Nothing but Trouble_ A Kevin Kerney Novel - Michael Mcgarrity [61]
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