Slow Kill

Chapter 14

O n his trips to Arlington, Kerney tried to take over as many childcare chores as possible. He got up early Saturday morning while Sara slept, and found Patrick stirring in his crib in need of a diaper change. He cleaned Patrick up, dressed him, and fed him breakfast. Then father and son slipped out of the house for a walk around the neighborhood.

Patrick’s affectionate personality, inquisitive nature, and sunny disposition delighted Kerney. Whenever he saw something that stirred his curiosity, Patrick’s face lit up in a happy smile.

Kerney let Patrick totter along the sidewalk within easy reach, scooping him up whenever he veered toward the street. While riding safely in his arms, Patrick chewed contentedly on Kerney’s shirt collar until it was damp and soggy.

The neighborhood, known as Aurora Heights, fascinated Kerney. Developed prior to World War II, the houses borrowed heavily from Tudor, Colonial, and Craftsman-style architecture, giving the area a settled, prosperous feel. Lush lawns were neatly tended, mature trees canopied homes, and tall shrubs screened front windows.

It was a tame, orderly slice of the world, much different from New Mexico’s raw deserts and rugged mountains. Although it was pleasing to the eye, the absence of a distant horizon against an immense, limitless sky made Kerney feel hemmed in.

Back at the house, Sara was soaking in the old cast-iron claw-foot tub, reading a book.

She closed the book and put it on the windowsill above the tub. “You don’t know how much I love it when you come to see us.”

Patrick stood at the edge of the tub trying unsuccessfully to climb in. Kerney picked Patrick up and let him splash his hands in the bathwater. “I try to be helpful.”

Sara smiled wantonly. “Actually, my thoughts were more about last night.”

He leaned over the tub and kissed her. “It’s my turn to fix breakfast.”

“Put Patrick in his high chair while you do,” Sara said, “and let him help.”

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.

A cluster of stark concrete buildings, each ornamented by ground-to-roof pillars and connected by glassed-in breezeways known to the staff as gerbil tubes, defined the main campus. Three high-rise towers served as student dormitories, all within easy walking distance of the classrooms, pool, gym, dining hall, and conference halls in the various buildings laid out in a tight geometrical pattern.

The grassy lawns and stands of trees that surrounded the buildings didn’t suppress the Spartan feeling. Woodlands bordering the athletic fields and outdoor shooting ranges were rigorously pruned back and held in check. North, behind the red-and-white-striped water tower, the forest spread down to a lake, reserved for the use of military and academy personnel and their families.

In the reception area of the administration building, Kerney’s credentials were reviewed again and a temporary visitor’s pass was issued. While he waited for his escort, he wondered if J. Edgar, the groundhog who lived in one of the enclosed patio areas, was still in residence.

A secretary from the Leadership and Management Science Unit came through the glass door and greeted him. The woman wore the conservative attire favored by the FBI, a pair of black slacks and a white blouse with a subdued bow around her neck. She led him through a maze of hallways and breezeways to a suite of offices, where he was introduced around to the few staff members who were at their workstations.

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.

Somewhere Kerney had read, “Americans like sameness.” Personally, he found it boring.

A sign at the clubhouse announced that the course was for the use of residents, members, and their guests only. On a putting green near the pro shop, Kerney spoke to an older fellow wearing a golfing cap, and shorts that showed his tanned, spindly legs.

The man chuckled when Kerney said he liked the neighborhood, was looking to buy, and wondered if there were any homes for sale.

“All the houses sell within twenty-four hours after they hit the market,” he said. “Your best bet is to get on a Realtor ’s waiting list.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Kerney said, “what’s the price range?”

The man pushed his cap back. “The smaller homes are in the $750,000 range. Those are mostly snapped up by empty-nesters or retired couples like me and the wife.”

“I’ve got a growing family,” Kerney said, thinking about the size of Ramsey’s house.

“Then you’re looking at right around seven figures,” the man said. “Of course, that gives you equity in the club and unlimited use of the golf course.”

Kerney smiled. “That’s what I want.”

The man nodded knowingly. “What’s your handicap?”

Kerney, who’d never golfed in his life, shrugged. “Not very good.”

The man laughed again. “I know what that’s like. Well, this is the right place to work on your game. We’ve got a great resident pro.”

“That’s what I need,” Kerney said, looking out at the greens. “Are the natives friendly?”

The man smiled at the comment. “Folks here get along well. There’s a good mix of people.”

“Civil servants?” Kerney asked.

The man shook his head. “Not too many of those. Some mid-level government appointees live here, but mostly we’ve got lawyers, doctors, think tank analysts, scientists, and of course old duffers like me.”

Kerney left the man to his putting practice, and during the stop-and-go drive to Arlington, with tractor-trailers cutting in and out of lanes and drivers tailgating madly, he did some math in his head. Could a federal employee on a civil service salary and a police retirement pension afford a million-dollar home?

Kerney wasn’t sure. Even with a large amount of equity from the sale of a previous house in Santa Barbara, could Ramsey afford a five- or six-thousand-dollar-a-month mortgage payment? What would his annual property taxes be? Was he still paying for his adult toys on top of the mortgage?

Ramsey seemed to be living large, and until he found out more, Kerney decided to keep him in his sights.

He called Sara on his cell, told her he’d pick Patrick up from day care at the Pentagon, and asked if she’d be home for dinner.

“What are you fixing?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Sounds good,” Sara said. “See you for dinner.”

Sara came home to fresh-cut flowers on the dining table, Yo-Yo Ma playing a Haydn cello concerto on the stereo, the smell of dinner cooking in the kitchen, and Patrick dressed for bed in his pajamas. She picked Patrick up from his playpen and found Kerney at the stove adding mushrooms and onions to a skillet of browned chicken.

She kissed him on the cheek. “How was your day?”

“Good,” Kerney said. “And yours?”

“Fine.” On the way home, Sara had decided not to tell Kerney about her planned end run around the brass at the Pentagon. She didn’t want the evening to spiral into a discussion of why it would be best for her to resign her commission. “Did you get some playtime with your son?”

“He wore me out,” Kerney said.

After dinner, Patrick got cranky. Sara examined his mouth, called Kerney over, and pointed out the tip of a small front tooth showing through his gums. She gave him a teething ring to chew on, which helped, but his discomfort kept him awake long past his bedtime.

Once he was finally asleep, they sat at the kitchen table, Sara sipping the last of her wine, Kerney reading the paperwork from George Spalding’s 201 file.

“What about this CID investigation?” Kerney asked.

Sara put the wineglass down. “I talked by phone with the case investigator, a retired chief warrant officer named Noah Schmidt. He says the sergeant he busted, Vincent DeCosta, was involved in illicit gemstone trafficking. Mostly high quality rubies and sapphires smuggled into Vietnam from Thailand, transported stateside, and sold on the black market to dealers. But he couldn’t prove it. He had enough on DeCosta to charge him with theft of personal property, which he did, while he continued to work the case. However, DeCosta escaped from the Long Binh Jail in Vietnam before he could be tried. He’s never been seen since. He’s still carried on the books as a deserter.”

“Did Schmidt ever prove his smuggling case against DeCosta?”

Sara shook her head. “His informant in Bangkok went missing.”

“How did DeCosta get away?” Kerney asked.

“During the pullout, the Army was shutting down the stockade at Long Binh and sending all the prisoners stateside. Schmidt thinks someone bribed one of the MP guards to look the other way.”

“Schmidt is sure George Spalding wasn’t involved in the gemstone smuggling?”

Sara shook her head. “Not at all. He thinks the smuggling ring consisted of a small group of enlisted personnel who worked with DeCosta. He just couldn’t prove it. Spalding and the other cohorts were cleared solely on the basis of insufficient evidence. They alibied each other.”

“Did Schmidt have a handle on the volume of smuggled gems?”

“Only one shipment was intercepted at the Oak-land Navy base. According to the experts who examined the stash, countries of origin for the stones included Burma, India, Thailand, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. All of the gems were cut, polished, and ready for sale. The estimated street value was a quarter of a million dollars for the shipment, at early 1970s prices.”

“What kept Schmidt from following up on the case?” Kerney asked.

“He got promoted and reassigned. The investigator who took over the case was a short-timer who dropped the ball.”

Kerney closed the file. “What do you know about Sergeant DeCosta?”

“Nothing more than you do, yet,” Sara replied “We’re waiting on his 201 file.” She handed Kerney a slip of paper. “Schmidt is more than willing to speak with you. That’s his home phone number.”

“Thanks.” Kerney put the paper on top of the Spalding documents. “How’s your project coming along?”

“It’s getting under way.”

“Are you just too tired to talk about it, or trying to avoid the topic altogether?”

“Don’t try to use your interrogation skills on me, Kerney. When are you taking me out to dinner?”

“Is tomorrow night soon enough?” he replied.

“That will work.”

Later, as Sara slept beside him, Kerney tired to figure out what was bothering her. Was she in a bind at work because of her assignment to prepare a report on the sexual assault of servicewomen? Was she avoiding the issue for his sake while he was here? Or was it something he’d completely missed, something he had done?

It wasn’t like Sara to hide her feelings or skirt an issue. He didn’t know what to do other than wait it out.