Slow Kill

by Michael McGarrity

  Kerney shook his head. “Do you want my department to make contact with her?”

  “That would be helpful, Chief.” Lowrey handed him a business card. “Ask your officer to call me first.”

  “Will do.” Kerney reached for his cell phone. “What did the coroner have to say?”

  “So far, Spalding’s death appears to be from natural causes.” Lowrey paused and gave him a once-over. “Quite a coincidence, isn’t it, Spalding’s wife having a place in Santa Fe?”

  “In this particular instance, I would say that it is,” Kerney replied.

  “Are you sure you’ve never met her while you’ve been out riding the range?”

  “That’s very funny, Sergeant,” Kerney said, slightly piqued at Lowrey’s sarcasm. “Actually there are times when we still ride the range. But now that the streets of Santa Fe are paved, my officers mostly drive squad cars.”

  “Maybe you met her at a horse show or a rodeo,” Lowrey countered.

  “Not that I recall,” Kerney said. He turned away from Lowrey and dialed Larry Otero’s home number.

  After talking to Larry, he waited for Lowrey to reappear. Instead, Wheeler came out of the office and told him Lowrey had a few more questions to ask and would be with him shortly. He agreed to meet Wheeler at the track when he was finished, and cooled his heels waiting on the porch.

  It didn’t surprise him that Lowrey wanted another go-round. The “coincidence” that both Kerney and the dead man’s wife lived in the same city would spark any competent officer ’s interest.

  Finally, Lowrey called him back into the office. Kerney sat in a straight-back chair, while Lowrey perched against the office desk and studied the coral and turquoise wedding band on his left hand.

  “You’re married,” she finally said.

  “Yes,” Kerney replied.

  Lowrey’s eyes searched his face. “And your wife didn’t come here with you.”

  “She’s a career military officer serving at the Pentagon. Her schedule didn’t allow it.”

  “You must not be able to spend a great deal of time together,” Lowrey said.

  “We manage to see each other frequently,” Kerney said, watching Lowrey, who was busy scanning him for any behavioral signals that might signal deception.

  “Have you been married long?”

  “A couple of years.”

  “Children?”

  “One son, ten months old.”

  Lowrey smiled. “Your first?”

  “Yes,” Kerney said. “Now, why don’t you get to the part where you stick your face in mine and ask me if I might be lying about not knowing Spalding’s wife?”

  Lowrey laughed. “As I understand it, Mrs. Spalding is about your age, and spends a great deal of time alone in Santa Fe, away from her husband. You seem to be in the same situation with your marriage.”

  “I am happily married, Sergeant. Don’t turn a perfectly reasonable coincidence into a soap opera about two lonely, unhappy people.”

  “Obviously, you and Mrs. Spalding share an interest in horses.”

  “Along with about five million other horse lovers.”

  “Mr. Spalding was rich and considerably older than his wife.”

  “So I understand, from what you’ve said.”

  “And neither you nor Spalding have ever stayed here before,” Lowrey noted.

  “Apparently not,” Kerney replied. “Do you find a chance occurrence tantalizing, Sergeant? That would be quite a stretch.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. Do my questions upset you?”

  “Not at all.” His cell phone rang. Kerney flipped it open and answered.

  “What kind of fix have you gotten yourself into out there?” Andy Baca, Kerney’s old friend and chief of the New Mexico State Police, asked.

  “What’s up?” Kerney asked, raising a finger to signal Lowrey that he’d only be a minute.

  “I just got a call from my district commander that some deputy sheriff, a Sergeant Lowrey out of San Luis Obispo County, wants an officer sent to inform a Mrs. Claudia Spalding of her husband’s death and to determine your relationship to the woman, if any.”

  “Interesting,” Kerney said.

  “I’ve got two grandchildren in my lap, one on each knee,” Andy said, “ready to head off to the Albuquerque zoo to see the polar bears. What’s going on with you?”

  “I’ll call you when I know more.”

  “That’s it?” Andy asked, sounding a bit exasperated.

  Kerney laughed. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “I’ll be home by dinnertime,” Andy said. “Unless you get locked up, call me then.”

  “I’ll do that. Have fun.” Kerney disconnected and smiled at Lowrey. “Are we done here, Sergeant?”

  Lowrey smiled back. “We’ll talk again after I’ve heard back from your department.”

  “I’ll be around,” Kerney said, thinking Lowrey was doing her job and doing it well. Still, he didn’t have to like it.

  Ellie Lowrey made another visual sweep of the cottage before the EMTs took Spalding’s body away. After they rolled him out, she gathered up the dead man’s luggage, put it in the trunk of her cruiser, and drove a back road to the sheriff’s substation in Templeton.

  The station was housed in a fairly new single-story faux western frontier-style office building with a false front and a slanted covered porch. It had been designed to fit in with the old buildings on the main street left over from the town’s early days as a booming farming and ranching community. Now, the charm of the village and its convenience to Highway 101, which ran the length of the West Coast, drew droves of newcomers looking to escape the sprawl of the central coast cities, creating, of course, more sprawl.

  As second-in-command of the substation, Ellie Lowrey served under a lieutenant who was on vacation with his family in the Rocky Mountains. She parked in front of the closed office, carried Spalding’s luggage inside, and placed it on her desk.

  She’d secured the dead man’s effects to ensure their safekeeping, which required her to do an inventory. She got out the forms she needed and glanced at the wall clock, wondering how long it would take to hear back from the New Mexico authorities.

  Ellie had decided not to rely on Kerney’s department for information until she knew for sure whether there was or wasn’t a personal relationship between the chief and Mrs. Spalding. Of course, if there was something going on between the two, both of them could lie about it. It was best to get corroborating information from an independent source such as the New Mexico State Police, in case they did have something to hide.

  Spalding’s overnight bag yielded nothing but toiletries and a change of clothes. The attaché case was a bit more interesting. A manila envelope contained a photograph of the horse Spalding was planning to buy, along with a record of its race results and bloodlines. The cover letter from Jardin listed the price at a few thousand dollars more than Ellie’s gross annual salary.

  Other paperwork in the case pertained to Spalding’s hotel holdings. Lowrey recognized a few of them by name: very swanky places in upscale California resort communities. A sleeve held a small number of business cards. Lowrey thumbed through them. One was from a Santa Barbara police captain who headed up the Major Crimes Unit. What was that all about?

  Lowrey wrote the information in her notebook. Tomorrow was Sunday. She doubted the autopsy would be done quickly, given the likely absence of foul play. If the results came back as death due to natural causes, she’d drop the matter completely. Until then, she would keep the case open and call the Santa Barbara PD captain on Monday to satisfy her curiosity.

  Ellie got up and poured a cup of coffee. She felt good about how the morning had gone. She’d spent five years as an investigator before earning her stripes and taking a patrol assignment. It was fun to work an investigation on her own again. In truth, she missed her old job, but accepting a promotion to the patrol division had been the only way to move up in the ranks.

  She returned to he
r desk and started in on the paperwork, hoping it wouldn’t take all day for the New Mexico cops to find Spalding’s widow and report back.

  Chapter 2

  After his retirement as an Army nurse, William Price had returned home to California and started a new career as a deputy sheriff. He’d put in three years as a patrol officer and then transferred into the detective unit as an investigator/coroner. During his ten years on the job, Price had seen just about every possible kind of dead body, from gruesome murder victims and gory traffic fatalities to little old ladies who died peacefully in their sleep.

  Until her promotion and transfer out of investigations to patrol, Ellie Lowrey had worked with Price on a number of homicide cases. He admired her meticulous attention to detail. Although Price saw no evidence of foul play in the death of Clifford Spalding, Ellie was right to assume a worst-case scenario until it was proved otherwise.

  The department contracted for autopsy space with a mortuary in the town of Los Osos, close to the coast. In an office outside the embalming room, Price went through the clothing he’d removed from Spalding’s body. The scent of flowers from the viewing rooms at the front of the mortuary made his nose itch.

  In a pocket of the expensive Italian slacks he found a small gold pill case with Spalding’s initials engraved on the hinged lid. It contained a single, small, pale yellow pill shaped in the form of two blunt arrow points with the name of the manufacturer stamped on it.

  Price reached for the Physicians’ Desk Reference he carried in his briefcase, known by all who used it as the PDR, and looked up the drug. It was a hormone replacement medication used in the treatment of Graves’ disease, a form of hyperthyroidism. He read through the entry and called Ellie Lowrey to give her the news.

  “Would having a thyroid condition kill him?” Lowrey asked after listening to Price’s report.

  “I’m no expert on immune system diseases,” Price replied. “But not taking the medication would be dangerous, perhaps even life threatening, especially if Spalding had other health problems.”

  “Wait a minute,” Lowrey said. “There was a physician’s business card in Spalding’s briefcase. Here it is, Dr. Daniel Gilbert. His office is in Santa Barbara.”

  Price reached for a pen. “You want me to call him?”

  “Right away,” Lowrey replied. “Get all the information you can and call me back.” She read off Gilbert’s phone number. “And pull the pathologist in to do the autopsy right now.”

  “Aren’t you rushing things a bit?” Price asked, knowing that Ellie might catch some flack from the brass for authorizing a priority autopsy for what appeared to be nothing more than a routine unattended death.

  “I’ve got a feeling about this,” Lowrey replied, “and a possible suspect I’d rather not lose sight of before I get some answers.”

  “Who’s your suspect?”

  “The man who found Spalding’s body. His name is Kevin Kerney. He’s the chief of police in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which coincidentally is where Spalding’s wife has a house.”

  “This could come back to bite you,” Price said.

  “Just because he’s a cop doesn’t mean he gets a free pass,” Lowrey said.

  Price hung up, contacted the pathologist, and then by phone tracked down Dr. Gilbert, who fortunately was handling weekend calls and emergencies for his group practice.

  Gilbert responded to the news with surprise. “Clifford was in three months ago,” he said. “His health was good and his blood work results were fine.”

  “What about the original course of treatment for the Graves’ disease?” Price asked.

  “Radioactive iodine was used to destroy the thyroid gland and stop production of the hormone. It was completely successful.”

  “When was that?” Price asked.

  “Ten or eleven years ago,” Gilbert replied. “Clifford had all the classic symptoms, but he’d let them go untreated thinking it was just stress related. He’d recently divorced his first wife and was about to remarry. He came in for a prenuptial physical exam and that’s when I made the diagnosis.”

  “Were there any complications?” Price asked.

  “It caused some weakening of his heart muscles,” Gilbert answered. “But I put him on a diet and exercise program that he religiously maintained. I saw no further deterioration.”

  “Would not taking his pill cause heart failure?”

  “Certainly not by forgetting to take his medication for a day. But in the long term, too little or too much of the drug can put the patient at risk for a variety of medical problems. The key is to maintain the patient on a stabilized thyroid hormone replacement regime. That’s why periodic blood work to determine medication levels is vital.”

  Price described the pill he’d found, and the dosage for it listed in the PDR.

  “That’s what I prescribed,” Gilbert said. “I haven’t changed the dosage in two years.”

  Price thanked the doctor, hung up, and reported back to Lowrey.

  “Bag and tag everything you have,” she said, “and turn it in to evidence.”

  “Will do,” Price said, nodding to the board-certified forensic pathologist, who stood in the office doorway looking not at all pleased and rather impatient.

  He dropped the headset in the cradle and stood.

  “Am I here because of one of Ellie Lowrey’s legendary hunches?” the pathologist asked.

  “You could say that,” Price said. “Mind if I assist?”

  “You damn well better,” the pathologist said. “I have a dinner party to go to tonight.”

  Using a borrowed western saddle lent to him by one of the trainers, Kerney rode each of the four geldings around the track, first in a slow trot using the reins to see how they responded to the bit, then moving them quickly from a canter to a gallop, letting them run for a while to test their endurance. Of the four, he favored a red roan and a gray, because of their smooth gaits, calm dispositions, and swift, tight turns.

  He watched Sergeant Lowrey drive up to the stalls just as he finished saddling Comeuppance, the stud horse. Other than the sheer fun of having a racing stallion under him, he had no compelling reason to check out Comeuppance on the track. He’d already decided to buy him, ship him home, and get him started servicing the mares. But he wanted the experience of running him full-tilt along the rail of the racetrack.

  Lowrey was still a good thirty feet away as Kerney swung into the saddle and nodded at the stable hand, who opened the gate to the track. He adjusted the strap to the helmet Wheeler had asked him to wear, touched his heels against Comeuppance’s flanks, and the horse surged through the gate at a full gallop.

  Why the horse couldn’t sire fast runners was anybody’s guess. He had good speed and power. Bent low over Comeuppance’s neck, Kerney gave him his head for a full quarter-mile, enjoying every second of the ride. But he sensed that the horse was running under protest, with little enthusiasm. He slowed the stallion gently to a walk and circled the track, deliberately letting Lowrey cool her heels.

  From phone calls he’d received, Kerney already knew that contact had not yet been made with Spalding’s wife. Both the state police and Detective Sergeant Ramona Pino, one of Kerney’s officers, had reported that the woman was away on a weekend trail-riding trip with friends somewhere in the Pecos Wilderness outside of Santa Fe.

  At the stalls, he turned Comeuppance over to the stable hand, returned the borrowed helmet, and walked to the track railing where Lowrey waited.

  She gave him a smile. “You ride well.”

  Kerney nodded at the compliment.

  “So what are you, a cowboy or a cop?”

  “A little of one, more of the other,” Kerney replied.

  Lowrey laughed. “In that order?”

  Kerney nodded again.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever met a cop who kept racehorses as a hobby.”

  “I don’t plan to race them, and it’s not a hobby.”

  “Still, it must be expensive,” Lowr
ey said, the smile fixed on her face.

  “Ask your question, Sergeant.”

  “The last time I checked, police work wasn’t in the top ten high-income professions,” Lowrey countered.

  Kerney stayed silent.

  “How many horses do you own?”

  “Right now, none. By the end of the day, probably four.”

  “That’s interesting,” Lowrey said, her smile fading.

  Kerney knew he had to give Lowrey more information or face her continued probes, starting with why a man who owned no horses would come to this ranch, at this particular time, to buy some animals.

  “I own a small place outside Santa Fe,” he said, “and I’m partnering with my neighbors to breed cutting horses. Except for ones I’m looking to buy, they’ll supply the brood mares. I’m also fronting the costs for the stud horse and two geldings. We plan to start training the geldings as soon as possible.”

  “On a ranch outside of Santa Fe,” Lowrey said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never been there,” Lowrey said in a casual tone, “but I’ve heard it’s where the rich people like to go and play.”

  “It’s one of those places,” Kerney said. “Let me answer some of the other questions you haven’t asked me yet. How can I afford a ranch outside of Santa Fe? I came into a sizable inheritance several years back. Do I live anywhere near Mrs. Spalding? I know all my neighbors and she’s not one of them. Why did I come to this ranch to buy horses? My partner suggested it. Some of the finest cutting horses in the country have been bred here.”

  Lowrey laughed and turned to face the track, where a trainer was running a frisky two-year-old. “You don’t like being the subject of an inquiry.”

  “Would you?”

  “Probably not. Are you going home tomorrow?”

  “That’s the plan,” Kerney replied.

  “Maybe I’ll have to come see you in Santa Fe,” Lowrey said as she returned her gaze to Kerney.

  “That would be a waste of your time.”

  “You haven’t asked me if Mrs. Spalding has been advised of her husband’s death.”