Nothing but Trouble_ A Kevin Kerney Novel - Michael Mcgarrity [62]
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.
Unwilling to jump to conclusions, Sara dug deeper into the paperwork. The forms used to ship and receive all personal effects required two signatures on both ends of the process: one to certify the contents, and one to attest to the form’s completeness. On at least eight of the shipments that Carrier had authorized for release to next of kin, the handwriting of the signatures looked decidedly similar.
Sara sent the forms to an army forensic center for handwriting analysis and did a background check on Carrier. A graduate of a southern military institute, he had stayed in the service after Vietnam, rising to the rank of full colonel before retiring. Divorced with two grown daughters, he owned a house free and clear in the Virginia suburbs, had a high-six-figure mutual fund account with a large brokerage firm, drove a midsize SUV, and apparently lived within his means.
For the past five years Carrier had worked as a senior military analyst for a conservative think tank with close ties to the White House. According to a Pentagon insider Sara trusted, he was a close friend of an assistant deputy secretary of defense and had access to a senior national security advisor to the president. The policy papers he’d written for the think tank clearly supported the current administration’s prosecution of the war on terrorism.
It took six months for forensics to get back to her with a report that Carrier had forged signatures on the documents she’d submitted for analysis. Even with that evidence in hand Sara had let the investigation slide. Without corroboration of Carrier’s involvement in the smuggling ring, it would be impossible to prove, and Spalding was nowhere to be found. But all that had changed in the last two weeks.
Before he could be detained, Spalding had left Canada with cash, valuables, and negotiable assets in the high seven figures. After a failed attempt to find him, army CID investigators and the Canadian authorities developed a watch list of a select number of Spalding’s known associates and close friends in the hope that one or another of them might eventually lead them to him. Those on the list had their bank, credit cards, brokerage accounts, and their foreign travel monitored, and their incoming telephone calls and e-mail traced.
Nothing had materialized until two weeks ago, when one of the targeted subjects, a French-Canadian woman named Joséphine Paquette, had bought an expensive seaside house on the coast south of Dublin with cash she’d deposited in an Irish bank.
A senior editor of a fashion magazine in Toronto, Paquette had been Spalding’s lover for a time before marrying the scion of a Canadian brewery. When the marriage failed, an ironclad prenuptial agreement kept Paquette from tapping into her ex-husband’s wealth. Although her income as a fashion editor put her in a high tax bracket, she had nowhere near the resources to pay for an expensive Irish property.
Before traveling to Ireland, Paquette had spent three days in France. Asked to backtrack on Paquette, Interpol reported that she