by Blake Pierce
“Agreed,” Nate said. “I’ll get the bags from the trunk; you go speak to the guy. I’ll meet you out here with the keys.”
She got out of the car to do what he’d asked, feeling like every step was far too heavy. She had the weight of another dead man on her shoulders.
And if tomorrow didn’t go well, she might soon be adding another – something that she could hardly bear to think about.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Laura shrugged on her jacket, pausing for a moment by the cracked mirror in the bathroom to look at herself. There were dark circles under her eyes, a consequence of another night of barely any sleep.
She’d tossed and turned constantly, swinging from bad dream to half-awake anxiety, until finally the cell phone resting on the bedside table had told her it was an acceptable time to wake up. She’d showered and dressed quickly, thinking of nothing else but getting back to the case and getting it solved.
She let something slip, yesterday. She hadn't been quick enough. She hadn’t managed to prevent the killer from taking another life. But she was going to be damned if that was going to happen today.
Laura walked out into the cold morning, expecting to have to knock on Nate’s door and get him out of bed. But instead, he was waiting for her, just locking up the door to his own room. They had taken rooms next door to one another, and he must have heard her emerging herself.
“Ready to get to the precinct?” he asked.
“Ready to catch this creep and get out of here,” Laura replied firmly, earning a weak flash of a tired smile from Nate.
They got into the car and drove, Nate taking the wheel again while Laura slumped into the passenger seat and wished for the sake of her aching bones that she'd had a few more hours of rest. “We need to figure out where to look next”, she said. “I don't have much confidence that we're going to have any fingerprint evidence or otherwise from forensics, given how careful he was at the previous two scenes.”
“I would have to agree there,” Nate said. “And from what I saw of the guy hanging up there last night, I'm sure the coroner is only going to be able to tell us more of the same. But we do have some very important new pieces of evidence. Two changes in the MO. That means whatever is left has to be considered even more strongly.”
“You're right,” Laura said. Trust Nate to spend the night coming up with a more positive spin on things. “So, what do we have? A victim set up on the platform, bound with ropes and gagged, and then hung by the neck until dead once the timer goes off.”
“It makes the clock look even more important,” Nate said. “The change of the time - there could be any number of reasons behind that. Maybe he thinks that men deserve less time to try and get away, or maybe he has this kind of sick system calibrated to just exactly the amount of time he thinks would give the victim hope but not allow them to actually escape.”
“This guy was bound even more tightly,” Laura said. “Did you see? His arms were bound around his torso as well as just his wrists. There was no way he was going to get out of that.”
Nate made a grunt of agreement. “So it's not about escape. I don't think any of them are meant to, even though they get all this time to stand up there on the platform. Which means that the time is really important to the killer, symbolic of something.”
Laura sighed. Her first sigh of the morning, but she thought grimly that it probably was going to be far from the last. “I just wish we knew what it meant.”
“You and me both,” Nate said. “Look, he's not giving us much in the way of evidence to go on. So that means we just need to look closer at what we do have. I'm thinking we might be able to get something out of these clocks.”
“It's the same type in all three, I think,” Laura said. “Some kind of custom build, from what I could see. I was thinking that those kinds of clocks are usually used as old kitchen appliances, you know? Where you can use the timer to tell you how long is left on your dish? But the digital timer itself must be a newer edition. The one I remember from my Granny's house; it just had a dial you could turn all the way up to an hour. No longer than that.”
“That's exactly what I was thinking,” Nate said. “I think our grannies might have had the same one. So, that's our first thing as we get in. We need to look at these clocks. Find out who makes them, where you can buy them. That kind of thing.”
He swung the car into the parking lot at the precinct, and Laura was grateful that the drive had not taken very long. Choosing a motel for its proximity to your local investigation headquarters, rather than the quality of the beds available, made for a poor night's sleep but a quicker start to the day's work.
“They’ll be in the evidence locker,” Laura said, unbuckling her seatbelt. “We should be able to get a closer look at them. Come on.”
They walked into the precinct, finding it already buzzing with activity despite the early hour. Most of the faces in the bullpen were unfamiliar, given that they hadn’t even had time to make it here yesterday. There were more than a few questioning looks sent their way, though Laura had the feeling that most of them would take one look at their suits and know right away that they were FBI agents.
It wasn’t every day that the FBI came down to work a murder case in your precinct. They would have to be very aware that Laura and Nate were coming.
Captain Blackford was, luckily, just heading into the precinct, seemingly only a handful of seconds ahead of them. He was carrying a takeout cup of coffee, which perhaps explained why they hadn't run into him in the parking lot. He was just opening his office door and going inside, a smaller structure set at the back of the bullpen where he could keep an eye on all of his officers.
Laura and Nate followed him, catching up just as he was setting the cup down on his desk and starting to sit down. He looked up at them with barely concealed annoyance, a frown cutting across his forehead. Laura could quite easily see where, in probably less than a year, he was going to have some very deep wrinkles across that part of his head. For all the youth he brought to the job, unusual at this level of the police system, he was going to end up aging very quickly.
“So, you didn't catch him last night,” was the first thing he said. So much for people from the South being more friendly.
“We didn't,” Nate replied, his tone even. At times like these, Laura was happier than ever to have him as a partner. She wasn't so convinced she would have been able to keep her tone level. “But we have some ideas on how we can stop him from striking again. We need to get a look at the clocks, the ones from all three crime scenes. Are they here at the precinct?”
Blackford nodded, getting up from his desk. There was a weary resignation around the action, like he was already accepting the fact that he wasn't going to get a lot of time to sit down today. He moved past them, leading them out across the bullpen again with a beckon of his hand. Another rudeness, not even bothering to explain where he was taking them. Laura gritted her teeth, telling herself it was far too early to get into an argument at this time of morning, and followed.
Again, crossing the bullpen seemed to draw the eyes of every officer in the place, all of them watching Laura and Nate like they were unusual specimens of some rare animal. Laura was used to that, given that they were always in new places and always ranking higher than those around them. Still, it could be unsettling, especially when you had spent the night watching a man slowly swing backwards and forwards from a noose and then dreamed it over and over again when you were trying to sleep.
At the end of the bullpen, two sets of stairs leading directly out to the street flanked an elevator. Blackford led them here, pressing a button on the inside of the elevator as they joined him to travel downwards.
“Do you have any kind of techs here?” Nate asked. “Someone who knows what they're looking at, when it comes to engineering? Any clock experts, by some happy coincidence?”
Blackford shrugged, shaking his head. “I don't know that we have any experts on that kind of thing,” he said. �
�But I can bring in a local source, if you need one.”
“We'll see how we go,” Laura said, as the elevator came to a stop one floor down. “It might be that we can figure things out ourselves.”
Blackford led them down a short corridor to a room which was guarded by an overweight cop behind a Perspex screen. He looked up at them as they approached, searching their faces and quickly settling back on Blackford's.
“What can I do you for, chief?” He asked, his voice cheerfully pleasant enough despite the early hour.
“Need to take a look at some evidence,” Blackford said. “All from the clock killer case. Mind if we just head straight back?” Clock killer. Laura noted that. Apparently, he was already getting a bit of a moniker among the locals.
The cop nodded, pulling out a clipboard with a pen attached by a string. “Sure thing, chief. Just need you to log anything you take.”
Blackford nodded, swiping the clipboard off the counter and leading Laura and Nate around to a door set into the wall beside the guard’s Perspex screen. There was an internal buzzing noise, then the locking mechanism disengaging, and he pushed the door open to lead them through.
The evidence locker walls, predictably, looked much like Laura had seen in a hundred other precincts. Cages and shelves everywhere, most of them containing brown or white cardboard boxes. Each of these was labeled with a case number, and some of them with names. Some even had letters, indicating that the case required more than one box to store all of the evidence that had been collected. There were also locked cabinets for the kind of evidence that needed to be kept safe, such as firearms or illegal drugs that had been seized.
Blackford led them unhesitatingly through what seemed like a maze of shelving to a specific spot, where he tapped the boxes. “We've stashed them in here, for now,” he said. “There's a table at the end of the room. We can examine them here, put them back in the boxes afterwards. No need to remove any evidence if we don't have to.”
Laura nodded, biting her tongue on the fact that he didn't need to tell them how to do their jobs. Inside the box, a number of different evidence bags held different items. Long coils of rope that had been cut from around the victim's bodies. Personal effects, found in their pockets. Clothing, most of it also cut in places. The platforms themselves, Laura guessed, were big enough to be held in another part of the locker. But the clocks were here, and Blackford reached in to pull out the evidence bags that contained them before carrying them over to a table set under a high, grated window. The light fell just on it, allowing them to see what they needed to.
Laura and Nate both pulled on evidence gloves, swiped from a dispenser that Blackford held out to them without saying a word. Only the surly expression on his face indicated that they were to put them on, or else. Again, Laura couldn't help but feel patronized. She knew how to handle evidence. She wasn't about to just start touching things and putting her fingerprints all over them. Did he think she'd only just completed basic training?
“Do you have a screwdriver, or some kind of tool set?” Nate asked. He was turning one of the evidence bags over in his hand, looking at the clock through the plastic rather than removing it just yet. “Looks like we might need to do a bit of work on the case to get these open.”
“Why do you need to open them?” Blackboard asked. He was almost protective of the evidence, like he didn't want anyone touching it that wasn't from his own team. He was going to have to get over that.
“To see who made them,” Nate said. “Or any kind of other hints as to how they were created. You see, this is a custom-built timer. We need to figure out where the killer is getting either the clocks themselves or the pieces to make them, if he's doing it DIY.”
Blackford scowled, an expression on his face as if to say that he wasn't stupid and could have worked this out himself. Laura was doing a very good job of biting her tongue, and she didn't want to stop now. However, she allowed herself a moment of crowing in her own head. If he was so smart, he would have never needed to ask the question.
This line of thinking was, of course, pretty juvenile, but that didn't stop her from getting a tiny little kick out of it.
Once the toolkit was produced from the booth where the cop on duty sat, Nate was the one to pull one of the clocks out of the bag and examine it carefully. He turned it over in his hands, and Laura pointed silently to a couple of places where there appeared to be markings on the plastic case of the clock itself. Places where someone might have opened it with some kind of prying lever, for example, to take out one element and put another in.
“Alright,” Nate said, taking a deep breath. “Let's get this baby open and see how it ticks.”
Laura nodded, unable to resist reacting to his terrible joke even in spite of the gravity of the situation. Blackford, she noticed, did not. His face remained as stony as ever as he watched them with folded arms over his chest.
Laura watched as Nate carefully lifted the unscrewed back off the clock, turning it over. He handed it to Laura as he looked closely at the inner mechanism of the clock and the timer, now even more clearly inserted into the place where a different kind of timer had once sat. It looked a lot more technical than the mechanics of the clock face, with a chip and soldered wires rather than simply cogs and wheels.
“Here,” Laura said, showing him the inside of the clock’s back. In small letters, engraved just at the same height of the new timer, was a name. JT Time.
“I know them,” Blackford said, with some surprise. “They’ve been here in the city for decades.”
“Then you’d better take us right there,” Laura said grimly.
They were on the right track at last – and though she couldn’t resist subtly resting the bare skin of her wrist, above the glove, on the clock casing just before they placed it away, no vision came. They were going to have to rely on old-fashioned police work this time.
And at last, they had a very good place to start.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Laura looked up suspiciously as Captain Blackford slowed to a stop right in front of them, his patrol car parking outside a storefront that did not look very auspicious.
“This is it?” she said, craning her head. She made out, in faded lettering above the store, the words ‘JT Time.’ She guessed it had to be the right place. At first glance, though, the store didn't even look as though it was open. The windows were dirty, the paint on the sign above cracked and even peeling off, and there were certainly no customers inside that she could see.
She and Nate got out of the car and rejoined Blackford as they headed inside. A bell above the door tinkled to announce their arrival, apparently prompting a flurry of activity from somewhere behind a beaded screen door, set into the back of the shop behind a counter.
The person that was back there took long enough to come out to them that Laura had time to glance around. And time, indeed, was what she saw. There were clocks of all kinds all around the store, upon shelves, hanging on the walls, and even laid out under glass within the counter. They ranged across the board of all the old-fashioned clocks she could think of. Cuckoo clocks, some of them seemingly carved with minute precision in what Laura thought might be a Swiss style. Grandfather clocks, tall and loud, their pendulums ticking above the rest of the incessant noise. It was almost eerie how the entire clock collection seemed to tick on the exact same beat, ongoing so that it started to make Laura feel as though she could only move or speak in time to the same rhythm. There were watches, both small gold pocket watches and the kind to be worn on wrists with leather straps, none of them looking modern at all.
The man who emerged from behind the beaded curtain with a clatter was elderly, to say the least. He was gray-haired, his shoulders and back slumped and slouched forward, a sign of years spent hunched over his work. His fingers and hands, too, were gnarled, another sign that he had spent a long time working with those same hands on small, detailed work. He wore a thick pair of glasses perched in front of watery blue eyes, and his face w
as thoroughly lined. Laura couldn't exactly say that he looked threatening at all. In fact, he looked rather timid, as if he was unsure of how to deal with these people in his store.
“Hello,” he said, the sound a timorous and questioning one.
“JT,” Blackford said, greeting him with a grunt.
“Captain,” the man - who must have been the owner, presumably this JT- replied. “Has something happened, something I can help you with?”
“Could be,” Blackford said. “These are FBI agents. I'll let them fill you in.”
Laura turned from giving Blackford a wide-eyed look, trying to smooth her expression as much as she could, as JT looked around at her and Nate expectantly. She knew that Blackford was not exactly going out of his way to help them, but sometimes it felt as if he was actually doing the opposite. Putting them on the spot, not hiding his rudeness. The locals had to pick up on it, and they were sure to trust the local Captain, especially if they knew him, more than a couple of random agents.
Laura cleared her throat and then smiled, figuring it was the best approach with an elderly man who looked as nervous as this one did. “We are trying to trace down a few clocks that we think you may have made,” she said. She kept her words calm and light. “We found your name carved into the back of the inside case.”
She took a picture they had prepared out of her pocket, placing it down on the counter in front of JT. There was a full color print of one of the clocks, taken not from the crime scene itself but from the moment that the items were logged in as evidence. There was nothing about the picture to suggest it had been involved in any kind of crime, much less clear as to which one. That, she thought, was going to be helpful. It was always good to get an unbiased reaction first, and then be able to assess whether the person they were talking to was genuinely surprised when they announced what the item had been used for.
