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.