Residue: A Kevin Kerney Novel

  RESIDUE

  MICHAEL

  MCGARRITY

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For my sister and brother, Joanne Burke and Crockett McGarrity

  RESIDUE

  It had been a week crammed full of military pomp, award ceremonies, celebrations, informal cocktail parties, and casual get-togethers, all in honor of Brigadier General Sara Brannon, retiring commandant of the U.S. Army Military Police School and commander of the MP regiment. Tonight, the ballyhoo would end with a formal dinner in Sara’s honor at the home of the Fort Leonard Wood commanding officer, Major General Thomas Christian Benson, and his wife, Margaret. Then, at the stroke of midnight, she would end her twenty-eight-year career of active service, and Kevin Kerney would finally be able to take her home to Santa Fe without worrying about where her next permanent duty station would be, her next rotation into a combat zone, or a peace-shattering crisis that wiped out family plans.

  Ten days ago, Kerney had left their son Patrick at home with his maternal grandparents to help move Sara out of her quarters and get everything packed to ship home, thus allowing the new commandant to move into freshly painted, updated housing. With the moving van on a slow, circuitous route to Santa Fe, making stops for other relocating families along the way, they were living out of suitcases in a modest, unadorned hotel room on the post.

  Earlier in the week, Patrick had flown in with Sara’s parents on a quick trip to attend the change-of-command ceremony, witness the parade in honor of her retirement, and see her receive the Distinguished Service Medal for exceptional meritorious service as commandant of the army’s military police school. It was her second DSM.

  Patrick was puffed up with pride about his mom during the various events, shooting pictures and video on his smartphone, which was constantly in need of recharging. When he wasn’t roaming the post headquarters areas, he was consuming prodigious amounts of food to fuel his growing five-eight frame.

  Sara’s parents had taken Patrick to Tucson, where they now lived after selling the family’s Montana ranch to Sara’s brother. Patrick would stay there during part of his spring vacation until Kerney and Sara came to fetch him. Already an academic year ahead of his fourteen-year-old peers, and showing signs of adolescent rebellion, he had strict orders to mind his manners, follow the rules of the house, and complete all his homework assignments due when classes resumed. Sara figured the boy would be totally spoiled by the time they got him back home.

  Her husband lounged in the small armchair jammed into a corner of the less-than-spacious hotel room, chatting about how glad he was they’d finally have one address and Patrick could spend more time with her. About to turn fifty, Sara had more endurance, greater discipline, and better smarts than most, if not all, of the soldiers under her command. She had excelled at all her staff and command postings, and the ribbons for combat deployments on her uniform jacket spoke to her courage under fire. The Silver Star, the third highest military award for heroism, testified to her bravery. Next to it, she wore the Purple Heart for a combat wound sustained in Iraq. In army parlance, she was a warfighter. But above all that, she was the most stunning woman Kerney had ever known.

  Keeping up with her had kept him fit. But not fit enough to squeeze into the army uniforms issued to him decades ago during Vietnam. Instead, he wore a new dark blue suit, with a pair of highly polished black cowboy boots and a starched white shirt offset by a black necktie adorned with the Military Police Corps insignia he’d bought at the post exchange. At Sara’s request, above his jacket pocket he wore a row of the five miniature medals he’d received for serving in ’Nam, anchored by the Silver Star.

  Over the years, Sara had worked hard to convince him to be proud of his military service. He had succumbed to her arguments to the point that his pickup truck now sported a New Mexico veteran’s license plate.

  She slipped into her jacket, buttoned it, took a last look in the mirror, and turned to face him. “Do I pass muster?”

  “You’re the baddest, best-looking warfighting general in the whole damn army,” he answered.

  Sara blew him a kiss. “You’re such a romantic. Are you going to behave yourself tonight?”

  “I promise not to voice my concern about the top-heavy bureaucracy of generals in the post-draft professional army, present company excluded.”

  “Thank you.”

  Her deep green eyes still captivated him, her long, sexy neck showed no sign of aging, and there was only a hint of gray in her strawberry-blond hair. She’d turned down a promotion to major general and a prestigious posting at NATO headquarters in Brussels to return to the ranch and, as she put it, “learn how to cowboy all over again.”

  He never thought she’d really do it, but now that she had, he couldn’t wait to have her home on their spread outside of Santa Fe. But first there was the road trip they had planned through the southern states to New Orleans for a few days before driving back to New Mexico by way of Tucson to pick up Patrick.

  It was to be a shortened version of a second honeymoon without the encumbrance of an occasionally lurking and sometimes defiant teenager. They’d been looking forward to it for the past several months.

  “Why don’t we just leave right after the dinner party?” she suggested. “Tom Benson is an early riser and would be glad to see us out the front door before nine. We can drive all night and find a twenty-four-hour diner for a plate of eggs and bacon in the morning, and get a room to crash in for a few hours if we need to. It won’t take us more than ten minutes to change, pack, and go.”

  Kerney loved the idea. “You just want me to stay sober and not talk about how fewer generals would make a better world.”

  She stuck out her tongue. “I’m serious, wise guy.”

  “I’m game,” he said, standing up. “Let’s blow this dump and hang out with some red-blooded American civilians who have no interest in the complexities of modern warfare.”

  His phone rang before she had a chance to reply. It was an incoming call from Isabel Istee, who almost never contacted him. It had to be important. He hoped nothing serious had happened.

  “It’s Clayton’s mother.” He swiped the phone icon and said, “Isabel, how are you?”

  “Clayton told me not to call you, but I had to.”

  “What’s wrong? Is someone sick or hurt?”

  “No, it’s you. The police are coming for you.”

  Kerney stiffened. “What? Why?”

  “They found Kim Ward’s remains on the grounds of Erma Fergurson’s old home and think you may have killed her. But I don’t believe it.”

  “Jesus.” Kerney sank down on the edge of the bed. “Are you certain of this?”

  “Clayton told me about it.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “It’s all over the Internet. It’s being made a big deal that a retired police chief has been accused of murdering someone long before he became a cop.”

  Kerney shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t know what to say. It’s crazy.”

  “Defend yourself, Kerney,” Isabel said. “And your family.”

  “I will.” He knew she meant more than Sara and Patrick. “I promise.”

  He waited for a reply, but the phone went dead. He opened the highlighted message icon on the phone. The text message from Clayton read: If my mother calls, don’t answer. It had been sent hours earlier. “Crazy,” he repeated, staring at the phone.

  Sara knelt in front of him. “What is it?”

  “I’m about to be arrested for a homicide.” He searched for his name under news, and a headline came up: “Retired New Mexico Police Chief Acc
used of Decades-Old Murder.” He gave her the phone.

  She read the item and stared intensely at him, her eyes questioning. “Tell me,” she demanded.

  Without hesitation, he told her about the night Kim Ward disappeared from Erma’s home, why she left, and his search to find her. Sara didn’t flinch, ask why he hadn’t told her about Kim before, or question his innocence.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  “I’ll go to the local sheriff’s office and turn myself in, before deputies and the MPs knock at the door,” Kerney said. “You go to dinner with the general and make my excuses.”

  Sara shook her head. “There is no way I can pull off a charade like that. Any minute, this is going to blow up in our faces. We’ll deal with this together. I’ll call Tom Benson and explain.”

  She took the phone from his hand just as flashing emergency lights penetrated the slight opening of the hotel room curtain.

  Kerney stood and peeked out. A sheriff’s unit and an MP vehicle slowed to a stop at the hotel entrance. “Here they come. What a mess.”

  Sara shook her head in disagreement as she dialed. “You’ve always made life interesting, Kerney.”

  “If you’re going to give our regrets, do it quick.”

  “Tom?” Sara said. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to make it.”

  She listened for a few seconds, thanked him, hung up, and turned to Kerney with worried eyes.

  “That was fast.”

  “He said he understood, and told me to turn on cable news.”

  “We don’t have time for that now,” Kerney replied as the sound of hurried footsteps echoed down the tile hallway floor. “Stay where you are.”

  Heavy pounding at the door ended any further conversation. He opened it and stepped back, arms raised, as two deputies burst into the room, nine-millimeters aimed at his chest. Two embarrassed MPs blocking the doorway looked away from Sara, who stood motionless, hands visible and empty, her face a mask of composure.

  The lead deputy holstered his weapon and said, “Kevin Kerney, you’re under arrest for the murder of Kimberly Ann Ward.”

  Kerney was devastated. One of the most important days in Sara’s life had turned to shit.

  EIGHT DAYS EARLIER

  CHAPTER 1

  In a sour mood, Lieutenant Clayton Istee, deputy commander of the New Mexico State Police Southern Zone Investigation Unit, slipped behind the wheel of his unmarked unit, cranked the engine, keyed the radio, and reported on duty to dispatch. On an early April morning, he’d been called into work just as he and his wife, Grace, were about to start a three-day getaway to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary. The trip was now delayed, if not ruined, because the Spanish ambassador to the United States was visiting Santa Fe on holiday, and Governor Javier Alejandro Vigil had impulsively invited the diplomat to accompany him to a groundbreaking ceremony for New Mexico State University’s Erma Fergurson Artist-in-Residence Center.

  The governor, the ambassador, Lieutenant Joe Castellano, the state police supervisor in charge of the governor’s security, and Castellano’s team would fly down to Las Cruces later in the day to attend the early evening gala event.

  The governor’s off-the-cuff invitation to the Spanish diplomat had started a chain reaction that quickly rippled down from the governor’s chief of staff to the chief of the state police, a descending series of senior headquarters officers, and finally landing in Clayton’s lap, with orders to provide additional security for the ambassador.

  There was no compelling reason Clayton knew of that Ambassador Ramon Francisco de Cardenas needed to be protected. If there was a credible threat to a foreign diplomat on U.S. soil, the FBI would be fully mobilized and shouldering everybody out of the way long before they’d invite the state police to participate—as little more than observers.

  Still, Clayton took his orders seriously. By radio, he called two agents with dignitary protection experience to assist him. Together they’d conduct a security inspection of the center and immediate grounds, coordinate with campus police to make sure everyone entering the event was screened, and protect the ambassador from the time he arrived until his departure.

  Paul Avery and James Garcia were experienced agents who worked directly under his command. Total professionals, neither groused about the callout. On a back channel, he gave them a brief rundown on the assignment and told them to meet him at district headquarters ASAP.

  Avery wanted to know if it was the real deal or some sort of training exercise. Clayton said he didn’t have a clue, but would find out.

  With unhappy Grace standing at the front door, Clayton waved and beeped his horn as he backed out of the driveway of his Las Cruces home. He shared her disappointment. With their two kids, Wendell and Hannah, living at home while attending college at NMSU, there was little privacy in their busy lives, and they’d been eagerly looking forward to some time alone together.

  Clayton had read about the gala in the Sunday paper. Erma Fergurson had been an NMSU art professor and nationally acclaimed landscape artist. Prior to her death, she donated her home and its extensive grounds to the university, along with a substantial endowment to turn the property into a visiting artists’ residence and fund a lecture series, seminars, and workshops on the nearby campus.

  From its inception, the Erma Fergurson Artist-in-Residence Program had brought a succession of distinguished artists to NMSU for an academic year, attracted by the beauty of the house, a generous financial stipend, and the steady growth in Fergurson’s posthumous reputation as an artist. No artist invited to participate had ever turned down the honor, or complained about its rather modest teaching duties, which included an undergraduate seminar and one free special event for the public.

  The NMSU administration had recently decided to leverage the Erma Fergurson Center into a small artists-in-residence colony that could be a hub for high-profile seminars at the School of Fine and Applied Arts. With the successful completion of a fund-raising effort, the university was about to break ground on three new studio residences for visiting artists. University and community officials quoted in the Las Cruces Sun-News predicted that the expanded center would attract world-class artists, writers, philosophers, and thinkers, and put Las Cruces on the map as a vibrant travel destination. Additionally, it would boost NMSU’s appeal to out-of-state and foreign students, who paid more in tuition and fees than in-state residents.

  While Clayton liked the sound of it, he wasn’t quite ready to believe that an intellectual and artistic renaissance in Las Cruces would replace the boot-scootin’ country mentality of the average citizen.

  He’d never visited the center. But he knew that as an undergraduate his father, Kevin Kerney, had rented a small apartment from Professor Fergurson. And it was at NMSU where he’d met Clayton’s mother, Isabel, one of the first Apache women to enroll at New Mexico State.

  If not for a long-ago fluke encounter on the Mescalero Reservation in the Sacramento Mountains east of Las Cruces, Clayton wouldn’t have known anything at all about Erma Fergurson or Kevin Kerney, because his mother had never told him who his father was.

  A tribal conservation police officer at the time, living on the rez with Grace and their two young children, he’d cited two Anglos for trespassing. Kerney, the deputy chief of the state police, had flashed his credentials, hoping to avoid the citation. Clayton wrote him up anyway and thought nothing of it until a few days later, when Kerney confronted Clayton’s mother and forced her to reluctantly admit that he was Clayton’s father.

  When Clayton learned the truth, he wasn’t at all pleased. The whole sticky mess of having a father he didn’t need or want in his life, and a mother who’d lied to him for years about some Anglo college boy knocking her up and disappearing, unsettled him. In fact, it pissed him off.

  In quiet moments of reflection, it still did at times. But not today. Today, he was curious to see the place where he’d most likely been conceived. Most people wouldn’t give it a second though
t, but as an Apache, a member of a nomadic nation of people defined by the very ground that they walked, it was part of Clayton’s tradition.

  He wondered why he’d never thought to visit the place before. Perhaps he’d let himself slide too far into the White Eyes’ world.

  Over the years, he’d heard bits and pieces of the story. How Isabel, pregnant and about to graduate as a nurse with a bachelor’s degree, had been forced by her Apache parents to dump Kerney. And how Kerney, not knowing she was pregnant and eager to get his ROTC commission and fight in Vietnam before the war ended, had given up trying to win her back.

  In Clayton’s mind, both parties were guilty of poor judgment, although he still vacillated about who pissed him off more, his mom for not telling Kerney the truth, or Kerney for not being sharp enough to figure out why she’d abruptly rejected him.

  It was certainly a different take on the old “love is blind” cliché. He figured they were two people who had simply baffled each other.

  Most of the time it was ancient history and didn’t matter. Life, his job, and his family intervened big-time. He rarely saw Kerney, who lived with his family on a ranch up in Santa Fe, and his visits home to the rez to see his mother, now retired and busy traveling the world, were becoming more and more infrequent.

  Clayton shook off the memories as he pulled into the district office parking lot. Only Captain Luis Mondragon’s marked unit was outside the front of the building. If there was a serious, imminent threat to the safety of Ambassador Ramon Francisco de Cardenas, every sworn officer on duty would have been assembled.

  In his office, Mondragon leaned back in his desk chair, with his trophy wall behind him, and shook his head in response to Clayton’s question. “There’s no known threat to the ambassador. And it’s not a training exercise, it’s politics.”

  Divorced, with his ex-wife remarried and living in Albuquerque, Mondragon had three passions: his job, weight lifting, and riding his Harley. When he got suited up to ride, he easily passed for a biker. All he lacked were club colors.