Nick of Time by Tim Downs Read Free Book Online Page A

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