Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [116]
The thought of returning to the solitude of his empty ranch house depressed Kerney. After two weeks with Sara and Patrick, he didn’t want to face the feeling of loneliness that would surely come as soon as he got home. Instead, he went to his office. On his desk was a memo from Ramona Pino and some material on the High Prairie Charitable Trust. According to the memo, the Calgary Police Department and Canadian federal authorities had not yet completed background checks on the staff and board members of the trust. Efforts to locate Debbie Calderwood, George Spalding, and the DeCosta brothers had just gotten under way.
Kerney turned to the charitable trust documents. Established twenty-eight years ago as a private foundation, its mission was to conserve, protect, and restore native prairies in Alberta and Saskatchewan, preserve historical sites in both provinces, and provide scholarships to agricultural students at Canadian colleges.
A small staff of four people ran the organization: a CEO, a director of development, a grants manager, and an administrative assistant. The board consisted of three individuals, including Clifford Spalding. It met twice annually to make grant awards and allocate funds. Except for Spalding, no familiar names were listed as staff or board members.
The permanent endowment came solely from gifts made by Spalding, and in the last two years, he’d tripled his annual contribution of cash and investments to the trust, which currently exceeded sixty million Canadian dollars.
The most recent annual report showed funding of program activities by category only. Over four million dollars had been disbursed in the reporting period, but there was no breakout of the organizations that had received funding or the amounts allocated.
Kerney eased back in his chair. The last light of evening had passed, along with his hope Pino would have found a money connection between Clifford Spalding, Ed Ramsey, and Dick Chase through the foundation. If one existed, it was hidden. He’d ask Pino to dig deeper.
Kerney had also hoped that the Canadian connection would lead him to George and Debbie, but nothing had surfaced. Still, it was conceivable that Clifford had been secretly bankrolling his son through the trust over the past twenty-eight years. Or perhaps, as Sara had suggested, George had bankrolled his father, and the trust was a blind used to launder and deliver George’s cut of the corporate profits.
Kerney had strong evidence that Clifford Spalding had falsified his son’s military records, probably with George’s help. Did the two men do it to keep Alice Spalding in the dark about their ill-gotten gains? By making George out to be a good soldier who’d died in combat, did they hope she’d accept his death more readily? If so, it had back-fired.
But what motivated Alice to keep searching for George? Did she have suspicions about Clifford’s sudden financial windfall that got him started building his hotel chain? Or had Clifford tripped himself up in the lies he’d told to keep the truth from her? And why had she been kept from knowing the truth in the first place?
Kerney figured with Clifford dead and Alice mentally out of it, only George could answer those questions, if he could be found. Otherwise the reasons would stay buried in the past.
Kerney wondered why Spalding had tripled his contributions to the trust during the last two years. His will divided his estate in thirds, shared equally by Claudia, the trust, and Alice, who was entitled to her slice through the divorce settlement.
Had Spalding been moving cash and investments into the foundation to reduce the amounts Claudia and Alice stood to inherit? Did he want to penalize Alice for being a thorn in his side for so many years, and punish Claudia financially for violating the terms of their amended prenuptial agreement?
Kerney wrote out his questions, knowing he might never learn the truth. He attached them to a note to Ramona Pino