Nick of Time (A Bug Man Novel)

by Tim Downs

  Nick entered the living room and shined the flashlight around the hardwood floors; he saw the taped contour of a body near the center of the room, marking the location where the Philadelphia police had discovered Pete’s body. He approached the spot carefully, aiming the flashlight directly in front of his feet to avoid disturbing any potential piece of evidence. He squatted down beside the contour and held the flashlight over it at arm’s length . . .

  The head’s positioned toward the back of the house with the feet pointing toward the front. Misco said he saw two bullet wounds in the chest, so the body had to have been lying on its back. Pete must have fallen backward, so the shooter must have been standing toward the front of the house when he fired. That means either Pete walked in on the shooter, or the shooter entered the front door looking for Pete. But who in the world would want to kill Pete—and why?

  Nick walked to the front door and pointed the flashlight at the area around the knob and the dead bolt. The doorframe was still intact; there were no signs of forced entry. He ran the flashlight around the room—at the walls, the picture frames, the bookshelves, the furniture. Nothing seemed disturbed or out of place; either the shooter was the neatest burglar Nick had ever seen or theft hadn’t been the motive.

  Nick returned to the taped contour again. This time he laid the flashlight on the floor at the body’s feet, pointing toward the head, then walked around to the head and got down on his knees. He bent forward, placing his fists on the hardwood floor to avoid leaving fingerprints. He turned his head to the side and looked at the flashlight; the brilliant beam passing along the glossy floor silhouetted every speck in its path. Dust balls looked like miniature sagebrush and dots of blood were as black as ink. He searched for shell casings first, but he knew that was too much to hope for—even the world’s worst forensic tech would spot brass on a hardwood floor.

  Next he noted the location of blood spatter in relation to the body; he noticed some at the feet, but it wasn’t widely dispersed and there was no sign of smearing. That was good; it meant the first two shots probably killed Pete quickly—he didn’t have time to crawl or drag himself across the floor. Thank God for small blessings.

  There was no sign of insect evidence—no maggots or puparia—but Nick didn’t expect to find any. The windows were tightly sealed and had prevented blowflies and flesh flies from gaining access to the house; the only insect that might have reached the body would have been a common Musca domestica already inside, and there wouldn’t have been time for its eggs to hatch and the maggots to begin to develop. It didn’t matter; the medical examiner had lots of reliable methods for estimating a postmortem interval this brief. Time of death wasn’t important here—at least not to Nick. To Nick, this case wasn’t about when—it was about why.

  He got up off his knees and retrieved the flashlight, then walked toward the front door and turned left into Pete’s office. Nick pointed the flashlight around the room; there was Pete’s beautiful cherry rolltop desk against the far wall with a fourdrawer file cabinet standing beside it. Bookshelves covered most of the walls, each one lined with neatly arranged books categorized by subject heading and then alphabetically by author—there were even little labels on the edges of the shelves like in a library. Nick shook his head. Pete had always been a compulsive organizer, but the man himself was so sociable and friendly that he could seem absentminded at times. Nick was the diametric opposite; his mind was compulsively organized, but his physical environment was always in chaos. Pete Boudreau was like Nick’s evil twin—or maybe Nick was the evil one, because his own office back at NC State looked like a toxic waste site, with stacks of books and journals teetering on every level surface while documents and articles cascaded from ledges like paper waterfalls. Everything in Pete’s office was assiduously arranged, right down to the calendar on the desktop oriented at a precise ninety-degree angle to the edge of the desk. Nick tried to remember if he even owned a calendar; he wondered how many times he had jotted down some important reminder on the back of an undergraduate’s blue book and then handed it back in class.

  He moved to the desk and began to flip through the pages of the calendar. The date of each Vidocq meeting had been faithfully entered, and the current month’s meeting bore the additional notation, “NICK IN TOWN.” Pete hadn’t forgotten their meeting; he would have been there if not for the intervention of three lead slugs. Nick placed his finger on today’s date and began to scan backward week by week and month by month, noting every entry Pete had made in his perfect script. A brief notation in late November caught his eye: CALL MARTY—no last name, no phone number. Three days earlier he found a similar entry: CALL MARTY. He continued to work backward through the fall calendar and found the same notation again and again. According to the calendar, Pete spoke repeatedly with some guy named Marty just a few months prior to his death. Nick remembered the words of Pete’s letter inviting him to Philadelphia: We’ve really had some interesting cases the last few months . . . I’ve been working on one since last fall and I think it’s about to come together . . .

  Who’s this guy Marty, Nick wondered, and how do I find him?

  Nick turned to the file cabinet and opened the top drawer— but just as he did he heard the blaring whoop of a police siren outside the house and almost simultaneously a pounding knock on the front door.

  “Police—open up!”

  Crap—some nosy neighbor must have spotted the beam from Nick’s flashlight and called the police. He thought about making a run for the back door, but he knew it was useless— the police would have surely sent a man around back before announcing their presence. There was no way out, and there was nowhere to run—and he probably had less than a minute before they let themselves in.

  He turned back to the file drawer and searched through the section headings: Correspondence, Financial, Personal . . . There it was—right where it should be, in the back, in alphabetical order: Utilities. Nick had never been so glad that Pete was a compulsive organizer; he could find his way through Pete’s files faster than he could his own. Nick rifled through the file folders in the Utilities section and quickly found it: the file marked Telephone.

  He pulled the file and ran out of the office just as he heard the sound of a key scratching in the dead bolt. He raced across the living room to the window and threw open the drapes; he unlatched the window and lifted it just an inch or two— then he slid the file folder out the window and let it drop to the ground behind the bushes. He had just drawn the drapes again when the front door flew open and Detective Danny Misco burst into the room with two patrolmen behind him. Misco held a flashlight in his left hand and a Glock in his right; he pointed both of them at Nick.

  “Well, it’s about time,” Nick said. “I want to report a Peeping Tom.”

  7

  Alena waited under a streetlamp on the sidewalk in front of the Endor Tavern & Grille. Two of her dogs sat obediently beside her, one on either side like canine bookends. On her left was Dante, one of the enormous black neo-mastiffs that she always kept nearby for protection; on her right was tiny little Ruckus, the gawky Chinese crested that looked like a half-plucked chicken with its tongue hanging out.

  She glanced down at her cell phone for the umpteenth time and remembered what Nick had told her: Three bars on the right means your battery is good; three bars on the left means you’re getting a signal. She remembered something else Nick had told her too: I’ll call at exactly nine o’clock. She checked the time—it was now 9:45.

  She could have kicked herself for walking instead of driving; she could be waiting for Nick’s call in the privacy of her truck instead of standing on a street corner like some hooker. But it took less time to take the footpath directly down the mountain than it did to make the drive to Endor on the long and winding road—and she didn’t like to pass up an opportunity to exercise her dogs. Besides, she never expected to end up standing on a street corner; she had hoped to wait for Nick’s call at Resurrection Lutheran Church on the outskir
ts of town. But when Nick’s call didn’t come at exactly nine o’clock she wondered if she was close enough to town to get reception. She knew that Endor’s only cell tower was an ugly eyesore standing in a field directly behind the Tavern & Grille—so for the last forty-five minutes she had been gradually working her way closer to the tower, hoping to improve reception and increase the chances that the call would finally come through.

  Alena had been standing on the street corner for twenty minutes now, enduring the looks from men in cars and pickup trucks who slowed down to ogle her as they passed—one of them even circled the block and came around for a second look. And all she could do was stand there, waiting for Nick to call— but each time they passed she lowered her head and shook her long black hair down to cover her face a little. She couldn’t help feeling cheap and ashamed somehow—but why should she? Those men were the ones who ought to be ashamed—the men who slowed down to drool over her and then drove home to their waiting wives.

  Alena had come down from the mountain extra early just in case Nick couldn’t wait until nine to call; that thought made her feel like a silly little girl. Apparently Nick had no problem containing himself until nine—or ten, or eleven, or whenever he finally got bored enough to call her. She wondered if he knew she was waiting on a street corner in the dark; she wondered if it would bother him if he did. Sometimes she wondered if anything bothered Nick; she wondered if he thought about her at all.

  One thing’s for sure: He’s not thinking about this wedding.

  But that thought made her feel angry and she scolded herself for letting her imagination run wild like that. Nick didn’t tell her to wait in the dark on some street corner—that was her choice, not his. She was standing outside the Endor Tavern & Grille because she didn’t want to go inside, pure and simple. She didn’t want to go inside because she knew the looks she would get in there—the looks and the whispers and the nodding heads that always made her feel like some kind of freak. Just because she lived on a mountain by herself; just because she had done so since the age of ten; just because she chose to surround herself with dogs of every imaginable shape and size; just because she had learned to command those dogs without ever speaking a word.

  Just because they think I’m a witch.

  But none of that was Nick’s fault. She loved Nick, and they were getting married on Saturday, and she wasn’t about to let her hatred for the people of Endor poison her thoughts about the man she loved. So she shoved the poisonous thoughts aside and tried to call up a pleasant memory instead . . . Six months ago, not long after they were first engaged, when Nick made the long drive up from Raleigh just to visit her.

  ***

  It was a clear and perfect night and they were lying on their backs on a blanket in a clearing in the woods, staring up at all the stars you can see only from the top of a mountain.

  Nick pointed at three faint dots in the sky. “That’s called Orion’s Belt,” he said, “and over there is—”

  “Stop it,” Alena said.

  “Stop what?”

  “Naming them. It’s wrong.”

  “It’s wrong to name stars?”

  “People only name things to control them. We don’t control the stars—we just like to think we do.”

  “People name things to understand them,” Nick said, “to classify them—to compare them. Take insects, for example—”

  “Nick.”

  “What?”

  “Shut up and look at the stars.”

  Half an hour passed in peaceful silence.

  “Nick.”

  “What?”

  “When do I get my ring?”

  “What ring?”

  Alena turned her head and gave him a look.

  “Oh,” Nick said. “That ring. Well, what kind do you want?”

  “I want a diamond,” she said. “A big one—a doorknob.”

  There was a long pause. “I’ve never really understood the attraction for diamonds,” he said. “I mean, look at it practically: The average person can’t tell a diamond from a piece of glass— yet we’re willing to pay a fortune just to be able to tell someone, ‘It’s a diamond.’”

  “Nick—don’t be a weasel.”

  “And when you go to buy a diamond the jeweler goes on and on about ‘cut’ and ‘clarity.’ You’re supposed to spend thousands more for a ‘flawless’ diamond, one that doesn’t have the tiniest little speck in it—something you couldn’t even see without a jeweler’s loupe. The whole thing’s a scam, if you ask me. Have you ever looked at a cubic zirconium?”

  “You want to buy me a fake diamond?”

  “Believe me, it’s a lot more economical.”

  “That’s good, Nick. You buy me a fake diamond, and I’ll pretend to be faithful.”

  There was another long pause . . .

  “I’m having you cremated,” Alena said.

  Nick rolled his head to the side and looked at her. “Excuse me?”

  “If anything happens to you, I’m having you cremated. Just thought I’d let you know.”

  “That’s planning pretty far ahead, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to pick a china pattern first?”

  “I read about this company in Illinois—LifeGem, I think it’s called. First they cremate you, then they take the carbon out of your ashes. They put all the carbon in this big press and they squeeze it for a couple of weeks, and when they’re done you’re a diamond. I’m serious. For twenty thousand bucks they’ll turn you into a one-carat diamond—any color I want.”

  Nick didn’t respond.

  “Yep,” Alena said. “One way or another, I’m getting a diamond out of you.”

  ***

  Alena flexed her fingers and looked at her ring; the flawless diamond sparkled blue and white under the halogen streetlamp. She felt raindrops patting softly on her hair; she looked up and saw silver needles streaking toward her from the darkness. The rain was beginning to fall harder now. In another few minutes she would be completely drenched.

  She looked at her cell phone one last time—it was 10:05.

  She snapped her fingers and made a little flip with her right hand. Both dogs rose to their feet and followed as she began the long walk back up the mountain.

  8

  Hey.”

  Nick didn’t look at the man sitting across from him in the holding cell; he’d been very careful not to make eye contact since the man was dragged in kicking and screaming about midnight the night before.

  “Hey. You.”

  He was a very large man, so large that he seemed to taper at both ends—like a third-instar maggot that was just about ready to pupate. The man had obviously been displeased with his incarceration when he first arrived, which he expressed by fuming and pacing and slamming his hamlike fists against the cinder-block walls—but he gradually calmed and cooled as the hours went by, and by dawn he had become positively chummy. Nick liked him better angry.

  “Hey—guess what they arrested me for.”

  “It’s none of my business,” Nick replied.

  “We got nothin’ else to do. Go ahead, take a guess.”

  Nick let his eyes sweep the man like a basting brush passing over a turkey. “Well, there’s only one knuckle on your left hand that doesn’t look like it belongs to some simian; that means you used to wear a wedding ring, but you took it off recently—probably just last night. You’ve got three parallel scratch marks on your left cheek, and they angle down from your ear to your chin—so she’s not as tall as you are and I take it she wasn’t in a very pleasant mood. You’re wearing that T-shirt inside out, which I really appreciate if it says what I think it does, and you’re only wearing one sock—so either you’re trying to start a new fashion trend or you got dressed in a big hurry. Now, we put all these mysterious clues together and what have we got? She walked in on you and she didn’t like what she saw. Things got ugly and somebody called the cops—my guess would be the girlfriend—so you’re probably here on a domestic disturbance charge.”
r />   “Hey, you oughta be a detective,” the man said admiringly.

  “What’d they haul you in for?”

  “Being a detective.”

  “No kidding? I figured you for some kind of pervert.”

  Nick looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Those eyes of yours—they’re the size of hockey pucks.”

  “Hockey pucks,” Nick mumbled. “Haven’t heard that one before.”

  “Yeah, I can see you pokin’ your head outta the bushes somewhere. Some woman steps outta the shower, she takes a look out the bathroom window—”

  “Thanks,” Nick said. “I’ve got the picture. And you’re right— there’s definitely a pervert in the room.”

  Just then the metal security door opened with a loud clack and an officer stepped into the holding area. “Dr. Nick Polchak,” he read from a clipboard. “Let’s go.”

  Nick stood and waited while the officer unlocked the cell.

  “You’re a doctor?” the big man asked.

  “That’s right,” Nick said. “You’d be surprised how many perverts get PhDs.”

  As Nick exited the holding area he found Nathan Donovan waiting for him—and Donovan didn’t look happy.

  “Don’t start,” Nick grumbled. “I had a very long night.”

  “What’s the matter? Didn’t bond with your cell mate?”

  “Nice guy,” Nick said. “I think he might start evolving any day now.”

  “Well, here’s a helpful tip for you, Nick: If you don’t like the kind of people you meet in holding cells, stay out of jail. Or is that too hard for you?”

  “Are you always so chipper first thing in the morning? I don’t know how Macy puts up with you.”