Killing Time (4 page)

“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.

She had studied maps of the town and surrounding areas until she had every street memorized, but she kept a map handy as she carefully negotiated the traffic signals and stop signs. Locating the house she wanted wasn’t difficult at all, and she was proud of herself. So far, so good.

The house was actually just outside the city limits, where the residences were farther apart and fields were beginning to appear. She parked in front and sat for a moment, studying the scene. Pretty. Nice tall trees and mature landscaping, lush green grass, and a house that looked affluent without being ostentatious. White, with dark blue shutters, and a nice deep porch that wrapped around the right side of the house. Four steps led up to the porch and directly to the front door.

Dark green bushes, covered with a multitude of pink flowers, hugged the foundation and hid the brickwork. Nikita wasn’t much on horticulture, but she thought the bushes might be azaleas. Maybe. The bushes were neatly trimmed, the grass recently cut. Two giant oak trees—she did know oaks, at least—threw shade across the entire front yard and part of the house. Yellow crime-scene tape was strung between the two trees, blocking the driveway, and extended around the house in a garish perimeter.

Slinging her bag onto her shoulder, she got out of the car, camera in hand, and took several quick photographs to have something to back up her memory when she was writing reports, or working theories. Ducking under the yellow tape, she walked up the paved driveway, snapping photographs as she went. She didn’t expect to see anything that would point the way to the killer, something that another experienced agent had missed, but she was fixing distances and measurements in her mind. Slowly she circled the house, noting every window and door, the state of the shrubbery under the windows, the distance to the ground from each window. Such knowledge might come in handy, might not. She already knew
how;
she just didn’t know
who.
Or where the
who
was.

In back there was a small door in the foundation that gave access to the crawl space beneath the house. She studied the ground to make certain there weren’t any footprints in front of the door, then crouched down in front of it; there was a handle, but she didn’t want to touch it and disturb any of the local cops’ evidence. Instead she worked her fingers into the seam until she could pull the thin slab of plywood outward, noting as she did so how the front corner dragged in the dirt. Taking a penlight from her shoulder bag, she directed the light on the ground directly inside the access door. It looked undisturbed, no scrape marks or hand imprints in the dirt.

The lack of marks reassured her that she was on the right track. Returning the penlight to her bag, she shoved the door back into place.

“What the hell are you doing in my crime scene?”

The deep voice, coming from directly behind and above her, shot through her nervous system like a bolt. She jumped, but managed to stifle the shriek that rose in her throat. “Good thing I don’t have a tricky heart,” she said as she stood and turned to face the owner of the voice.

“Answer the question,” he said, expression hard and blue eyes cold.

He was broad-shouldered and tall, a good six or seven inches taller than she, and she was five seven. He wore jeans, scuffed boots, and a blue jacket over a white polo shirt. His brown hair was a little on the shaggy side, not quite regulation. Maybe he just hadn’t had time to get a haircut, but maybe he had a little bit of rebel in him.

At her hesitation he put his left hand on his hip, a deliberate move that opened his jacket and exposed the badge clipped to his belt, as well as the big weapon tucked into his shoulder harness. “If you’re a reporter,” he said, evidently having noticed her camera, “your ass is in big trouble.”

Just as deliberately, Nikita opened her own jacket, showing him
her
weapon; then she lifted the flap of her shoulder bag and flashed her badge at him. “Nikita Stover, FBI,” she said, and held out her hand to him.

His eyebrows lifted, and if anything, he looked even more displeased. “Last time I checked, murder wasn’t a federal charge. What are you doing here?”

She shrugged and let her hand drop. Things would go better if he was friendly, since he was evidently in charge of the investigation; he’d called this “his” crime scene. This was the tricky part; she just hoped her documentation was good enough that he wouldn’t investigate her. “Following a trail,” she said, and sighed. “There has been a string of attacks targeting attorneys and judges, and we think it’s the same person doing all of them. A federal judge was killed in Wichita last year, remember that? We’re following up on every crime that could be remotely connected, looking for a break, because so far we aren’t having much luck.” She glanced at the house. “Mr. Allen was an attorney, so here I am. I’m not looking to take over your investigation; I was hoping
you
could help
me.
”