Killing Time by Linda Howard Read Free Book Online Page B

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,