Killing Time Read online

  The killer was perhaps strong, but he hadn’t used his hands. There were no livid finger marks on the old man’s neck, just a single ligature mark, meaning something had been looped over his head, twisted, and pulled. A belt, maybe. Could have been a rope, a long scarf, anything that was long enough and pliable.

  It wasn’t Knox’s crime scene. The mayor lived within the city limits, so the scene was being worked by the city detectives. There was a great deal of cooperation between the two forces, though, effectively combining the experience, manpower, and budgets. They knew each other, formed specialized task forces together, and each helped the other as needed.

  They didn’t need Knox to work the scene, but the city detectives were always interested in hearing his observations; his reputation for being insatiably curious was well-known. He wasn’t the only county investigator present; Roger Dee Franklin was also there, pretty much doing the same thing Knox was doing, which was watching.

  The murder had occurred shortly after dark, by the next door neighbor’s reckoning. She’d seen Harlan let his cat out as he did every day, late in the afternoon. It was the cat that had led her to check on Harlan, because the poor thing was standing at the door yowling to be let in, and he never ignored his cat. The racket had finally gotten on her nerves and she had called him. When he didn’t answer the phone, she then called 911.

  Roger Dee heard the cat story and drifted over to where Knox was standing. “Good thing the cat was outside,” he murmured. If cats were trapped in a house alone with a dead person, they had been known to start snacking on the body. People forgot that cats were predators as well as pets. After seeing a few instances where someone old had died alone, with only a cat or cats for company, Knox swore to himself that if his lifestyle ever allowed him to have a pet, it would be a fish. He liked cats, but not enough to be their food.

  Knox let his gaze drift back to the murder scene. There was nothing similar to the scene at the Allen house; the method was different, and on the surface the two victims had nothing in common, one being a fairly prosperous lawyer with a trophy wife, the other a retired, widowed old gentleman who owned a cat and had lived in the same house for fifty years. From what the neighbor said, Harlan Forbes didn’t leave the house much, content to putter in his flower garden or sit on his front porch watching traffic pass by. His daughter or granddaughter usually brought his groceries once a week or so, or would pick him up to take him on an outing. He’d grown increasingly frail over the past year, and had begun talking about maybe selling his house and moving into an assisted-living apartment. The poor old guy didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

  With nothing to connect the two murders, Knox was amazed at his own conviction that they were, somehow, related. He wasn’t crazy enough to mention that to anyone, however. He’d be laughed out of the county. If he hadn’t known Nikita, if he hadn’t seen someone materialize right in front of him, if he didn’t know a killer from the future was in the area, the idea would never have occurred to him, either.

  The weird things that had been happening were all linked. The time capsule, the flashes out at Jesse Bingham’s place, Nikita, the time traveling, Taylor Allen’s murder—those were definitely linked, though Nikita didn’t know exactly how Taylor Allen figured into it. She knew only that her UT had killed him, not why, and not who. So . . . how did Harlan Forbes’s murder connect?

  Harlan hadn’t been robbed. There were no signs of forcible entry, but neither had his doors been locked. Most people around town didn’t lock their doors if they were at home, until they went to bed. Both the method and the fact that nothing had been stolen said that the murder wasn’t drug related, because an addict would have been looking to score some cash or something to sell.

  “Poor old guy,” said Roger Dee, echoing Knox’s earlier thought. “Who’d want to kill someone like him? Retired, living off his pension—and God knows, being mayor of Pekesville never paid much. If he’d been robbed, at least there would be some sense to it, but to just come in and kill him—why? Reckon one of his relatives was in a hurry to inherit this old house and some beat-up furniture?”

  “Could be.” If Harlan had a hefty life insurance policy, maybe, or a nice nest egg in the bank. He hadn’t lived as if he had money, but then a lot of old folks who’d gone through the Depression squirreled their money away and lived as if they could barely make it from month to month. Knox tried to think of all the possibilities, but the fact was he was still convinced this was somehow connected to Nikita’s case. Well, it wasn’t his scene to work; the city boys would check out the insurance/bank-account angle, and he’d help out here with interviewing the neighbors.

  He and Roger Dee set out with their notebooks, knocking on doors and asking questions. This was an old, established neighborhood, and most of the residents were retired, which meant they were usually home at night watching television. None of them reported seeing anything or hearing anything unusual. They were all aghast at the violence done so close to home, and to someone they knew and liked, but not one of them was any help at all.

  It was after two AM when he wearily drove home. The day had been a very, very long one, and when he pulled into his driveway and saw the lights still on inside the house, he knew it wasn’t over yet.

  Nikita sat at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee steaming close to her hand as she read one of Knox’s books and waited for him. When she heard the car pull into the driveway, she got up and looked out the kitchen door to make certain it was him, then unlocked the door and opened it for him.

  He looked tired when he came in, but why shouldn’t he? It was late, he needed some sleep. Instead of going to bed, however, when he came in he sniffed the air and asked, “Is that coffee fresh?”

  “I made it about an hour ago,” she said as she returned to her seat at the table. She was proud that she’d figured out what the coffeemaker was, and how to work it. She had done the first because she’d seen a machine at Knox’s office with the name “Mr. Coffee” printed on it, and though this one didn’t have that name, it was essentially the same machine, the carafe differing slightly in shape. Without any instructions, she had puzzled out the procedure: the big empty space had measuring marks on it, so something went in there. The coffee? But if the coffee went there, then what was the box of paper coffee filters for? By experimenting, she discovered that the filter perfectly fit in the little basket, so that was where the coffee had to go. That meant the empty tank was for the water.

  She found an unopened bag of coffee, read the instructions on how much coffee to use for each cup of water, and carefully measured both into the machine. Then it was a matter of pressing the On button, and after a moment the water began hissing and spewing into the carafe. Simple. And it tasted wonderful.

  “Guess coffee’s still around two hundred years from now,” he said as he got a cup from the cabinet and poured some for himself.

  “Definitely. It’s the largest cash crop in South America.”

  “Even bigger than oil?”

  “The oil market crashed when technology moved on.” She remained in her position, book open, and kept her gaze on the book even though she was no longer seeing the words.

  He pulled up a chair across from her and collapsed heavily into it. He rubbed his eyes, then folded both hands around the coffee cup. “The victim is a former mayor, Harlan Forbes. The MO is totally different, strangulation. Harlan was eighty-five, physically frail. There’s nothing that ties his murder to Taylor Allen’s, except my gut feeling.”

  “Could the mayor have written some sort of research paper that went in the time capsule?”

  “No, he didn’t even go to college. He was just one of those good old boys with the ability to glad-hand and schmooze, intelligent enough to be a good administrator, but not a go-getter.”

  Most of that, she mused, was in English, and she could understand the meaning of the idioms she didn’t know by the way he used them. Glad-hand. She had to remember that.

  “Perhap