{"product_id":"killing-time-isbn-9780345453464","title":"Killing Time","description":"Returning to the entrancing supernatural territory of her popular novels Dream Man and Son of the Morning, New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard has written a sizzling new novel that is her most daring, exciting, and original yet. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1985, with much fanfare, a time capsule was buried under the front lawn of a small-town county courthouse, to be reopened in 2085. But just twenty years later, in the dead of night, the capsule is dug up, its contents stolen. That same night, one of the contributors to the capsule is brutally slain in his home–with no sign of forced entry or indication of a struggle. One by one, others who had placed items in the time capsule are murdered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBesides his suspicions about the sudden, mysterious appearance of Nikita Stover,\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003ethe chief investigator, Knox Davis, has absolutely no leads. And while Nikita’s no murderer, she seems to be hiding plenty of secrets. With more at stake than anyone else realizes, the smart-talking Nikita is determined to catch this cunning killer–while at the same time battling her own deepening feelings for a man and for a world in which she doesn’t belong. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen readers crave a seductive novel of unrelenting suspense with a paranormal twist, Linda Howard delivers time and again . . . make that Killing Time–a captivating, character-rich story that races along on a breathless plot full of action and intimacy, romance and danger, thrills and intrigue.Linda Howard is the award-winning author of many New York Times bestsellers, including To Die For, Kiss Me While I Sleep, Cry No More, Dying to Please, Open Season, Mr. Perfect, All the Queen’s Men, Now You See Her, Kill and Tell, and Son of the Morning. She lives in Alabama with her husband and two golden retrievers.\u003cb\u003eJune 27, 2005\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Hey, Knox, who dug that hole next to the flagpole?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Knox looked up from the report he was writing. As chief county  investigator, he  had his own office, though it was small and crowded.  Deputy Jason MacFarland was  leaning in through the open door, the  expression on his freckled face only mildly  curious.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “What hole next to the flagpole?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I’m telling you, there’s a  hole next to the flagpole. I’d swear it wasn’t  there yesterday afternoon when my  shift was over, but one’s there now.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Huh.” Knox rubbed his jaw. He himself  hadn’t noticed,   because he’d parked behind the courthouse when he came in   this  morning at four-thirty to wade through an ass-deep pile of paperwork.  He’d been  up all night, and he was so tired he might not have noticed even  if he’d walked  right by the supposed hole.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Having been sitting at his desk for three hours,  he figured he needed to  stretch his legs a bit. Grabbing his coffee cup, he refilled  it as he  passed by the coffeemaker, and he and Deputy MacFarland went out the side   door, then walked around the side of the redbrick courthouse building to  the front,  their   rubber-soled shoes quiet on the sidewalk. The new day was showing a  cloudless  blue sky, and the lush green grass was wet with dew. Colorful  banks of spring flowers  grew in carefully tended beds, but Knox would have  been hard put to name any of  them. He knew roses, and daffodils.  Everything else was lumped under the general  designation of “flowers.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The courthouse opened at eight, and the back parking  lot was rapidly  filling with employees’ cars. The sheriff’s department had a separate  wing  on the right of the courthouse, and the county jail occupied the top two  stories  of the five-story building. The prisoners used to catcall down to  the female employees  and visitors to the courthouse, until the county  installed slats over the windows  that let in air and light but effectively  blocked the prisoners’ view of the parking  lot below.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The flagpole was on the left front corner of the courthouse square;  park  benches faced the street on both sides of the corner, and there were more   of the neat flower beds. Today there wasn’t any wind; the flags hung  limply. And  at the base of the flagpole was a nice-sized hole, about three  feet wide and two  deep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Knox and the deputy stayed on the sidewalk; they could   easily see from  there. A granite slab had been flipped upside down and lay  in the grass. The dirt  was scattered more than seemed strictly necessary  for digging a simple hole. “That  was the time capsule,” Knox said, and  sighed. This was just the kind of shit high  school kids would do, but it  ate at his time just like any other crime.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “What  time capsule?” MacFarland asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “There was a time capsule buried . . . hell,  it was twenty years ago:  1985. I watched them bury it on New Year’s Day.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “What  was in it?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I don’t remember, but nothing struck me at the time as being valuable.   Things like a copy of the newspaper, a yearbook, some music and things.”  He did  remember that the newspaper hadn’t listed everything in the  capsule, though, and  in retrospect he was still pissed off about it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Bunch of kids, most likely,”  MacFarland said. “Thought stealing a time  capsule would be funny.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Yeah.”  Out of habit, Knox surveyed the surrounding ground. There were no  footprints in  the dew, which meant the van-  dals had struck hours ago. He stepped up on one of  the park benches so he  could get a better view, and said, “Huh.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “What is it?” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Nothing. No footprints.” The way the fresh dirt was scattered around,  there  should have been at least a partial footprint caught somewhere. But  the dirt looked  as if it had burst up out of the ground, rather than been  dug up and tossed with  a shovel. The flagpole was no more than ten feet  distant from the park bench, so  he had a very good view; there was no way  he was overlooking any prints. There simply  weren’t any.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e MacFarland climbed up on the bench beside him. “Don’t that beat  all,” he  said, after staring at the ground for at least thirty seconds. “How’d they   manage that? I wonder.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “God only knows.” He’d find out, though. Because the  county jail was  located at the courthouse, every corner of the building was equipped  with  a security camera, tucked up high under the eaves and painted to blend in   with the building. Unless a person knew the cameras were there, he’d have  a tough  time spotting them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He still had that report to finish, but the lack of footprints  around the  hole fired his curiosity. Now he had to know just how the little bastards   had managed to dig up the time capsule with a streetlight right there on  the corner  shining down on them, but with no one seeing them and without  leaving any prints  in the fresh dirt. Maybe First Avenue, the street right  in front of the courthouse,  didn’t have all that much traffic on it during  the wee hours, but there were always  patrol cars coming and going. Someone  should have seen something and reported it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He looked across the street at the hardware store where he and his dad had   lived; after he’d gone off to college, his dad had finally gotten serious  about  someone and remarried about ten years ago. Knox liked Lynnette just  fine, and was  glad Kelvin wasn’t alone. Lynnette hadn’t wanted to live  above the store, though,  so they’d bought a house out in the country. If  Kelvin had still lived there, Knox  thought, no kids would have managed to  do anything without Kelvin noticing, because  his bedroom had looked out  over the square.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Put some tape around the scene,  keep people from tromping all over it,”  he instructed MacFarland.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e MacFarland  could have argued that there was nothing there but a hole, and  that a missing time  capsule didn’t have any great value anyway—certainly  not enough value to justify  an investigation—but he merely nodded. Telling  Knox when   to back off was the sheriff’ s job, not his; besides, Knox was a source of  great amusement to the deputies, who  sometimes made bets on how far he  would go to solve a puzzle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He and MacFarland  retraced their steps around the courthouse to the  sheriff’s department, where they  parted company: MacFarland to carry out  his instructions, and Knox to the jail,  where the security cameras were  manned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Manned” was a loose term, because  more accurately they were “womanned,”  by a six-foot, fierce-eyed woman named Tarana  Wilson, who kept fanatical  watch over her domain. Her   facial features were carved  and strong, her skin burnished like dark  bronze, and she had a brown-belt in martial  arts. Knox strongly suspected  she could kick his ass.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Because a smart man never  approached a queen without bearing gifts, Knox  snagged a cream-filled doughnut out  of the break room and poured two fresh  cups of coffee, one for himself and one in  a disposable cup. Gifts in  hand, he went up the stairs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He had to stop and  identify himself; then he was buzzed into the jailor’s  offices.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The actual  cells were on the floors above, and access to those floors was  rigidly controlled.  They hadn’t had a breakout in at least fifteen years.  Not that Peke County had any  real hard cases in the county lockup; the  hard cases were in state prisons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The door to Tarana’s office was open, and she was pacing in front of a  bank of  ten black-and-white monitors. She seldom just sat; she seemed to  be constantly on  the move, as if too much energy burned in her lean,  long-muscled body for her to  sit still.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Hey, T.,” Knox said as he strolled in, extending the cup of coffee.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e She eyed the cup suspiciously, then looked back at the monitors. “What’s  that?” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Coffee.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “What’re you bringing me coffee for?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “To stay on your  good side. I’m afraid of you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That brought her dark, narrow-eyed gaze swinging  back to him. “Liar.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Okay, so I really have the hots for you and this is my  way of softening  you up.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A faint smile curved her mouth. She took the cup  of coffee and sipped it  as she studied the monitors. “It might work, too, if me  and my sisters  hadn’t sworn an oath to stay away from white boys.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He snorted,  then extended the doughnut. “This is for you, too.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Now I’m gettin’ scared  you really meant that about softening me up, but I  got news for you: it takes more  than any doughnut to do the job.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “It’s cream-filled.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Oh, well then,  I might have to rethink my position.” She grabbed the  doughnut and took a big bite  out of it, squishing white cream out both  sides of the pastry. She licked the cream  filling before it could splat to  the floor, her attention never leaving the monitors.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Now then, what can I do for you?”New York Times bestseller Author of Cover of Night","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302035509477,"sku":"NP9780345453464","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345453464.jpg?v=1767730729","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/killing-time-isbn-9780345453464","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}