Slow Kill kk-9

by Michael McGarrity

  “The remains in Spalding’s casket belong to a chief petty officer. He was lost overboard when his strike assault boat came under fire during a mission to pick up a SEAL team operating near the Cambodian border in 1972. According to eyewitness reports, he took rounds in the chest. Several other sailors were wounded.”

  “At least he wasn’t a murder victim,” Kerney said, “which means we have one less crime to worry about. How was his body retrieved?”

  Sara wiped Patrick’s chin with a napkin. “There’s no record that it was, at least by our personnel. The file does show that South Vietnamese naval commandos mounted several search and recovery missions for his body after the SEAL pullout. But there are no follow-up action assessment reports. They were probably burned before Saigon fell. Lots of official documents were destroyed to keep them out of the hands of the North Vietnamese.”

  “What about mortuary records?”

  Sara held out the spoon to Patrick. He took it and banged it on the high chair. “According to the quartermaster corps, the sailor ’s remains were never received at either Da Nang or Tan Son Nhut. From what we now know, the likely scenario is that after Spalding faked his death, someone at the mortuary sent the body bag home under Spalding’s name, and whoever processed it stateside made sure no questions were asked.”

  “I wonder how many gemstones were in the body bag, and how Spalding left Nam without getting caught.”

  “Given his job, it would have been easy for him to assume a dead soldier ’s identity. He probably came home on a chartered troop transport flight.”

  “He would have needed orders to do it.”

  “Which a processing clerk could have provided for a hefty bribe.”

  “That makes sense,” Kerney said. “Has the sailor ’s family been notified?”

  Sara shook her head as she tried to get Patrick to eat more dinner. He pushed the spoon away. “No, but when they are told, there will be no mention of the fact that his remains were unearthed in a casket buried over thirty years ago under another man’s name.”

  “I think he’s finished eating.” Kerney took Patrick out of his high chair and plopped him on his lap. “That would be an embarrassment to the military.”

  Sara gave him a guarded look. “Do you think they should be told the truth?”

  “I don’t think that would be wise,” Kerney said. “The family has had over thirty years to wonder, hope, and grieve. Let them bury him and move on. What are the Army’s plans to find George Spalding?”

  “JAG and CID have mounted a full-scale investigation into the entire gemstone smuggling operation. It’s quite possible that a quartermaster officer, who has since retired at a fairly high rank, may have been involved.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The officer in question authorized the release of the remains to Clifford and Alice Spalding and logged in the body bag containing the gemstone shipment that was intercepted.”

  Patrick smeared a sticky hand on Kerney’s shirt and burped. “Are you still in the loop on the case?”

  Sara shook her head. “Only peripherally, but I’ll keep an eye on it. When will you tell Alice Spalding about her son?”

  “Not right away,” Kerney replied. “Although with her deteriorating mental condition it might not matter when I did. Are you busy tomorrow night?”

  “Of course not, it’s Saturday.”

  “Good. I’ve booked dinner reservations at a Georgetown restaurant. Afterward, we have tickets for a chamber music concert in the city. I’ve already arranged for a babysitter.”

  Sara smiled. “That sounds nice.”

  Kerney lifted a very smelly Patrick off his lap. “I think our young friend needs his diaper changed.”

  “Your turn,” Sara said. “I’ll do the dishes.”

  Kerney took Patrick away and cleaned him up. Through the open door he could hear Sara loading the dishwasher. She was still a bit preoccupied and overworked, and not her usual self. But the tension between them had diminished.

  Kerney thought it best to let the situation ride. He didn’t want anything to spoil his last two days in Arlington.

  He put a clean diaper on Patrick and tickled his belly. “Let’s have a great weekend, Champ, before I head back to Santa Fe.”

  Patrick giggled in agreement, burped, and kicked his little feet in the air.

  A late afternoon summer sky greeted Kerney upon his return to New Mexico. The sun flooded golden light on the desert and made the distant peaks behind Santa Fe flutter miragelike against a hot blue horizon.

  The thought of returning to the solitude of his empty ranch house depressed Kerney. After two weeks with Sara and Patrick, he didn’t want to face the feeling of loneliness that would surely come as soon as he got home. Instead, he went to his office. On his desk was a memo from Ramona Pino and some material on the High Prairie Charitable Trust. According to the memo, the Calgary Police Department and Canadian federal authorities had not yet completed background checks on the staff and board members of the trust. Efforts to locate Debbie Calderwood, George Spalding, and the DeCosta brothers had just gotten under way.

  Kerney turned to the charitable trust documents. Established twenty-eight years ago as a private foundation, its mission was to conserve, protect, and restore native prairies in Alberta and Saskatchewan, preserve historical sites in both provinces, and provide scholarships to agricultural students at Canadian colleges.

  A small staff of four people ran the organization: a CEO, a director of development, a grants manager, and an administrative assistant. The board consisted of three individuals, including Clifford Spalding. It met twice annually to make grant awards and allocate funds. Except for Spalding, no familiar names were listed as staff or board members.

  The permanent endowment came solely from gifts made by Spalding, and in the last two years, he’d tripled his annual contribution of cash and investments to the trust, which currently exceeded sixty million Canadian dollars.

  The most recent annual report showed funding of program activities by category only. Over four million dollars had been disbursed in the reporting period, but there was no breakout of the organizations that had received funding or the amounts allocated.

  Kerney eased back in his chair. The last light of evening had passed, along with his hope Pino would have found a money connection between Clifford Spalding, Ed Ramsey, and Dick Chase through the foundation. If one existed, it was hidden. He’d ask Pino to dig deeper.

  Kerney had also hoped that the Canadian connection would lead him to George and Debbie, but nothing had surfaced. Still, it was conceivable that Clifford had been secretly bankrolling his son through the trust over the past twenty-eight years. Or perhaps, as Sara had suggested, George had bankrolled his father, and the trust was a blind used to launder and deliver George’s cut of the corporate profits.

  Kerney had strong evidence that Clifford Spalding had falsified his son’s military records, probably with George’s help. Did the two men do it to keep Alice Spalding in the dark about their ill-gotten gains? By making George out to be a good soldier who’d died in combat, did they hope she’d accept his death more readily? If so, it had back-fired.

  But what motivated Alice to keep searching for George? Did she have suspicions about Clifford’s sudden financial windfall that got him started building his hotel chain? Or had Clifford tripped himself up in the lies he’d told to keep the truth from her? And why had she been kept from knowing the truth in the first place?

  Kerney figured with Clifford dead and Alice mentally out of it, only George could answer those questions, if he could be found. Otherwise the reasons would stay buried in the past.

  Kerney wondered why Spalding had tripled his contributions to the trust during the last two years. His will divided his estate in thirds, shared equally by Claudia, the trust, and Alice, who was entitled to her slice through the divorce settlement.

  Had Spalding been moving cash and investments into the foundation to reduce the amo
unts Claudia and Alice stood to inherit? Did he want to penalize Alice for being a thorn in his side for so many years, and punish Claudia financially for violating the terms of their amended prenuptial agreement?

  Kerney wrote out his questions, knowing he might never learn the truth. He attached them to a note to Ramona Pino asking her to look deeper into the trust, put it on her desk, and went home.

  At the ranch, he heard the whinny of a horse through the open truck window. He drove toward the barn, and the two geldings he’d bought in California, a red roan and a gray, scampered to the far end of the corral away from the glare of the truck headlights. There was a note taped to the barn door from Riley Burke saying he had put Comeuppance in a stall across from the geldings to keep the animals separated, and the brood mare was stabled at his father ’s place.

  Kerney walked to the corral on the opposite side of the barn and Comeuppance trotted over to check him out. He spoke to the horse in low, reassuring tones, but Comeuppance didn’t buy it, and moved away, shaking his mane.

  Kerney checked the stalls. They were clean, with a fresh mat of straw laid down, and the doors were latched open to give the animals access to shelter. The geldings were friendlier, and Kerney spent some time talking to them and feeding them a few horse biscuits.

  He went to the house thinking that having the animals on the ranch made the place seem a whole lot less lonely. He’d call Riley in the morning and thank him for his good work.

  There was only one phone message on the answering machine and it was from Sara, reminding him not to forget that she loved him. Although he still worried about her, it put a smile on his face.

  In the morning, Kerney found it unnecessary to call Riley Burke and thank him. At first light through the kitchen window, he could see the young man inside the corral working with the gray gelding. The horse had a halter on, and attached to it was a lightweight, thirty-foot line.

  Riley stood behind the horse outside of the kick zone and flicked the line against the gray’s hindquarters. The startled horse took flight and Riley followed along, pitching the line gently against the gray’s rear quarter until the animal broke into a canter.

  After the gray made a half dozen turns around the corral, Riley reversed its direction and repeated the exercise. Finally, the gray slowed and lowered its head. Riley approached the horse at an angle, coiling the line as he moved in, and the gray retreated, refusing to join up. Riley backed off, flicked his line against the gray’s hindquarters, and set the horse in motion again.

  Kerney liked what he saw. Riley was starting from scratch with the gray, training it his way, gauging its agility, responsiveness, and temperament. He watched for a few more minutes, then showered, dressed in his uniform, and walked to the corral. Riley released the gray and met Kerney at the fence.

  Tall and slim, Riley had his father’s square jaw and deep chest, and the same widely spaced brown eyes and button nose as his mother. His sandy-colored hair was hidden under his cowboy hat.

  They exchanged greetings and Kerney nodded in the direction of the gray. “What do you think?”

  “Both geldings are well balanced,” Riley said. “They got good, long muscles for stride and mobility, and their front legs match up nicely with their chests. All in all, I’d say they’ll make fine cutting horses. But it will be a while before we know how good they are.”

  Kerney nodded, quietly pleased that Riley approved of his selections.

  “You only bought one mare,” Riley said as he climbed the fence and dropped down next to Kerney.

  “I’m hoping your dad will sell me one of his.”

  Riley nodded. “I think he might consider it. Comeuppance is going to need a firm hand if you’re planning to ride him.”

  “I already have,” Kerney said.

  Riley hitched a boot on the low railing. “I can’t understand why he wasn’t raced. He’s got the bloodlines and the conformation for it.”

  “According to the trainer, he does fine on an empty track, but doesn’t like running in a crowd. I appreciate the work you’ve done while I was gone.”

  “I wish I could have done more,” Riley replied. “My dad’s trail-riding business picked up last week, and he corralled me to take some tourists out on half-day trips.”

  Kerney knew that Riley’s parents worked hard to keep their ranch afloat, and trail rides during the tourist season brought in some much-needed income. “That’s okay.”

  Riley’s comment about trail riding made Kerney think about Kim Dean’s cabin in the Canadian River canyonlands. Last night at the office, he’d reviewed the status report on the hunt for Claudia Spalding and no one had thought to look for her there. According to Lucky Suazo, the Harding County sheriff, it would make a perfect hideout.

  “I’ve got to go,” Kerney said abruptly, turning on his heel. “We’ll talk later. Thanks again.”

  Riley watched Kerney walk briskly to his house. In less than ten minutes, he came back out the front door, dressed in jeans, boots, and a work shirt, with his sidearm strapped to his belt. He got into his pickup truck and drove away, kicking up a trail of dust on the ranch road.

  Riley wondered what had made Kerney switch getups so quickly and leave in such a big hurry. Behind him, the gray snorted quietly and he turned to find it had come closer, no more than three feet away. He moved slowly away from the animal, showing his back, and the gelding followed along.

  Riley stopped as the gray closed the distance. He reached out, and rubbed the animal between the eyes. The gelding didn’t flinch. Now the training could begin.

  Only one highway traversed the Canadian Gorge, a state road that ran from the town of Wagon Mound to the village of Roy. A tangle of canyons and mesas, the gorge dropped off the high plains of northeastern New Mexico into breaks over a thousand feet deep in places. Cut by rivers and streams, most of the Canadian was remote and wild, virtually empty of people, sprinkled with the remains of failed Hispanic and Anglo settlements.

  Other than the locals, some hunters, and occasional tourists, few people visited the gorge, a forty-five mile swath of box canyons, slippery rock mesas, boulder-strewn streambeds, sandstone chutes, rock slides, and bottom land meadows. But there were signs that a more ancient civilization once used the gorge. Caves cut into the soft sandstone mesas were littered with pottery shards and flint. Rock art of birds, animals, feet, abstract symbols, and fantastic creatures were engraved in the perpendicular vermillion walls. Cliff overhangs were thick with the black smoke from a thousand years of campfires.

  Kerney crossed the canyon and entered the most sparsely populated county in New Mexico. About eight hundred people lived in Harding County, an area larger than the state of Delaware, and just about all of them resided and worked on the high plains grasslands.

  He passed quickly through Roy, a village with a post office, school, one restaurant, a few small businesses, and a lot of shuttered, empty buildings. Not too many years ago, there had been a state park with a lake near the village, which had drawn tourist traffic and put some money into the local economy. But the lake dried up and the park was closed. To Kerney’s eye, Roy looked about as dead as the lake.

  North of the village, the Kiowa National Grasslands spread out over the prairie that rolled toward a flat, endless horizon. To the west, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rose up into a sky peppered with enormous puffball cumulus clouds that crowded the peaks.

  Kerney turned off at Mills, once a small hamlet that had served dryland farmers. A victim of drought, it was reduced to a few scattered buildings along the highway. Eight miles in on a dirt road, he dropped into the canyon. Juniper-studded mesas towered over the slow-moving, shallow river that snaked through the valley, parts of it hidden from view by stands of invasive salt cedar trees that lined the banks and sapped up precious water.

  Instead of drought, a long-ago flash flood had wiped out the agricultural settlement of Mills Canyon. The torrent had left behind rock wall ruins of a few buildings, including an old hotel, and
had inundated the bottom land crop fields, now reclaimed by junipers, yuccas, and cactus.

  Kerney found Sheriff Lucky Suazo waiting for him near the hotel ruins. He’d brought along two saddled mounts in a horse trailer. Suazo ran a small cow-calf operation when he wasn’t busy enforcing the law. Built close to the ground, he had a narrow face and a thick mustache that covered his upper lip.

  Lucky’s department consisted of himself and one chief deputy. Together, the two men policed over 2,100 square miles. Fortunately, crime wasn’t rampant in Harding County.

  “You made good time,” Suazo said as he shook Kerney’s hand. “How sure are you that this Spalding woman is at the cabin?”

  “It’s nothing more than a guess,” Kerney said.

  Suazo nodded and raised his chin at the mesa across the river. Flat-topped, with a wide band of sandstone that ran horizontally along the base, it was capped with rock.

  “We’ll skirt that mesa through a side canyon,” he said. “The trail is good for a spell, but then it gets rough. Keep an eye out for rattlers. We’ve got plenty of them.”

  On the ride in, they followed a jeep trail that was much too rocky to accommodate a horse trailer. They saw signs of deer, bear, and mountain lion along the rocky trail cut.

  Suazo briefed Kerney on Kim Dean’s cabin. “It’s on a little spit of high ground at the end of a small canyon near a clear spring,” he said. “There’s a cleft behind it where the trees thin out, but it would be a damn near impossible climb to the top. The cabin faces the canyon mouth, so we better go in on foot.”

  “Is there any cover and concealment?” Kerney asked.

  Suazo reined in his horse where the jeep trail petered out. “Some mountain mahogany, a few cottonwoods and box elders, some pinons and junipers. We can leave the horses at a sandstone chute just outside the canyon, and get fairly close on foot without being seen. But the last quarter mile beyond a rock slide is all meadow, part of it fenced. If Spalding is there, she should see us coming.”