Michael McGarrity - Nothing But Trouble

She opened her briefcase and took our her laptop before speed-dialing Kerney’s cell-phone number. The call didn’t go through. Since leaving Arlington for the flight to Albuquerque, she’d repeatedly tried to contact him without success. Kerney was way overdue from his weekend trip to the Bootheel and it was unlike him to be unreachable. As Santa Fe police chief he was on call virtually all of the time, no matter where he was or what he was doing. Until now Sara had always been able to contact him without difficulty.

She couldn’t help but wonder if he’d encountered some trouble on the road or had been caught up in an emergency at work. To ease her mind she dialed his direct office number and got no answer. With growing concern she called the regional emergency dispatch center and asked to be put through to him. The dispatcher advised her that he was not on duty and had last been heard from by telephone earlier that morning.

Trying hard not to sound like a worried wife, Sara asked the dispatcher to let Kerney know, if he made contact, that she was at the ranch.

“Is everything all right, Colonel Brannon?” the dispatcher asked.

“Perfectly,” Sara replied. She thanked the woman, disconnected, and powered up her laptop.

Kerney had no idea she was about to leave Patrick in his care for the next two weeks. It would be a first for father and son, and she wasn’t happy about springing the situation on him unannounced. Fortunately, Patrick was thrilled about seeing his father, although she doubted he had really taken in the fact that Sara would be gone for two weeks, the first time they’d been separated for more than a few hours. Even on the busiest days she had always managed to look in on him at the Pentagon day-care center.

She stared at the laptop screen for a long moment searching out the folder containing the case file that had led to her special orders. She would be out of the country for the next week, but her mind kept wandering back to Kerney. Where was he? What was he doing? What if he arrived home without checking in with dispatch, saw lights on inside the house, and assumed a crime was in progress?

She went from room to room and turned on all the exterior lights, hoping it would signal her presence at home. Had his truck broken down? Had there been an accident? Was he hurt and unable to call? The thought that he might be cheating on her surfaced in her mind, and she tried to dismiss it as absurd. Yet why else would he not be home or at work so late on a Sunday night?

It was an unkind, silly notion that she fought off as she returned to the study and forced her attention to the task at hand. In twelve hours she would be flying to Ireland on the hunt for George Spalding, an army deserter from the Vietnam War.

Two years ago Spalding had gone missing after Kerney had uncovered facts that revealed he’d faked his death in Vietnam and had been living in Canada under his ex-wife’s maiden name for over three decades. At Kerney’s request Sara had searched old military and CID records and uncovered evidence that Spalding had operated a gemstone-smuggling operation while in-country. When the pieces had been put together, it was clear that he’d funneled his ill-gotten gains to his father, who’d used the money to build a multimillion-dollar company that operated a string of luxury resort hotels. If Spalding’s father hadn’t been murdered by his second wife, none of it would have come to light.

Spalding, a graves registration specialist assigned to a military mortuary in Tan Son Nhut, outside of Saigon, had been targeted by army CID for possible smuggling activities, but the case had been dropped after Spalding faked his death. According to the army CID investigator, a retired chief warrant officer, the scheme had surfaced when a shipment containing the personal effects of dead soldiers was found to include a quarter of a million dollars in precious stones bought on the black market in Southeast Asia. Although he couldn’t substantiate it, the investigator thought it likely that a number of similar shipments had slipped through undetected.

In her spare time Sara had dug into the case. She tracked down and interviewed surviving members of Spalding’s unit who had been implicated but never charged, and ran into a wall of silence. Forced to look elsewhere for evidence, she accessed quartermaster archives, looking for a paper trail that might point to the Stateside member of the ring responsible for intercepting the shipments, removing the smuggled gems, and selling them to unscrupulous dealers.

Fortunately, the Quartermaster Corps, which oversaw mortuary operations, carefully inventoried and documented the shipment of personal effects, and sign-off sheets showed the names of the personnel who’d conveyed the shipments from Tan Son Nhut and those who’d received them Stateside. Unfortunately, there were literally thousands of documents from a variety of sources to search through.

To simplify the process Sara concentrated only on those shipments Spalding himself had inventoried and sent from Vietnam. With that information in hand she compared it to the logs of the receiving authority, and one name surfaced that drew her attention: Thomas Loring Carrier, a junior officer who’d been stationed at the Ton Son Nhut mortuary with Spalding before rotating Stateside to take charge of a unit tasked with returning personal effects to family members.

Unwilling to jump to conclusions, Sara dug deeper into the paperwork. The forms used to ship and receive all personal effects required two signatures on both ends of the process: one to certify the contents, and one to attest to the form’s completeness. On at least eight of the shipments that Carrier had authorized for release to next of kin, the handwriting of the signatures looked decidedly similar.

Sara sent the forms to an army forensic center for handwriting analysis and did a background check on Carrier. A graduate of a southern military institute, he had stayed in the service after Vietnam, rising to the rank of full colonel before retiring. Divorced with two grown daughters, he owned a house free and clear in the Virginia suburbs, had a high-six-figure mutual fund account with a large brokerage firm, drove a midsize SUV, and apparently lived within his means.

For the past five years Carrier had worked as a senior military analyst for a conservative think tank with close ties to the White House. According to a Pentagon insider Sara trusted, he was a close friend of an assistant deputy secretary of defense and had access to a senior national security advisor to the president. The policy papers he’d written for the think tank clearly supported the current administration’s prosecution of the war on terrorism.

It took six months for forensics to get back to her with a report that Carrier had forged signatures on the documents she’d submitted for analysis. Even with that evidence in hand Sara had let the investigation slide. Without corroboration of Carrier’s involvement in the smuggling ring, it would be impossible to prove, and Spalding was nowhere to be found. But all that had changed in the last two weeks.

Before he could be detained, Spalding had left Canada with cash, valuables, and negotiable assets in the high seven figures. After a failed attempt to find him, army CID investigators and the Canadian authorities developed a watch list of a select number of Spalding’s known associates and close friends in the hope that one or another of them might eventually lead them to him. Those on the list had their bank, credit cards, brokerage accounts, and their foreign travel monitored, and their incoming telephone calls and e-mail traced.

Nothing had materialized until two weeks ago, when one of the targeted subjects, a French-Canadian woman named Josephine Paquette, had bought an expensive seaside house on the coast south of Dublin with cash she’d deposited in an Irish bank.