Slow Kill Read online

  Chapter 16

  By the time Kerney and Suazo got back to Mills Canyon with Spalding in tow, Kerney’s left hand was badly swollen. From the top of the mesa, Suazo had called ahead by cell phone and his chief deputy was waiting for them. He drove Kerney to the Las Vegas hospital while Suazo took Spalding to the Santa Fe County Jail.

  The ring and little fingers of Kerney’s left hand were broken and his wedding band was squashed. An ER doctor cut the ring off, took X-rays, which revealed that the breaks were clean, and immobilized the fingers with splints. He gave Kerney a prescription for codeine and told him to go home and rest, which in Kerney’s mind wasn’t an option.

  The chief deputy drove Kerney to Santa Fe, where Suazo was waiting in Kerney’s office at police headquarters. Together, the three men prepared the necessary reports, talked to the DA by phone, entered Spalding’s arrest into the National Crime Information Center data bank, and notified the California authorities that Spalding had been taken into custody. After dealing with the outstanding homicide and fugitive warrants on Spalding, they did the paperwork charging her with the attempted murder of a police officer.

  As soon as Suazo and his deputy left, Helen Muiz buzzed him on the intercom.

  “Your wife is on the phone,” she said.

  “You called her?” Kerney asked.

  “Darn tooting, I did,” Helen replied.

  Kerney punched the blinking button. “I’m all right,” he said quickly.

  “A smashed hand is not all right,” Sara said emphatically.

  “It’s only two broken fingers. I’ll be fine.”

  “You are not a twenty-something cop without a family, Kerney. Stop acting like one. Tell me exactly what the doctor said.”

  “I don’t need surgery, and I’ll be able to use the fingers when the bones heal. It’s no big deal.”

  “It is to me. Are you going home now?”

  “Yes, as soon as I send Sergeant Pino to the DA’s office with all the paperwork.”

  “Good. I’ll call you at home. Put Helen back on the line.”

  “What for?”

  “Since I can’t be there to take care of you, Helen has volunteered.”

  “To do what?”

  “Whatever needs doing, but mostly to grocery shop, fix some meals to put in the fridge for you, and act as my spy.”

  “I suppose I have no choice in the matter.”

  “You do not,” Sara said. “You could have been killed, Kerney.”

  Kerney looked at his mangled wedding ring. Without a crevice toehold he might well have fallen eighty feet to his death. “Don’t be upset, Sara.”

  “I am upset. Put Helen on. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Because of the swelling and pain, Kerney’s hand was useless for the next several days. He got through the nuisance of it as best he could. Helen’s home-cooked meals in the fridge made caring for himself easier, but getting dressed in the morning remained a bit of a challenge.

  On Thursday morning, he called Penelope Parker and told her the remains in the coffin were not those of George Spalding. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s alive,” Kerney cautioned. “Will you let Alice know?”

  “I will, although I can’t promise that she’ll understand,” Parker said. “She’s already forgotten that Claudia has been arrested for Clifford’s murder, and she’s taken to calling me Debbie, which she’s never done before.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Kerney said.

  “Perhaps if you came out and told her yourself,” Parker said wistfully, “it would sink in more readily.”

  “I’ll have to leave that in your good hands, Ms. Parker,” Kerney said.

  Ramona Pino stepped through the open door to his office with a pleased expression on her face. Kerney made his excuses to Parker and hung up.

  “I’ve got news, Chief,” Ramona said. “The Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency reports that Edward Ramsey and Richard Chase have both received annual consulting fees of a hundred thousand dollars U.S. each from the High Plains Charitable Trust over the past fifteen years. The deposits were made to a bank in Toronto.”

  “That’s a nice sum of money to put in your pocket. Has it been reported as earned foreign income on their tax returns?”

  “Not according to the IRS agent I spoke with.”

  Kerney smiled, “Good work, Sergeant. Any word on George or Debbie?”

  “That’s not going well, Chief. The Calgary PD has stopped talking to me. It seems that the U.S. Army has stepped in and wants to keep the investigation all to themselves.”

  “Let them have it,” Kerney said.

  “You want me to drop it?”

  “It’s a military matter that doesn’t concern us now.”

  “Okay, Chief, but I hate to leave loose ends untied,” Ramona said.

  “That’s one of the reasons you’re good at what you do,” Kerney replied with a laugh. “Give me a copy of your supplemental report on Ramsey and Chase as soon as it’s done.”

  “It’s on your computer, Chief,” Ramona said as she waved from the office door.

  Kerney pulled it up on his screen, read through it, and dialed the number of the resident FBI special agent.

  “Would you be interested in a bribery case involving an FBI employee and a city police captain?” he asked.

  “I always like a good bribery case,” the agent said. “Is the officer from your department?”

  “Nope, Santa Barbara, California.”

  “What kind of FBI employee?” the agent asked.

  “A GS 12 who teaches at Quantico,” Kerney answered, “who also happens to be the retired chief of the Santa Barbara PD.”

  “Intriguing. How big a bribe are we talking about here?”

  “One point five million each, spread out over fifteen years.”

  The agent whistled. “You’ve got proof?”

  “I do.” Kerney printed Pino’s supplemental report and stuck it in his case file.

  “Can you bring it to me now?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  He left the building thinking how absolutely grand it would be if the feds busted Ramsey and Chase at work.

  Two months after the Army started looking for George Spalding and Debbie Calderwood, Sara called Kerney from her office with an update on the investigation.

  “Debbie Calderwood is in custody,” she said as she scanned the CID investigator ’s report.

  “That’s good news,” Kerney replied. “Where was she found?”

  “At the Toronto airport about to board an international flight to Europe under the name of Caitlin Thomas,” Sara replied. “It’s her legal name. She changed it after gaining Canadian citizenship.”

  “What about George?” Kerney asked. “Did he change his name to Dylan Thomas?”

  Sara laughed. “That’s unknown, as are his whereabouts.”

  “Is Debbie cooperating?”

  “Yes, indeed. She divorced George twenty years ago and hasn’t seen him since. But she got a multi-year, multimillion-dollar settlement. The Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency is auditing her income tax records for a paper trail that should eventually lead us to him.”

  “You sound very confident about it,” Kerney said.

  “I am. No matter where George might be, he’s about to discover that the world is a very small place. We’ll get him.”

  “I’ve never understood why George colluded with his father to deceive his mother. Has Debbie shed any light on that?”

  “According to Debbie, Alice sexually molested George until he got old enough and strong enough to resist her. He hated his mother.”

  “When I first spoke with Alice, she said that she never should have let George go. At the time, I thought she meant she should have talked him out of enlisting in the Army.”

  “Apparently, it was far more twisted than that,” Sara said.

  “Yeah,” Kerney replied, thinking about Clifford Spalding. When it came to women, the man had picked two real hu
mdingers to marry.

  “I’ve got to go,” Sara said.

  “I’ll call you at home tonight,” Kerney said.

  Sara hung up, put the report aside, and returned to the task of compiling all the data that had been gathered on the active rape cases her team had surveyed.

  In six cases, vital evidence had been misplaced or lost. One CID investigator had been ordered by a post commander to destroy evidence, which the officer had refused to do. A victim with ten years’ service had accepted an honorable discharge after being threatened with a letter of admonishment for a trumped-up minor rule infraction that had occurred after the rape.

  In another case, an accused rapist, a master sergeant, had been allowed to retire before the paperwork could be forwarded to JAG for action. At JAG, several prosecutions had been dropped when victims had recanted their allegations after receiving spot-promotions and transfers.

  Of all the cases surveyed by her team, only two investigations had been conducted without any evidence of interference or inappropriate meddling by higher-ups. The findings made Sara boil.

  She entered the last of the information, saved the file to the computer hard drive, and made a backup copy. With the case sampling data now complete, Sara decided it was time to pass the results on to her Teflon-coated, chickenshit boss. In all probability, she would pay a price for submitting hard, disturbing facts the general didn’t want to hear. At the very least, a butt-chewing was likely.

  But whatever the outcome, for the first time in weeks, Sara felt good about doing her job.

  Kevin Kerney returns. . . .

  Read on

  for a special preview

  of Michael McGarrity’s

  new novel

  NOTHING BUT TROUBLE

  Available from Dutton in December 2005

  For as long as Kevin Kerney had known him, Johnny Jordan had been nothing but trouble. But it had taken a long time before Kerney began to recognize any serious downside to being a friend of John Douglas Jordan.

  The memory of Johnny flooded through Kerney’s mind on a snowy April afternoon after he returned to police headquarters to find a telephone message on his desk from his old boyhood chum. Johnny was in Santa Fe, staying at a deluxe downtown hotel, and wanted to get together for drinks and dinner that evening.

  Kerney stared out his office window at the fluffy wind-driven snow that melted as soon as it hit the glass. He’d last seen Johnny well over thirty years ago at the memorial services for his parents, who’d been killed in a traffic accident on the day Kerney had returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam. Johnny had shown up at the church late accompanied by a good-looking woman twice his age, his left arm in a cast, broken in a fall he’d taken at a recent pro rodeo event.

  He remembered Johnny waiting for him outside the church, standing next to a new truck with the initials JJ painted on the doors above a rider on a bucking bronc. Dressed in alligator-skin cowboy boots, black pressed jeans, and a starched long-sleeve white western-cut shirt and wearing a gold-and-silver championship rodeo buckle, he’d flashed Kerney a smile, led him away from the truck where his lady friend waited, and offered his condolences.

  “It’s a damn shame,” Johnny said with a shake of his head. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Eventually, I suppose,” Kerney replied.

  “But not yet,” Johnny said.

  “Not yet.”

  They caught up with each other. Johnny, who been rodeoing since graduating from high school, had become a top-ten saddle bronc rider, while Kerney had finished his college degree and gone off to Vietnam as an infantry second lieutenant. Johnny’s parents, Joe and Bessie, who owned a big spread on the Jornada, a high desert valley straddled by mountains in south central New Mexico, where Kerney had been raised, had sold out and bought another ranch in the Bootheel of southwestern New Mexico. Joe had left his job as the president of a local bank in Truth or Consequences to take over a savings and loan in Deming.

  Still in shock over the loss of his parents, Kerney didn’t have much to say, but he did promise to stay in touch with Johnny once things settled down. Johnny gave him a phone number where he could be reached and left with the nameless woman.

  It had been typical of Johnny not to introduce his lady friend. He had a catch and release attitude toward women.

  Kerney had never followed up with Johnny, perhaps because his boyhood friendship with Johnny had ended years before. At the age of sixteen Kerney had hired out one summer to work for Johnny’s father on the ranch. On his first day at work, he’d been sent out with Johnny to repair a trap to hold cattle for the fall roundup. The job consisted of replacing broken wooden fence posts with steel posts and stringing new wire with a fence stretcher.

  By noon, they’d almost finished the chore when they ran out of steel posts. Johnny took the truck to get a dozen more from the ranch supply store in Truth or Consequences, while Kerney stayed behind to string and splice wire. Four hours later, Kerney was still waiting for Johnny’s return when the ranch manager, Shorty Powell, had showed up.

  “Is this as far as you’ve got?” Shorty asked, surveying the unfinished trap.

  “We ran out of posts,” Kerney replied. “Johnny went to get more.” He didn’t say anything about Johnny leaving him stranded in the hot desert sun for four hours with no water, no shade, on foot, and ten miles from the ranch headquarters. He didn’t tell Shorty that while he’d waited for Johnny he’d rebuilt and rehung the gate to the trap by himself, using the old wooden fence posts.

  “This job should have been finished today,” Shorty said as he grabbed the mike to the CB radio in his truck and called for Johnny. “Where are you?” he asked when Johnny replied.

  “Just leaving the store with the posts.”

  “I want you and Kevin out at the trap first thing in the morning to finish up. I’ll bring Kevin back to the ranch.”

  At the ranch, Johnny had not yet arrived. Shorty killed the engine and gave Kerney a long, appraising look. “That wasn’t a full day’s job I sent you boys out to do. What took so long?”

  “We had a lot of wire to splice and the ground was pretty hard,” Kerney replied, so parched he could barely speak. “Pounding those posts in took a while.”

  Shorty grunted. “It’s your first day on the job, so I’ll give you some slack. But if you’re going to work for me this summer, I expect you to put your back into it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kerney said.

  The next morning, as they finished up at the trap, Johnny told Kerney how he’d stopped by his girlfriend’s house in town on the way to the store and had gotten “distracted.” He never once apologized for leaving Kerney in the lurch, nor did he thank him for covering up his absence with Shorty.

  “Don’t worry about Shorty,” Johnny said as he pounded in the last post. “I’ll make sure he keeps you on through the summer.”

  Kerney spliced a top wire with fencing pliers, clipped it to the post, and stretched it tight. “Don’t do me any favors, Johnny.”

  “What’s bugging you?”

  “Nothing,” Kerney replied, staring at Johnny, who stood grinning at him, showing his perfect white teeth. Unlike Johnny, who lacked for nothing, Kerney needed the job and the money it would bring. “Just don’t expect me to lie for you again.”

  “You’re taking this way too seriously.”

  Kerney wrapped the remaining wire around the post, took off his gloves, and handed Johnny the pliers. “You can finish up.”

  Johnny laughed. “When did the hired hand start giving orders?”

  “When I found out my partner is a slacker.”

  Over the course of the summer, Kerney distanced himself from Johnny and won Shorty’s respect as a hand, which meant more to him than Johnny’s friendship.

  That summer, Johnny’s wild streak took over. In his free time, he organized beer busts on his father ’s boat at Elephant Butte Lake, made trips to sleazy Juárez nightclubs in Mexico, and got in fistfights over girls. When he was
n’t working or partying, he was glued to the back of a horse, practicing his calf roping and rodeoing skills.

  As he considered Johnny’s invitation, Kerney wondered if his old boyhood pal had changed at all over the years. Did he still have the big grin, the easy laugh, his charming, cocksure ways? As a rodeo fan, he’d kept up with Johnny’s career for a time. Johnny had been good enough to repeatedly reach the national finals and had won two saddle bronc championships, but never the all-around title. Then he’d faded from view.

  Kerney decided it was worth his time to have dinner with Johnny, just to find out what had prompted his phone call. He dialed the hotel and asked to be put through to Johnny’s room. The operator asked for his name and when he responded, she told him Johnny would meet him in the bar of an expensive downtown restaurant at seven o’clock.

  Kerney confirmed he’d be there and disconnected, thinking maybe Johnny hadn’t changed much at all: he still expected things to go his way and for people to do his bidding. Any nostalgia he had about his past friendship was erased by a sense of wariness.

  He checked the time. If he left for home now, he could change out of his uniform into civvies and get back in town to meet up with Johnny at the restaurant.

  At the Santa Fe airport, Johnny Jordan sat with the woman he’d brought with him to Santa Fe, eager to put her on a flight home and be done with her. Brenda was a petite, hard-bodied workout maven who conducted trim and tone exercise classes at a Denver gym and spa that catered to professional women. He’d met her at a party three weeks ago, and by the end of the night he had taken her to bed.

  Over the past three weeks Johnny had found her to be the perfect combination of what he liked in a woman: haughty, hot-looking, and sluttish in bed. Two days ago, he’d invited Brenda to accompany him on a short business trip, thinking it would be fun to have someone to play with who liked it wet and wild and didn’t demand too much of his time. By the end of the drive down from Denver, Johnny realized he’d make a huge mistake.