Slow Kill (17 page)

“Or maybe she violated the terms of her agreement with Clifford and he found out about it,” Ramona said.

“Exactly,” Ellie said. “If we could prove that, we’d have a solid motive for murder.”

“So let’s find out if there have been any other lovers in Claudia’s life during the past four years,” Ramona said.

“It’s a deal,” Ellie said. “Keep in touch.”

“Talk to you later,” Ramona said.

She disconnected, turned the house search over to a senior detective, and headed back to the jail. Although Mitch Griffin had denied any sexual involvement with Claudia, Ramona decided it was time to push the subject a bit harder with him to see where it led.

Kerney’s house was built on a shallow depression along a gently sloping ridgeline above a red sandstone canyon. From the portal that ran the length of the south-facing house, he could look down on the meadow below. Cut by a wandering, sandy arroyo and bordered by a stand of old cottonwood trees, the meadow was frequently visited by a small herd of antelope that grazed on the native bunch grasses that grew in the poor soil.

Beyond the canyon, the Galisteo Basin stretched out to meet the Ortiz Mountains, which tumbled against the higher peaks of the Sandias, a good fifty miles distant. Behind the house, a swath of pine-studded pastureland rose up a hill, framed in the background by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside of Santa Fe.

In Spanish, Sangre de Cristo meant “blood of Christ.” Tradition had it that the mountains were so named by the Spanish settlers because of the deep red color that washed over the peaks at sunset. To the native people who had lived at the foot of the mountains for hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived, they were “the place where the sun danced.”

To Kerney, both names perfectly described the mountains. At times, he’d seen a deep mahogany-red color tint the peaks, and on certain monsoon days had watched shafts of sunlight flit like nimble waves across the rain-darkened range. One night he’d stood in awe as the full moon rose, backlighting a bank of clouds behind the mountains, creating a creamy white mantle that draped down to the foothills.

With Sara and Patrick on the other side of the country, Kerney filled his free time with home improvement projects that kept his hands busy and his mind occupied. His latest undertaking was a rock wall that, when finished, would enclose a long planting bed on the east side of the house. He’d bought a truckload of flat landscaping rock from a quarry and was teaching himself how to cut, fit, and dry stack the stone to create a three-foot-high wall. So far, he’d trenched the foundation and leveled the grade. Now it was time to start laying in the largest, widest stones as the base course.

He arrived home, changed into jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, and started working up a sweat in the late afternoon sun. He’d planned the wall to curve and join up with the end of the south-facing portal, and he found that cutting the stones to make the bend was no easy matter.

He stood up to get another rock and saw a car enter the ranch road through the meadow and move up the hill. Even from a distance Kerney could see it was an unmarked police unit. The make of the vehicle, the spotlight mounted on the driver-side door, and the two trunk-mounted antennas were dead giveaways. But he didn’t have any idea who the driver might be.

At a hose bib, he splashed water on his face, wiped a sleeve over his damp, matted hair, put his cap back on, and walked to the car as it slowed to a stop in the driveway.

Agent Joe Valdez got out and walked to him. “Building a wall?” he asked as he shook Kerney’s hand.

“Trying to,” Kerney asked. “What brings you out to the boonies?”

“I’m driving down to Carlsbad for an early morning meeting,” Joe said as he walked over to the line of rocks Kerney had laid. “Since you’re on my way, I thought I’d stop by to tell you what I’ve learned about Clifford Spalding.”

Valdez knelt down and studied the partial line of rock Kerney had placed in the trench. “Are you planning to dry stack or use mortar?”

“I plan to dry stack,” Kerney said.

“How high is the wall going to be?” Joe asked as he jiggled a stone to test its stability. It was firmly placed.

“Three feet,” Kerney replied.

Joe shook his head and rose. “Your foundation is too narrow. You’ll need to double the size of it.”

“You know about this stuff?” Kerney asked.

“My grandfather was a stone mason,” Joe said, with a nod of his head. “I used to work for him in the summertime. Will it be a free-standing or a retaining wall?”

“Retaining,” Kerney said. “I’ll backfill it with topsoil and eventually put in a flowerbed and a flag-stone path.”

“You’ll need to slope it for drainage, otherwise it will give way over time,” Joe said as he walked along the empty part of the trench. “That’s one of the reasons your foundation has to be wider, so you can step it back a bit and still have support at the base.”

“Should I start over?” Kerney asked.

“I would,” Joe said, glancing at Kerney’s rock pile. “And you might want to order more rock. You’ve only got half of what you’ll need.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Kerney said.

“That’s about all the help I can give you,” Joe replied with a smile, “because this thing with Clifford Spalding is a washout. There’s no way I can track down the source of the money Spalding used to buy the leasehold for the Santa Fe hotel or pay his way out of bankruptcy. Nobody keeps financial records for thirty years, unless there are potential litigation issues, and there weren’t any with Spalding.”

“How much money are we talking about?” Kerney asked.

“All together, a little over three hundred thousand,” Joe said, “and none of it came from the life insurance policy on Spalding’s son. That was for ten grand, and the beneficiary was Debbie Calderwood, who cashed it in, according to the insurance company records.”

“Where do you think Clifford Spalding got that kind of money?” Kerney asked.

Valdez shrugged. “One source told me Spalding had no partners. Another, the lawyer who handled the lease agreement for the Santa Fe property, said he had an investor. The state has no record of a partnership contract, so I’m assuming it was an informal, handshake arrangement.”

“Did the lawyer give you the name of the investor?” Kerney asked.

“Nope,” Joe replied. “He didn’t handle that part of it, and Spalding made the first payment on the lease through his personal checking account. Even if I could have found the bank account he’d used, the record wouldn’t be there. Banks only keep checking account information for six years.”

“What about state and federal tax records?”

“You’d need to make a strong case for tax evasion first, before we could access that information,” Joe replied. “Same with bank deposit reports to the feds when the amount is in excess of ten thousand dollars.”

“Did the insurance company have a record of where they sent the policy proceeds to Debbie Calderwood?” Kerney asked.

“Yeah,” Joe replied, stepping off toward his unit. “I’ll get my notes.” He came back and opened a file. “It was sent to general delivery in Taos.”

“Thanks, Joe,” Kerney said.

“Sorry I couldn’t have been more helpful,” Valdez replied. “Good luck with the wall.”

Kerney glanced at his project. He’d put a lot of hours into doing it wrong, and now he’d have to start over again from scratch. “I might as well get it right,” he said.

Valdez laughed and nodded in agreement.

Kerney waved as Joe drove away, thinking maybe his research hadn’t been a complete waste of time. According to Lou Ferry, the PI Clifford Spalding had hired and then fired for failing to continue falsifying his investigative reports, Debbie Calderwood had spent some time in Taos living on a commune before disappearing into southern Colorado.

While the communes around Taos were long gone, many of the old hippies from the sixties and early seventies remained. They formed an alternative lifestyle community of fringe artists, environmental activists, ski bums, building contractors, and reconstructed small business owners.

Kerney decided to pay the Taos police a call in the morning. Given the small size of the town, surely the local cops had to know someone with connections to the old communes who remembered Debbie Calderwood.

It was worth a shot.

He turned to the rock work, and started lifting out the stones he’d so carefully leveled at the bottom of the trench.

Ramona Pino had left Mitch Griffin’s house weighing a question that had troubled her all afternoon. Why had Griffin waived his rights and given carte blanche permission for the search without demanding a deal from the ADA? It made no sense. Surely, Griffin had to know what the cops would find. Was he just plain stupid, or protecting someone or something? If so, who or what?

Pino knew that a successful interrogation never happened unless you had enough information to pursue the facts by asking the right questions. Was Griffin afraid of somebody? His marijuana supplier perhaps? Or was there another, larger issue at stake that had caused Griffin to cave in so readily?

Ramona didn’t think Griffin was stupid, which meant she had to try to get a handle on his motivation before questioning him again. She stopped her unit near the on-ramp to the interstate and thought about what he might be hiding. Nothing came to mind. She decided to make some phone calls to other law enforcement agencies in the morning to see if Griffin’s name rang any bells.

Commuter traffic on the interstate had eased up. Ramona glanced at the dashboard clock, sighed, put her car in gear, and headed toward the office. Her shift had been over for hours and there was still reams of paperwork that had to be done for submission to the DA in the morning.

Sometimes she wondered why she liked her job so damn much.

K erney woke up stiff and sore. He’d worked on the garden wall until dusk, removing stones from the trench and expanding it so he could lay in a wider foundation as Joe Valdez had suggested. After a good hot soak in the shower, he dressed and drank a cup of tea at the breakfast table. Before he’d been gut shot by a drug dealer, Kerney had been a heavy coffee drinker, and sometimes he still missed the aroma and taste of it.

Always an early riser, Kerney watched dawn break through the French doors that opened onto the pergola. A thin layer of clouds on the horizon, washed pink by the first light, faded into pale ribbons as the sun bleached color from the dark blue morning sky, foretelling a still, dry day.

Across the pasture, peppered with dull green rabbitbrush and bunches of bluestem grass withered by drought, he could see the horse barn, sunlight now reflecting off the slant of the metal roof. It had stood empty since a day last summer when he’d found Soldier, a mustang he’d bought and gentled some years back, brutally slaughtered by a man who’d then tried to kill Kerney’s family.

Behind the barn at the top of the hill stood an ancient pinon tree. He’d buried Soldier in its shade and placed a boulder on top of the grave.

The tree was dead now, a victim of drought and bark beetles, the bare branches rising and jutting at odd angles against the skyline. He’d lost a lot of trees on his 1,240 acres and had cut most of them down, especially the dead thickets that dotted the land and posed the greatest fire danger. But the tree on the hilltop he’d let stand in Soldier ’s memory.

After rinsing out his cup, he walked into the living room and gathered up his keys, handheld radio, and cell phone. He took his sidearm from the locked gun cabinet, put it in a clip-on holster, and attached it to his belt. Today, he wore civvies, jeans, boots, and a white western-cut shirt, for his trip to Taos. But that would come later. First he’d stop by the office to see where things stood with Griffin and Dean, and make a call to the Taos PD to let them know he was coming and what he was looking for.

He glanced around the room. Sara’s sense of style was everywhere. The matching soft Italian leather couch and love seat were arranged to give a view through the picture window to the canyon below. Cherrywood end tables held handsome pottery reading lamps, and under the glass coffee table a Tibetan area rug picked up the warm color of the Mexican tile floor. On the walls Sara had hung two western landscapes, the larger one an oil painting of his parents’ ranch on the Tularosa Basin done by Erma Fergurson, his mother’s lifelong friend and a renowned artist. Upon her death, Erma had bequeathed it to Kerney along with a parcel of northern New Mexico ranchland that had made him a rich man.

Right now, having money was the furthest thing from Kerney’s mind. He was lonely for his wife and son and weary of seeing them so infrequently. He counted the days until he left for Arlington. He’d be with Sara and Patrick for two solid weeks, commuting to the FBI Academy at Quantico to attend an executive development seminar and teach several classes.

He would fly east on Friday, and the time couldn’t pass quickly enough.

Day shift started at 6:30 in the morning and radio traffic on his handheld picked up as officers began broadcasting their call signs and reporting in. As he left the house he heard Sergeant Pino announce her arrival at headquarters. He’d ask her for a briefing as soon as he’d finished scanning the reports and paperwork.

It was midmorning before Ramona Pino found the time to call other cop shops to ask if Mitch Griffin might be the target of a probe or a person of interest in an ongoing case. She came up empty, which wasn’t surprising. Queries about suspects ate up time and often resulted in dead ends. But going through the exercise narrowed the focus and usually enhanced the investigation.

Unwilling to let her suspicions about Griffin’s motives drop, Pino put in requests to federal, state, county, and municipal agencies asking for a records search of his name in all appropriate databases. The bureaucrats she spoke to warned that it would probably be several days before she heard anything back.