Slow Kill Read online

  Her immediate boss, a brigadier general, had made it clear that none of the closed sexual assault cases would be reopened. Everything in the report to Congress was to be forward-looking and proactive. He wanted loopholes closed, coordination improved, policies defined, protocols recommended, training proposed, staffing patterns detailed, and nothing more.

  Post commanders could be interviewed only to gain feedback about how the system could be improved. No case studies of actual investigations were to be included; only a statistical model of the investigations, with graphs and charts, would be incorporated in the report.

  She’d griped to Kerney about the decision by the brass to sanitize the shoddy sexual assault investigations, and her dissatisfaction with the assignment was deepening. The agenda was pure face-saving, buck-passing, Teflon-coated gamesmanship.

  Sara had come to her Pentagon post as a realist, knowing full well that not everyone in command operated ethically or honestly. But she was saddled with a petty, childish tyrant of a boss, who was more interested in making rank than doing the right thing.

  Two choices faced her: She could play the marionette, get her ticket punched, and move up a rung on the ladder. Or she could exercise initiative and risk short-circuiting her career.

  Her gut told her that she really didn’t have a choice. No woman willing to serve her country, who’d been viciously assaulted and violated while performing her duty, deserved anything less than justice. The shackles put on her by the higher-ups were unacceptable. She would have to find a way to push the envelope and try to force the brass to confront a reality they dearly wanted to avoid. How to do that without scuttling her career was the question.

  She touched the glass jar of seashells she’d collected from the beaches in Ireland. A memento from their honeymoon, it brought back happy memories of early morning walks with Kerney along the wild, misty western coast, whitecaps breaking in ink-black water against the shore.

  She turned her attention back to Spalding’s 201 file. The CID investigator, Chief Warrant Officer Noah Schmidt, who’d cleared Spalding of any involvement in the decades-old stolen property case, might very well be an important source of information for Kerney.

  She put in a request to personnel to see if Schmidt was a lifer still on active duty or retired military now working as a civilian for DOD or a branch of the armed services. Then she called the Defense Finance and Accounting Services in Kentucky, which handled military retirement pay, and the Armed Forces Record Center in St. Louis, and asked for a fast check on the man. Hopefully, she’d know something by the end of the day.

  Down the hall, Master Sergeant Wilma Lipinski, who worked for Sara, was at her desk. With twenty-eight years of active duty service, Lipinski had recently rotated into the Pentagon from a first sergeant posting with a military police company. Only exceptional noncoms were authorized to stay in the ranks for thirty years, and Lipinski was one of them.

  “Ma’am?” Lipinski asked as Sara stepped into her cubicle.

  “Have you read my briefing summary on our new assignment?” Sara asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lipinski replied cautiously. A sturdily built, middle-aged woman, the daughter of a retired Chicago fireman, she’d won the Bronze Star for valor while serving in Bosnia.

  “What do you think about it?” Sara asked.

  “On or off the record, Colonel?”

  “Off the record, Sergeant.”

  “It sucks, ma’am.”

  “Exactly,” Sara said, taking a seat. “How many of the sexual assault cases are still carried as active?”

  Lipinski consulted a binder. “Thirty-eight at JAG awaiting disposition, and twenty-six are still being investigated by CID.”

  “The general doesn’t want us to touch the closed cases in our report,” Sara said. “But he failed to say anything about those that are still active.”

  Lipinski blinked. “I think it’s pretty clear that we’re not to do any investigating, Colonel.”

  “I’m thinking more along the lines of research, Sergeant, that gets to the core issues of what we’re charged to address in our report.”

  “Field research?” Lipinski asked.

  “Yes, with information we can append to the report.”

  “Aren’t you splitting hairs, ma’am?”

  “Definitely.”

  Lipinski smiled. “Your orders, ma’am.”

  Sara’s team of six noncoms and officers had been drawn from military police corps personnel assigned to area bases. “We’ll field survey one-third of the active cases: nine that are still under investigation, and twelve at JAG. Pick cases that are within a reasonable striking distance and divide the work as equally as you can among the team.”

  Lipinski scribbled a note. “I could take on some of the cases, ma’am.”

  “Don’t jump into deep water too fast, Sergeant.”

  Lipinski smiled broadly. “I know how to swim, Colonel.”

  “Okay, you’re on the team. Find an off-site facility where we can meet and go over the details. Did you read Spalding’s 201 file?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Get me what you can on that sergeant Spalding worked for in Vietnam who was busted for theft.”

  “I’ve already put in a priority request through channels, Colonel.”

  “You have a degree in criminal justice and twenty-eight years of service, Sergeant. Care to tell me why you never pursued a commission?”

  “A long time ago, I decided it was better to be part of the backbone of the Army rather than part of its head. I’ve observed that when heads roll, it’s frequently the wrong heads.”

  At lunch, Kerney made it a point to sit next to Ed Ramsey, who talked amiably while packing away a meal of meatloaf and soggy mashed potatoes smothered in gravy.

  In his fifties, Ramsey looked fit in his brown suit. He had a full head of hair, a ruddy complexion, and blunt, strong-looking hands. Kerney picked at a dry chicken breast and nibbled his salad as Ramsey made small talk.

  “I understand you’ve taught here before as a visiting lecturer,” Ramsey said affably.

  “Once, some years ago,” Kerney replied.

  Ramsey nodded. “I’ve never been to Santa Fe.”

  “Tourists love it.”

  Ramsey touched the corners of his lips with his napkin. “Any good golf courses?”

  Kerney finished the salad and pushed his plate aside. “Far too many for my taste.”

  “Why is that?” Ramsey asked, laughing.

  “Santa Fe is high desert country. It takes a lot of water to keep fairways green, and we don’t have enough to go around. Is golf your game?”

  Ramsey grinned. “I hack at the ball every chance I get. If I’m not on the links, I’m sailing. Last month, I taught a police media relations class in Chicago. Stayed over on the weekend and spent two days on Lake Michigan. Pure magic.”

  “Do you live near the water?” Kerney asked.

  Ramsey shook his head. “It’s too high-end for me. I have to haul my boat from home, but it isn’t that far.”

  “Where is home?” Kerney asked.

  “Do you know the area?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Stafford,” Ramsey said with a half smile. “It’s a small city south of here. If you have time, you can meet me at the river this weekend, and I’ll take you sailing.”

  “Thanks,” Kerney said, “but I’m not much of a water person. Do you miss Santa Barbara?”

  Ramsey dropped his napkin on the table. “Not really. As long as I’m near water, I’m happy. Listen, if I can’t take you sailing, how about sitting in on my class next week? That civilian task force on community policing and the mentally ill you established last year was really innovative. I plan to use it as an example of how to build good media and community relations. It would be great to have you there to do a Q&A with the students.”

  “I’d be glad to participate,” Kerney said as he got to his feet. The luncheon was winding down. An attractive fema
le agent was gathering the other adjunct instructors around her to take them on a tour. “Guess I’d better join up for the tour.”

  He shook Ramsey’s hand and followed the group out of the building, mulling over his conspiracy theory. Ramsey hadn’t said a word about the Spaldings. Maybe Ramsey and Captain Chase hadn’t colluded with Clifford Spalding to keep Alice in the dark about her son. Maybe Clifford Spalding had finessed the whole thing.

  Kerney decided there were too many maybes. Soon his attention was drawn away by the tour. The new indoor range was a marvel, with high-tech, small-arms combat shooting stations that tested accuracy, judgment, and reaction times in deadly force situations. He got a huge kick out of seeing the Behavioral Science Unit, made famous by a number of movies about serial killers.

  Windowless, with mazelike corridors, hidden away in a sub-basement, the unit was unlike the neat, tidy, well-appointed office suites everywhere else in the complex. There were stacks of boxes in hallways, piles of research books spilling off shelves, desks cluttered with reports and paperwork, movie posters tacked to office walls, and dusty, unused typewriters and broken office machines heaped on steel gray work tables.

  But the pièce de résistance, the object that truly defined the eccentricity of the staff, was the framed picture of a space alien prominently displayed among the official staff photographs that lined a wall near the elevator.

  Outside, within easy walking distance, they strolled the streets of Hogan’s Alley, a self-contained, completely functional village built to train agents in crime scene scenarios. They finished up the tour with a peek inside the new forensic building and the DEA Training Academy.

  During lunch, Ramsey had mentioned that he owned a home in Stafford, a commuter community halfway between Quantico and Fredericksburg. Kerney decided that finding out how Ramsey lived might go a long way to answering some of his questions about the man. With the afternoon still young, Kerney drove south on the congested interstate that ran the length of the eastern seaboard from Maine to Florida.

  After a failed attempt to locate Ramsey through the phone book at a gas station in Stafford, Kerney stopped at the county administration building and visited the public utilities office on the first floor, where a very helpful clerk provided Ramsey’s mailing address along with driving directions to the house.

  Located in a private subdivision surrounding a golf course, the house looked out on a fairway with water hazards, sand traps, stands of big trees, and a paved golf cart lane that wandered up and down the gently rolling terrain. Dense, overgrown woodlands bordered the houses and the golf course. From the lay of the land Kerney could tell the developer had carved the subdivision out of the forest to create a duffer ’s paradise. A dozen or so golfers were out on the links teeing off and scooting around in their carts.

  Ramsey’s house was a big, two-story, modern structure with a tall, overwhelming entryway and a redbrick facade under a series of pitched roofs. Outside the two-car garage was an expensive sailboat on a trailer and a high-end touring motorcycle. Ramsey obviously liked his toys.

  The subdivision was completely built-up and looked fairly new, expensive, and exclusive. Nothing about it felt like an enclave for civil servants. The houses along the streets consisted of a half dozen different floor plans in varying sizes, all with similar exterior treatments and rooflines, probably required by homeowner covenants.

  Somewhere Kerney had read, “Americans like sameness.” Personally, he found it boring.

  A sign at the clubhouse announced that the course was for the use of residents, members, and their guests only. On a putting green near the pro shop, Kerney spoke to an older fellow wearing a golfing cap, and shorts that showed his tanned, spindly legs.

  The man chuckled when Kerney said he liked the neighborhood, was looking to buy, and wondered if there were any homes for sale.

  “All the houses sell within twenty-four hours after they hit the market,” he said. “Your best bet is to get on a Realtor ’s waiting list.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” Kerney said, “what’s the price range?”

  The man pushed his cap back. “The smaller homes are in the $750,000 range. Those are mostly snapped up by empty-nesters or retired couples like me and the wife.”

  “I’ve got a growing family,” Kerney said, thinking about the size of Ramsey’s house.

  “Then you’re looking at right around seven figures,” the man said. “Of course, that gives you equity in the club and unlimited use of the golf course.”

  Kerney smiled. “That’s what I want.”

  The man nodded knowingly. “What’s your handicap?”

  Kerney, who’d never golfed in his life, shrugged. “Not very good.”

  The man laughed again. “I know what that’s like. Well, this is the right place to work on your game. We’ve got a great resident pro.”

  “That’s what I need,” Kerney said, looking out at the greens. “Are the natives friendly?”

  The man smiled at the comment. “Folks here get along well. There’s a good mix of people.”

  “Civil servants?” Kerney asked.

  The man shook his head. “Not too many of those. Some mid-level government appointees live here, but mostly we’ve got lawyers, doctors, think tank analysts, scientists, and of course old duffers like me.”

  Kerney left the man to his putting practice, and during the stop-and-go drive to Arlington, with tractor-trailers cutting in and out of lanes and drivers tailgating madly, he did some math in his head. Could a federal employee on a civil service salary and a police retirement pension afford a million-dollar home?

  Kerney wasn’t sure. Even with a large amount of equity from the sale of a previous house in Santa Barbara, could Ramsey afford a five- or six-thousand-dollar-a-month mortgage payment? What would his annual property taxes be? Was he still paying for his adult toys on top of the mortgage?

  Ramsey seemed to be living large, and until he found out more, Kerney decided to keep him in his sights.

  He called Sara on his cell, told her he’d pick Patrick up from day care at the Pentagon, and asked if she’d be home for dinner.

  “What are you fixing?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Sounds good,” Sara said. “See you for dinner.”

  Sara came home to fresh-cut flowers on the dining table, Yo-Yo Ma playing a Haydn cello concerto on the stereo, the smell of dinner cooking in the kitchen, and Patrick dressed for bed in his pajamas. She picked Patrick up from his playpen and found Kerney at the stove adding mushrooms and onions to a skillet of browned chicken.

  She kissed him on the cheek. “How was your day?”

  “Good,” Kerney said. “And yours?”

  “Fine.” On the way home, Sara had decided not to tell Kerney about her planned end run around the brass at the Pentagon. She didn’t want the evening to spiral into a discussion of why it would be best for her to resign her commission. “Did you get some playtime with your son?”

  “He wore me out,” Kerney said.

  After dinner, Patrick got cranky. Sara examined his mouth, called Kerney over, and pointed out the tip of a small front tooth showing through his gums. She gave him a teething ring to chew on, which helped, but his discomfort kept him awake long past his bedtime.

  Once he was finally asleep, they sat at the kitchen table, Sara sipping the last of her wine, Kerney reading the paperwork from George Spalding’s 201 file.

  “What about this CID investigation?” Kerney asked.

  Sara put the wineglass down. “I talked by phone with the case investigator, a retired chief warrant officer named Noah Schmidt. He says the sergeant he busted, Vincent DeCosta, was involved in illicit gemstone trafficking. Mostly high quality rubies and sapphires smuggled into Vietnam from Thailand, transported stateside, and sold on the black market to dealers. But he couldn’t prove it. He had enough on DeCosta to charge him with theft of personal property, which he did, while he continued to work the case. H
owever, DeCosta escaped from the Long Binh Jail in Vietnam before he could be tried. He’s never been seen since. He’s still carried on the books as a deserter.”

  “Did Schmidt ever prove his smuggling case against DeCosta?”

  Sara shook her head. “His informant in Bangkok went missing.”

  “How did DeCosta get away?” Kerney asked.

  “During the pullout, the Army was shutting down the stockade at Long Binh and sending all the prisoners stateside. Schmidt thinks someone bribed one of the MP guards to look the other way.”

  “Schmidt is sure George Spalding wasn’t involved in the gemstone smuggling?”

  Sara shook her head. “Not at all. He thinks the smuggling ring consisted of a small group of enlisted personnel who worked with DeCosta. He just couldn’t prove it. Spalding and the other cohorts were cleared solely on the basis of insufficient evidence. They alibied each other.”

  “Did Schmidt have a handle on the volume of smuggled gems?”

  “Only one shipment was intercepted at the Oak-land Navy base. According to the experts who examined the stash, countries of origin for the stones included Burma, India, Thailand, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. All of the gems were cut, polished, and ready for sale. The estimated street value was a quarter of a million dollars for the shipment, at early 1970s prices.”

  “What kept Schmidt from following up on the case?” Kerney asked.

  “He got promoted and reassigned. The investigator who took over the case was a short-timer who dropped the ball.”

  Kerney closed the file. “What do you know about Sergeant DeCosta?”

  “Nothing more than you do, yet,” Sara replied “We’re waiting on his 201 file.” She handed Kerney a slip of paper. “Schmidt is more than willing to speak with you. That’s his home phone number.”

  “Thanks.” Kerney put the paper on top of the Spalding documents. “How’s your project coming along?”

  “It’s getting under way.”

  “Are you just too tired to talk about it, or trying to avoid the topic altogether?”