Killing Time Read online

  “Don’t tell me somebody done dug up that time capsule a week ago, and you boys have just noticed.”

  “According to your tape, it was still there at sunset yesterday.”

  She wheeled, stared at the image. “If it was there yesterday, then whoever took it’s on that tape.”

  “I didn’t see anyone,” he repeated patiently, and fast-forwarded through to dawn to show her. When he stopped the tape, they could see the hole at the base of the flagpole and the granite marker flipped off to the side. A ferocious frown pulled her brows together.

  “Run it again,” she snapped, coming to stand behind him.

  He did, rewinding the tape yet again, and this time doing periodic stops of the tape to see when the vandalism first appeared. At 2:30 AM, the hole was there. When he stopped it again, at 1:53 AM, the site was undisturbed.

  “Now run it in real time,” she said, dragging a chair over. She gave her monitors a quick look, then settled her attention on the tape playing in front of her.

  Knox punched Play and the time-counter began clicking forward a second at a time. Seven minutes later he said, “Shit, what was that?” A brief, white flash had glared on the screen. Then it was gone, and so was the time capsule.

  He stopped the tape, hit Rewind, then almost immediately hit Play again. The tape had backed up three minutes. The same thing happened. The ground was undisturbed, then came that white flash, and when it faded, the capsule was gone.

  “Somebody’s messing with my camera,” Tarana said in a voice of doom.

  “I don’t think so.” Frowning, Knox rewound the tape over those same few crucial minutes. “Watch the timer.”

  Together they watched the seconds ticking away. At 2:00 AM, the white flash filled the screen. At 2:01 AM, the flash faded and the time capsule was gone.

  “That’s not possible,” Tarana snapped, surging to her feet and kicking her chair. She turned and glared at all the monitors. “If somebody’s messing with that camera, he can mess with all these, and that ain’t gonna happen.”

  Silently Knox watched the sequence again. He hadn’t noticed the flash when he’d been fast-forwarding or rewinding. But it was definitely there, and the granite slab had been in place before the flash but was pushed aside afterward, and the dark hole gaped at the foot of the flagpole.

  He rewound the tape all the way. The time display was exactly twenty-four hours before he’d come in here and Tarana had stopped the tape. He didn’t know if anyone could tamper with the tape without messing up the time, or if it was even possible without someone coming into this office, in which case no way had a bunch of high school kids been responsible.

  He scratched his jaw. He supposed he could sit with his watch in one hand and time the tape, but that would take twenty-four hours and be boring as hell besides. There was an easier way to get to the bottom of this.

  Tarana was stalking back and forth behind him, breathing fire and muttering curses. Knox felt sorry for the next person who came through that door, because, deprived of a definite target, she might just take her ire out on anyone handy.

  “I’m going over to the hardware store,” he said, sliding his chair back and grabbing his coffee cup.

  “Hardware store? What you going to the hardware store for? You can’t just waltz in here and show me somebody’s been messing with my cameras, then just waltz out again to go buy some nails. You sit back down!”

  “Dad has security cameras, too,” Knox said. “One of them is pointed toward the door.”

  “So?” she snapped, then realization dawned. “Oh, I gotcha. Glass door, big glass storefront, right across the street from the flagpole.”

  He winked at her as he went out the door.

  The square was busy now as he crossed the street; people were coming to the courthouse, taking care of business like car tags, driver’s licenses, boat registrations. Some of the stores were open, including the hardware store; the rest of them opened at nine. MacFarland had strung a nice crime-scene perimeter, blocking off a good twenty yards in either direction from the flagpole, thereby blocking the sidewalk and making people walk around.

  The bell above the door dinged when Knox walked in, and Kelvin looked up as he was checking out a customer. “Be with you in a minute, son,” he said.

  “Take your time.” Looking up, Knox located the security camera and turned to follow the alignment. Just as he’d thought, the flagpole was almost dead center opposite the front door. Whoever had done the vandalism might have somehow blocked the courthouse security camera, though he didn’t see how, but this camera was inside the store and hadn’t been tampered with.

  The customer left and Knox went over to the checkout counter. “I need to see your security tape,” he said to Kelvin. He nodded out the window. “Somebody dug up the time capsule last night and somehow blocked the courthouse camera. I figure your camera caught the action.”

  Kelvin looked up at the camera, following the path the same way Knox had. “Reckon so. I wondered what all that yellow tape was for. That’s the time capsule we watched them bury, right?”

  “The same one. Unless they dug it up and buried a fresh one that I don’t know about.”

  “Nineteen eighty-five. Southern Cal won the Rose Bowl, and I had to listen to that asshole Aaron for a whole year.”

  Kelvin always referred to his brother-in-law Aaron as “asshole Aaron” because he liked the alliteration; he didn’t, however, like his brother-in-law. Reaching beneath the counter, he ejected a tape and handed it over the counter to Knox. “There you go.”

  “I don’t know when I’ll get it back.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I got extras.”

  Tape in hand, Knox went back to his office. He had a small TV/VCR combo and he turned it on, then slipped in the tape. With the remote in his hand, he rewound until he was close to the right time, then in fits and starts until 1:59 AM showed on the clock display. The detail wasn’t as good and the glass distorted the view some, but he could make out the square granite marker right where it was supposed to be. He pressed Play and watched. There was always some variance in clocks, so he had no idea how long he’d actually have to watch.

  At 2:03:17, there was a white flash. Knox sat up straight, staring at the screen. At 2:03:18, the flash faded. Now the pale square of the granite marker was lying off to the side, and the ground had been disturbed.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. “What in hell is going on?”

  2

  A more careful examination of the scene revealed exactly nothing. The granite marker was polished on the side that bore the engraved dates, but a careful dusting picked up no fingerprints at all. There definitely weren’t any footprints. The whole thing was weird.

  By now, Knox wasn’t the only one who was curious. Tarana was furious, still certain someone was messing with her security cameras even though Knox had tried to tell her his dad’s store camera had shown the same brief flash, then nothing else. He figured when she calmed down some, he’d try again.

  MacFarland was telling everyone how he’d noticed the hole when he drove by on his way in to work; others had noticed the hole, but hadn’t thought anything about it. Now, if there’d been a body lying there, that would have been different, but a hole in the ground hadn’t seemed all that suspicious.

  Peke County was small, and not a hotbed of crime. Pekesville had a comfortable population of twenty-three thousand, just big enough to afford some conveniences that wouldn’t be found in a smaller town but not big enough to attract gang activity or satanists, anything exotic like that. The sheriff’s department more normally handled the garden variety of trouble: domestic violence, theft, drunk driving, some drugs. Lately meth labs had become real popular, and since the labs were normally set up in remote locations, that meant most of them were in the country rather than within Pekesville’s city limits, which meant the deputies had fast become experts in how to handle the literally explosive situation.

  But a hole in the ground? W