Slow Kill Read online

  “Okay, Cora, that’s all for now. But I may have to speak to you again.”

  Sluka hurried out, and Glenn Davitt, the estate manager, replaced her at the kitchen table. A man in his thirties, he had jet black hair, dark, deep-set eyes, and a lean, angular face. He looked at Macy with feigned boredom, which raised Macy’s curiosity.

  “How long is this going to take?” Davitt asked as he slouched in his chair and glanced at the three cops.

  Macy countered the question. “Tells us what you know about Mrs. Spalding’s lovers.”

  “I know nothing about any of that,” Davitt said, peering over his shoulder as the two detectives moved behind him.

  “Please pay attention to me, Mr. Davitt,” Macy said softly as he approached. “Would you say Claudia Spalding is a beautiful woman?”

  Davitt shrugged. “Sure, for someone her age.”

  “Hard to resist?” Macy asked.

  Davitt crossed his arms. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Macy chuckled. “Come on, don’t give me that. She’s a very sexy lady.”

  “If you say so. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think of her that way. She’s my employer, that’s all.”

  Macy gave Davitt a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Relax. Talking to me can only help you.”

  “Help me how? This is a waste of time.”

  “Let’s forget about Mrs. Spalding for a minute. Think about yourself, your future.”

  Davitt laughed. “Maybe I’ll write one of those tell-all books and make a pile of money.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Macy said approvingly. “But if you don’t tell us the truth, you’ll have to write that book in jail.”

  “In jail for what?”

  “Making false statements to the police,” Macy said. “Obstructing justice.”

  Davitt raised a hand. “May lightning strike me if I’m telling a lie.”

  Macy pulled a chair over and sat close to Davitt. “I don’t think you’ve lied, yet. But if you don’t tell us about your relationship with Claudia, you’ll be in a world of trouble. We know you’ve been sleeping with her.”

  “Who says?”

  Macy glanced at the closed door to the dining room where Cora Sluka waited. “Who changes and washes the bedsheets?” he asked.

  Davitt bought into Macy’s trickery and started talking. He copped to having sex with Spalding, and cast himself in the role of a pursued, put-upon employee who only wanted to keep his job.

  When Davitt finished, Macy stood. “Did she ever ask you to help her kill her husband?”

  “No way,” Davitt said, making good eye contact.

  “I believe you,” Macy said, “and I can’t wait to read your book, if you ever get it published.”

  Late afternoon turned golden, the clear sky so bright that the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains were washed in a flood of light. On such days, Ramona Pino could still believe in the enchantment of Santa Fe.

  Good news from California earlier in the day had put her in an excellent mood. She hummed a song, off-key as always, on the drive to Claudia Spalding’s Santa Fe house, search warrant in hand.

  In the two units behind her were Matt Chacon and Chief Kerney, who’d invited himself along without explanation. The chief occasionally went out in the field with the troops, but this was the first time for Ramona. Cheerily, she decided not read anything more into it than that, and turned her thoughts to the work at hand.

  The arrest of Claudia Spalding, Dean’s confession, and the statements given by Coe Evans and Glenn Davitt were important milestones, but the investigation was far from over. Without an admission of guilt from Spalding, which Ellie Lowrey said was highly unlikely, nailing down motive remained a crucial issue.

  Without it, Ramona could visualize Spalding’s defense attorney in court, convincing a jury that the grieving widow had no reason to murder her husband, that she was a victim of lies and false accusations by Kim Dean and other men of questionable character.

  Ramona pulled into the driveway of Claudia’s Santa Fe house. It certainly wasn’t the Montecito mansion Ellie had described to her, but it was no adobe shack either. It was a long, rectangular, two-story double adobe under a high, forest-green pitched roof, with deeply recessed doors and windows. A horse stable, corral, and hay shed stood nearby under a stand of trees. Given its Arroyo Hondo location with sweeping views of the distant Sandia Mountains and the tip of Mount Taylor, it had to be a million-dollar property.

  She waited at the front door for Matt and the chief to join her, wondering why a woman who had so much would risk so much. Perhaps they’d find the answer inside.

  She smiled as the two men approached. “Ready to go hunting for secrets?” she asked.

  “Lead on,” Kerney said.

  She searched for a spare house key and found it under a rock at the base of a large bronze and stone garden sculpture of a life-size raven perched on a boulder. Inside, a great room consisting of living, dining, and kitchen areas ran the length of the first floor. It rose to a high vaulted ceiling bracketed on both ends by two second-story lofts accessed by staircases.

  Ramona went over the scope of the search warrant with Kerney and Chacon. All written or electronically stored materials pertaining to or mentioning Clifford Spalding, Kim Dean, Mitch Griffin, Coe Evans, and Glenn Davitt, including financial and legal documents, letters, journals, diaries, business correspondence, handwritten notes, lists, address books, calendars, computers, electronic organizers, and recorded telephone messages, were fair game.

  She made Matt Chacon the inventory officer, responsible for logging and tagging what was found, where, when, and by whom. Prepared for the role that always fell to junior detectives, Chacon opened his briefcase, took out a clipboard, and started organizing the forms he needed.

  “I’d better get started,” Ramona said, glancing at Kerney.

  “I came along to help, Sergeant,” Kerney replied. “Put me where you want me.”

  “We’ll start on this floor,” Ramona said, wondering if Kerney was testing her on search protocol, “and clear an area for Detective Chacon to use.”

  The sun was low on the horizon when they finished searching the ground floor and started on the lofts. One served as the master bedroom, and the other was a combination library and music room with a baby grand piano, writing desk, soft leather reading chairs with matching ottomans, and built-in bookcases.

  Kerney had just finished with the contents of the writing desk in the library/music room when Ramona came up the loft stairs.

  “Have you found anything interesting, Chief?” Ramona asked.

  Kerney fanned the stack of papers in his hand. “Not really. Closing documents on the house, property tax notifications, canceled checks, paid veterinary and feed bills for the horses. The usual stuff. How about you?”

  “The same. What about the laptop?”

  “It’s password protected,” Kerney answered as he rose with the laptop in hand to turn over to Chacon.

  “What about the books?” Ramona asked, looking at the shelves lining the walls. There had to be at least a thousand volumes, and each one had to be checked.

  “That’s next on the list,” Kerney said from the ground floor.

  Ramona glanced at some of the titles on the spines. Carl Jung’s complete works; books by Boswell, Swift, Yeats, Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jorge Luis Borges; Shakespeare’s sonnets; Joseph Campbell’s works on mythology; a complete shelf devoted to art and architecture.

  She passed in front of a cushioned banco below a large window and inspected the next stand of shelves. A book at eye level, Premier Nudes, caught Ramona’s attention. Next to it was a tome on the erotic world of wrestling, followed by a book of erotic drawings. In fact, the entire set of shelves was given over to erotica, with many of the titles in French, German, and Italian.

  She flipped through several volumes. Some were nothing more than photography books of nude men and women, not at al
l provocative, while others had more explicit sexual content with heavy sadomasochistic and homosexual themes.

  “Well, well,” Ramona said quietly to herself.

  “Find something?” Kerney asked as he returned to the loft.

  She turned and handed him a small softcover German book entirely devoted to photographs of a dominatrix with various men.

  Kerney opened it to the first photograph, which showed the finely sculpted buttocks of a woman wearing garter belts, stockings, and spike heels. At her feet kneeled a fat, elderly, nude man with downcast eyes.

  “Well, well, indeed,” Kerney said.

  “There’s a whole wall of this stuff, Chief.”

  “Let’s see if Claudia Spalding left any messages inside these tantalizing little volumes,” Kerney said, fanning through the pages.

  They carefully searched through every book in the library, discovering an errant bookmark or two, a forgotten postcard, an occasional cash receipt for a book purchased but never read. They emptied one shelf at a time, and soon the floor, the desk, the chairs, and the top of the baby grand piano were covered with wobbly stacks of books.

  Ramona finished first, thumping down an enormous old copy of The Oxford Universal Dictionary of Historical Principles on the last empty bit of floor space. She cleared off the piano bench, sat, and watched Kerney as he pulled a book off the lowest shelf and inspected it in the dim light of dusk that filtered through the window.

  Ramona switched on the desk lamp. Her fingers were dirty gray, the creases in her palms etched with grit. During the time they’d been searching Claudia’s library, Ramona had learned that the chief shared her love of books. They’d exchanged comments about interesting titles, the discovery of favorite authors, and some of the more valuable signed first editions.

  Kerney fanned through the last book to be checked, put it down, and rubbed his hands on his jeans. “That does it. Have we missed anything?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ramona said.

  “Have you looked inside the piano bench?”

  Ramona opened the bench. Inside there was a stack of sheet music, and under it a diary bound in red leather with gilt edging and a sterling silver clasp lock.

  “Is there a key for this in the desk?” she asked, holding up the diary.

  Kerney found the key and passed it over. Ramona unlocked the diary and read a random, dated entry, written in neat script.

  K has a lovely penis, medium in size, but he uses it enthusiastically. He lets me fondle it, but I haven’t yet taken him in my mouth. I wonder if he’s afraid to give up control.

  She scanned another entry.

  I’m as twitchy and horny as a broodmare in heat. Masturbated three times this morning.

  Ramona flipped back to a longer entry.

  Dinner out with K last night. The lovely blonde who arrived soon after us with her escort was enchanting. Tiny waist, long legs, perfect hips, and just a sexy hint of a round tummy. I told him she’d be perfect for us to share, and he made some inane comment that he’d have to sleep with her first before he could suggest a threesome. I’m beginning to wonder if I can take him to the next level. He’s sexually possessive and not as open-minded as he’d like to believe. But I’ll continue to hold my tongue and stroke his little-boy’s ego.

  She read aloud an entry made soon after Claudia’s move to Santa Fe.

  Putting distance between Clifford and myself hasn’t worked. It’s still bondage of a certain kind, no matter how much freedom I’ve managed to broker for myself in this marriage. It’s all an anachronism, lacking only the lordly robes of some duke or earl hanging from Clifford’s aged body in testimony of his right to possess me. Even his generosity is a two-edged sword, designed to bind me to him to do his bidding, right down to his need to have me at his side at some absurdly boring event. This cannot continue. I will not be owned.

  “I think this clears up a few things,” Ramona said as she handed the diary to Kerney.

  He scanned a few passages. One detailed how Claudia had used her erotica collection to stimulate Kim Dean’s interest in more adventuresome sex. It read like a sex manual. Another spoke directly of Claudia’s growing desire to rid herself of Clifford.

  Kerney closed the diary. “She may have never put her murder plan on paper, but what’s here is damaging.”

  “What do you make of her?” Ramona asked.

  Kerney shook his head. “I don’t know, but the psychiatrists on both sides will have a field day in court.”

  Ramona shook her head. “I never imagined sex could be so devoid of any feelings.”

  Kerney smiled at the comment. “Perhaps you just didn’t expect it from a woman.”

  Ramona laughed and headed for the loft stairs. “Good point, Chief.”

  “Make a copy of the diary for me, if you will.”

  “It will be on your desk in the morning.”

  A full moon hung in the clear evening sky, shedding a silvery light over the Galisteo Basin and spilling pale shadows across rangeland, low wood-land mesas, and grassy hills.

  Kerney’s earlier attempt to locate Jennifer Stover, the woman who’d owned the gallery where Debbie Calderwood’s college roommate once worked, had failed. He was determined, if possible, to find and talk to Stover before calling it a day.

  He knew the village of Galisteo well. For a time, he’d worked on the basin as a caretaker of a small ranch while recovering from gunshot wounds, and now he had his own spread on the north lip of it.

  Although some of the land near the village had been carved up into residential parcels, most of the surrounding countryside remained open range owned by ranchers who still ran cow-calf operations and cowboyed every day. There were outfits that encompassed ten and twenty thousand acres, but the largest ranch took up almost ninety thousand acres of grassland, canyons, low-slung mesas, and wide sandy creeks that ran west toward the Rio Grande.

  Within the private holdings were the remnants of ancient Indian pueblos, petroglyphs etched on massive rock outcroppings, ruins of early Spanish sheep camps, caves with painted pictographs, and abandoned farmsteads rarely viewed by outsiders. Kerney had been fortunate enough to see many of the sites during the times he’d participated in gathering cows on the neighboring ranches during spring and fall works.

  A village of several hundred people, Galisteo still retained the look and feel of a Spanish settlement. Tall cottonwoods spread thick branches over high adobe walls, and dirt lanes wound past flat-roofed haciendas and veered away from the deep channel of the small river, in truth no more than a stream, that defined the eastern boundary of the settlement. A small distance beyond the village stood a narrow old highway bridge with concrete railings, and beyond that were the rodeo grounds, consisting of a fenced arena and corrals, where every summer working cowboys from the basin gathered for a weekend of friendly competition.

  An adobe church with stone buttresses and rows of narrow, tall windows defined the center of the village, fronting a two-lane state road that crossed the bridge and wandered up grassland hills to Comanche Gap, an ancient route once used by Plains Indians to raid nearby pueblos. Across the road from the church was a small general store with turquoise-blue wood trim, earthy peach plastered walls, and a hand-painted sign that advertized homemade tacos. To the rear of the church, away from the lush tree cover by the river, was a scattering of more modest houses and a cemetery on a rocky knoll.

  There were a few businesses in and around the village, but they were not the usual array of gas stations, diners, and motels found in small towns. There was a bed-and-breakfast inn with an excellent restaurant, a riding and horse-boarding stable, an herbalist’s shop, an upscale spa resort, a new age spiritual awareness center, and of course the Stover-Driscoll Gallery, which had to be somewhere nearby.

  Kerney stopped at a lighted house behind the church to ask where the gallery was, and was directed to the old territorial-style schoolhouse on the county road that cut west toward the Cerrillos Hills.

  Tw
o cars were parked in front, and warm light poured out into the silvery night through the tall, open windows. From deep inside came the soft sounds of a piano sonata. Kerney’s heavy knock on the original double doors brought a quick response by a woman whose expression of anticipation changed to one of surprise.

  She was dark-haired with widely spaced eyes and a softly rounded face that matched the attractive curves of her frame. The plain gold band on the ring finger of her left hand signaled to Kerney that if she was indeed Jennifer Stover, she had remarried.

  “Are you Jennifer Stover?” Kerney asked, after introducing himself.

  “I am,” Stover said. “I’m sorry I reacted the way I did. I thought you were Dennis and Marie.”

  “There’s no cause to apologize,” Kerney said. “Have I come at a bad time?”

  Stover stepped back and motioned Kerney to enter. “I can spare a few minutes.”

  “That’s all I need.”

  The inside guts of the schoolhouse lobby had been ripped out, enlarged, and renovated, creating a great room of considerable size that spanned the width of the building. Thick posts and beams had been installed to bear the weight of the roof, a rectangular stone fireplace had been added along one wall, and the old oak floors gleamed with a satiny patina.

  A fluffy, overweight cat scurried past Kerney’s feet and out the open door. Five seating areas filled the room, each large enough to accommodate six to eight people, strategically arranged for viewing the artwork on the walls, all of it modern, abstract, large canvases.

  “I’m looking for an employee,” Kerney said, “who once worked in your Canyon Road gallery. Her first name is Helen.”

  Stover smiled. “Helen Randell is my partner.”

  “Can you put me in touch with her?” Kerney asked.

  “She’s my partner in life as well as business,” Stover added without hesitation. “Why do you need to speak with her?”

  “I’m looking for someone she knew a long time ago, and I hope she might be able to help me.”