Killing Time Read online

  She blew out a shaky breath. “I agree. You can’t touch me again until tonight, not even for just a kiss.”

  “I don’t think you have to go that far.”

  “I do.” She looked around; if the kiss had gone on much longer, she might have been taking off her clothing right here, surrounded by mice, briars, and assorted other unpleasantness. “Let’s look around and get out of here. I don’t like all of this out-of-control greenery. The forest is one thing; this is a bit spooky.”

  “Because Howard hung himself from that tree over there?”

  “No, it’s because people used to live here but now it’s abandoned and rotting, and soon there won’t be anything left to show they were here. Also, I think I’m bleeding in a dozen different places from these damn briars—” She stopped as she felt something crawling on her arm. She looked down, made a quick sound of disgust, and slapped a bug away. “I’m also not fond of bugs, and I hate mice.”

  “Got it. I’ll hurry.”

  He bent and picked up the hatchet, then set to work clearing away the vines and bushes that almost obscured the opening. He poked his head inside. “There’s a lot of stuff in here,” he finally said.

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Rotten cardboard boxes, for one thing. Some sort of clamp set up on a board; he must have used it to hold the models while he worked on them. A stack of Playboy magazines that I wouldn’t touch for love nor money; looks like rats have been living in them for years.”

  She knew what the magazine was, because it had existed for almost a hundred years before becoming defunct. Some carefully preserved issues were occasionally sold at auction, where collectors bought them for ridiculously high prices. They would cry to see these issues abandoned and rotting. She thought it would be a mercy not to tell Knox how much they would be worth in her time.

  “Wouldn’t all of this have been thoroughly searched at the time of his suicide?”

  “I can’t say. It should have been, but from everything I’ve heard or read, there were no signs of foul play; so I don’t think there was ever a criminal investigation. In a case of suicide, you try to help the family as much as possible.”

  He stepped inside the storage area, and Nikita carefully followed, watching where she put her feet. The thick, musty smell of rot filled her nostrils. Junk was piled helter-skelter in the small space: folding metal lawn chairs, discarded clothing, stacks of magazines and newspapers, the cardboard boxes Knox had mentioned. There were two of them, stacked, taped across the top, which was useless now because their bottoms would probably fall out as soon as they were moved.

  “Why would anyone go to the trouble to box something up and tape it, then just leave it behind?” she wondered aloud.

  “I wonder why people do a lot of things,” he said with a grunt as he booted a chair out of the way.

  She didn’t want to touch those nasty boxes, but she didn’t see any way out of it. “Do you have a blanket or tarp in the trunk? Those things will disintegrate when we try to move them. If we can pull them onto a tarp, then we can drag them out of here.”

  He took his keys from his pocket. “There’s a tarp. It’s in the bottom of the box I keep in there.”

  She made her way back to the car and unlocked the trunk, then dug through a box of equipment and found the green tarp. She also plucked two pairs of plastic gloves from a package that was also in the box.

  “Here,” she said when she reached the garage again, handing him his keys, then a pair of gloves.

  “Thanks.” He snapped the gloves on like a surgeon, and took the tarp from her. She pulled on her own gloves, and working carefully, they spread the tarp out in front of the boxes. Knox used the hatchet to swipe down some monstrous spiderwebs that hung close to the boxes; then they each carefully moved into the cramped space, one on each side.

  As gingerly as possible they shifted the top box, sliding it instead of jerking and lifting, while trying to support the bottom with their hands. It was useless; as soon as the weight of the contents weren’t supported by the box underneath, the box tore apart and dumped the contents onto the tarp.

  The same thing happened with the bottom box. As soon as they lifted it, the bottom tore out. By dropping and shoving, they managed to get half the box on the tarp. The spilled contents seemed to be mostly textbooks, stained and musty, but in fairly good shape. They began moving the textbooks to the tarp; they might have belonged to Howard Easley, in which case he might have written something in the margins, or left a paper stuck between the pages.

  Knox made a soft sound, staring at a metal box that had been packed in with the textbooks.

  “What is it?” Nikita asked as he picked it up.

  He glanced up at her, his expression both surprised and gleeful. “I’m not certain, but I think it’s the time capsule.”

  30

  Nikita looked down at the box. Silly of her, but she’d been expecting something that was shaped like a cylinder, like a capsule of medication. The phrase “time capsule” brought to mind something sleek and capable of traveling through time, not a rather large metal box that was about eighteen by twelve inches, and perhaps five inches high. “Are you certain?”

  “Not until we open it, no. The time capsule was wrapped in waterproof plastic before it was buried, too. But it was this shape; I think it was custom-made at a local metalworking plant.”

  The box was in surprisingly good condition, insulated as it had been all those years by the heavy textbooks. She squatted next to it, carefully looking it over but not touching it. “It’s been here all these years; it wasn’t buried beneath the flagpole at all.”

  “I watched them bury it. The coach must have come back that night and dug it up again. It was New Year’s night, cold, snowing, the bowl games were on; I doubt there was any traffic at all in town, if he timed it right, waited until the third-shift deputies left on patrol.” He squatted next to her. “There goes your theory that someone was sent in ahead of Hugh and got the box for safekeeping.”

  “Then the flash must have been Hugh transiting in; with a laser, he could have dug that hole in no time, found out the box wasn’t there, and left before the security cameras caught up in time.”

  “Then he must have transitioned right back out, because there were no footprints, anything to show how he did it. I thought these links were like a two-lane highway, with no exit points other than the beginning and end. Wouldn’t he have gone back to your time?”

  “Theoretically, it depends on the link settings,” she said slowly. “I heard that the Transit Laboratory was working to develop links that could be programmed in the field, but I haven’t heard that they’re certified for use yet. The regular links have two settings: one for the destination, and one for home. The traveler activates the setting needed. If Hugh is transiting short distances back and forth, then he must have stolen the prototypes.”

  “That’s damn interesting,” Knox drawled. “Explains how the killer got into Taylor Allen’s house and out again without touching anything that we could tell. I thought he’d wiped his prints off the doorknobs and gone out through the automatic garage doors, but if Hugh is just popping in and out, he could show up anywhere.”

  Nikita’s hair lifted and she automatically looked around, then blew out a relieved breath. “He’d have to know exactly where we are and have the GPS coordinates before he could transition to us. He wouldn’t want to do that anyway unless he could be certain he was in a position where we couldn’t see him. Remember what happened to Luttrell? The traveler is at a disadvantage until the transition is complete.”

  “If we go back to my house, he has the exact coordinates,” Knox pointed out. “I don’t know how he tracked you there—”

  “I do,” Nikita interrupted. “Mrs. Lacey.”

  Knox opened his mouth, probably to automatically disagree, then abruptly shut it. A look of cold anger edged into his eyes. Cops didn’t believe in coincidence. First Mrs. Lacey had seen them together at Wal-Mart