Slow Kill

by Michael McGarrity

  He punctuated his last entry on the legal pad with a flourish and looked at Pino. “As far as the arrest affidavits go, you and this Sergeant Lowrey have given me only the possibility of a motive for murder. The rest of it is just an interesting theory regarding opportunity.” He tapped the paperwork with his pen.

  Ramona waited a beat before responding. She and Ellie Lowrey had each put in at least three hours of intensive work preparing a strong circumstantial case. “The forensic evidence proves the victim was murdered,” she said, “and both Dean and Claudia Spalding had the opportunity to do it.”

  “Yes, but which one?” Larranaga countered, crossing his hands over his belly. “Dean? Possibly. Claudia Spalding? You can’t seriously expect a judge to approve an arrest warrant for Mrs. Spalding based on the fact that she bought perfume at Dean’s pharmacy after picking up her husband’s prescription somewhere else.”

  “It establishes a chain of events,” Pino said. “Quite likely Spalding met with Dean to switch the medication.”

  “Or Dean could have switched the medication without Mrs. Spalding’s knowledge”—Larranaga shifted his weight in the chair—“at some other time or location. Dean could have been acting on his own. The fact that Dean left Mrs. Spalding alone for a few minutes in the front of the store to do something in the back room doesn’t establish collusion or conspiracy between the two parties. I’m sure if the clerk had seen the actual exchange you would have included it in your affidavit.”

  Larranaga brushed a hand over his new-look, swept-back haircut. “Also, you don’t have a strong motive for Mrs. Spalding to plot and carry out the murder of her husband. In fact, I don’t see that you have one at all. She was literally having her cake and eating it too, and she was bound by the amended prenuptial agreement to keep Dean in the dark about it.”

  “What about the arrest and search warrants for Dean?” Pino asked.

  “Again, a motive for Dean isn’t clearly articulated,” Larranaga said. “Other than noting he was Mrs. Spalding’s lover, you’ve presented nothing that points to an inducement or reason to kill on his part. Was it jealousy? Money? Did he want Spalding dead so he could marry Claudia? Or was he perfectly happy with the affair as it stood? Why hasn’t he been interviewed?”

  “Given how the victim was killed and what went into accomplishing the crime,” Ramona said, “I think probable cause has been established that Dean committed murder, and that the evidence to that effect can be found at his house or business.”

  “Even with the lack of a clear motive, I agree that it is probable that Dean, with his expertise as a pharmacist, could have done it. That’s why I’m approving the search and arrest affidavits for Dean only. If he confesses and implicates Mrs. Spalding, then your problem is solved, and the California authorities can pick her up without a warrant.”

  Larranaga signed the affidavits and Ramona went to find a judge. During a ten-minute wait outside chambers, she called both Sergeant Lowrey and Chief Kerney to give them the news about the rejected Spalding arrest affidavit. Lowrey promised to take another crack at Claudia after Dean was in custody. Kerney told her to stick with the plan to rattle Dean and break him down if possible.

  The judge issued the warrants without any probing questions. Five blocks away from Dean’s place of business, Ramona met up with two uniformed officers and went over how she wanted the bust staged. At the pharmacy, a photojournalist from the newspaper waited in the parking lot. The three officers hustled inside to find only the store clerk, Tilly Gilmore, and a female customer standing at the counter.

  Ramona gestured for Tilly to approach her at the front of the store. “Where’s Dean?” Ramona asked when she arrived.

  The woman averted her eyes. “He left in a hurry.”

  “When?”

  “About an hour ago,” Tilly said tentatively, her eyes fixed on the floor. Immobile and hunched, she looked like a tense, frightened animal trying hard to be invisible.

  Ramona let out a disgusted sigh. “What happened?”

  “He saw you follow me into the deli,” Tilly replied.

  “And?”

  Tilly looked at Ramona through glasses that magnified her anxious eyes. “I had to tell him,” she said apologetically, like a child hoping to avoid punishment.

  Ramona turned to the two officers. “Send the reporter away and put out an all points bulletin on Dean pronto.”

  At the drug counter, the middle-aged woman clutched a prescription bottle in her hand and stared at Ramona, unsure of what to do.

  “You can leave if you like, ma’am,” Ramona said to her. The woman scurried down an aisle and out the door, her shoes clacking noisily on the tile floor.

  Ramona studied Tilly’s drained, beaten-down expression. Had Dean simply bullied the woman into becoming a wet rag over the years, or had she always been easy prey? Ramona guessed the latter, but it didn’t matter. She now had to deal with the consequences of Tilly’s inability to keep her mouth shut.

  “Okay,” Ramona said soothingly, as she guided Tilly away from the front of the store. “Let’s talk about what happened.”

  At a restaurant on Cerrillos Road close to police headquarters, Andy Baca stirred sugar into his refilled glass of iced tea and listened as Kerney spoke to Ramona Pino on his cell phone.

  “Problems?” he asked when Kerney disconnected.

  “Our murder suspect seems to have disappeared,” Kerney replied, looking a bit vexed as he hooked the phone on his belt. “Pino has issued an APB and is on her way to search Dean’s house.”

  “Do you need to go?” Andy asked.

  Kerney shook his head and waved off the waitress as she approached to refill his glass of lemonade.

  “Well, then, finish your story,” Andy said.

  Kerney continued, recounting the events in Santa Barbara that had prompted his request to have Andy meet him.

  When Kerney stopped talking and sipped his lemonade, Andy jumped in with a question to back him up a bit. “What made this Sergeant Lowrey think you’d be stupid enough to kill Spalding and then stick around to report it as an unattended death?”

  “She didn’t know I was a cop,” Kerney replied, “until she questioned me. Once she picked up on Claudia Spalding’s connection with Santa Fe, she decided to probe it. I probably would have done the same thing.”

  “Still, it was no fun,” Andy said.

  Kerney pushed the glass aside. “Not really. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Alice Spalding’s thirty-year search for her dead son, George, has some unusual wrinkles to it. I think Clifford Spalding may have sabotaged his ex-wife’s quest for the truth.”

  Andy shot Kerney a quizzical look. “From what you said, it sounds more like the woman has been in total denial of the facts for decades.”

  “Has she? If so, why would Clifford Spalding continue to maintain a long-term arrangement with a local cop to stay informed of Alice’s activities? Why would he hire a PI to feed false reports to Alice and then fire the gumshoe after he’d done some real work that might have lead to finding the son’s old girlfriend?”

  “If the ex-wife was unstable, maybe Spalding was just indulging her and trying to stay on top of her obsession at the same time,” Andy suggested.

  “So he burns all the information she’d gathered over the years just before their divorce,” Kerney replied with a shake of his head, “and openly denigrates her to their mutual friends. I don’t buy it.”

  “People do ugly things when they get divorced,” Andy said.

  “I also have trouble with the scarcity of information contained in the police file I reviewed. There was no documentation that Alice Spalding’s assertion that a newspaper photograph showed her son to still be alive had ever been proven false. The photograph was missing, as were the statements of people who identified the subject as someone other than George Spalding.”

  “So track them down and talk to them,” Andy said. “That should satisfy your curiosity about whether or not Cliffor
d Spalding was hiding something from the ex.”

  “Can’t,” Kerney said. “Neither were identified by name, just referenced in passing by the police captain I spoke with, who seemed a little uncomfortable with my questions.”

  “Do you think this captain was helping Spalding keep the truth from his ex?” Andy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kerney said. “But another point troubles me. Look at the sequence of events. Thirty-some years ago, George Spalding allegedly dies in Nam.”

  “Verified by military authorities,” Andy said.

  “Soon after the helicopter crash, George Spalding’s girlfriend goes missing, never to be found, and his father, owner of a mom-and-pop Albuquerque motel, starts building a hotel empire.”

  “Which means what, if anything?” Andy asked, throwing his hands up in the air. “Maybe Spalding cashed in his son’s G.I. life insurance policy and parlayed it into his first big step up the corporate food chain.”

  “Maybe, but again, I don’t know,” Kerney answered.

  “You’re not going to let this drop, are you?”

  “Not yet. I’ve started background checks on all the players, but I could use some help from your department.”

  “To do what?”

  “To chase down information on Clifford Spalding’s early business dealings in New Mexico,” Kerney said. “Can you free up some of Joe Valdez’s time to take a look?”

  Agent Joseph Valdez, a certified public accountant with a master ’s in business administration, handled most of the financial crime cases for the state police, which meant he was usually overworked.

  “Not easily,” Andy said.

  “It doesn’t have to be given priority,” Kerney said.

  “Here’s what I’ll do,” Andy said after a pause. “You talk to Joe. Tell him what you know and what you want to know. If he’s interested and willing to peck away at it, then it’s okay with me. But don’t expect too much. He’s a busy man.”

  Kerney smiled. “That went a lot smoother than I expected. Thanks.”

  Andy paid the check and stood. “I know how you are, stubborn and bullheaded. Why should I waste my time letting you wear me down until I finally give you what you want?”

  Kerney laughed and added some money to the tip. “Come on, admit it. This is worth taking a look at.”

  “Either that, or you have an overactive imagination,” Andy replied with a grin.

  Ramona Pino brought in a squad of four detectives to assist in the hunt for Dean and the search of his pharmacy and residence. She assigned two of them to work the pharmacy. The others followed her to Dean’s house in Canada de los Alamos, a small settlement in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains a few miles southeast of Santa Fe.

  Once part of a land grant, Canada de los Alamos had remained a sleepy, forgotten place well into the 1960s. Situated next to the national forest in a protected valley, it held a mixture of mobile homes, small adobe houses, and a growing number of more upscale residences that had been built by newcomers over the past forty years. Anchored by a pretty church along a dirt road that cut through the center of the valley, the settlement had no businesses or stores.

  Old fences, corrals, sheds, and outbuildings that bordered an arroyo still gave the area a rural feel. But the landscape was changing, and it wasn’t only because of a recent increase in population. Drought had so dried out the piñon and ponderosa forest that the trees could no longer stave off their longstanding enemy, the bark beetle. In wetter times, the trees suffocated the beetles by releasing sap. Now, the beetles had the upper hand and were killing whole stands of trees, sometimes turning their needles brown in a matter of days.

  The die-off of the forest throughout the mountains and foothills of northern New Mexico was creating a major wildfire hazard. According to the forestry experts, not much could be done about it.

  Kim Dean’s house, a solar adobe on five acres, overlooked the old settlement. Two huge dead piñon trees at the front of the property drooped burly barren branches over the driveway. On the off chance that Dean was home, Ramona blocked the driveway with her unit and, accompanied by the two detectives, went in on foot. A quick perimeter check of the house and horse barn turned up nothing other than Dean’s two geldings.

  Dean’s flight to avoid arrest and the search warrant for his premises were all the justification needed to enter the house. They knocked first, waited a minute, then kicked in the front door with weapons at the ready, and cleared the house room by room.

  In a workshop attached to the two-car garage, Ramona found a number of small knives and cutting tools on a table made of sawhorses and plywood, several of them coated with a thin layer of pale yellow dust. She bagged and tagged them right away.

  Six-foot-high steel shelves filled with paint cans, bottles, coffee cans, and plastic storage bins lined one wall. Waist-high, built-in cabinets made from plywood and rough lumber ran along the opposite wall. Boxes of junk were strewn around the floor. From the looks of it, Dean was a total pack rat, which was an encouraging sign.

  Ramona put the two detectives to work going through the shelves, the toolboxes, and cabinets. She cleared a space on the floor, covered it with clear plastic, and started emptying the trash basket next to the table piece by piece. She found a crumpled paper bag containing traces of yellow dust and a number of loose, oval-shaped, empty capsules.

  Her cell phone rang, and the senior detective at the pharmacy search reported in. In Dean’s desk he’d found a full, unopened packet of the active thyroid ingredient and a copy of the wholesaler’s invoice showing that two packets, not one, had been delivered to Dean a month before Clifford Spalding’s last visit to Santa Fe.

  “Describe the packet to me,” Ramona said.

  “A small white box, two by three inches, sealed at both ends, with the name of the drug on a manufacturer ’s label.”

  “Good deal,” Ramona said. “Make sure it’s dusted for prints.”

  “Already done,” the detective replied.

  Ramona disconnected, whistled at the two detectives, and told them what to start looking for. Then she called Sergeant Lowrey in California and gave her a status update.

  “I hope you find that packet,” Lowrey said.

  “If not, we still may come away with enough evidence to tie Dean to the crime.”

  “You think Dean may be on his way out here?” Ellie asked.

  “Possibly,” Ramona said. “Have you talked to Claudia?”

  “Not yet. I’m on my way to her house right now,” Ellie said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  Ramona put the cell phone away and went through the trash again until she was satisfied nothing had been overlooked. The two detectives were digging through the cabinets and pulling the plastic containers off the shelves. It would take time to go through everything, but they just might get lucky.

  Ellie Lowrey found the Spalding estate no less mind-boggling on her second visit. In the past, she’d read newspaper articles about celebrities and their multimillion-dollar Montecito properties. But it had been impossible for her to imagine what that kind of money could buy until she’d seen it firsthand. In some ways, it still didn’t compute.

  The solemn-looking secretary who met Ellie at the driveway took her through the vast living room, down a wide, long, arched corridor with tiny recessed ceiling lights that softly illuminated the paintings on the wall, and into a sunroom filled with exotic plants and wicker furniture that opened onto a patio at the rear of the house.

  In the center of the patio were a large swimming pool and a separate hot tub surrounded by marble tile. Scattered around the pool was enough lawn furniture to accommodate forty or more people. Off to one side of the house stood an outdoor kitchen with stainless steel appliances, a built-in gas barbecue grill, and a work island protected by a freestanding pergola.

  Beyond the swimming pool four cabanas sat near two tennis courts. A large swath of carefully groomed lawn in front of a low garden wall served as a putting green. At
the bottom of a gently sloping hill, a gardener pruned shrubbery lining a pathway to a guesthouse three times the size of Ellie’s modest home.

  Claudia Spalding stepped out of the guesthouse and paused along the pathway to speak to the gardener. She wore black slacks and a sleeveless black scooped top. At her neck a large solitary diamond glimmered in the sunlight.

  “This is not a good time,” Spalding said stiffly when Ellie drew near. Her thin mouth was pinched, but her makeup, right down to the long lashes, eye shadow, and creamy red lip rouge, had been perfectly applied.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Ellie said.

  “What do you want, Sergeant?”

  “Have you spoken to Kim Dean recently?”

  “Yes, I called him yesterday to tell him about Clifford’s death, as I have many other people. We’ve spoken several times since then.”

  “Did he say anything to you about leaving Santa Fe?”

  Spalding pushed a wisp of hair away from her cheek. “No.”

  “An arrest warrant charging him with murder has been issued in Santa Fe,” Ellie said.

  Spalding’s aloof expression vanished. She drew her head back sharply. “Impossible.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Kim is perfectly happy with our relationship as it is. He has no reason to harm my husband.”

  “Can you think of any reason for him to leave work suddenly?”

  “Perhaps he had an emergency of some sort at home,” Spalding said.

  “He’s not at his house,” Ellie replied.

  “Have you checked with his ex-wife in Colorado?” Claudia asked. “She constantly calls Kim to come and deal with his son when the boy acts out. The child has serious behavior problems.”

  “That’s good to know,” Ellie said. “Where else might he have gone?”

  “I have no idea,” Spalding said.

  Ellie looked meaningfully at the guesthouse. “Would he be coming here?”

  “No,” Claudia said emphatically.

  Ellie stared hard at Spalding. “If you know where he is and refuse to tell me, you can be charged as an accessory to murder.”