Killing Time

by Linda Howard

  “Instead of locking me in a cell, I suggest we work together. We’re both looking for the same killer.”

  “Uh, yeah—just how does the time capsule, the unauthorized time traveler, and all of that tie in with my homicide case?”

  “Is it possible he wrote the research paper? All I’ve ever read on the subject indicated that the author was unknown, but archivists recover bits of old books, recordings, newspapers—things like that—every day. Some new information could have been discovered.”

  Knox shook his head. “Taylor sure as hell wasn’t a physicist. He was a small-town lawyer, through and through. And what makes you so certain your time traveler killed him?”

  “He was killed with a spear, wasn’t he?”

  “Well now,” Knox said softly, leaning back in his chair and lacing his hands behind his head. “Just how did you know that? That little detail wasn’t released to the press.”

  It was amazing, she thought, how eyes that blue could turn so cold. “McElroy was tracking the UT—unauthorized traveler—and found the body. He knew the UT had done it because of the spear, which you’ll have an impossible time tracing because it was manufactured in China in the year 2023.”

  He flipped open a notebook and began making notes. “China stopped making nuclear bombs and reverted to spears?”

  “I said it was manufactured there, not that it was used there. Do you think you should do that?” she asked, indicating his notebook. “Put this in writing?”

  “If we’re talking about one of my cases, I’m writing it down.” His tone of voice said there was no room for discussion. “Why in hell would anyone start manufacturing spears? That’s not exactly cutting-edge technology.”

  “For a while, spears were the terrorists’ low-tech weapon of choice; they’re cheap, is the main reason. When funds started running low, alternative means of murder were sought and spears were selected. There’s something symbolic about a spear, especially when it’s all of a sudden sticking through someone’s neck. It’s silent, which makes it a very effective weapon at night.”

  “So is there something especially symbolic about this particular spear, or was it just lying around and this guy saw it and thought, Hey, it’ll be neat to kill someone with a spear?”

  “This particular spear was in a museum, and it does have a special symbolism to certain people. That spear killed a heavily protected American general in 2025, so to them it represents human spirit over technology, or something like that.”

  “A victory for the Luddites.”

  “Exactly. To these groups that’s exactly what they’re trying to do, save mankind from their own technology.”

  “I really hate people who try to save me from myself,” he muttered.

  Despite the worry gnawing at her, she had to grin. “Yeah. Good-doers.”

  He chuckled, and she said, “What?”

  “Nothing. What’s first on your agenda?”

  She wanted to pursue the “nothing,” because in her experience when someone said that, there was damn well something. But he was right, in that there was something more urgent that she needed to do, and she didn’t know if he would go along with it. He might have uncuffed her, but at the moment he was still very much in charge unless she was willing to hurt a lot of people, him included, and matters hadn’t progressed to that point.

  “I need to go to my home time,” she said. “I need to notify people that there’s a mole, and if it wasn’t one of us who went in early and stole the time capsule to protect it, then that’s what we need to do, too, except we’ll go in a day earlier.”

  “You’re talking about zigzagging back and forth, until you’re overlapping like fish scales.”

  “Yes, exactly,” she said, pleased that he’d gotten the concept. “Like I said, this is new to us, but all we have to do is protect the time capsule and catch the killer. We know when he came over; one of us needs to transit in ahead of him. I can’t believe we were so shortsighted.”

  “But if you come in ahead of him and catch him, he hasn’t yet committed a murder and he’s innocent of everything except unauthorized travel.”

  She gave him a helpless look. “We can’t change life and death. We can’t bring Taylor Allen back. But I can’t think of anything else to do. I need to go back. When I make my report, it’ll be out of my hands, but at least I’ll have tried for the best outcome.”

  “Okay,” he said mildly. “I’ll go along with this—as long as I get to watch.”

  “You like watching, huh?” Damn it! Nikita had known she shouldn’t say that, but it came out anyway. She had been doing so well, too, at keeping everything completely impersonal and focused on the matter at hand, because it wasn’t fair to let this become anything more when she had no intention of staying in this time. But she liked his blue eyes and his lean features, and he had nice, strong hands, try as she might not to notice all that.

  “I’m better at doing,” he drawled, his eyelids drooping in a sleepy expression that made her heart pound.

  Her stomach tightened, the sensation of physical response so strong she was disconcerted. She swallowed hard, then grimly got herself back under control. No, this could not happen. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I shouldn’t have said that, it was unprofessional.”

  “I don’t mind unprofessional, every now and then.”

  “I do.” Her cheeks burned with embarrassment. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Guess you’re right,” he said with apparent regret. “If you really leave, it literally can’t happen.”

  “Which is why I shouldn’t have said anything out of line. I’m sorry.”

  “So you’ve already said.” He waited a moment, then rose to his feet. “We don’t have to wait until dark or anything like that, do we? For you to leave, or transit, or whatever.”

  “No.” She was relieved by the change of subject. “I can go any time.”

  He grinned and shook his head at the double meaning. “All right, I’ll drive you there, since your rental car is obviously known to whoever took a shot at you this morning. Wait here, and I’ll get one of the deputies to pull my car into the secure area we use for special prisoners; that way no one can see you.”

  She might be crazy as hell, she might be pulling a con, she might be the actual murderer—Knox couldn’t forget that she’d known about the spear—but whatever she was, she told a good tale. And just when he was ready to lock her up, he would think about those gadgets of hers and keep listening.

  No matter what, he couldn’t deny that her ID card, the DNA scanner, and that little tube of Reskin were things he’d never seen or heard of before. The cut on his thumb was completely healed over. That, more than anything, was what forced him to concede that there might, just might, be a kernel of truth in the yarns she told. The other stuff he might not have heard of, but something that healed a cut on contact—yeah, he and everyone else in the country would have heard about that. Wall Street and the company that had developed Reskin would have had commercials touting it running every fifteen minutes on every television station. The military would be buying the stuff by the shipload. So the fact that he hadn’t heard about Reskin was a big point in her favor.

  But he was a cop, and cops by nature had a hard time believing just about anything they were told until they had hard proof it was true.

  He stopped a deputy and handed over his keys with a request to move his car into the secure prisoner loading area; then he knocked on Sheriff Cutler’s door and stuck his head inside.

  “What’s up with our FBI agent?” Calvin asked, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “You’ve been in your office with her a long time.”

  “I have my doubts anything she told us was on the level,” Knox said. “And she knew about the spear, which makes me twitchy. Either we have a leak, or she has prior information.”

  “Like from the killer? Well, now.” Calvin leaned back in his chair. “Are you saying Ms. Stover is involved with the killer, or maybe is our spear-
chucker herself?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but she may know who it is, and that person may be who shot at her this morning. For whatever reason, she was definitely the target this morning. I’m going to do some digging. Whoever shot at her obviously knew her rental car and followed her this morning. There are some things I want to check out and I’m taking her with me.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Okay, but watch your back.”

  Knox felt uneasy about keeping things from the sheriff, but if he’d told the whole story, Calvin would have insisted on locking up Ms. Fake FBI Agent for impersonating a federal agent, at least. Knox held that option open, but first he wanted some answers that made sense. He couldn’t accept that she had come from two hundred years in the future; that was too much to swallow. But something weird was going on, and he wanted to know what it was.

  She was waiting patiently in his office, just as she had while he tried out the DNA scanner. He didn’t know what to think of that; any guilty person would have taken advantage of the situa-tion and tried to run, but she hadn’t. Not that she would have succeeded, because he’d been ready for any move she might make, and it could be she was smart enough to realize that.

  If she intended to run, her best chance would be when she was alone with him. He would see she got that chance.

  “Come on,” he said, and she got to her feet, stuffing things back into her purse. He still had possession of her weapon, and he meant to keep it. He’d have to be crazy to hand over a powerful weapon to her. She glanced at it, raised her eyebrows in a silent question, and he grinned as he shook his head. “No way.”

  She accepted the situation without argument. He stood back and let her precede him out the door. She angled herself to step past him, but he was still close enough that he could feel the heat of her body, smell the faint, sweet scent of a woman’s skin. She didn’t even glance at him, but he knew she was as aware of him on a physical basis as he was of her.

  It had been a while since any woman had turned him on. Wanting sex wasn’t the same as being turned on, and, yeah, he’d wanted sex. He was a normal, thirty-five-year-old man, and he hadn’t died with Rebecca. But wanting a particular woman—no, that hadn’t happened, until now, until Nikita Stover, with her big brown eyes and friendly smile. He had to be careful not to let the sexual attraction between them blind him to any guilt on her part.

  His car was waiting for them, and she got into the front seat beside him, then leaned over so her head was almost in his lap and she wasn’t visible through the windows. He glanced down at her; her head was almost touching his thigh. God, she had to know what that suggested. His hands tightened on the steering wheel as he imagined her head bobbing up and down in his lap. His johnson sprang to attention. Shit.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, his voice level and cool. He’d keep this situation under control if it killed him.

  “Take county road 73,” she instructed. “And let me know when it’s safe for me to sit up.”

  They were well away from the courthouse before he said, “Okay, you can sit up now.” She did so immediately, tossing her hair out of her face. He breathed easier once she was safely buckled on her side of the car.

  County road 73 led in the general direction of Jesse Bingham’s place. There were no coincidences, he reminded himself. Whatever was going on with her was directly related to the flashes Jesse had seen three nights before. Jesse would probably say she’d killed his chickens, but somehow Knox couldn’t see Nikita as a chicken murderer.

  Nikita flipped open a mirrored compact, released the mirror by pressing on a tiny latch, and exposed a GPS unit. “Another two miles, approximately,” she said.

  Knox eyed the GPS with interest. The military GPS was far more accurate than the ones in cars and boats, and from what he’d seen, this was at least military grade. He wondered where she’d gotten it, if it had been stolen from a military base somewhere.

  She carefully watched the GPS, and just before they reached the turn to Jesse’s place, she suddenly said, “Here. Pull over here.”

  Obediently, he steered the car completely off the road, tucking it behind some bushes. She was already out of the car, walking swiftly toward a thick stretch of forest.

  Knox followed her, watching her, watching the way she moved and the way her shiny dark hair swung with every stride. Then they were in the forest and the sounds of the occasional traffic faded, to be replaced by the sounds of nature: birds calling, insects rustling, leaves gently sighing in a light breeze. She stepped over fallen limbs, went around bushes, but didn’t hesitate or veer from her chosen direction.

  Then she stopped and pointed to the ground. “There.”

  He examined the earth. If she’d buried something there, she’d covered her tracks well. “Guess I should have brought a shovel.”

  “No need. I have this.” She took another slender tube from her purse, this one black in color, and pressed the end of it. He’d thought it was a pen, or a laser pointer. He’d been half right. A thin beam of green light shot out of the tube and began to bore into the earth. She moved the light in gentle, ever increasing circles, digging as it went.

  Then she turned it off, got down on her knees, laid the GPS unit to the side; he could see a series of concentric circles growing out of the center of its screen, expanding and disappearing, only to begin again. Ground zero, he thought. Nikita began scooping up loose dirt with her hands and tossing it aside.

  Knox moved to stand in front of her so he could keep an eye on both her and anything she might uncover, but not so close that she could grab an ankle and topple him, or throw dirt in his eyes.

  “That’s strange,” she muttered. “I didn’t think I’d dug this deep before.”

  “Sure this is the right place?”

  “I marked the coordinates on the GPS. I’m certain.” A moment later she made a soft sound of satisfaction and gripped the edge of a clear plastic bag, pulling it free from the dirt.

  There was nothing in the bag.

  Knox looked sharply at her. She remained on her knees, her face abruptly paper white as she stared at the empty bag.

  “They’re gone,” she said in a tight, strained voice. “My links are gone. I can’t get home. I’m stranded here.”

  10

  Nikita remained on her knees in the dirt, barely able to speak. She felt numb with combined horror and shock. Who could have taken her links? Who could have known where they were? She had thought she was alone when she transited, but someone must have been nearby and watched her bury the links.

  Logically, it couldn’t be the person who had shot at her, because what better opportunity to kill her than when she was alone in this isolated spot?

  Even more logically, if some unknown enemy had known she was coming through, why hadn’t he been waiting here for her, to kill her the way he’d killed Houseman? Only one solution occurred to her that fit both parameters.

  Still holding the waterproof bag by two fingers, she reached for the DNA scanner but couldn’t manage to open it with just one hand. She held it up to Knox. “Would you open that for me, please?” she asked. Her voice still sounded strained, even to her, but it was level.

  Silently, he took the scanner and flipped it open, then gave it back to her.

  She aimed it at the bag and pressed the button. Any samples would have been contaminated by the soil, but the newest scanners were better at filtering out the contamination than the earlier models had been. With any luck, she’d get a reading.

  The lights flickered, showing the locations of DNA on the bag. She pressed the scanner to one of the locations and the reading popped on the screen: Stover, Nikita—“Okay, the samples are clean enough to read,” she murmured to herself as she cleared the entry. She glanced up at Knox. “The first reading was on me. Let’s see what it says about these other samples.”

  The next sample was also hers. And the third. On the fourth, though, the screen flashed different information. She read it aloud: ” �
��Subject unknown. Genetic structure compatible with that of the northern European areas, specifically the ancient Celtic tribes’—Good God, Knox, it was you!”

  “Ha ha,” he replied. “I guess I don’t have to tell you most people in this area will have a common genetic heritage. Don’t tell me there’s Cherokee in there, too?”

  “No, you’re clear. The rest of it is ‘and to a lesser extent the southern Mediterranean area. Subject has green eyes and brown hair. Require additional data for information.’

  “That description narrows things down to a few thousand people in the immediate area.”

  Nikita sat down in the dirt, staring at the little screen. How could this situation get any worse? But she’d been right in her supposition, cold comfort that it was. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “That you don’t have any way to demonstrate to me that you can really travel back and forth in time?” he supplied with smooth irony.

  “That this isn’t anyone from my time,” she explained patiently.

  He hunkered down in front of her, blue eyes intent. “How do you figure that?”

  “Subject unknown. If anyone from my time stole my links, the odds are he would be in the database.”

  “You have almost the entire world’s population in this database?” he asked incredulously.

  “Not everyone, not even close. But everyone in the FBI is in the database, as well as all Council members and all the personnel at the Transit Laboratory. Everyone ever convicted of a crime is entered. And since most people who belong to protest groups have committed at least misdemeanors such as disturbing the peace, they’re in the database.”

  She rubbed her forehead, leaving smears of dirt across her skin. “No, the links were taken by someone from your time. I don’t know if that’s a relief, or not. An innocent civilian—well, maybe not so innocent, but a civilian—has those links and doesn’t have a clue what can happen if he puts them on and accidentally activates them.”