Michael Mcgarrity - Slow Kill

At the drug counter, the middle-aged woman clutched a prescription bottle in her hand and stared at Ramona, unsure of what to do.

“You can leave if you like, ma’am,” Ramona said to her. The woman scurried down an aisle and out the door, her shoes clacking noisily on the tile floor.

Ramona studied Tilly’s drained, beaten-down expression. Had Dean simply bullied the woman into becoming a wet rag over the years, or had she always been easy prey? Ramona guessed the latter, but it didn’t matter. She now had to deal with the consequences of Tilly’s inability to keep her mouth shut.

“Okay,” Ramona said soothingly, as she guided Tilly away from the front of the store. “Let’s talk about what happened.”

At a restaurant on Cerrillos Road close to police headquarters, Andy Baca stirred sugar into his refilled glass of iced tea and listened as Kerney spoke to Ramona Pino on his cell phone.

“Problems?” he asked when Kerney disconnected.

“Our murder suspect seems to have disappeared,” Kerney replied, looking a bit vexed as he hooked the phone on his belt. “Pino has issued an APB and is on her way to search Dean’s house.”

“Do you need to go?” Andy asked.

Kerney shook his head and waved off the waitress as she approached to refill his glass of lemonade.

“Well, then, finish your story,” Andy said.

Kerney continued, recounting the events in Santa Barbara that had prompted his request to have Andy meet him.

When Kerney stopped talking and sipped his lemonade, Andy jumped in with a question to back him up a bit. “What made this Sergeant Lowrey think you’d be stupid enough to kill Spalding and then stick around to report it as an unattended death?”

“She didn’t know I was a cop,” Kerney replied, “until she questioned me. Once she picked up on Claudia Spalding’s connection with Santa Fe, she decided to probe it. I probably would have done the same thing.”

“Still, it was no fun,” Andy said.

Kerney pushed the glass aside. “Not really. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Alice Spalding’s thirty-year search for her dead son, George, has some unusual wrinkles to it. I think Clifford Spalding may have sabotaged his ex-wife’s quest for the truth.”

Andy shot Kerney a quizzical look. “From what you said, it sounds more like the woman has been in total denial of the facts for decades.”

“Has she? If so, why would Clifford Spalding continue to maintain a long-term arrangement with a local cop to stay informed of Alice’s activities? Why would he hire a PI to feed false reports to Alice and then fire the gumshoe after he’d done some real work that might have lead to finding the son’s old girlfriend?”

“If the ex-wife was unstable, maybe Spalding was just indulging her and trying to stay on top of her obsession at the same time,” Andy suggested.

“So he burns all the information she’d gathered over the years just before their divorce,” Kerney replied with a shake of his head, “and openly denigrates her to their mutual friends. I don’t buy it.”

“People do ugly things when they get divorced,” Andy said.

“I also have trouble with the scarcity of information contained in the police file I reviewed. There was no documentation that Alice Spalding’s assertion that a newspaper photograph showed her son to still be alive had ever been proven false. The photograph was missing, as were the statements of people who identified the subject as someone other than George Spalding.”

“So track them down and talk to them,” Andy said. “That should satisfy your curiosity about whether or not Clifford Spalding was hiding something from the ex.”

“Can’t,” Kerney said. “Neither were identified by name, just referenced in passing by the police captain I spoke with, who seemed a little uncomfortable with my questions.”

“Do you think this captain was helping Spalding keep the truth from his ex?” Andy asked.

“I don’t know,” Kerney said. “But another point troubles me. Look at the sequence of events. Thirty-some years ago, George Spalding allegedly dies in Nam.”

“Verified by military authorities,” Andy said.

“Soon after the helicopter crash, George Spalding’s girlfriend goes missing, never to be found, and his father, owner of a mom-and-pop Albuquerque motel, starts building a hotel empire.”

“Which means what, if anything?” Andy asked, throwing his hands up in the air. “Maybe Spalding cashed in his son’s G.I. life insurance policy and parlayed it into his first big step up the corporate food chain.”

“Maybe, but again, I don’t know,” Kerney answered.

“You’re not going to let this drop, are you?”

“Not yet. I’ve started background checks on all the players, but I could use some help from your department.”

“To do what?”

“To chase down information on Clifford Spalding’s early business dealings in New Mexico,” Kerney said. “Can you free up some of Joe Valdez’s time to take a look?”

Agent Joseph Valdez, a certified public accountant with a master ’s in business administration, handled most of the financial crime cases for the state police, which meant he was usually overworked.

“Not easily,” Andy said.

“It doesn’t have to be given priority,” Kerney said.

“Here’s what I’ll do,” Andy said after a pause. “You talk to Joe. Tell him what you know and what you want to know. If he’s interested and willing to peck away at it, then it’s okay with me. But don’t expect too much. He’s a busy man.”

Kerney smiled. “That went a lot smoother than I expected. Thanks.”

Andy paid the check and stood. “I know how you are, stubborn and bullheaded. Why should I waste my time letting you wear me down until I finally give you what you want?”

Kerney laughed and added some money to the tip. “Come on, admit it. This is worth taking a look at.”

“Either that, or you have an overactive imagination,” Andy replied with a grin.

Ramona Pino brought in a squad of four detectives to assist in the hunt for Dean and the search of his pharmacy and residence. She assigned two of them to work the pharmacy. The others followed her to Dean’s house in Canada de los Alamos, a small settlement in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains a few miles southeast of Santa Fe.

Once part of a land grant, Canada de los Alamos had remained a sleepy, forgotten place well into the 1960s. Situated next to the national forest in a protected valley, it held a mixture of mobile homes, small adobe houses, and a growing number of more upscale residences that had been built by newcomers over the past forty years. Anchored by a pretty church along a dirt road that cut through the center of the valley, the settlement had no businesses or stores.

Old fences, corrals, sheds, and outbuildings that bordered an arroyo still gave the area a rural feel. But the landscape was changing, and it wasn’t only because of a recent increase in population. Drought had so dried out the pinon and ponderosa forest that the trees could no longer stave off their longstanding enemy, the bark beetle. In wetter times, the trees suffocated the beetles by releasing sap. Now, the beetles had the upper hand and were killing whole stands of trees, sometimes turning their needles brown in a matter of days.

The die-off of the forest throughout the mountains and foothills of northern New Mexico was creating a major wildfire hazard. According to the forestry experts, not much could be done about it.

Kim Dean’s house, a solar adobe on five acres, overlooked the old settlement. Two huge dead pinon trees at the front of the property drooped burly barren branches over the driveway. On the off chance that Dean was home, Ramona blocked the driveway with her unit and, accompanied by the two detectives, went in on foot. A quick perimeter check of the house and horse barn turned up nothing other than Dean’s two geldings.