Time Of Murder:1

1

June 09, 2185....

"Hey, Henry, who dug that hole next to the flagpole?"

Henry looked up from the report he was writing. As chief county investigator he had his own office though it was small and crowded. Deputy Gray Madison was leaning in through the open door the expression on his freckled face only mildly curious.
"What hole next to the flagpole?"

"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."

"Huh." Henry 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 go through an ass-deep pile of paperwork. He'd been up all night and was so tired he might not have noticed even if he'd walked right by the supposed hole.
Having been sitting at his desk for three straight hours he figured he needed to stretch his legs a little bit. Grabbing his cup of coffee he refilled it as he passed by the coffee maker and he and the deputy Madison went out the door then walked around the side of the courthouse building to the front. The new day was showing a cloudless blue sky and the green grass was wet with dew. Colorful banks of spring flowers grew in carefully tended beds but Henry would have been hard to put to name any of them. He knew roses and daffodils. Everything else was pumped under the general designation of 'flowers'.

The courthouse opened at eight and the back parking lot was totally filled with the employees cars. The sheriff department had a separate wing on the right of the courthouse and the county jail occupied the two stories of the six-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 key air and light but effectively blocked the prisoner's view of the parking lot below.
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 feet deep.

Henry and the deputy stayed on the sidewalk; they could easily see from there. A granite slab had been flipped upside down and lay in grass. The dirt was scattered more than seemed strictly necessary for digging a simple hole. "That was the time capsule," Henry said and sighed. This was just the kind of shit high school kids would do but it wasn't just like any other crime.

"What time capsule?" Madison asked.

"There was a time capsule buried...hell, it was twenty years ago 2085. I watched them bury it on New Year's day."

"What's in it?"

"I don't really remember, but nothing struck me at the time as being valuable. Things like a copy of the newspaper a year book 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.

"Bunch of kids, supposedly" Madison said. "Thought stealing a time capsule would be fun."

"Yeah." Out of habit, Henry surveyed the surrounding ground. There were no footprints in the dew which means the vandals had struck hours ago. He stepped up on one of the park benches to get a better view and said. " What the..?"

"What is it?"

"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.