Slow Kill (32 page)

Assigned to a small office crammed with three desks, chairs, and file cabinets, he settled in to prepare for his two-week stint as a visiting instructor. First, he looked over his schedule. He would teach two morning-long classes, attend a three-hour seminar on terrorism, participate in a roundtable discussion on leadership development, and speak at an evening conference on community policing for midsize law enforcement agencies. All in all, it was light duty with plenty of free time built in.

Classes were already in session, and his first order of business was to attend a luncheon meeting with full-time and visiting faculty in the executive dining room. He reviewed the list of assigned instructors. Edward Ramsey, of the FBI Law Enforcement Communication Unit, was scheduled to teach an afternoon class next week on public speaking and media relations.

Kerney wondered if he was the same Ed Ramsey who’d once headed up the Santa Barbara PD. The instructor resumes inside the three-ringed binder of student course materials confirmed he was. That meant it should be easy to approach Ramsey and engage him in conversation. He’d be interested to learn if Ramsey knew about his meetings with Captain Chase. He hoped so.

He put the binder aside, took out the lecture notes he’d prepared before leaving Santa Fe, and started adding to them.

After a lengthy morning meeting, Sara returned to her cubicle at the Pentagon to find George Spalding’s military service jacket on her desk. Known as a 201 file, it contained, among other things, information on Spalding’s military training and occupational specialty, performance ratings and promotions, awards and decorations, medical/dental records, pay and allowances, permanent duty assignments, and disciplinary actions.

The file confirmed Spalding had been a graves registration specialist and not a military policeman. According to his performance ratings, he’d been a marginal soldier at best; so much so that, had he survived his tour of duty in Vietnam, he would have been denied a Good Conduct Medal. However, he was awarded the National Defense and the Vietnam Service medals.

While Spalding was in Nam, his promotion from private first class to specialist fourth class had been delayed due to a CID investigation into missing personal effects of soldiers killed in action. He’d been cleared of any wrongdoing, but a sergeant in his unit had been tried and convicted for theft under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Sara made copies of Spalding’s dental charts and the CID report for Kerney, put them in her briefcase, and reviewed her notes from her latest meeting with the brass, which had been a rehash of her original marching orders.

Her immediate boss, a brigadier general, had made it clear that none of the closed sexual assault cases would be reopened. Everything in the report to Congress was to be forward-looking and proactive. He wanted loopholes closed, coordination improved, policies defined, protocols recommended, training proposed, staffing patterns detailed, and nothing more.

Post commanders could be interviewed only to gain feedback about how the system could be improved. No case studies of actual investigations were to be included; only a statistical model of the investigations, with graphs and charts, would be incorporated in the report.

She’d griped to Kerney about the decision by the brass to sanitize the shoddy sexual assault investigations, and her dissatisfaction with the assignment was deepening. The agenda was pure face-saving, buck-passing, Teflon-coated gamesmanship.

Sara had come to her Pentagon post as a realist, knowing full well that not everyone in command operated ethically or honestly. But she was saddled with a petty, childish tyrant of a boss, who was more interested in making rank than doing the right thing.

Two choices faced her: She could play the marionette, get her ticket punched, and move up a rung on the ladder. Or she could exercise initiative and risk short-circuiting her career.

Her gut told her that she really didn’t have a choice. No woman willing to serve her country, who’d been viciously assaulted and violated while performing her duty, deserved anything less than justice. The shackles put on her by the higher-ups were unacceptable. She would have to find a way to push the envelope and try to force the brass to confront a reality they dearly wanted to avoid. How to do that without scuttling her career was the question.

She touched the glass jar of seashells she’d collected from the beaches in Ireland. A memento from their honeymoon, it brought back happy memories of early morning walks with Kerney along the wild, misty western coast, whitecaps breaking in ink-black water against the shore.

She turned her attention back to Spalding’s 201 file. The CID investigator, Chief Warrant Officer Noah Schmidt, who’d cleared Spalding of any involvement in the decades-old stolen property case, might very well be an important source of information for Kerney.

She put in a request to personnel to see if Schmidt was a lifer still on active duty or retired military now working as a civilian for DOD or a branch of the armed services. Then she called the Defense Finance and Accounting Services in Kentucky, which handled military retirement pay, and the Armed Forces Record Center in St. Louis, and asked for a fast check on the man. Hopefully, she’d know something by the end of the day.

Down the hall, Master Sergeant Wilma Lipinski, who worked for Sara, was at her desk. With twenty-eight years of active duty service, Lipinski had recently rotated into the Pentagon from a first sergeant posting with a military police company. Only exceptional noncoms were authorized to stay in the ranks for thirty years, and Lipinski was one of them.

“Ma’am?” Lipinski asked as Sara stepped into her cubicle.

“Have you read my briefing summary on our new assignment?” Sara asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lipinski replied cautiously. A sturdily built, middle-aged woman, the daughter of a retired Chicago fireman, she’d won the Bronze Star for valor while serving in Bosnia.

“What do you think about it?” Sara asked.

“On or off the record, Colonel?”

“Off the record, Sergeant.”

“It sucks, ma’am.”

“Exactly,” Sara said, taking a seat. “How many of the sexual assault cases are still carried as active?”

Lipinski consulted a binder. “Thirty-eight at JAG awaiting disposition, and twenty-six are still being investigated by CID.”

“The general doesn’t want us to touch the closed cases in our report,” Sara said. “But he failed to say anything about those that are still active.”

Lipinski blinked. “I think it’s pretty clear that we’re not to do any investigating, Colonel.”

“I’m thinking more along the lines of research, Sergeant, that gets to the core issues of what we’re charged to address in our report.”

“Field research?” Lipinski asked.

“Yes, with information we can append to the report.”

“Aren’t you splitting hairs, ma’am?”

“Definitely.”

Lipinski smiled. “Your orders, ma’am.”

Sara’s team of six noncoms and officers had been drawn from military police corps personnel assigned to area bases. “We’ll field survey one-third of the active cases: nine that are still under investigation, and twelve at JAG. Pick cases that are within a reasonable striking distance and divide the work as equally as you can among the team.”

Lipinski scribbled a note. “I could take on some of the cases, ma’am.”

“Don’t jump into deep water too fast, Sergeant.”

Lipinski smiled broadly. “I know how to swim, Colonel.”

“Okay, you’re on the team. Find an off-site facility where we can meet and go over the details. Did you read Spalding’s 201 file?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Get me what you can on that sergeant Spalding worked for in Vietnam who was busted for theft.”

“I’ve already put in a priority request through channels, Colonel.”

“You have a degree in criminal justice and twenty-eight years of service, Sergeant. Care to tell me why you never pursued a commission?”

“A long time ago, I decided it was better to be part of the backbone of the Army rather than part of its head. I’ve observed that when heads roll, it’s frequently the wrong heads.”

At lunch, Kerney made it a point to sit next to Ed Ramsey, who talked amiably while packing away a meal of meatloaf and soggy mashed potatoes smothered in gravy.

In his fifties, Ramsey looked fit in his brown suit. He had a full head of hair, a ruddy complexion, and blunt, strong-looking hands. Kerney picked at a dry chicken breast and nibbled his salad as Ramsey made small talk.

“I understand you’ve taught here before as a visiting lecturer,” Ramsey said affably.

“Once, some years ago,” Kerney replied.

Ramsey nodded. “I’ve never been to Santa Fe.”

“Tourists love it.”

Ramsey touched the corners of his lips with his napkin. “Any good golf courses?”

Kerney finished the salad and pushed his plate aside. “Far too many for my taste.”

“Why is that?” Ramsey asked, laughing.

“Santa Fe is high desert country. It takes a lot of water to keep fairways green, and we don’t have enough to go around. Is golf your game?”

Ramsey grinned. “I hack at the ball every chance I get. If I’m not on the links, I’m sailing. Last month, I taught a police media relations class in Chicago. Stayed over on the weekend and spent two days on Lake Michigan. Pure magic.”

“Do you live near the water?” Kerney asked.

Ramsey shook his head. “It’s too high-end for me. I have to haul my boat from home, but it isn’t that far.”

“Where is home?” Kerney asked.

“Do you know the area?”

“Not at all.”

“Stafford,” Ramsey said with a half smile. “It’s a small city south of here. If you have time, you can meet me at the river this weekend, and I’ll take you sailing.”

“Thanks,” Kerney said, “but I’m not much of a water person. Do you miss Santa Barbara?”

Ramsey dropped his napkin on the table. “Not really. As long as I’m near water, I’m happy. Listen, if I can’t take you sailing, how about sitting in on my class next week? That civilian task force on community policing and the mentally ill you established last year was really innovative. I plan to use it as an example of how to build good media and community relations. It would be great to have you there to do a Q amp;A with the students.”

“I’d be glad to participate,” Kerney said as he got to his feet. The luncheon was winding down. An attractive female agent was gathering the other adjunct instructors around her to take them on a tour. “Guess I’d better join up for the tour.”

He shook Ramsey’s hand and followed the group out of the building, mulling over his conspiracy theory. Ramsey hadn’t said a word about the Spaldings. Maybe Ramsey and Captain Chase hadn’t colluded with Clifford Spalding to keep Alice in the dark about her son. Maybe Clifford Spalding had finessed the whole thing.

Kerney decided there were too many maybes. Soon his attention was drawn away by the tour. The new indoor range was a marvel, with high-tech, small-arms combat shooting stations that tested accuracy, judgment, and reaction times in deadly force situations. He got a huge kick out of seeing the Behavioral Science Unit, made famous by a number of movies about serial killers.

Windowless, with mazelike corridors, hidden away in a sub-basement, the unit was unlike the neat, tidy, well-appointed office suites everywhere else in the complex. There were stacks of boxes in hallways, piles of research books spilling off shelves, desks cluttered with reports and paperwork, movie posters tacked to office walls, and dusty, unused typewriters and broken office machines heaped on steel gray work tables.

But the piece de resistance, the object that truly defined the eccentricity of the staff, was the framed picture of a space alien prominently displayed among the official staff photographs that lined a wall near the elevator.

Outside, within easy walking distance, they strolled the streets of Hogan’s Alley, a self-contained, completely functional village built to train agents in crime scene scenarios. They finished up the tour with a peek inside the new forensic building and the DEA Training Academy.

During lunch, Ramsey had mentioned that he owned a home in Stafford, a commuter community halfway between Quantico and Fredericksburg. Kerney decided that finding out how Ramsey lived might go a long way to answering some of his questions about the man. With the afternoon still young, Kerney drove south on the congested interstate that ran the length of the eastern seaboard from Maine to Florida.

After a failed attempt to locate Ramsey through the phone book at a gas station in Stafford, Kerney stopped at the county administration building and visited the public utilities office on the first floor, where a very helpful clerk provided Ramsey’s mailing address along with driving directions to the house.

Located in a private subdivision surrounding a golf course, the house looked out on a fairway with water hazards, sand traps, stands of big trees, and a paved golf cart lane that wandered up and down the gently rolling terrain. Dense, overgrown woodlands bordered the houses and the golf course. From the lay of the land Kerney could tell the developer had carved the subdivision out of the forest to create a duffer ’s paradise. A dozen or so golfers were out on the links teeing off and scooting around in their carts.

Ramsey’s house was a big, two-story, modern structure with a tall, overwhelming entryway and a redbrick facade under a series of pitched roofs. Outside the two-car garage was an expensive sailboat on a trailer and a high-end touring motorcycle. Ramsey obviously liked his toys.

The subdivision was completely built-up and looked fairly new, expensive, and exclusive. Nothing about it felt like an enclave for civil servants. The houses along the streets consisted of a half dozen different floor plans in varying sizes, all with similar exterior treatments and rooflines, probably required by homeowner covenants.