Killing Time by Linda Howard Page B

burning the card,” she suggested, thinking he needed to be more intrigued before she tried explaining about NASA.
    “I’ll take your word for it,” he said, and tossed the card onto his desk.
    She was losing him. The key was getting his curiosity piqued enough that he would keep listening to her. He looked ready to haul her off to a cell, so she said quickly, “That silver case. Open it up.”
    “Why don’t you just save your breath and—”
    Abruptly her patience broke. She had to convince him, and she didn’t have a lot of time to waste doing it. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said in exasperation. “I’m from the future. The year 2207, to be exact. I’m federal agent Nikita Stover, sent back to catch a killer from my time who traveled back to this time to systematically kill—
    “You don’t believe a word I’m saying, do you?”
    “You’re kidding, right?” he asked rhetorically. He’d folded his arms across his chest and appeared to be waiting for her to wind down.
    “The silver case is a DNA scanner. I was hoping I’d be able to get a reading in the forest behind Mr. Allen’s house, but you stuck too close to me. Go ahead, open it. I assume you’re bright enough to recognize technology that doesn’t exist now.”
    Goading him probably wasn’t smart, but she would do anything necessary to stay out of a jail cell. She would be useless there, and if her location became known, vulnerable to another attack.
    “If it doesn’t exist yet, then how can it be right here?” he asked, picking up the case and showing it to her, for all the world as if she hadn’t noticed it before.
    “I didn’t say ‘yet,’ I said ‘now.’ There’s a world of difference.”
    “Not that I can see. I’m holding it
now.
”
    “Okay, so time travel messes with syntax,” she snapped. “Do you want to get into an argument about past future tenses? The scanner exists temporarily in your now, but when I leave, it goes with me and it will then not yet exist.”
    Again she saw that flicker of curiosity in his expression when she mentioned past future tenses, which she’d hated studying in school. Time travel could tie language in a knot, making it possible for one person to both intend to do something, and at the same time to have already done it. But she didn’t want to discuss language with him, she wanted him to look at the scanner.
    “The lid is really a part of the scanner,” she said, nodding toward the case. “It folds all the way back and connects to the bottom of the case. It won’t work unless all the connections are made.”
    “There aren’t any holes in the lid for connections,” he pointed out, again showing the case to her.
    Nikita rolled her eyes. “There will be. They stay closed until the initial contact, to keep out dust and debris. Just open the damn thing, will you?”
    His lips quirked in amusement at her irritable tone. “You’re getting a tad pushy, Ms. Stover. Remember who’s wearing the cuffs and who isn’t.”
    She narrowed her eyes. “Only because I let you cuff me, to show my goodwill.”
    “So you keep saying.” He’d been fiddling with the scanner the entire time, and now he opened it and slowly folded the lid all the way back, holding it up close to his face so he could watch for any hidden latches to spring open. Just as the two surfaces touched there was a quiet click as the two halves locked together. Immediately the self-test function began running, a series of different colored lights dancing over the scanner.
    He tried to pull the pieces apart, but once the lid was secured, it stayed that way until the release button was pushed.
    “Magnetized?” he asked, frowning.
    “No. I told you how it worked. Press the triangular button at the very top to release the mechanism.”
    He studied the face of the scanner, pressed the specified button, and the lights went out as soon as the lid was released.
    Silently he once more folded the lid back so it met with its matching