Killing Time (3 page)

“So, what are you up to?” Ruth asked as they reached her car. She hadn’t cried, and she might see that as a victory even though grief still lay like a veil over her fine-boned features. She asked the question to completely pull herself out of the past, not because she was really interested in the answer.

“I’m heading out to Jesse Bingham’s. Somebody slashed the tires on his tractor and killed some of his chickens.”

“Why on earth would anyone hurt those poor birds?” she asked, frowning. “That’s terrible.”

“Yeah, I’m getting a lot of concern about the chickens.”

“But none about Jesse or his tractor tires, huh?” The frown eased from her forehead and she laughed as he hugged her.

He opened the car door for her and out of habit watched to make certain she buckled her seat belt. “Take care,” he said as he closed the door, and she gave him a little wave as she started the car and drove off.

Knox returned to his own car, wishing he hadn’t seen her. She made him feel guilty, as if he should still be mourning as deeply as she did. He couldn’t. He didn’t want to. He wanted to find someone else to love and laugh with, have sex with, someday get married and have kids with, though damn if he had much chance of that, considering the rut he’d dug for himself.

He pulled his mind back to the job and drove out to the Bingham farm to see what he could make of the vandalism. Sometimes people had a good idea of who had done it, or the neighbors had seen something, but in Jesse’s case just about everyone who knew him disliked him, and he had no nearby neighbors. He was one of those people who blamed everything that happened to him on someone else; if he had trouble with the engine in his truck, he immediately thought someone had poured sugar in his gas tank. If he lost something, he thought it had been stolen and filed a report. But they couldn’t just blow him off; they had to investigate every time he filed a report, because all it took was for him to be right one time and they’d catch hell if they hadn’t done their jobs.

Slashed tractor tires and dead chickens weren’t produced by Jesse’s sense of persecution, though. Either the tires were slashed or they weren’t, and the chickens were either dead or running around pecking at bugs. At least there was something concrete Knox could see.

The Bingham farm was set on a pretty piece of property, with wooded hills and neat fields. Jesse’s one good quality was that he took care of the place. The fences were always mended, the grass cut, the house painted, the barn and sheds in good repair. Jesse didn’t have any help on the place, either; he did it all himself even though he was in his late sixties. He’d been married once, but Mrs. Bingham had showed the good sense to leave him flat more than thirty years before, and go live with her sister in Ohio. Word was they’d never gotten a divorce, which to Knox’s way of thinking was a smart way to save money. Jesse sure as hell wasn’t going to find anyone else to marry him, and Mrs. Bingham was so put off marriage by her experience with him that she wasn’t interested in giving it another whirl.

Knox parked his car beside Jesse’s truck and got out. The house’s door opened as he started up the front steps. “Took your time getting here,” Jesse said sourly through the screen door. “I’ve got chores that I need to be doing, instead of sitting on my butt waiting for you to decide to show up.”

“Good morning to you, too,” Knox said drily. Seeing Jesse always surprised him. If there was ever a man whose appearance didn’t match his personality, it was Jesse Bingham. He was short, a little pudgy, with a round cherubic face and bright blue eyes; when he opened his mouth, though, nothing pleasant came out. The effect was that of a rabid Santa Claus.

“Are you gonna do your job, or stand there making sarcastic remarks?” Jesse snapped.

Knox took a firm hold on his patience. “Why don’t you show me the tractor and chickens?”

Jesse stomped his way toward the barn, and Knox followed. The tractor was parked in the shelter of a lean-to attached to the barn, and even from a distance Knox could see that the wheels were sitting flat on the ground. “There,” Jesse said, pointing. “Little bastards got all six of them.”

“You think it was kids?” Knox asked, wondering if a gang of kids had been extra busy last night.

“How the hell would I know? That’s your job, finding out. For all I know, it was Matt Reston at the tractor place, so he could sell me some new tires.”

“You said ‘little bastards.’ ”

“Figure of speech. Don’t you know what that is?”

“Sure,” Knox said easily. “Like ‘asshole.’ Figure of speech.”

Jesse gave him a suspicious look. In his experience, most people either took off in the face of his nastiness, or wanted to fight him. Knox Davis always kept his temper, but one way or another he made it plain he’d take only so much.

Knox carefully examined the ground; unfortunately, the prints in the dirt all seemed to be Jesse’s, which he could tell because they were small for a man. “You walked around out here?”

“How else would I look at all six tires?”

“If there were any prints in the dirt, you ruined them.”

“Like you could look at a footprint and tell who made it. I don’t believe that crap. Millions of people wear the same size shoe.”

Knox knew exactly where he’d like to plant a size eleven athletic shoe. He examined the tires, looked for fingerprints on the metal parts, but from what he could tell each tire had one slash in it: stab in a knife, pull downward. If the tractor had been touched at all except for that, he couldn’t tell it. Maybe he could get a fingerprint that wasn’t Jesse’s off it, though—if Jesse hadn’t wiped the tractor down this morning, and destroyed all the other evidence. Knox wouldn’t put anything past him, though he guessed the old fart wouldn’t slash his own tires, because that meant he had to spend the money to replace them. Unless—“You got insurance for things like this, Jesse?”

“Course I do. Only a damn fool doesn’t have coverage these days, with people running around pretending to fall down on your property so they can sue you.”

“What’s your deductible?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“Just asking.”

Jesse’s face began to get red. “You think I did this? You think I’d slash my own tires?”

“If your insurance would buy new tires, and you have a low deductible, that would be a way to save money. You could get new tractor tires for, what, a hundred dollars?”

“I’ll call the sheriff!” Jesse bellowed. “Get your ass off my land! I want someone else—”

“It’s me or no one,” Knox interrupted. “As for who cut your tires, I can’t say. My job is to cover all the bases. You’re a base.” He walked around to the back of the barn, taking care to stay out of the soft dirt around the wall where Jesse kept the grass killed. There. The dirt was scuffed. He looked closer, and could make out what looked like one footprint on top of another one, as if someone had walked the same way, leaving as they had arrived. Bigger than Jesse’s foot, too.

“What about my chickens? You think I killed my chickens, too? Just take a look at them!” Jesse had followed him, still bellowing, and practically jumping up and down he was so mad.

Knox held up a hand. “Don’t mess up these prints, too. Just stay back, will you?”

“Changing your mind now, huh? Coming onto a man’s property and accusing him of—”

“Jesse.” Knox said it quietly, but the look in his eye when he turned his head to pin Jesse with his gaze said that he’d had enough.

Jesse stopped in mid-tirade, and contented himself with looking sullen.

“Show me the chickens.”

“This way,” he muttered, and led the way, back past the tractor, to a small chicken coop tucked up next to a trimmed hedge at the back of his house. “Look at that,” he said, pointing. “Six of them.”

Six hens lay scattered about the coop. There wasn’t any blood, so Knox guessed someone had wrung their necks. The sheer meanness of some people never failed to surprise and disgust him.

“Did you hear anything last night?”

“Nothing, but I was tired and had trouble getting to sleep, so I may have been sleeping too hard. Weird night. All those lightning flashes kept me awake, but I never did hear no thunder. Finally stopped around midnight, and I went to sleep. I guess all this happened after that.”

“Lightning flashes?” Knox asked, frowning. He didn’t remember any lightning, and he’d been out and around.

“Kind of low to the ground, too. Like I said: weird. Not like normal lightning. Just these white flashes, like big flashbulbs going off.”

White flashes, Knox thought. Wasn’t that a coincidence. What in hell was going on around here?

3

“The flashes might be related,” Knox said. “There was another vandalism last night where there was a white flash. Where were they, about?”

“Don’t see how in hell any flashes could have something to do with killing my chickens,” Jesse grumbled, but he turned and pointed toward the stretch of woods across the road. “Over there. My bedroom window faces that direction.”

“You said they were low.” Knox turned and surveyed the land: hilly and heavily wooded, like most of eastern Kentucky. “How low? Tree level, or higher than that?”

“Just above the treetops, I guess.”

“Got any guess as to the distance?”

Jesse was a farmer, and farmers knew distances. He could probably pace off almost an exact acre. That it had been night would hamper him some, but he had the advantage of knowing every hill and curve of his land. He narrowed his eyes as he squinted at the hill, too interested to bitch. “About a hundred yards in, I’d say. Can’t be much farther, or you crest the hill and go down the other side.”

Made sense to Knox. “I’m going to take a look over there,” he said. “Want to come along?”

“Let me put on my boots.”

While Jesse fetched his boots, Knox opened the trunk of his car and took out his own pair of field boots, which reached almost to his knees. The heavy leather protected against snake-bites. He was lucky in that he wasn’t allergic to either poison oak or poison ivy, but so far as he knew no one was immune to snake venom. He sat down on the porch step to put on the boots.

Jesse came out wearing a pair of green Wellingtons, and together they tromped across the road and into the woods. Knox thought this had to set a world record for length of time for Jesse not griping about something; it had been—what—five whole minutes? He checked his watch so he could keep track of how long the peace lasted.

The temperature was cooler under the thick umbrella of the trees. He wasn’t much of a woodsman, but he recognized the red and white varieties of oak, the maple trees, the hemlock. Wild azaleas dotted the undergrowth with delicate color. The rich, earthy smell teased his nostrils, prompting him to take deep, appreciative breaths.

“Smells good, don’t it?” Jesse observed, and for once his tone was quiet instead of strident. Knox made a mental note that the woods seemed to affect Jesse’s personality; maybe they should build a pen out here and keep him locked in it.

The land began to rise, the slope becoming steep. They pushed through bushes, tugged their clothing free of briars that grabbed at them, climbed over some rocks and went around bigger ones. Jesse kept looking around, mentally measuring the distance, since the foliage was too thick for him to see his house. They were near the crest of the hill when he stopped. “Right about here, I guess.”

Knox took his time, studying every detail around him. Just to the right, the foliage thinned out somewhat, but was still too dense to be called a clearing. The trees grew thick and tall here, with flowering dogwoods tucked up under the shelter of the bigger trees. As far as he could tell, none of the leaves looked singed or in any way disturbed, so whatever the flash was, either it hadn’t been close enough to do any damage or there was no accompanying heat.

The ground, though . . . something had disturbed it, in a vague way. He couldn’t find any prints, but clumps of decaying vegetation had been disturbed, with the darker, wetter side turned up. “Someone’s been here,” he said to Jesse, pointing to the forest floor.

“I see.”

“Wiped out their prints, though. Wonder what they were doing up here.” Knox did a full turn, looking for a break in the foliage that allowed a view of . . . something. “Nothing’s visible from here. I guess some sort of flare could have been set off, but for what reason?” He sniffed the air again, but smelled only that same rich, loamy scent. No one had burned anything recently, or the smell of smoke would have lingered in the air.

“An animal could have done this,” Jesse said, indicating the disturbed vegetation. “Two bucks mighta locked horns, or a fox could have caught a rabbit. Don’t see no blood, though. And I don’t see no point to this, other than wasting time.”

Knox checked his watch: thirteen minutes, a new world rec-ord for Jesse Bingham. “You’re right,” he said, turning around and reversing his path downhill. “I was just curious about those flashes.”

“I told you, it was heat lightning.”

“Not if you didn’t hear any thunder, it wasn’t. This was right on top of you.” Any type of lightning caused thunder. Moreover, the flash that had blinded the security cameras in town hadn’t been produced by lightning.

“Then maybe there was thunder and I just don’t remember it.”

“That isn’t what you said. You said you couldn’t hear any thunder.”

“I’m getting old. I don’t hear so good anymore.”

His patience shredded, Knox turned around and jabbed a finger into Jesse’s chest. “Stop messing with me. Now.”

Jesse glared at him, but before he could decide whether or not to risk pushing just a little further, the radio on Knox’s belt crackled to life.

“Code 27,”
said the dispatcher’s voice.
“Code 27; 2490 West Brockton; 10-76.”

Knox was already heading downhill at a run.
Code 27
meant “homicide/deceased person,” and
10-76
meant an investigator was needed. He fished the radio off his belt and keyed it to give the dispatcher his 10-4 and ETA.

“Hey!” Jesse yelled behind him, but Knox didn’t slow or in any way acknowledge him.

He was intimately familiar with all the roads in Peke County, even the back trails. West Brockton began life in Pekesville as simply “Brockton,” but once it crossed over the main highway it became West Brockton. The road was almost exclusively residential, upper-middle-class, though the farther you traveled from town the farther apart houses were. To the best of his recollection, 2490 was about a mile outside the city limits.

He got back to his car much faster than he’d gone up the hill. Grabbing the blue light from the seat, he slapped it on top of the car and turned it on, then jammed his foot down on the accelerator and left rubber as he rocketed onto the road.

He recognized the house as soon as he saw it, and not just because of the tangle of county cars and emergency vehicles parked on the far shoulder of the road. He knew the people who lived here—or at least he
had.
Right now he had no idea how many bodies he’d find inside.

No one had parked in the driveway or yard, at least not yet. He’d taught them well: let an investigator and Boyd Ray, their forensic guy, have a shot at finding some evidence before it was driven over, trampled, or otherwise obliterated—not that they had a big forensic department with all the newest equipment, but, hell, at least give Boyd a chance.

As Knox got out of his car one of the deputies, Carly Holcomb, came toward him. The expression on her freckled face was as serious as he’d ever seen it.

“This is Taylor Allen’s house,” Knox said. Taylor was a lawyer, and Knox thought, judging from his dealings with him, a pretty decent one, as lawyers went. He was fiftyish, divorced a couple of years back, and had quickly acquired himself a twenty-nine-year-old trophy wife.

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?”