Slow Kill kk-9

by Michael McGarrity

  A pretty woman, perhaps two inches taller than Ramona, with short, dark hair and a dimple in her cheek, stepped forward and waved in her direction.

  “Ramona?” the woman asked with an easy smile.

  “You must be Ellie.” Impulsively, she stepped forward and gave Lowrey a hug.

  “Welcome to California,” Ellie said. “Let’s get your bags and hit the road.”

  As they waited at the covered baggage stall next to the terminal, Ellie’s cell phone rang.

  “Is Sergeant Pino with you?” Lieutenant Macy asked.

  “Yes, she just arrived,” Ellie said.

  “Good. I need you both here now,” Macy said. “Claudia Spalding is out of jail.”

  “What happened?”

  “The judge threw out the arrest on a technicality and released her. She’s home, but I’ve got people there making sure she stays put.”

  “Do you want us at Montecito?” Ellie asked.

  “No, the sheriff and the DA want you and Pino here to vet the new arrest affidavit before it’s served. They want everything in perfect order.”

  “Does it need vetting?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Are they just covering their butts?”

  “I didn’t say that either,” Macy replied.

  “We’re on our way.”

  “Problems?” Ramona asked as she picked up her luggage.

  Ellie smiled. “We’ve been called into work. I’ll tell you about it on the drive.”

  “Another Friday evening shot to hell,” Ramona said cheerfully as she followed Ellie to her unit.

  Much more than three hours passed while Detective Bill Price waited in his unit with all the windows down so that no outside sound would go unnoticed. Every ten minutes he checked in with his team by radio. All the entrances were covered, two detectives were constantly circling the estate perimeter in units looking for any sign of movement, and an officer was on station at the bottom of the hill ready to stop, ID, and question the destination of any drivers entering the street.

  Price checked the time as he unwrapped a stick of gum and folded it into his mouth. The night breeze whispered through the trees, soft and soothing, and a full moon flung tangled webs of shadows from the branches across the roadway.

  The distant sound of rotors made Price stiffen, listen intently, and look up at the empty sky through the windshield.

  He got out and did a three-sixty scan. Tall trees blocked his line of sight in every direction.

  The sound grew closer and a helicopter broke into view, traveling fast, descending quickly, veering toward the estate.

  Price decided he couldn’t wait for Macy’s call. He reached into the car and grabbed the microphone. “Go, go, go,” he yelled. “Stop that chopper.”

  Car engines roared to life, entrance gates opened, and police cars barreled onto the grounds from three directions, converging on the house. Price swerved around the lead car and braked hard by the front door just in time to see the chopper rise above the rooftop, displaying only the tail boom and rear fins as it flew away.

  His cell phone rang. He took a deep breath to swallow his frustration and answered.

  “You’re good to go,” Macy said.

  Price watched the flashing anticollision beacon on the upper fin of the chopper recede in the sky. “It’s too late. A helicopter just picked her up.”

  “Dammit,” Macy said. “You’re sure of that?”

  “It just left, Lieutenant. We’re at the house now, but we haven’t searched it yet.”

  “Do it,” Macy snapped. “I’ll notify all the area airports and local police departments.”

  Price thought about LAX and Burbank, which weren’t that far by air, Santa Barbara just minutes away, and all the other, smaller fields Spalding could land at before any cops could get there in time. It seemed hopeless.

  “Ten-four,” he said.

  “Did you ID the chopper?” Macy asked.

  “Negative, I couldn’t read the markings.”

  “Dammit,” Macy said, this time with more feeling. “Seal that place off and search every inch of it. I’ll take care of the warrant affidavit. I want to know exactly what Spalding took with her.”

  “Roger that.” Price put the cell phone away, gathered his team, and began the search.

  The only person they found on the premises was Glenn Davitt, the estate manager, waiting for them in his quarters. He cheerfully admitted that he’d seen Claudia fly away.

  “Did she say where she was going?” Price asked.

  “No,” Davitt replied, “just that her arrest had all been a big mistake.”

  “Were you with her when she arranged for the helicopter?”

  Davitt shook his head. “I didn’t even know about it until it landed.”

  “But you saw her leave.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What air charter company did she use?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “What was she carrying?”

  “Two bags and a briefcase.”

  “Did you see her pack?”

  “No.”

  “Where’s the housekeeper?” Price asked.

  “She gave herself the night off.”

  “But you stayed here. Why?”

  “Look, I didn’t help Claudia, if that’s what you mean. And even if I had, like I said, she told me everything was cool and you guys had fucked up.”

  Price didn’t believe one word of it. Pissed beyond belief, Price told Davitt he would be held as a material witness.

  “What does that mean?” Davitt asked.

  “You’re going to jail, and you’ll stay there until you’re called to appear at Spalding’s trial.”

  “When will that be?”

  Price smiled wickedly. “Who knows? Months, maybe. It depends on how long it takes to find her. What air charter company did she use?”

  “Valley Air, out of Burbank.”

  “There, that wasn’t so hard,” Price said as he dialed Lieutenant Macy’s number.

  “Do I still have to go to jail?” Davitt asked.

  “Maybe not.”

  The full moon Kerney left behind in Santa Fe was hidden by a bleak night sky and a light wind that carried a mist of rain across the river into Arlington. A warm glow came through the windows of the house, and the exterior light was on in anticipation of his arrival.

  He paid the cabbie and carried his bags inside just as Sara stepped out of the kitchen. He could feel the grin on his face spread the moment he saw her. Barefoot, dressed in shorts and a halter top that showed the flat muscles of her stomach, her long, slender legs, and the rise of her breasts, she hurried to him and he held her tight, smelling her scent.

  After a long look at Patrick, sound asleep in his crib, they sat in the kitchen, Sara sipping wine and Kerney a glass of iced tea. They talked idly, comfortably, about small matters.

  Kerney told her of his faulty attempt to build the rock retaining wall at the ranch, and described in detail the horses he’d bought. Sara told him Patrick was about to start teething, and that she was planning to have the old-fashioned radiators enclosed to protect him from accidental burns.

  Later, with the bedsheets tangled at their feet, pillows pushed aside onto the floor, damp legs intertwined, Sara talked more about their son. How he was starting to say words, how he would sit quietly and stare at the pages in his picture books.

  “He’s already reading and talking,” Kerney said. “What a genius. Do the three of us have the weekend together?”

  Sara reached for the pillows, brought them up to the bed, and yawned sleepily. “We do.”

  She ran her foot along Kerney’s leg and snuggled close. In the darkness, he listened until her breathing slowed into the quiet rhythm of sleep.

  A cooperative Glenn Davitt supplied Price with phone numbers where Cora, the housekeeper, and Sheila, the personal assistant, could be reached. After making contact with them by phone, Price sent detectives to fetch them. Onc
e they arrived, he had them show him the secret places where the Spaldings kept their important papers, cash, and valuables.

  Cora took him to the hidden safes in the walk-in closets off the master bedroom. In the library, Sheila opened a sliding wall panel that concealed another safe.

  All of them were locked, and since Price and his team didn’t know diddly about safecracking, he called in an expert, which meant waiting for the guy to show.

  Once they were opened, Price found the closet jewelry safes had been cleaned out. Inside the library wall safe were insurance policies, prior year tax returns, real estate documents, car titles, personal property inventories, and current year quarterly investment statements.

  One of the insurance polices carried a three-million-dollar jewelry endorsement. Appended to it was a list of the items with an appraised replacement value for each. A thick envelope contained photographs of the jewelry and watches. He called Lieutenant Macy.

  “From what the housekeeper could tell me, Spalding packed casual traveling clothes. I don’t know how much money she has with her, or if she took her passport, but she cleaned out three million dollars in jewelry that can be pawned or sold for cash. I’ve got photographs of the jewelry we can circulate.”

  “There’s a BOLO and fugitive warrant out on her,” Macy said. “Customs, the Mexican authorities, and Interpol have been alerted. Valley Air dropped her off at Burbank, where a car was waiting. We don’t know yet who picked her up or where they went.”

  “I’m going to shut it down here, Lieutenant.”

  “Leave a detective behind until I can get the Santa Barbara PD to put a close watch on the place.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Price gave the word to his team, walked outside, and studied the deep marks in the grass left by the helicopter landing skids. A daring escape from justice in a helicopter was something right out of a novel. Who would have thunk it?

  Over the years he’d listened to a lot of tales by other cops about their biggest cases, the tough ones, the bizarre ones, the headline grabbers. Price figured he was smack in the middle of a doozie that topped them all.

  Chapter 14

  O n his trips to Arlington, Kerney tried to take over as many childcare chores as possible. He got up early Saturday morning while Sara slept, and found Patrick stirring in his crib in need of a diaper change. He cleaned Patrick up, dressed him, and fed him breakfast. Then father and son slipped out of the house for a walk around the neighborhood.

  Patrick’s affectionate personality, inquisitive nature, and sunny disposition delighted Kerney. Whenever he saw something that stirred his curiosity, Patrick’s face lit up in a happy smile.

  Kerney let Patrick totter along the sidewalk within easy reach, scooping him up whenever he veered toward the street. While riding safely in his arms, Patrick chewed contentedly on Kerney’s shirt collar until it was damp and soggy.

  The neighborhood, known as Aurora Heights, fascinated Kerney. Developed prior to World War II, the houses borrowed heavily from Tudor, Colonial, and Craftsman-style architecture, giving the area a settled, prosperous feel. Lush lawns were neatly tended, mature trees canopied homes, and tall shrubs screened front windows.

  It was a tame, orderly slice of the world, much different from New Mexico’s raw deserts and rugged mountains. Although it was pleasing to the eye, the absence of a distant horizon against an immense, limitless sky made Kerney feel hemmed in.

  Back at the house, Sara was soaking in the old cast-iron claw-foot tub, reading a book.

  She closed the book and put it on the windowsill above the tub. “You don’t know how much I love it when you come to see us.”

  Patrick stood at the edge of the tub trying unsuccessfully to climb in. Kerney picked Patrick up and let him splash his hands in the bathwater. “I try to be helpful.”

  Sara smiled wantonly. “Actually, my thoughts were more about last night.”

  He leaned over the tub and kissed her. “It’s my turn to fix breakfast.”

  “Put Patrick in his high chair while you do,” Sara said, “and let him help.”

  Kerney looked down at his son. “How do I do that?”

  “Mash some bananas into two small plastic bowls, and give him his spoon and a teething biscuit. He’ll stir it all up, dump it from bowl to bowl, and make a mess.”

  At the kitchen table, Sara, now bathed and dressed, laid out the weekend plans while Patrick sat in his high chair gleefully stirring gooey banana pulp with his fingers. The plastic bowls and spoon had long ago fallen to the floor at Kerney’s feet.

  Since moving in, Sara had replaced all the appliances and had a contractor put in a new countertop and sink and restore the original kitchen cabinets. The room had a warm, country feel that Kerney liked a lot.

  Sara had arranged for them to stay overnight in Fredericksburg at a bed-and-breakfast inn. They would tour the town’s historic district, visit some nearby plantations and Civil War battlefields, and perhaps do some shopping. A history buff, Kerney thought it an excellent plan.

  He was washing breakfast dishes at the sink when Ramona Pino called from California and gave him the news about Claudia Spalding’s fugitive status. The sheriff’s department had tracked her to Los Angeles and lost her there. Detectives were working the phones, talking to everyone in California and New Mexico who knew her, hoping to get a lead on her whereabouts. The story had already hit the newspapers and television networks.

  “Keep me informed,” Kerney said as Sara stepped into the kitchen with a cleaned-up, freshly dressed Patrick at her heels.

  “Problems?” she asked, with a tight, resigned smile on her face.

  Kerney put the phone down and smiled reassuringly. “Nothing that will spoil our weekend. Claudia Spalding, our murder suspect, is on the lam, but I’m not about to fly out to California and help find her.”

  “Then let’s get out of here,” Sara said, “before the phone rings again.”

  “Good idea.”

  Late Sunday afternoon, Kerney and Sara arrived back home with a sleepy, cranky Patrick in tow. In his high chair during dinner, he kicked his feet, waved his arms, and refused to eat. After his bath, Kerney put him in his crib and tried to settle him down. When that didn’t work, Kerney rocked him until he fell asleep in his arms.

  Leg-weary from tromping through battlefields, plantations, and historic old Fredericksburg, Kerney stretched out on the living room couch and read the Sunday edition of the Washington Post. While it hadn’t made the front page news, the story of Claudia Spalding’s flight from justice got half a column of play inside the front section under the headline “Wealthy Murder Suspect Vanishes.”

  He passed it over to Sara, who was curled up in an easy chair scanning the house and garden supplement.

  She read it quickly and handed it back. “That reminds me, George Spalding wasn’t a military policeman. According to his records, he was a graves registration specialist, confirmed by his DOB and Social Security number. The information you got from the Santa Barbara Police Department is false.”

  “The police captain I spoke with told me George’s father provided the military documents to his department, and from what I saw in the file they looked authentic to me.”

  “They had to be forged,” Sara said. “I researched the helicopter crash. No such event occurred in Vietnam on that date. George Spalding was killed in an RPG attack at the Tan Son Nhut Airbase.”

  Kerney dropped the paper and swung into a sitting position. “Do you have his complete service jacket?”

  Sara shook her head. “Not yet. I’ll get it tomorrow. When do you expect the forensic results on the skeletal remains?”

  “In a week, I hope.”

  “I’ll alert the Armed Forces DNA lab and ask them to give it high priority when the results arrive.”

  “Jerry Grant, the forensic anthropologist I used, suggested the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii might also be helpful.”

  Sara rose and raised the window blind
s. Muted evening light bathed the oak floor. “I agree, especially given your theory that the remains in the casket aren’t those of George Spalding.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Sara sat back down. “You raised it in your case notes. George Spalding was five-feet-eight, and nineteen years old at the time of his death. Not five-eleven and in his thirties, as Grant’s preliminary findings of the remains suggest.”

  Kerney nodded in agreement. “There’s a cover-up of some kind going on.”

  “A cover-up of what?” Sara asked.

  “I don’t know. Clifford Spalding did everything possible to thwart his ex-wife’s quest to find her son, and we now know he probably gave forged military documents about George’s death to the police. Why? Did George fake his death, desert his post, and somehow make his way back to the States from Vietnam?”

  “Possibly,” Sara said. “As a graves registration specialist he could have been in a position to send home the remains of another soldier under his name. But that deception should have been caught stateside. The Army goes to extraordinary lengths to confirm the identity of every KIA.”

  “So how could he get away with it?” Kerney asked.

  Sara tapped her fingers together. “He couldn’t, without help. In the material you sent me, you noted that Clifford Spalding started building his wealth right around the time his son was reported KIA.”

  “Up until then, he operated a less than successful mom-and-pop motel in Albuquerque,” Kerney said. “But the story of how he got the money, or where it came from, can’t be substantiated.”

  “Maybe George supplied the money,” Sara said. “Graves registration is part of the quartermaster corps, which controls the flow of massive amounts of material and equipment. Toward the end of the Vietnam War, there were hundreds of reports of black marketeering in stolen military property, drug trafficking, and currency smuggling, that were run by networks of soldiers in the quartermaster corps. Army CID was swamped with cases. Although a lot of contraband was seized before it was shipped to the States, quite a bit of it got through and was never recovered.”

  “How do you know so much about this?” Kerney asked.