A/N: So here it is. The prologue of Re: The Ties that Bind. This chapter was originally 3 pages, now it's 4, but not that much is different about it in content. It was still fun comparing the two side by side. I don't have a beta, so all mistakes are my own.

Prologue
Another Night in Vegas

Flashing red and blue lights illuminated the parking lot. There was a thick smell of copper and death in the desert night air and a growing excited thrill in her gut she often got when the chase began and she thought, yep, this is my job.

The long haired blond standing on the other side of the crime scene tape was Peyton Callaghan. With a silver case in her hand, she stared at the body of Hector Almaraz with large brown eyes. The victim lay on his back in a pool of his own blood. He was thirty-one years old, Hispanic, and resident of the vibrant city of Las Vegas, Nevada. He was pronounced dead at the scene by dispatch. Apparent cause of death was multiple stab wounds to the torso with a serrated blade left a few feet from the body, but the C.O.D. wouldn't be officially disclosed until the corner arrived.

Ducking under the crime scene tape, she headed for the body, her small heeled boots clicking against the concrete, not deterred by the sight or smell of blood or the fact that the poor soul had been stabbed so many times that some of the internal bits were no longer inside or in their proper anatomical position. In not so many words, the body was a mess.

Setting her case down, she pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, and she got to work.

Hazel eyes were dull and vacant of life, staring endlessly into the starry night sky. The petechial hemorrhaging in his eyes suggested suffocation, perhaps from drowning in his own blood. The amount of said blood indicated that this wasn't a body dump. There was smearing in the blood which showed that there had been a struggle. There was still sweat on his upper lip. His body was still a little warm even with the cold night air.

When the coroner arrived and took liver temp he pronounced the time of death to be around an hour or two ago so evidence would be fresh. Preliminary observations suggested two assailants, one holding the victim down while the other preformed the stabbing.

Looking around, she observed her surroundings like a field CSI should. She was greeted by the Las Vegas desert, an empty convenience store with one clerk, currently being questioned, and a kick-ass looking Peterbilt semi truck with custom painted flames, sitting about forty feet from the body.

The teenage boy working in the store claimed to have not seen or heard anything, which was pretty conclusive since the boy's iPod was cranked to deafening levels of Slipknot and Slayer. Other supportive facts included that he had no blood on him and that he looked ready to wet himself upon hearing that there was a murder in the parking lot.

The 911 had come in anonymously. The caller had been male, deep voice, assumedly between the ages of thirty to forty. Anonymous tips were always suspicious and the caller was always the first suspect. In the cases in which the anonymous caller was the perpetrator, the call was a sign of remorse. The voice had been rather scratchy, almost electronic sounding, from what she heard from the recording. But whoever made that call had to have used a disposable cell phone, because the number had not been traceable.

Sighing, she knelt down to examine the body more closely as the coroner backed up his bag and got out of the way.

"Whatcha got?"

Peyton looked over her shoulder as her supervisor strode forward, ducking under the crime scene tape, holding a case similar to her own, but bore many more scuff marks to its surface. Jeffery Ellis, the acting supervisor of the graveyard shift, was in his late fifties, his hair peppered gray. His face was scruffy with age and experience and perpetual five o'clock shadow, but had a kind and gentle demeanor. Just by looking into his gray-blue eyes one knew that they he was nothing short of a genius in his own right both scientifically and philosophically.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, not unkindly.

"There was a 419 at the Bellagio. I left it to Grant and Carter and decided to see how you were doing," he replied.

Peyton became all business. "Victim's name is Hector Almaraz, approximately thirty-one years old. There are extensive stab wounds covering the torso and lividity is fixed so this is the primary crime scene. Time of death was a couple hours ago. Cash and ID left on him suggests that this wasn't a mugging gone wrong and the nice looking Rolex affirms." She looked up at her boss and pointed at the victim's hands. "Dirty fingernails are a good start," she said. "Maybe he scratched one of his killers."

"Killers?" Jeffery asked.

With a gloved hand she pulled back the man's jacket sleeve revealing a heavily bruised wrist. "Position of the body and bruising of the wrists," she indicated. "Someone held him down while the other one stabbed him to death. Anonymous caller indicated two assailants."

"Crime of passion," Jeffery mused. "Clearly, someone wanted this man to suffer."

"Given the condition he's in, I'd say so."

Jeffery lifted the blood-matted jean jacket away from the body and cringed a little at the carnage. Peyton quickly jotted notes and snapped a few pictures. "He has hardly any defensive wounds," Jeffery observed. "Check it out."

Sure enough there were only one or two deep gorges on the man's hands in all. Whoever killed him must have been people he trusted because a lack of defensive wounds suggests that he was taken by surprise. The man probably had no chance once they had him on the ground. The position of the body, elbows bent, and hands on either side of his head corroborated the anonymous caller's tip about two assailants and the blood void on the victim's body also indicated that the stabber had actually sat on top of the man to help hold him down.

"We won't know how many times he was stabbed until he's cleaned up," Peyton said. "I already tried counting, but I can tell you that this was serious overkill. I think he might have been dead already before the stabbing even ended."

"I can't believe no one heard this guy scream or anything," Jeffery said. "We're not that far outside of Clark County."

Peyton wordlessly pointed her flashlight at the victim's mouth. "Blood void around the mouth, cotton fibers," she said. Jeffery took the camera Peyton have been using and snapped a photo. Peyton then withdrew a pair of tweezers and removed a fiber from the corner of the victim's mouth. "He could've been muffled."

"Any suspects yet?" Jeffery asked.

"Just the caller but we can't get a trace."

"What about the store? Was anyone in there?"

"Just a kid, but he didn't hear anything. Kelly is with him now," the blond replied. "She looked for blood on his clothes, under his fingernails, and hands, but he was clean. He still gave us a DNA sample voluntarily."

"Hmm," was the reply, Jeffery's attention drawn elsewhere. "Look at this."

Leaning closer to the body, he lifted a strand of long blond hair from the victim's shirt. The skin tag at the end indicated that the hair had been pulled out.

"Our guy's a brunet," Jeffery said.

"The caller said one male, one female."

"Bag it."

They stuck around the crime scene into the early morning, even when the body had been removed. Every so often, Peyton found herself looking up at the truck in the dark corner of the parking lot. No one would just abandon a truck that good looking alone in a city with the fastest growing crime rate in the country. The whole thing was pure custom and the owner must've sold his soul for it, yet no one had come to claim it.

"Hey, Tony," Peyton called.

A heavy set man in a suit with a gold badge on his chest turned towards her. Tony Miller was the leading detective in homicide, but spent a lot of time at the lab with them. In his mid-fifties, his hair line was receding and his eyes and mouth were starting to wrinkle. He was a good man and good cop, married to the job that resulted in his subsequent divorce. But he had two kids, both in college now, so retiring from the force was not in the immediate future.

He stepped up next to her before the truck eying it as suspiciously as she did. "What's up?"

"Why don't you run the plates on this guy," she suggested. "It's been sitting here for hours and no one's come around asking for it yet."

"I'll get on it," he said lifting his phone to his ear. "Yeah, we got an abandoned semi at Clark's Party Store. Nevada plate. Number is OPR 1M31. Model? Umm…"

"Petebilt," Peyton provided. "I'm thinking 379, but don't quote me on that."

Miller gave her a strange look. "Umm, it's a Peterbilt semi, possible model number 379, blue with custom flames and rims. Broaden the search from that. Yeah, call me when you get it. Right." He snapped his phone shut. "They said it'd be a few minutes."

"This has got to be the most badass truck I've ever seen," she stated, venturing closer and staring up at it appraisingly.

"What do you know about trucks?"

"My dad," she replied. "He drove them. He had a Peterbilt semi too."

They only had to wait a little while for Miller's call to come in. Peyton watched his expression falter from calm and collected to confused and suspicious. She waited patiently for him to end the call, but already knew what he was going to say before he said it.

"The license number doesn't exist in the state of Nevada," he said. "They'll do a county wide search."

Peyton nodded slowly as she faced the truck again. She stepped towards the driver's side and shined her flashlight on door. There was a smear of blood, but a still pretty distinctive partial finger print on the handle.

"Jeffery!" she called.

He boss rushed over and examined the spot she was illuminating with her flashlight. "Well, hello, Dolly."

"I bet this is an unregistered truck. Plate's fake," she hopped up and peered through the window. "The interior looks custom, too, so I'll have trace look into it when we get this back to the lab."

"I see," Jeffery said. "Can you get a print off that?"

"I'm sure as hell gonna try," she responded. "It's smeared a little, but I think there will be enough to at least get a partial." She looked over at Miller. "Can you get us a tow-truck? We're going to have to take the big guy with us."

Miller already had his phone to his ear. "On it."

Not long after that, Peyton was watching the truck get hauled away. The body of Hector Almaraz was on its way to the autopsy table and the truck was on its way to the lab's auto garage. Most of her interest, however, was in the truck; an unregistered truck in the middle of nowhere, without a driver, looking mighty fine and expensive with a bloody, smeared fingerprint on the handle. She hadn't even submitted the blood to DNA testing, but she was riding on it belonging to one of the killers. Maybe they locked themselves out and were forced to abandon it. From where she stood, the truck could be a key piece of evidence if it somehow belonged to the victim, the perpetrators, or even the anonymous caller.

Jeffery left soon after the truck to follow up with the autopsy, but Kelly was making her way towards Peyton carrying her crime kit, curly brown hair bouncing with every step but remaining perfectly in place.

"What do you think?" she asked, her voice thick with a southern accent.

"That Hector Almaraz pissed off the wrong people. This was personal," Peyton supplied. "Let's get a hold of the victim's bank records. Check for any recent withdraw or iffy transactions. And let's checked out where he worked. Maybe he had a beef with someone there."

"What about the family?" Kelly asked.

"What about them?"

"They need to be notified."

Peyton shrugged. "Yeah, okay. Get Miller to pick them up. Maybe the wife knows something."

"Will you question them?"

Peyton rolled her eyes. "Hell, no. I don't need to deal with a weepy widow. You do it."

Kelly fumed angrily and shoved a plastic bag into the other woman's hands. "You don't have a sensitive bone in your body, do you?"

Peyton frowned, clearly offended, as she watched Kelly stomp off towards the car. She could to be sensitive…if she wanted to be. She was just doing her job and it was true. Peyton didn't handle emotional people very well.

She looked at the bag containing a brown leather wallet. She took it out of the bag and opened it. Her expression faltered. The first picture she saw was a family portrait of the victim, his wife, and three children, all girls and all under the age of ten, one of which was still an infant. Her finger traced the infant's cheek in the photo.

She sighed through her nose and looked down at the bloodstained concrete, void of a body, as she snapped the wallet closed. Placing the wallet back in the evidence bag, she picked up her case and bypassed the crime scene tape and headed for the car, where Kelly waited, arms crossed as she sat in passenger seat, looking anywhere but at her. While Kelly may think she was insensitive, she couldn't allow herself to make every case personal. No one could survive this job if they did.

A/N: There you have it. I will try to updated regularly. Compare it to the original and let me know what you think!

Please Review!

-Ray

5/3/15