Michael Mcgarrity - Slow Kill

“It would be reasonable to assume that she was eager to get her hands on Clifford’s wealth. But why the hurry? Spalding indulged her. She lacked for nothing, including his permission to get her sexual needs met elsewhere.”

“Right now, I’m stymied, Chief,” Ramona said, “and losing Griffin as an informant and a witness doesn’t help matters.” She stopped short of saying more and took a deep breath.

“You’re angry because I kept you in the dark about Winslow.”

Ramona gave a tight nod of her head.

“Until now, except for me, no one in this department or any other local law enforcement agency knew about Agent Winslow’s undercover operation. I have full confidence that you and Detective Chacon will also honor that commitment to silence. Or do I need to be more emphatic?”

“No, sir,” Ramona said tersely.

“Good. Don’t let this situation shake your focus, Sergeant. Griffin still may do time. But if not, he’s permanently out of business and DEA has gained a major informant. You’ve got Dean for murder one. Make the same thing happen with Claudia Spalding.”

Ramona smiled thinly and rose. “Yes, sir.”

Kerney smiled. “Put your frustration aside, Sergeant. Most of the time you handle it well.”

Ramona got the sugarcoated warning. “I’m sorry if I seemed abrupt, Chief.”

“No harm done,” Kerney replied.

Ramona left and Kerney thumbed through a plan Larry Otero had prepared for rearranging offices and renovating space in the building now that the department’s dispatch and 911 unit had moved to the new regional communication center housed at the county law enforcement center.

It was a good plan, but it didn’t capture Kerney’s interest. He wanted Sara to call with word that she’d cleared the decks and he could get on with the exhumation.

He occupied himself by working on the details of the George Spalding matter that he could control. He lined up a forensic anthropologist, arranged for a private lab to do the DNA testing, confirmed that Alice Spalding’s saliva sample had been sent by overnight express, and got the judge’s signed exhumation order faxed to Sara, the VA, and the U.S. Attorney.

When he finished, he thought about calling Sara and dismissed the idea. He’d already asked her for a big favor. The least he could do was wait patiently to hear back. Holding that thought in mind, Kerney forced his attention on a fresh stack of documents Helen Muiz had deposited on his desk.

Dressed in stonewashed blue jeans, lightweight walking shoes, and a peach-colored pullover top, Ellie Lowrey left her house, greeted by a fair evening with calm, blue skies showing the first hint of sunset. The air, still moist from a brief shower that earlier in the day had brushed the coastal mountains, felt cool against her face.

She drove with her car windows down, trying hard to put the Spalding murder investigation behind her. Lieutenant Macy’s lecture should have been warning enough. But over a light dinner, a summer salad with orange slices, greens, and a vinaigrette dressing, Ellie couldn’t convince herself to leave things well enough alone. She’d promised Ramona Pino she’d take a closer look at Claudia Spalding’s extramarital love life, and she felt honor-bound to follow through.

According to her phone message, Ramona had scored a possible lead on one of Claudia’s former lovers, a man named Coe Evans. Supposedly, Evans had been approached by Claudia to join in a murder plot that predated Kim Dean. For now, it was nothing more than hearsay. But Ramona had made some progress, which was more than Ellie could claim.

She took a back road out of Templeton past soft, hilly pastureland dotted with cattle resting under oak trees, yearlings and colts trotting along enclosed white fences bordering the lane, and tidy rows of grapevines winding up gentle inclines.

She drove quickly through Atascadero, a city gutted by the El Camino Real and Highway 101, a place with no true heart left, no real sense of community. Outside of town, she stayed on country roads, driving aimlessly, trying without much success to shake thoughts of Claudia Spalding from her mind.

Spalding was an attractive, sophisticated, calculating, and smart woman, with a smugness and a cold edge to her. She’d swatted away Ellie’s attempts to crack her defenses. What would it take to break her down?

Ellie sat in her parked car looking down at the training track of the Double J Ranch. Across the way, perched on a small rise, was the house where Ken Wheeler, the ranch manager, lived.

She wondered if Wheeler felt lucky to live on a picture-perfect ranch, working with beautiful, pampered animals, spending every day inside an enchanted bubble sheltered from ugliness, crime, depravity, and violence.

Cops were supposed to be cavalier about the grotesque and monstrous things people do to each other, immune to the hideous and the horrible. At least, that was the way Hollywood and the hard-boiled crime writers portrayed them. Ellie hadn’t gotten to that point yet, and doubted she ever would. She didn’t even know any cops with that kind of invisible emotional shield.

Sometimes she yearned to be inside an enchanted bubble, away from it all. It was pure fantasy. As an alternative, she’d settle for bursting Claudia Spalding’s bubble.

She gazed at Wheeler’s house. White clapboard siding beneath a slanted roof with a single chimney, a porch with a neat front lawn enclosed by a low fence, a detached single-car garage with doors on hinges that swung outward. It was far more lovely and appealing to Ellie than the Spalding mansion.

At the house, Ellie knocked on the screen door and was greeted by a pleasant-looking woman, who identified herself as Lori Wheeler and went to fetch her husband.

When Wheeler arrived, he offered Ellie a seat on the porch and a refreshment.

Ellie accepted both and sat sipping raspberry iced tea from a tall glass, enjoying the scenery and the coolness of the evening. On the enclosed dirt track below, a rider exercised a spirited gray along a quarter-mile straightaway, close to the infield railing. On the rise behind the open-air stalls and barn, a small herd of yearlings, bunched tightly together, wandered up the hill. The smell of wet grass from the afternoon shower still clung in the air.

Wheeler remained silent while Ellie watched a noisy killdeer, clearly recognizable by two black breast bands, circle and dip, piercing the silence with its call.

“What can I do for you?” Wheeler finally asked, after the bird had gained altitude to join a scattered flock. An ex-jockey, he was small and thin, but rail-hard. He exuded the quiet confidence of a competent man comfortable inside his skin.

“You mentioned to Chief Kerney that Claudia Spalding is something of a flirt. Could you be more specific?”

Wheeler swirled his glass, two fingers of Scotch poured neat. “I didn’t put it that way. I guess you could say she acted coquettish at times, especially with the good-looking younger guys who worked at the tracks. Believe me, she wasn’t alone among the other married women in that regard.”

“Do you recall any of those younger men she might have seemed particularly interested in?”

Wheeler drank from the glass and put it on the arm of his chair. “I’ve thought about that some since Chief Kerney asked me about her. It’s more like the other way around. There was this trainer out of Albuquerque, name of Coe Evans, who really had the hots for her. He worked a couple of seasons at the tracks out here, then he went back to New Mexico for a time. Now he trains horses on a TV celebrity’s spread south of Atascadero.”

The mention of Coe Evans made Ellie sit up straight. “Was there any gossip floating around about the two of them?”