Michael Mcgarrity - Slow Kill

Kerney looked down at his son. “How do I do that?”

“Mash some bananas into two small plastic bowls, and give him his spoon and a teething biscuit. He’ll stir it all up, dump it from bowl to bowl, and make a mess.”

At the kitchen table, Sara, now bathed and dressed, laid out the weekend plans while Patrick sat in his high chair gleefully stirring gooey banana pulp with his fingers. The plastic bowls and spoon had long ago fallen to the floor at Kerney’s feet.

Since moving in, Sara had replaced all the appliances and had a contractor put in a new countertop and sink and restore the original kitchen cabinets. The room had a warm, country feel that Kerney liked a lot.

Sara had arranged for them to stay overnight in Fredericksburg at a bed-and-breakfast inn. They would tour the town’s historic district, visit some nearby plantations and Civil War battlefields, and perhaps do some shopping. A history buff, Kerney thought it an excellent plan.

He was washing breakfast dishes at the sink when Ramona Pino called from California and gave him the news about Claudia Spalding’s fugitive status. The sheriff’s department had tracked her to Los Angeles and lost her there. Detectives were working the phones, talking to everyone in California and New Mexico who knew her, hoping to get a lead on her whereabouts. The story had already hit the newspapers and television networks.

“Keep me informed,” Kerney said as Sara stepped into the kitchen with a cleaned-up, freshly dressed Patrick at her heels.

“Problems?” she asked, with a tight, resigned smile on her face.

Kerney put the phone down and smiled reassuringly. “Nothing that will spoil our weekend. Claudia Spalding, our murder suspect, is on the lam, but I’m not about to fly out to California and help find her.”

“Then let’s get out of here,” Sara said, “before the phone rings again.”

“Good idea.”

Late Sunday afternoon, Kerney and Sara arrived back home with a sleepy, cranky Patrick in tow. In his high chair during dinner, he kicked his feet, waved his arms, and refused to eat. After his bath, Kerney put him in his crib and tried to settle him down. When that didn’t work, Kerney rocked him until he fell asleep in his arms.

Leg-weary from tromping through battlefields, plantations, and historic old Fredericksburg, Kerney stretched out on the living room couch and read the Sunday edition of the Washington Post. While it hadn’t made the front page news, the story of Claudia Spalding’s flight from justice got half a column of play inside the front section under the headline “Wealthy Murder Suspect Vanishes.”

He passed it over to Sara, who was curled up in an easy chair scanning the house and garden supplement.

She read it quickly and handed it back. “That reminds me, George Spalding wasn’t a military policeman. According to his records, he was a graves registration specialist, confirmed by his DOB and Social Security number. The information you got from the Santa Barbara Police Department is false.”

“The police captain I spoke with told me George’s father provided the military documents to his department, and from what I saw in the file they looked authentic to me.”

“They had to be forged,” Sara said. “I researched the helicopter crash. No such event occurred in Vietnam on that date. George Spalding was killed in an RPG attack at the Tan Son Nhut Airbase.”

Kerney dropped the paper and swung into a sitting position. “Do you have his complete service jacket?”

Sara shook her head. “Not yet. I’ll get it tomorrow. When do you expect the forensic results on the skeletal remains?”

“In a week, I hope.”

“I’ll alert the Armed Forces DNA lab and ask them to give it high priority when the results arrive.”

“Jerry Grant, the forensic anthropologist I used, suggested the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii might also be helpful.”

Sara rose and raised the window blinds. Muted evening light bathed the oak floor. “I agree, especially given your theory that the remains in the casket aren’t those of George Spalding.”

“Why do you say that?”

Sara sat back down. “You raised it in your case notes. George Spalding was five-feet-eight, and nineteen years old at the time of his death. Not five-eleven and in his thirties, as Grant’s preliminary findings of the remains suggest.”

Kerney nodded in agreement. “There’s a cover-up of some kind going on.”

“A cover-up of what?” Sara asked.

“I don’t know. Clifford Spalding did everything possible to thwart his ex-wife’s quest to find her son, and we now know he probably gave forged military documents about George’s death to the police. Why? Did George fake his death, desert his post, and somehow make his way back to the States from Vietnam?”

“Possibly,” Sara said. “As a graves registration specialist he could have been in a position to send home the remains of another soldier under his name. But that deception should have been caught stateside. The Army goes to extraordinary lengths to confirm the identity of every KIA.”

“So how could he get away with it?” Kerney asked.

Sara tapped her fingers together. “He couldn’t, without help. In the material you sent me, you noted that Clifford Spalding started building his wealth right around the time his son was reported KIA.”

“Up until then, he operated a less than successful mom-and-pop motel in Albuquerque,” Kerney said. “But the story of how he got the money, or where it came from, can’t be substantiated.”

“Maybe George supplied the money,” Sara said. “Graves registration is part of the quartermaster corps, which controls the flow of massive amounts of material and equipment. Toward the end of the Vietnam War, there were hundreds of reports of black marketeering in stolen military property, drug trafficking, and currency smuggling, that were run by networks of soldiers in the quartermaster corps. Army CID was swamped with cases. Although a lot of contraband was seized before it was shipped to the States, quite a bit of it got through and was never recovered.”

“How do you know so much about this?” Kerney asked.

Sara smiled. “I wrote a paper about it when I was at the Command and General Staff College.”

“What would it take to do a CID records search to see if George Spalding was a target of an investigation in Nam?”

“I don’t know,” Sara said, rising to her feet. “The information may be in Spalding’s service jacket. If not, I’ll have my first sergeant look into it.”

“When is your report on sexual assaults due?” Kerney asked.

“In ninety days. But let’s not talk about that now.”

“Okay, what should we talk about?”

She reached out, took Kerney by the hand, and pulled him close. “Come into the bedroom and I’ll tell you,” she whispered playfully.

Early Monday morning, Kerney took Sara and Patrick to the Metro rail station and drove Sara’s SUV through the insane Beltway traffic south toward Quantico. Weak light in a gunmetal gray sky dulled the thick woodlands that bordered the road to the FBI Academy. On a 385-acre enclave smack in the middle of a U.S. Marine Corps base, the academy had the feel of an austere college campus isolated from the outside world.

Marine guards in combat fatigues reviewed his credentials at a roadside checkpoint and then passed him through to the main gate where a police officer verified his authorization to enter the secure facility.

In the years since Kerney’s last visit, much had changed. A new indoor shooting range had been added, a state-of-the-art forensics center had been built, and the Drug Enforcement Agency had opened a separate academy on the grounds. Kerney was eager to see it all.