Nothing but Trouble (18 page)

“He grew up in the valley?” Kerney asked.

“He came here as a foster child the state placed with an older couple. They adopted him and found out they got more than they bargained for.”

“How so?”

“Let’s just stay he had a hard time adjusting to our ways. He went straight from high school into the service and didn’t come back much after that. His adoptive parents died in their sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning about fifteen years ago. A leak in the bedroom wall heater is what killed them. Walt inherited the property.”

“I enjoyed passing the time with you,” Kerney said. “Good luck replacing that thermostat.”

“I’ll get it done,” Gundersen said as he pulled the screwdriver out of his pocket.

Kerney left Gundersen to his chore and went looking for Shaw’s house, which he spotted without difficulty from the highway. There was no sign of activity and no vehicles parked outside, although a nearby barn could easily house the van. He cruised by slowly and continued a mile down the road before turning around for another pass.

Shaw kept his property in good repair: both the house and barn were freshly painted, and although there were several barren flower beds in front of the porch, the grounds were free of junk and the grass had recently been mowed.

Kerney decided a closer inspection of the house and grounds wouldn’t be wise. Driving onto the property would raise the interest of the farmer on a tractor tilling a nearby field, or the woman across the highway hanging out the wash at the side of her house.

What he’d learned about Shaw from Gundersen was interesting but added no weight to his suspicions. A couple of hours of research into Shaw after he was back in Santa Fe might give him a better handle on the man. He was particularly intrigued by the way Shaw’s adoptive parents had died, and wanted to do a records search to see what kind of an investigation had been mounted and what the official findings had been.

Kerney left the valley wondering whether he’d be able to drop his cop mentality when he retired. He’d spent his career questioning motives, digging into dirty little secrets, unraveling crimes, probing for guilty knowledge, and holding people accountable for their wrongdoings.

Would he ever be able to step aside from the ingrained reflex he had to want to set everything right? He wasn’t sure it would be easy, but he would damn sure try. Although, so far, he had to admit to himself that he wasn’t doing a very good job of letting go.

All in all Johnny Jordan was pleased with how the scouting trip had gone. Usher loved the rodeo grounds location in Duncan, and they had worked out a sequence of shots based on the new material from the Hollywood screenwriter that gave Johnny’s clients more lines and time in front of the cameras.

Besides that, the new scenes strengthened the backstory conflict between the rodeo cowboy and his father and, as Usher put it, contrasted the hard-living hedonism of the son with the rock-solid decency of the father. Usher likened it to the clash between Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas in Hud.

Johnny also thought the brawl sequences between the cops and cowboys during the stampede at the smelter would be outstanding. About the only thing he didn’t like was Usher’s decision to cut some of the locations from the cattle drive.

After returning from Duncan, Johnny tried to get Usher to restore the cattle-drive scenes, but his pitch fell on deaf ears. He left Usher and his team, who were about to finish up for the day, went back to the apartment, and tried to call his mother at the ranch. When the answering machine clicked on, he hung up without leaving a message. He tried Julia’s number, hoping he could recruit her as an intermediary to soothe Bessie’s anger with him, and got no response.

He threw the cell phone on the couch and decided it didn’t really matter. He’d endured his father’s cold rejection for years, hadn’t been close to Julia since high school, and would probably never again need his mother’s help to get money out of the old man.

He was on the verge of becoming a major player. Foreign distribution rights for the movie had sold for big bucks, and the sports-cable-channel rodeo deal was in the bag. Sponsors were warming up to the idea of signing his clients to advertising contracts, which would put a fifteen-percent commission in Johnny’s pocket.

Entertainment-industry buzz about the movie had generated talks with a major network about the possibility of a spin-off series. It would basically be an updated version of the old Stoney Burke television drama of the early 1960s that starred Jack Lord and Warren Oates as two maverick rodeo cowboys vying to make it to the national championship and win the buckle. But now one cowboy would be Hispanic and the other a high-stakes poker player, and they’d spend a lot of time at rodeos in Reno and Las Vegas.

The positive reaction by the network bigwigs to his slightly twisted, fun-loving, rodeoing, poker-playing characters, which he’d thought up while watching the World Series of Poker on ESPN, convinced Johnny that he was going to make a killing in Hollywood. After all these years he’d finally found something he could do as well as ride. Rodeo was my first love, Johnny joked to himself, but now it’s all going to be about residuals.

In an matter of weeks Johnny would be able to stop floating loans to himself by maxing out his credit cards, pay off the shyster who masqueraded as a divorce lawyer, and settle accounts with his soon-to-be ex-wife, Madeline. But until then he still needed Brenda.

After a series of telephone conversations Johnny had managed to convince her that his father’s “stroke” had left him foggy headed and confused about his medical condition. Johnny figured he would stay with Brenda until just before filming began and then pack his bags and go.

Johnny picked up the cell phone and clipped it on his belt. Usher’s meeting with the production team was about to start. He left the apartment and fell in behind Susan Berman, who was on her way to the community center where the group would convene.

She was a tasty-looking piece in spite of her no-nonsense, all-business manner. He couldn’t help but wonder what it would take to get her in the sack. He quickened his pace, caught up with her, flashed a big smile, and asked if she’d ever been to a rodeo.

“No, I haven’t,” Berman replied.

“Maybe I could get my boys together and put one on for you after the film wraps,” Johnny said, feeling remarkably expansive.

“That would be unusual,” Berman said, trying hard not to laugh at the man’s unbelievable grandiosity.

“We could do a barbecue at the ranch with live country music, tubs of longneck beer on ice, and some good sipping whiskey. Do you know how to two-step?”

“No, I don’t,” Berman replied.

“I’ll teach you,” Johnny said.

Susan Berman arched an eyebrow. “Will you, now?”

Johnny smiled broadly. “Private lessons.”

Susan smiled sweetly and quickened her pace. “That would be hard to pass up.”

He watched her scurry ahead of him and grinned. Long ago, Johnny had tired of the easy pickings he found with the buckle bunnies. He liked women who showed a little spunk, put up a few barriers, and made the chase worthwhile. At first Brenda had acted that way, but in truth she was nothing but a gushy, gullible, tiresome chatterbox.

Experience had taught Johnny that aloof women were totally hot in bed. He followed along behind Berman and pondered the moves he could make, promising himself that he would have her before filming ended. He had months to wear her down.

Sara parked the rental car next to Kerney’s unmarked police cruiser, carried a sleepy Patrick inside the house, and quickly put him to bed. As she tucked him in and kissed his warm cheek, he asked for his father.

“You’ll see him in the morning,” Sara said.

Patrick smiled. “Can I go riding with Daddy in the morning?” “Daddy has to work tomorrow and you may have to go with him.”

“Why?”

“To keep him company,” Sara said as she gave him his favorite stuffed animal, a palomino pony with a bushy tail. “Now go to sleep.”

Clutching the pony, Patrick turned on his side and closed his eyes.

Outside, the horses in the paddock gently whinnied as Sara opened the trunk of the car and removed the luggage. In the stillness of the night she could hear the sound of their hooves as they trotted expectantly along the fence. She crossed the pasture to the barn and gave each of the four geldings a horse biscuit and a nose rub before taking the luggage inside. In the living room she dropped the bags on the oversized sofa and walked into the adjoining study. She sat at the original mission desk that she’d inherited from her grandmother and looked out through a picture window onto the canyon below, where the ranch road crossed an arroyo and rose toward the house. From here she would be able to see the headlights of Kerney’s pickup truck long before he reached the house.

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.