Killing Time

by Linda Howard

  Carly nodded. “He’s inside,” she said, falling into step beside Knox as he strode toward the house. “When he didn’t show up at his office, his secretary called but didn’t get an answer. She tried his cell phone, and when she didn’t get an answer on it, either, she called Mrs. Allen, who, incidentally, is in Louisville visiting friends. Mrs. Allen reported that she’d talked to Mr. Allen first thing this morning, and he hadn’t mentioned anything to her about having to go anywhere before going to the office. The secretary was afraid maybe he’d had a heart attack, so she called the department and I was dispatched out here to check on him.”

  “You found him?” Knox asked sharply.

  “Yes, sir. First thing, I checked the garage, and his car is still in there. I knocked on the door but no one answered.” She pulled out her notepad and glanced at it. “This was at oh-nine-eighteen. The front door is locked. I tried both the back door and the sliding glass doors on the deck, but they also are locked.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “I didn’t, sir. No one has. I came back around front and tried looking through the windows. He’s lying on his stomach in the middle of the living room floor.”

  “Possible heart attack?”

  “No, sir. He has a spear in his back.”

  “A spear?” Knox echoed, startled and not at all certain he’d understood.

  “Yes, sir. I estimate its length at roughly five feet.”

  They went up the steps together. The house was one of those newer houses built to make it look old, with a wide porch wrapping around two sides. The wood was painted white, and the shutters on either side of the tall windows were a neat dark blue. The porch itself was painted a medium gray, and looking down, Knox plainly saw one set of footprints on the planks. He pointed, and Carly said, “Mine.”

  There were no other prints. Not many people came to the front door, then. Taylor and his wife would normally have entered and left through the garage; because they were outside city limits, their mail was delivered by a rural carrier who put the mail in a box on the side of the road, instead of bringing it to the house.

  Carly directed him to the bank of windows on the left. The curtains were partially drawn, so he stepped to the side and looked in. The porch provided shade, and the lights were on inside; he didn’t have to press his face to the glass to see. A man lay prone on the living room carpet, his head turned toward them and—by God, it really was a spear in his back. A fucking spear.

  Taylor Allen’s eyes were open and fixed, and blood had run from his open mouth and pooled around his head. He lay in that particular boneless manner that was achieved only in death.

  Knox had seen people killed by pistol, rifle, and shotgun; he’d seen people who had been run over by car, pickup truck, tractor, motorcycle, and big semis. He’d seen people who had been sliced and diced by a variety of sharp objects, from a pocket knife to a chain saw. This, however, was a first. “Not many people use spears nowadays,” he said pensively.

  Carly gave an abrupt cough, turning her back while she covered her mouth with her hand.

  “You okay?” he asked, not really paying attention to her while he studied the scene in the living room. “If you have to puke, go out in the yard.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said in a muffled voice. “I mean, I’m okay. Just had a tickle in my throat.”

  Absently he fished in his pocket, came up with a cough drop he’d been carrying around since winter and could never think to throw away when he was emptying his pockets, and held it out to her. She coughed some more as she took it from him, the sound stifled as she tried to control it.

  Nothing looked disturbed inside, from what he could see. No lamps were overturned; the furniture all seemed to be in place. For all the world it looked as if Taylor Allen had been caught unawares by a spear-throwing intruder—who could still be inside, though that was unlikely. The locked doors didn’t necessarily mean anything; most doors could be locked by turning a lock or depressing a button, then shutting the door as you left.

  Boyd Ray came hustling up, carrying a tackle box of his gear. “Whatcha got?” he said as he puffed up the steps.

  “A clean scene,” Knox replied, stepping back. “No one’s been inside.”

  Boyd’s red, perspiring face lit up. “No shit. Well, hallelujah. Let’s see what I can find.” Not often did a forensics team find an untouched scene; usually it was already contaminated by the responding officers, or family members, or even well-meaning neighbors.

  Giving Boyd time to collect his evidence wouldn’t make Taylor Allen any less dead. Knox withdrew to the other side of the road and let Boyd work.

  Collecting evidence was a painstaking process. Smooth surfaces were dusted for prints, photos were taken, tweezers were used to pluck tiny pieces of paper or cloth or other material out of the grass. Boyd made several circuits of the house, looking for footprints, tire prints in the driveway, anything he could photograph, lift, or otherwise preserve. The summer day grew hotter. Eastern Kentucky was usually cooler than the rest of the state, because of the mountainous terrain, but today the temperature had to be at least ninety.

  Finally Boyd signaled he was finished with the outside, as he carried some of his gear to his van. Knox and one of his investigators, Roger Dee Franklin, tried to finesse all the door locks but were unable to get them open. The sliding glass doors had been secured with a safety bar. Finally, in frustration, Knox called for the heavy battering ram they used to knock down doors. He selected the back door for their entrance, as it was the farthest from the crime scene, and let the boys do their job. When the back door was reduced to separate pieces hanging lopsidedly on the hinges, he and Roger Dee, along with Boyd, stepped into the house.

  The first thing Knox noticed was that the door had been locked with a sturdy dead bolt.

  Ditto the front door. The dead bolt there was even bigger. The sliding doors were out because there was no way to fix the security bar in place from outside.

  But the house was empty. An efficient search revealed that the only person inside, other than themselves, was the victim.

  “How in hell?” Roger Dee muttered to himself. “All the doors are locked, and no one else is here. Don’t tell me Mr. Allen speared himself.”

  “The garage,” Knox said. “The garage door opener is probably missing from the car. Make sure Boyd dusts the car for prints.” That was the only logical way for the killer to exit; he could then lower the garage door and the house was locked up tight. It was an excellent delaying tactic.

  Roger Dee left, and returned to say, “No opener that I can see, but the car is one of the new ones with the garage door opener built in. He probably didn’t have a separate remote.”

  “Bet he did. We’ll find out from his wife. Most people don’t go to the bother of programming the built-in openers when they’ve got the remote right there anyway. By the way, has Mrs. Allen been contacted?”

  “A couple of friends are driving her home.”

  “She probably hasn’t realized yet that she can’t stay here. Make certain she’s intercepted, and taken to a motel.” Whenever someone was murdered, in the absence of glaring evidence to the contrary, Knox automatically suspected the spouse. He couldn’t quite see the trophy wife doing the deed with a spear, but stranger things had happened. Until he checked out her alibi, she was a suspect.

  He wandered through the house, seeing what he could see. A single coffee cup sat in the sink, along with a cereal bowl and a lone spoon. Breakfast for one, indicating that Taylor Allen had either been alone or merely eaten alone. Knox looked in the trash and saw the package for a microwave dinner, along with the black plastic container that still contained a few bites of what looked like broccoli. A wrapper from a candy bar lay on top of that.

  Upstairs, only one side of the bed had been slept in. The bed was made up, after a fashion: the custom-made bedspread had been pulled up over the pillows, but the bed was nice and smooth on one side, and sort of lumpy where the sheet hadn’
t been straightened out on the other. Knox knew all about that sort of bed-making, because it was how he made his own bed. In the bathroom was one toothbrush, though the holder had a space for two. One basin still showed signs of dampness, while the other was bone dry.

  All the signs said that Taylor Allen had been alone in the house. But someone had been here, probably someone he knew. He’d opened the door and let his killer in the house. Then, when he’d turned his back, the killer had . . . No, how could the killer have concealed a five-foot-long spear? Mr. Allen would have noticed. The only way a spear would have been unremarkable was if someone who collected spears had brought a fine specimen over to show Mr. Allen, who was for some reason interested.

  Right offhand, Knox couldn’t think of a single spear collector in Peke County.

  4

  Knox squatted off to the side, not touching anything, while Boyd carefully worked his way inward toward the body, using a handheld vacuum to suction fibers and hairs from the carpet. Next would come the body, and what clues could be found on it. The wooden shaft could have been homemade, though it looked so smooth and uniform Knox thought it might even be a broom handle. The metal head, though, could be homemade only if their killer had a metalworking shop in his house.

  Roger Dee squatted beside him. “What’re you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking about spears,” Knox replied. “And logistics.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m not an expert in spears, but it seems to me a spear can be used two ways: you can stab with it, or you can throw it. Either way, it would be almost impossible for the angle of entry to be straight on. So you can stab up, or stab down. The M.E. will have to say for sure, but looks to me as if the spear is angled slightly downward.”

  “Stabbed downward. We can get a rough idea of the perp’s height.”

  “Unless it was thrown. A thrown spear would have a slight arc to it, right?” Knox made an overhand throwing motion and imagined the trajectory of the spear. “A sidearm throw would arc out and then in, instead of up and then down. The spear would enter slightly right to left if the thrower was right-handed, and left to right if he was a lefty.”

  “Agreed.” Roger Dee pulled at his lip, eyeing the prone body lying in the small pool of congealed and blackened blood. “He didn’t bleed much, so he must have died almost instantly.”

  “Going by the location of the spear, I’d say it went through his heart.” Had he dropped right there, or maybe turned around and faced his attacker, then collapsed? And had the spear been stabbed into him, or thrown?

  Knox pondered the logistics of a spear, which, unlike a bullet, required a clear line of sight to be effective when thrown. Some prowess with spear-throwing was also required, either that or a lot of luck. “Logically, he was stabbed with it. Strange choice of weapon, but an ordinary method. But suppose the spear was thrown. Where would the killer have stood, so he had a clear line of sight?”

  Roger Dee pointed into the foyer beyond the wide entrance into the living room.

  “Had to be in there.”

  “Unless Mr. Allen turned, then went down, in which case the perp was standing in front of this window.” Knox pointed to the side window. “Considering the size of the room, the length of the spear, he wouldn’t have wanted to get much closer. We have two possibilities, and we need to give them equal attention.”

  “What if Mr. Allen only managed a half turn?”

  “In my opinion,” Boyd Ray said from his position beside the body, “if he’d made a half turn, he wouldn’t be so perfectly prone. He’d have been sprawled more, because the fall would have been more awkward. As it is, it looks like he pitched facedown.”

  His men didn’t work many murders, Knox thought, but there was nothing wrong with their thinking.

  They did all the usual things, such as checking the answering machine, punching Redial on the telephone to see the last number Mr. Allen had called, and getting the number of the last call he’d received. In the first case, the last call he’d made had been to his office, and the last call he’d received was from a number in Louisville, probably the call Mrs. Allen had reported to his secretary.

  “If I had a suspicious nature,” Knox said, “I’d wonder if Mrs. Allen made that call this morning to make certain Mr. Allen was at home.”

  Roger Dee grunted. It was a truism that the spouse was usually the number one suspect, at least at first. The closer you were to someone, the more likely it became that you would either kill or be killed by that very person. “You’re thinking she hired it done.”

  “Since I doubt U.K. offers spear-throwing as an elective, I’d say she didn’t do the throwing herself.” He’d heard it said that Mrs. Allen had had a double major at the state university: dating and primping. He’d never met her, so he had no personal reading on her. Interviews would bring to light whether she was disenchanted with her marriage and her husband, if she had any contacts with any knowledge of spears, if she was maybe slipping around and visiting other mattresses.

  In the meantime, their biggest clue was the spear itself. Something as esoteric as spear-making had to be noticed, and the spear had been made somewhere. The metal head would be analyzed, the type of wood studied, and eventually they would find out where it came from. Maybe it had been stolen from a collection somewhere. Maybe the killer had used a weapon from his own collection—stupid, but possible. Most killers weren’t renowned for their brainpower, anyway. They all made mistakes. Even the smartest ones, the ones who made a game of it, eventually screwed up.

  In this case, using such an unusual weapon was the first mistake, because it gave Knox something to go on.

  The next night, a woman checked into a motel on the highway, just outside Pekesville. She was pretty, with dark hair and dark eyes, and a friendly expression that invited conversation. Pauline Scalia accepted that invitation and found out the new guest was from New York, would be in town at least a couple of days, and had an easy laugh. She paid with a credit card issued in the name Nikita T. Stover, and her driver’s license matched her in both name and photo.

  After getting the key, Nikita Stover pulled her car in front of unit 117, got out a small suitcase, and disappeared into her room. Half an hour later, the lights went out, signaling that Ms. Stover had retired for the night.

  The next morning, Nikita dressed with controlled eagerness. Excitement kicked her heart rate up, and she could feel the pulse of her blood as it pumped through her body. She was here, she was really here! After all the years of studying, training, getting herself ready both mentally and physically, she was finally on the job. And what a job she’d been handed!

  Not that the bosses had done her any favors; she was the third agent to be given this assignment. The first, Houseman, had been killed on the job. The second, McElroy, had failed miserably. Nikita was well aware of the danger she was facing, both personally and professionally, but she still felt the buzz of adrenaline burning through her system. She dearly loved a challenge, and she was as ready for the task as she would ever be.

  She fumbled a bit as she tried to button her blouse, took a deep breath to calm the slight shaking of her fingers, then completed the task. She eyed herself in the mirror critically. Everything looked okay: white blouse, tailored black trousers, holster at her waist on her left side. She wore black pumps with two-inch heels, a plain wristwatch with a black leather band, and small gold hoops in her ears. She put on her lightweight black jacket and checked to make certain her weapon was covered. Frowning, she adjusted the fall of the garment just a bit to disguise the bulge. There; she was good to go.

  She had a plan, and she was ready to implement it. Where McElroy had failed, she thought, was in trying to go it alone and not using the local assets available to him. He had gone the cowboy route, which was the safest way in terms of protecting the secrecy of the mission, but it had also been the route that held the most personal danger and had also hampered his investigation. Was safest necessarily the best? By protecting one
directive, he had failed at the most important part of the mission. She didn’t intend to fail.

  She found herself smiling at her own thoughts. God, she loved the colorful idioms: good to go, cowboy, go it alone. They were all so culturally descriptive, while her own language was far more technical—and colorless. She’d studied the dialect so intensely that she now thought in those terms, which was good; she was less likely to slip up and make a mistake. Accent had been less of a problem, because she wasn’t trying to pass herself off as a local.

  Grabbing her camera and her small black shoulder bag, she left the motel room and automatically checked to make certain the door latched behind her. The heat of a Kentucky summer swamped her, making her wish she didn’t have to wear a jacket, but a professional appearance was important.

  Her rented vehicle was parked directly in front of her room. She hadn’t precisely centered it in the marked space, she saw, chagrined at her lack of skill. Training was valuable, but it couldn’t take the place of actual experience. Driving on a training course wasn’t the same as driving a strange vehicle in unfamiliar territory at night. At least she hadn’t crashed into anything, or gotten lost. That would have been a humiliating way to begin her assignment.

  A little remote device unlocked the vehicle, and she got behind the steering wheel. Always thorough, she took a moment to look over the controls and refamiliarize herself with the location of all the various knobs, levers, and buttons, then turned the key and grinned as the combustion engine roared to life. She took a moment to play with the radio; punching the Select buttons didn’t produce much except static, but she’d learned the night before that the Seek button would find a station by running through the frequencies. She smiled at each music station she heard, but kept pushing the Seek button until the frequency search landed on what seemed to be a local talk show. She needed to know what was going on locally.