Killing Time Read online

  At last he saw movement at the back of the house, and he grabbed the binoculars. They were already focused, so all he had to do was train them on the two people coming out of the house.

  He muttered a curse; Davis was between him and the woman. But he could see the woman’s red hair even though she was wearing a baseball cap; sunglasses hid her eyes. She said something to Davis and smiled up at him, and his hand slid over her ass as he bent to kiss her. Then he opened the car door for her, closed it after her, and went around to the other side.

  Ruth was right about one thing, Byron mused; Davis was definitely having sex. But they had seen a blond, and this woman had red hair. Either Davis had more than one woman keeping him happy, or the woman had changed her hair color.

  Changing hair color was so easy it wasn’t much different from changing clothes. Between the baseball cap and sunglasses, Byron hadn’t been able to see enough of the woman’s face to definitely identify her, but his instinct said this was Nikita Stover. She was about the right height and weight, and she was with Davis. Stover had last been seen leaving the courthouse with him; then later Davis had reported that she’d left town. Byron knew she wouldn’t have done any such thing, so that meant Davis was lying.

  Stover had made Davis her ally, maybe hooked him in with sex. How much she had told him was anyone’s guess, but likely not very much; she was one of those by-the-book agents who either didn’t have the imagination to improvise or was afraid to veer away from the rules. On the other hand, perhaps he’d underestimated her, because she had obviously improvised when it came to Davis. She was using him to provide shelter, and possibly using his resources to investigate.

  For a brief moment he thought about taking both of them out, but cops tended to lose all sense of perspective when one of their own was murdered. The local ones were already antsy enough, with three murders inside a week in this little town that normally wouldn’t see many more than that in a year. The citizenry would be on edge, too, and paying close attention to anything out of the ordinary.

  No, this was better left to a more private time and place. It didn’t matter. He knew where she was. She thought she was safe, but Davis was evidently called out on a lot of nights and Stover would be left at the house alone. He had her now.

  27

  Knox drove slowly down the treelined street, his head swiveling. He already had his cell phone in his hand and he keyed it. “Get me the registration on this license plate.” He recited the number, then said, “ASAP.”

  To Nikita he said, “Take a look at that car, the dark green one. Is that the one you saw last night?”

  She gave it a quick look, but she didn’t need to do that. “No, the one last night was a light color, either pale gray or white.”

  “That would be Ruth’s car, then.”

  “What’s wrong with the dark green car?”

  “So far as I know, it doesn’t belong to anyone on this street.”

  She wasn’t surprised that he would recognize all his neighbors’ cars. Cops simply noticed things. Without thinking about it, they registered clothing, body language, their surroundings. If she and Knox had been driving down a busy freeway, he could probably have described every vehicle he’d passed in the last five minutes, plus all the vehicles around him, and some of the ones on the other side of the freeway. Working the streets developed that kind of hyperawareness. She had a form of it herself, not so much when it came to vehicles, but in analyzing evidence and reports. She knew what rang false, and what was important.

  Law enforcement in her time relied too much on technology, she thought. Traffic was monitored by cameras almost everywhere, except for the long, empty stretches of highway out west; as a consequence, she didn’t know a single cop in her time who really paid attention to traffic. They still noticed people, could expertly read body language, but part of their vigilance had been abandoned to the unblinking cameras.

  Mankind had to learn the same lessons over and over; many battles in the decades-long war with terrorists in this century had been waged in cyberspace. Information and communication satellites had been targeted, not with missiles, but with spammers, jammers, and technoviruses. Secure defense sites had been hacked. When the computer networks went down, commerce had been first disrupted, then shut down. Having great technology was wonderful; completely relying on it was stupid.

  Knox’s cell phone beeped and a woman’s voice said, “That license plate is registered to Enterprise.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Enterprise was the name of the rental agency where Nikita had gotten her car. “It’s a rental?” she asked.

  “Yeah, and I’m going to find out who rented it.”

  Nikita sighed. She didn’t think she would be having breakfast soon, after all. On the other hand, something was disturbing Knox, and she had just been thinking how his instincts were probably much sharper than those of law enforcement officers in her time, so it followed that she should pay attention to those instincts. Probably one of his neighbors had guests or a family vehicle was in the shop, but it had to be investigated.

  Not to her surprise, the rental office he went to was the same one where she had rented her car; it must be the only one in town, she thought. A town as small as Pekesville, without a commercial airport, wouldn’t do a booming business in car rentals. The neat single-story building was of yellow brick, with a halfhearted stab at landscaping in the form of some sort of bush planted on each side of the door. The small parking area in front was shaded by large trees, while a fenced area in back held the vehicles available for rental. Unfortunately, from what she could see, the back lot was empty.

  Knox pulled off his sunglasses as they went inside, and Nikita did the same, hooking one of the earpieces in the neck of her T-shirt.

  “Hey, Dylan,” he said to the diligent young man behind the chest-high counter. “Troy around?”

  “He’s in the back, Mr. Davis. Want me to get him?” Dylan gave a quick glance at Nikita, then another one. She smiled at him, and he flushed as he looked away.

  “Yeah, I got a question I think he can help me with.” Knox leaned on the counter, all lazy grace. “Won’t take but a minute.”

  Dylan disappeared through a door. Nikita leaned against the counter beside Knox. “You know him, obviously.”

  “Yeah, I busted his ass for smoking pot back when he was twelve or thirteen. Scared the shit out of him. Never had any more trouble with him, either.”

  “Good job,” she said, patting his ass in appreciation.

  One eyebrow hiked up as he gave her one of those long, blue looks of his. “You keep doing that. You fixated on my ass, or something?”

  “It’s a fine ass,” she murmured, because she could hear Dylan returning. She propped both arms on the counter, the picture of decorum.

  Dylan was followed by a stocky man who was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and a tie, and drying his hands and arms with a towel. “I was cleaning up one of the cars,” he explained, making Nikita wonder why the manager was evidently doing menial labor, but maybe he was the sort of person who preferred doing things outside rather than sitting at a desk. “Dylan said you have a question. Come on back to my office and I’ll see if I can help you.”

  It couldn’t be that easy, Nikita thought as she and Knox followed Troy back to his office. In her time, not one shred of information or evidence was given without the proper authorization. No matter how insignificant, no matter if a cop was talking to a member of his own family, everything had to be authorized.

  “Tina, this is Troy Almond. We were in school together. Troy, Tina.”

  If Troy noticed that Knox had omitted her last name, he gave no indication, smiling and saying, “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” and waiting until she extended her hand before he extended his to take it. In her time, no one shook hands anymore; that practice had died out during the great viral pandemics that had killed so many millions of people. She had read about the practice, though, and read that polite men didn�