Residue: A Kevin Kerney Novel Page 14

  “I did not, and I apologize for it.”

  “No need. What’s on your mind?”

  “That cute little gal you danced with at the American Legion Hall in Deming the year we took first in the team roping event.”

  “And you won the all-around championship,” Dale added. “That was some great rodeo.”

  “The girl,” Kerney prodded. “She was with Kim Ward when we met them at the arena, remember?

  “I do,” Dale recollected. “She was a cutie. Loretta Page was her name. We stayed in touch after I went into the air force. Wrote back and forth for a time while I was in ’Nam.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Not much to know. She lost interest in me, and that was that. Haven’t seen or heard from her since.”

  “I need to find her, if possible. If there’s anything about her you can recall in that ancient brain of yours, I’d be grateful.”

  Dale chuckled. “Insulting me ain’t gonna make my noggin work any better. I remember she wrote me about some trouble she was having at home, and that she was going to stay with Kim’s mother for a spell.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Kerney asked. “Kim never mentioned it to me.”

  “I am.”

  “When was that?”

  “Now you’re really making me think. It was in her last letter to me, when she cut it off. I remember, because I was hoping to see her when I came home on leave. Instead, you got me drunk in a T or C dive.”

  Kerney thought back. Their excursion into drunkenness had occurred long after Kim had dumped him. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing right now. I’ll cogitate about it and let you know if something seeps through my muddled brain. Come see me before I drop over dead.”

  “Is that gonna happen anytime soon?”

  “Not if I can help it,” Dale said. “Oh, yeah, she was a year behind Kim in school.”

  “That’s good to know. Did you keep Loretta’s letters?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Cops never assume and always ask. I take back my earlier insult. You’re an exceptionally intelligent person with a razor-sharp memory.”

  “Damn straight I am,” Dale said with a laugh.

  Home and in an upbeat mood, Kerney found Sara in the kitchen and filled her in on his session with Upham, his phone conversation with Dale, and a possible lead to one of Kim Ward’s high school friends.

  “Let’s hope it gets us somewhere,” she said, as he retreated to the library to start an Internet search for Loretta. When security phoned twenty minutes later to say that Clayton Istee was at the gate, she decided to let Kerney make the call on what to do.

  She opened the library door and said, “Your son wants to talk to you.”

  Kerney raised his gaze from the computer screen. “Is Patrick already back from town with Dean and Barbara?”

  “Your older son,” Sara said pointedly. “Security is holding him at the gate.”

  Kerney looked at the ceiling and sighed. “Jesus.”

  “Well?”

  He half smiled and shrugged. “Why not get it over with?”

  She came to his side and put a hand on his shoulder. “Do you want company when you see him?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll be fine.”

  “No fisticuffs, promise?” Sara demanded, half serious.

  “It won’t come to that. I’m over being angry.”

  “But not over feeling hurt.”

  “There is that,” Kerney admitted.

  “Good luck.”

  “Is that the sum total of your advice?”

  “Just remember he’s a lot like you in many ways.”

  “The poor man.”

  Sara smooched his cheek. “He’s a good man, one of the best, like you.”

  Sara left, and his smile disappeared. He stared at the open doorway, wondering what in hell Clayton wanted with him. He couldn’t think of anything pleasant. A sudden urge came over him to give the man a royal ass-chewing. He shut down the computer, pressed a fist to his lips, and bit back the impulse.

  Clayton pulled to a stop next to Kerney’s truck, killed the engine, and took a deep breath. It had been some years since his last visit, under different and more pleasant circumstances. The low adobe ranch house with faraway views of the Galisteo Basin and the great swath of rolling grassland that climbed the hill behind the horse barn looked much the same, except the windbreak trees were bigger and the landscaping more mature.

  Sara met him at the patio door to the kitchen, and slid it open with a smile. “He’s in the library.”

  “Thank you.” His throat was so dry, it was all he could manage. He felt like a schoolboy about to be disciplined. He forced down his apprehension as he strode through the living room. He was middle-aged, no kid, and would make his apologies to Kerney man-to-man.

  Through the open library door, he saw Kerney sitting behind his desk looking out the window. He knocked on the door. Kerney turned.

  “Come in,” he said tonelessly, his expression stern. Older now, with a little less hair, and wearing reading glasses, Kerney still looked fit and healthy.

  Clayton stepped into the room. One side held a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookcases, with a shelf reserved for some of Kerney’s police mementos. On another wall hung a rather large, nicely framed pencil sketch of Hermit’s Peak, clearly the work of Erma Fergurson. Underneath it, two easy chairs were angled for conversation, separated by a table that held a mid-century pottery lamp.

  Having memorized his short speech on the drive from Las Cruces, Clayton launched into it without preamble. “Over the years, I have not treated you kindly, and for that I apologize. You have been generous to me and my family, and I’ve been stingy, refusing to accept you as my father. For that, I am also sorry. You are part of my family and I should have been loyal to who you are. Instead, I was suspicious.”

  Taken aback, Kerney moved to one of the matching easy chairs and sat. “I wasn’t expecting this.” He waved at the empty chair. “Stop standing in the doorway and take a seat. Why were you suspicious?”

  “For one, Erma was suspicious,” Clayton replied as he joined ­Kerney. “You read her journal entry. She practically accused you.”

  “I’ve never told anybody this, but Erma was very stoned that night,” Kerney replied. “She’d smoked a lot of grass before Kim showed up.”

  “Stoned?”

  “Very. It was the seventies, and Erma liked to get high. She was always experimenting with art, with men, with life. There was no one like her.”

  “Were you high?”

  Kerney’s expression darkened. “Now you’re sounding like a cop.”

  Clayton shrugged.

  “I’d smoked a little with Erma that evening, but I was nowhere close to being stoned. When Kim showed up, I wasn’t even buzzed.” Kerney shifted in his chair to face Clayton head-on. “Was that your basis for coming after me?”

  “Not completely. You’ve read the criminal complaint.”

  “You didn’t have a thumbnail’s worth of hard evidence. Why did you go for the arrest warrant?”

  “It gets down to that, doesn’t it?”

  Kerney nodded. “You sure put yourself in a pickle.”

  “I kept thinking about the Craig Larson case we worked together.”

  Kerney sat bolt upright, his eyes cold. “That sonofabitch broke into my home and killed a young man on my doorstep who I truly liked and admired.”

  “Although I didn’t see you do it, I think you shot Larson down in cold blood.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what you just said.” Clayton paused. “But before that, because of what you radioed back to me that day in the forest. Something like, ‘He’s almost dead.’ You were watching him die, instead of calling for help.”

  “You didn’t seem upset by the news at the time.”

  “Did you shoot him and let him die?”

  “And that would make me what, a vigilante with a badge
?”

  “Did you kill an unarmed man who’d surrendered to you?”

  “And that, in your eyes, would make me capable of murdering Kim Ward.”

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell did I do to make you distrust me so much?”

  “I was asking questions, doing what any good cop does, looking to build a profile. Erma’s journals made me think that maybe after killing Kim Ward, guilt made you want you to become a cop. To atone for your sin. It’s not unheard-of. Or that you enjoyed killing so much, as a sworn officer, you’d be free to kill again without suspicion or punishment. These were theories I had to follow.”

  “You were profiling me on your own, solely based on some psychological mumbo-jumbo?” Kerney said disbelievingly. “No matter how conflicted you might have been about my guilt or innocence, you should have stepped aside. Instead, you went way over the line.”

  “I know that,” Clayton snapped. “And I paid for it with my job.”

  Kerney snorted. “You get no sympathy from me on that account.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question. Did you willfully murder Craig Larson, or at the very least let him die?”

  Kerney got up and slammed the door shut. “Is this some sort of setup? Are you wearing a wire, trying to get a confession out of me?”

  “Now who’s distrustful?”

  “Who’s not answering questions now?” Kerney thundered.

  “I’m not wearing a wire.” Clayton stood and spread his arms out. “Pat me down.”

  Kerney stared hard at him. “I’ll answer your question. I shot Craig Larson in self-defense,” he lied. “That’s what happened, and that’s what the shooting review board confirmed.”

  “Whether that’s true or not, he deserved to die.”

  Surprised by the comment, Kerney sat back down. “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all.”

  His tension ebbing, Clayton sat. His thoughts turned to another killer, Samuel Green, who had blown up Clayton’s home on the reservation to wipe him and his family out, all because he was Kerney’s son. He’d later learned from the Lincoln County sheriff that Kerney had anonymously contributed a large sum of money to help him rebuild.

  It had never been mentioned, and for a time afterward they’d gotten along fine, with a few family visits back and forth. But they’d stopped staying in touch. Maybe it was his fault; maybe nobody’s.

  “Nothing more to say?” Kerney asked.

  “You once told Paul Hewitt that I was a good man, a good cop, and you were proud to be my father.”

  “I did say that.”

  “Not to me, you didn’t.”

  Kerney sighed. “Well, I’m backing off on the good cop part for the time being. But you are a good man and I’m still proud of you, despite being pissed off at what you’ve done.”

  “I truly don’t know if you are innocent, but you’re my father and part of my family, so I must help you, with or without your consent.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  Kerney put his elbows on the chair arms and leaned forward. “I’ve always felt that you’re more Apache than gringo like me, so tell me what this is really all about.”

  Clayton met his gaze directly. “I am your son. I’ve apologized and want to help. Isn’t that enough?”

  Kerney exhaled. “For chrissake, you’re impossible. I was not trying to pry.”

  “I know that,” Clayton answered.

  “It will look like collusion to your old bosses if you help me. You’ll probably never get your job back.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I want to make it right between us.”

  “Seriously?”

  Clayton nodded.

  Kerney studied Clayton. He’d been willing to risk his career to find out if his father was guilty of murder, and was now prepared to torpedo his future in law enforcement to help Kerney prove his innocence. “Go home to your family, Clayton. You’ve made your amends, and I thank you for it.”

  “I can’t do that,” Clayton replied stubbornly.

  Kerney knew him to be a fine detective with great instincts. He certainly could use the help. “If we do this, I run the show.”

  Clayton nodded. “Understood.”

  “And you stay with it for the duration.”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, we’ll start with you telling me everything you know, with nothing held back.”

  Clayton held up a hand to call a stop, and turned to the Hermit’s Peak pencil sketch on the wall. “First, tell me about the drawing.”

  “It’s by Erma, of course. Sara found it in a Tucson art gallery and gave it to me as a present before we got married.”

  “An oil of Hermit’s Peak was in Erma’s guest bedroom the night Kim Ward came to see you.”

  Kerney nodded. “It’s a study for that painting.”

  “I thought so.”

  The door opened, and Sara stepped inside. “It was quiet enough in here to suggest either coffee or something stronger, if you like.”

  “Coffee will do just fine,” Kerney replied. “And join us. Clayton was just about to run down all he knows about the investigation. He’s signed on with us for the duration.”

  Sara’s smile lit up the room. “Brilliant, as my opposite number in the British army used to say.”

  By the time Patrick and his grandparents were due to return from town, Clayton had finished his briefing on the investigation up to the point of being pulled off the case. From there, they worked out an operational strategy and set priorities.

  Kerney and Clayton would handle the fieldwork and Sara would run a one-woman command center at the ranch. She’d do phone research and Internet searches, coordinate with Dalquist, manage communications, and—if possible—keep the state police investigators in the dark or at bay.

  In the morning, Kerney and Clayton would travel south to Deming in separate vehicles to begin the search for Loretta Page. Before Clayton’s surprise arrival, Kerney had found three different area listings under the last name Page in online directories. If none of those sources panned out, they’d dig into city and county public records.

  It was a long shot, at best, but it was also the only lead to the whereabouts of Todd Marks and Lucille Ward the police didn’t have.

  “We’ve got a plan,” Kerney said, exchanging looks with Sara and Clayton. “Let’s hope it takes us somewhere.”

  Clayton reached in a pocket and took out his smartphone. “Grace will want to know.”

  “Of course,” Kerney said.

  “Let me say hello when you finish,” Sara said.

  “I will,” Clayton answered with a smile, feeling a whole lot better about himself than when he’d arrived.

  CHAPTER 12

  Early morning began with a heated discussion in the kitchen between Kerney and Patrick, who adamantly demanded the right to be included in finding Kim Ward’s killer, despite being fourteen years old and required by law and his parents to go to school, which had resumed on Monday. They argued about it throughout their barn-cleaning chores, until Kerney finally decreed the matter closed to further discussion. But the decision unraveled upon their return to the house, where Sara announced she didn’t think it necessary to remain behind while Kerney and Clayton did the fieldwork.

  “There’s no earthly reason why I can’t manage all the phone research, do Internet searches, and stay in contact with everyone on the fly,” she noted. “I’m coming with you.”

  “I can help too,” Patrick pleaded defiantly, squaring his shoulders to resist the inevitable rejection of his offer, looking to Clayton for support, who was studiously stirring cream in his coffee to avoid getting pulled into the debate.

  “You will help, by looking after the ranch in our absence,” Sara told Patrick. “We need you here to stay on top of things and keep us informed.”

  “You’ll be our eyes and ears, in case the police come calling or try to pull some funny stuff,” Kerney added.

  “Fun
ny stuff?” Patrick queried, not fully satisfied with his sudden promotion to chief of home security.

  “Tapping our phones, intercepting our mail, searching the house in our absence, planting listening devices, trespassing on our land,” Kerney enumerated quickly.

  Patrick’s eyes widened. “I didn’t think about that.”

  “That’s why we need you here,” Kerney added.

  Outnumbered and outgunned, Patrick groaned in reluctant agreement. “Okay.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can skip school,” Kerney cautioned.

  “I know that,” Patrick huffed, offended by the remark.

  “Then it’s settled,” Kerney said, extending his hand.

  Still feeling left on the sidelines, Patrick grudgingly shook his father’s hand. “How long will you be gone?” he asked.

  “A few days at the most,” Sara guessed.

  “If it runs over that, you can all come down to Mescalero for the weekend,” Clayton suggested.

  Sara flashed him a big smile. “Oh, that would be wonderful. Get the whole clan together. I love it.”

  “Cool,” Patrick said, excited by the prospect. “But who’ll look after the ranch?”

  “Juan Ramirez will,” Kerney replied. “He’s already offered.”

  Pleased with achieving a reasonable degree of family harmony, they rounded up Dean and Barbara from the guest quarters for a family confab, and laid out the plan over coffee at the kitchen table.

  “We’ll be fine here, with Patrick running the show,” Dean said. “I’ll give him a hand with the chores and whatever else he says needs doing.”

  Patrick grinned at his grandfather’s compliment.

  “It would be wonderful to see Mescalero and meet your family, if that works out,” Barbara said to Clayton.

  “Let’s make it official,” Clayton said impulsively, looking around the table. “Mescalero this weekend, agreed?”

  “I’m all for it,” Kerney said with gusto as he pushed his chair back from the table. “Why let a trumped-up first-degree murder indictment stand in the way of a long-overdue family gathering? Let’s all plan to meet in Mescalero Friday evening, no matter what. And we’ll convoy out of here this morning. If nothing else, that should throw the cops into a tizzy for a little while.”