything, and the body looked so firmly wedged into position that she was not sure if she could budge it. And, as much as she wanted to get out, she really didn't want to try.

She slowly sank into a sitting position, all thoughts of scorpions and spiders a thing of the past, her back against the concrete box wall. At least this way she didn't have to look the corpse in the face. It was a woman, with a bullet hole in her forehead and black shoulder length hair similar to Tory's own, hanging down and waving gently in the inlet box with every movement Tory made.

The next feeling that hit was an overwhelming fear that she was trapped, and that the person who had killed this woman was standing over the inlet box, ready to kill her, too. She told herself that there had been no one within sight when she had first, eons ago, entered the drain system. Herself answered right back that didn't mean there wasn't someone up there right now, standing over the drain inlet, pointing a gun in Tory's direction.

She kept as quiet as she possibly could, switched off her torch, and forced herself to look up at the woman's face, partially visible in the light shining in from the opened manhole cover. There was some blood, but not much, it was dark and dried, and it ran a course from the hole in the forehead over both sides of the face, disappearing into a gray sweat shirt.

This has to tell me something, thought Tory, if I can only calm down enough to figure it out. The blood doesn't look red, it looks dark and dried, so this woman didn't die recently. And, I'm an engineer, I understand storm drains, which means that water flows downhill, so blood should follow suit. This woman was killed while she was standing or sitting upright, thought Tory. She was dead before she was put into the inlet box. For some reason, Tory found this thought immensely comforting, and she began to feel like she could think again.

The thought that came to mind was that someone else should deal with this, and that her place was at home, no matter what the company she had to keep. She kept her eyes glued to the opened drain inlet, or what she could see of it around the body wedged in there, just in case someone should lean over and start shooting into the box. She reached in her hip pocket for her cell phone, thanking the gods of all technology that this was not one of the times the battery had unexpectedly run out. She further thanked the gods of serendipity that the number she was going to call was one she had committed to memory.

End of Chapter One