Residue: A Kevin Kerney Novel Read online

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Seems an assistant art history prof at the university is researching a biography on Erma Fergurson, and is putting up a stink about releasing all the material to your custody. Their general counsel, Larry Babcock, who regularly loses to me on the golf course, wants our office to vouch that you need everything.”

  Clayton smiled. Robbins and Manchester had made their play. “I can’t answer that until we see it.”

  “Granted. How long will you need the documents?”

  Clayton shrugged. “I’ll put people on it right away. Give me a week.”

  Larkin nodded and signed off. “That will placate Larry. I’ll call when the warrant has been approved.”

  “Good deal,” Clayton said.

  “You should come out and play golf with me sometime,” Larkin said as he walked Clayton down the corridor.

  Clayton laughed. He hated golf and wouldn’t watch or play it. “Find another pigeon to fleece, Henry. This town is teeming with ambitious young lawyers looking to get ahead politically.”

  “Yeah, but you’d be more fun to watch.”

  At the district office parking lot, Paul Avery pulled in right behind Clayton. As he exited his unit, Avery approached.

  “We got zilch from the sheriff’s office and campus police records search,” he announced. “However, they did pass along lists of drunks, vagrants, psychos, panhandlers, trespassers, and homeless subjects who were either arrested or given a summons between ten and twenty years ago.”

  “How thoughtfully useless.”

  Avery waved a sheaf of papers at Clayton. “Three hundred and six individuals, several of whom I personally know to be dead and buried.”

  “Put it in the master case file.”

  “I predict the rest of the day will be just as fruitless.”

  “There’s always tomorrow.”

  “You sure know how to bolster my spirits.”

  Clayton told him about the Fergurson journals and search warrant, and jokingly ordered him back to work with a growl.

  At the end of the day, the victim remained unidentified, the partial thumbprint lifted from the cartridge was so degraded no definitive match could be made, and the piece of the metal whittled from the juniper branch proved to be a sterling silver chain of unknown origin. When the search warrant for Fergurson’s journals came through, it contained a note from Larkin saying the NMSU library had until morning to assemble all the documents.

  With Garcia and Avery sitting in his office, Clayton restrained his impatience, and reminded them that whatever they learned tomorrow would move the case along one way or another.

  “When we find the perp, that partial print could help seal the case. We also need to think about why someone would wrap a sterling silver chain around the branch of a tree above a burial site.”

  “I got my wife a sterling silver necklace for Christmas last year, and it had to be exactly twenty inches long, to go with a pendant she had,” Garcia offered. “When I went shopping, I found out real quick that’s a standard size for a necklace.”

  “Twenty inches? That’s the same length the grad student estimated the chain would have been,” Avery said.

  “So maybe it held a piece of jewelry that had a special meaning to the victim,” Garcia speculated.

  “Or the perp,” Avery suggested.

  “Left there and meant to be found,” Clayton added. “But why?”

  “To make sure the body would be discovered,” Avery ventured. “The killer wanted to get caught. When the cops screwed it up, he just walked away.”

  “That’s not unheard-of,” Clayton said, staring at the thick piles of computer printouts on his desk, listing missing persons cases of young Anglo females from the 1960s and ’70s. “I’m bringing in help,” he announced. “Epperson and Olivas will join us tomorrow from the Alamogordo office.”

  “Good deal,” Avery said. “Maybe everything we need will be in Fergurson’s journals.”

  “Wouldn’t that be lovely?” Garcia replied.

  Clayton sent them home, checked his email for the last time, and thought about the Fergurson journals. He’d promised Larkin to release any unneeded documents back to the library as quickly as possible. But maybe not. As important as researching a biography about Fergurson might be to an assistant art history professor, it didn’t trump murder.

  He rose to leave, but another glance at the computer printouts gave him pause. Why simply scour old files when there was another possible way to ID the victim? He settled back in his chair and typed a draft public announcement asking any New Mexico citizen with knowledge about a young adult woman who’d gone missing in the 1960s or 1970s to contact the state police immediately. He sent it to Deputy Chief Robert Serrano, who oversaw the department’s Investigation Division, as an attachment to an email, with a copy to Luis Mondragon, asking for approval to release it in the morning.

  He powered off the computer and left the building, wondering how much time he had before a boot landed on his backside. If progress continued to inch along with no apparent breakthroughs, it wouldn’t be good for his chance at a promotion.

  His tenth year with the department loomed on the horizon, and he had another ten to go for a full pension. He was on the list to make captain, and the commander of District 8, headquartered an hour’s drive away on the east side of the Tularosa Basin in Alamogordo, had announced his pending retirement at the end of the year.

  If Clayton got the job, it meant leaving the Investigation Division, returning to uniform, and taking on greater responsibilities. It would be a perfect fit for the family, allowing them to stay in Las Cruces. Grace could continue her career in a job she thrived at, while Wendell and Hannah finished college without any disruption. It was only a possibility, but it would sure be nice if it all worked out.

  He tossed wishful thinking aside, locked his unit in the driveway, and walked inside the house. Tomorrow he’d have Fergurson’s journals in hand. He was eager to see where they might lead him.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Fergurson journals weren’t ready to be picked up until late morning. While they waited, Clayton had his team—including the two additional agents—conduct a series of narrow, ten-year searches of missing persons cases. It yielded no results. The goal to identify a murdered twenty-something Caucasian female, approximately five-foot-five, killed forty, fifty, maybe sixty years ago, seemed insurmountable. Women and girls went missing far more often than any other demographic group, and with the sketchy victim profile Clayton had, record-searching was tedious and seemed almost futile.

  Experience had taught him that a significant number of lost, vanished, or missing persons were previously unknown to law enforcement. Or, like this case, they were a murdered Jane or John Doe waiting to be discovered, often by accident.

  Robert Serrano, the deputy chief in charge of the Investigation Division, had vetoed Clayton’s request to issue a public service announcement asking for citizen help in identifying the victim, saying it was premature and failed to show progress, making the department look bad. Before hanging up, he noted Clayton could easily be replaced, which would kill any chance for promotion. He shrugged it off. Serrano liked to use threats in the mistaken belief it motivated people.

  The library called to say the journals were ready. Robbins and Manchester were waiting for him in a staff conference room with the documents carefully packed in sturdy cardboard file boxes, each with cataloged contents. Liz Waterman, the campus police chief, and a lawyer from the general counsel’s office were also present.

  Clayton served the papers, did a quick inspection to make sure he had the real deal, and thanked Robbins and Manchester for their cooperation. It yielded tight-lipped smiles. He wondered why they seemed so put-upon. After all, he wasn’t seizing the Book of Kells or the Gutenberg Bible.

  Under the watchful eyes of Waterman and the lawyer, Clayton carried the boxes out to his unit, signed a receipt, and drove off, the backseat piled high.
r />   Back at the district office, Avery and Garcia helped him unload. At the conference table they unpacked the carefully wrapped journals while Charlie Epperson and Carla Olivas hovered nearby.

  Clayton surveyed the documents with a glimmer of hope. There were thirty volumes of personal history recorded in a hodgepodge of loose-leaf binders, pages from old writing tablets stapled together, cheap plastic spiral notebooks, sketchbooks that were a combination of drawings and writings, and expensive leather-bound journals filled with dated entries from end to end.

  On the surface it seemed a jumbled, disorganized mess. But a quick look revealed Fergurson had chronicled events in her life stretching from her time as a young WAVE serving in the navy during World War II, to the year before her death. Many of the years overlapped in the individual volumes.

  Fergurson’s clarity of vision and attention to detail in her artwork carried over in her journals. She seemed to concentrate on important and memorable events, as opposed to idle musings. There were snippets of thoughts and observations, succinct yet detailed, that sparked Clayton’s growing optimism there was something of value to be uncovered.

  Until now he’d said nothing about his family connection to ­Fergurson. Although it was no secret that the legendary New ­Mexico cop Kevin Kerney was his father, he’d seen no need to mention ­Kerney’s connection to Fergurson. But now the journals had surfaced, and it was likely they contained comments about Kerney and his parents. It was time for full disclosure.

  “Professor Erma Fergurson was my paternal grandmother’s lifelong friend,” Clayton said. “During his college years in the sixties, my father, Kevin Kerney, rented an apartment from her. There may be entries about him, as well as my mother.”

  Clayton’s revelation raised eyebrows.

  “This investigation has suddenly become a lot more interesting,” Avery said. “It’s right during our time frame for the murder. Maybe we should haul Kerney in and give him the third degree.”

  He got a pinched look from Clayton and groans from the rest of the team. “Just joking,” Avery said, backpedaling.

  “Let’s get to work,” Clayton snapped.

  After logging the journals into evidence, Clayton divvied them up, making sure everyone had sequential documents, including at least one that fell within their working time frame of the murder. He added the oldest two volumes to his stack as well, admonished everyone to bring him something they could use in the morning, and sent them off to do their homework.

  When the office cleared, he returned to his desk and glanced at his watch. Grace was at the community college teaching an evening preschool teacher-aide certification class, and the kids were on their own for dinner. There was no reason to hurry home. He had the rest of the afternoon and well into the night to dig into the material.

  One by one, he examined the journals. The tantalizing impulse to start at the very beginning pestered him, but the years long before the murder were likely irrelevant to the investigation, and not what he needed to focus on. Instead, he opened the 1955 diary and began reading.

  Suddenly awake, Grace reached across the bed for Clayton, who wasn’t there. The blue light of the LED clock read two in the morning. Not surprised to find him missing, she puffed up her pillow, shifted on to her side, and tried unsuccessfully to go back to sleep, her thoughts dancing with speculations about the contents of the Erma Fergurson journals.

  Curious when she found Clayton with binders and notebooks strewn across the kitchen table upon her return home hours ago, she’d asked what he was doing. He’d told her about the papers and why they could be important to the case. Usually, when he spoke about work, his comments were brief and matter-of-fact. But this time there was a touch of eagerness and apprehension in his voice. Grace worried that delving into Erma Fergurson’s personal memoirs might rekindle Clayton’s bitter emotions about his father.

  She hoped not. Over the years, since Kerney and Clayton had met, their relationship had improved from chilly to civil. In Grace’s mind, if it went no further that would be okay. Sometimes just getting along was good enough, especially if it was much more than one might expect.

  She suspected Clayton had never fully let go of the idea that Kerney had abandoned his mother because she was pregnant, despite being told differently by both parents. If he found an inkling of support for that in the journals, it could easily result in a complete estrangement between the two men.

  She slipped out of bed and went downstairs. He was still reading at the kitchen table, red-eyed, chin propped up by a hand.

  “Aren’t you ever coming to bed?” she asked warily.

  He sighed, closed the spiral binder, and stood. “Might as well. There’s no murder victim or suspect to be found in these pages so far.”

  “May I read them?” Grace asked, relieved not to find him fuming.

  “Sometime, maybe,” he replied, taking her by the hand to lead her upstairs.

  “But not now?”

  “Not now,” he confirmed.

  “Have you learned anything?”

  Clayton stopped at the head of the stairs. “Yeah. In completely different ways, Erma Fergurson and Mary Kerney were two extraordinary women.”

  Grace continued to their bedroom. “Now you really have my interest up. What about your father?” she asked as casually as possible.

  Clayton turned on the bedroom light. “Kerney’s barely a teenager in the material I’ve read. Fergurson was like an aunt to him, and from her point of view he was one great kid.”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  Clayton shook his head. “No, I’ve got two great kids of my own.”

  “It’s all about the genetics,” Grace proposed, hoping her fears would remain groundless. “On both sides. Come to bed.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Grace always marveled at Clayton’s unique ability to mentally detach from events of the day, no matter how frustrating, trying, or gruesome they were. As usual, once in bed he fell asleep within minutes.

  Although she worried about him every day he went to work, she never said a word or showed outward concern. Not once had she probed about the major felony cases he’d investigated, leaving it up to him to talk about them if he chose to do so. She was very good at being a homicide cop’s wife, and he in turn spared her all the gory details of his job, for which she was grateful.

  Until this moment in their marriage, it had never occurred to her to look through any of the work he brought home. But the Fergurson journals were different. They contained information about Clayton’s ancestral family—people she knew little about, people her children were entitled to have knowledge of. What made Clayton think Mary Kerney was extraordinary? What made Kevin such a great kid?

  Sleep wouldn’t come. Quietly, she went downstairs, and found the journals tucked away in Clayton’s attaché case on the shelf in the hall closet. She sat down at the kitchen table and started reading. She began with the first volume and quickly learned that Erma’s friendship with Mary Ralston had blossomed during their service together in World War II. And how, after the war, Mary helped Erma escape from a disastrous marriage and convinced her to move with her to Las Cruces, where they rented an apartment and enrolled in college under the GI Bill.

  She read how Matthew Kerney, a decorated veteran, blinded in one eye in Sicily, met Mary, courted her, took her to see the family ranch on the Tularosa, and married her in a whirlwind ceremony at a charming old hacienda in nearby Mesilla.

  She was particularly fascinated by a small pencil sketch on the margin of a lined page with a notation identifying the subject as Clayton’s great-grandfather, Patrick Kerney, a crusty-looking old frontiersman. His resemblance to Clayton and Kevin was remarkable, the same deep-set eyes, square shoulders, and lean frame.

  She read Erma’s detailed, loving description of the Kerney ranch on the edge of the San Andres Mountains, and its vast views of Sierra Blanca, ancestral home of the Apache people.

  It made Grace r
ecall the story she’d heard as a child of Crooked Running Woman, a famous Apache warrior who during the pony soldier wars had been saved by two White Eyes on a Tularosa ranch and returned safely home. Did Kerney’s grandfather help save her? She would ask to hear the tale again from the old ones the next time she went home to Mescalero.

  There were long segments in Erma’s journals with no mention of the Kerney family, and while interesting, Grace skimmed them, her focus solely on learning more about Clayton’s ancestors. She found rich material in several letters from Mary to Erma that had been folded in among the pages.

  She was deeply engaged in one of Mary’s letters when Clayton appeared in the kitchen. The stovetop clock read five a.m. He arched an eyebrow, but didn’t say a word as he set up the coffee maker. As it gurgled and began to brew, he teasingly asked if she’d identified the victim and found the murderer.

  “You’re not upset at me for looking?” Grace replied.

  Clayton shook his head. “It’s too early in the morning to be upset about anything. It would only sour the day. Well, did you?”

  Grace laughed. “Find the killer? No, but I did learn that Kevin’s high school girlfriend was arrested and thrown into jail along with Erma Fergurson and some others at an anti-war protest in Las Cruces in the sixties.”

  “Jeannie Hollister,” Clayton noted. “I read that. She was quite the budding young peacenik.”

  “You don’t think she’s the victim, do you?”

  Clayton’s expression turned thoughtful. “I don’t know.”

  “Will you read all of Erma’s journals?”

  “Eventually.”

  “I worry that it will raise old issues for you.”

  The coffee maker beeped. Clayton poured two cups. “About all my past grievances with Kerney? I doubt it.”

  Encouraged by his tone, Grace joined him at the kitchen counter and looked him in the eyes. “Why is that?”