Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [122]
The agent whistled. “You’ve got proof?”
“I do.” Kerney printed Pino’s supplemental report and stuck it in his case file.
“Can you bring it to me now?”
“I’m on my way.”
He left the building thinking how absolutely grand it would be if the feds busted Ramsey and Chase at work.
Two months after the Army started looking for George Spalding and Debbie Calderwood, Sara called Kerney from her office with an update on the investigation.
“Debbie Calderwood is in custody,” she said as she scanned the CID investigator ’s report.
“That’s good news,” Kerney replied. “Where was she found?”
“At the Toronto airport about to board an international flight to Europe under the name of Caitlin Thomas,” Sara replied. “It’s her legal name. She changed it after gaining Canadian citizenship.”
“What about George?” Kerney asked. “Did he change his name to Dylan Thomas?”
Sara laughed. “That’s unknown, as are his whereabouts.”
“Is Debbie cooperating?”
“Yes, indeed. She divorced George twenty years ago and hasn’t seen him since. But she got a multi-year, multimillion-dollar settlement. The Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency is auditing her income tax records for a paper trail that should eventually lead us to him.”
“You sound very confident about it,” Kerney said.
“I am. No matter where George might be, he’s about to discover that the world is a very small place. We’ll get him.”
“I’ve never understood why George colluded with his father to deceive his mother. Has Debbie shed any light on that?”
“According to Debbie, Alice sexually molested George until he got old enough and strong enough to resist her. He hated his mother.”
“When I first spoke with Alice, she said that she never should have let George go. At the time, I thought she meant she should have talked him out of enlisting in the Army.”
“Apparently, it was far more twisted than that,” Sara said.
“Yeah,” Kerney replied, thinking about Clifford Spalding. When it came to women, the man had picked two real humdingers to marry.
“I’ve got to go,” Sara said.
“I’ll call you at home tonight,” Kerney said.
Sara hung up, put the report aside, and returned to the task of compiling all the data that had been gathered on the active rape cases her team had surveyed.
In six cases, vital evidence had been misplaced or lost. One CID investigator had been ordered by a post commander to destroy evidence, which the officer had refused to do. A victim with ten years’ service had accepted an honorable discharge after being threatened with a letter of admonishment for a trumped-up minor rule infraction that had occurred after the rape.
In another case, an accused rapist, a master sergeant, had been allowed to retire before the paperwork could be forwarded to JAG for action. At JAG, several prosecutions had been dropped when victims had recanted their allegations after receiving spot-promotions and transfers.
Of all the cases surveyed by her team, only two investigations had been conducted without any evidence of interference or inappropriate meddling by higher-ups. The findings made Sara boil.
She entered the last of the information, saved the file to the computer hard drive, and made a backup copy. With the case sampling data now complete, Sara decided it was time to pass the results on to her Teflon-coated, chickenshit boss. In all probability, she would pay a price for submitting hard, disturbing facts the general didn’t want to hear. At the very least, a butt-chewing was likely.
But whatever the outcome, for the first time in weeks, Sara felt good about doing her job.
Kevin Kerney returns. . . .
Read on
for a special preview
of Michael McGarrity’s
new novel
NOTHING BUT TROUBLE
Available from Dutton in December 2005
For as long as Kevin Kerney had known him, Johnny Jordan had been nothing but trouble. But it had taken a long time before Kerney began to recognize any serious downside to being a friend of John Douglas Jordan.
The memory of Johnny flooded through Kerney’s mind on a snowy April afternoon after he returned to police headquarters to find a telephone