Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [9]
Lowrey laughed. “As I understand it, Mrs. Spalding is about your age, and spends a great deal of time alone in Santa Fe, away from her husband. You seem to be in the same situation with your marriage.”
“I am happily married, Sergeant. Don’t turn a perfectly reasonable coincidence into a soap opera about two lonely, unhappy people.”
“Obviously, you and Mrs. Spalding share an interest in horses.”
“Along with about five million other horse lovers.”
“Mr. Spalding was rich and considerably older than his wife.”
“So I understand, from what you’ve said.”
“And neither you nor Spalding have ever stayed here before,” Lowrey noted.
“Apparently not,” Kerney replied. “Do you find a chance occurrence tantalizing, Sergeant? That would be quite a stretch.”
“Perhaps you’re right. Do my questions upset you?”
“Not at all.” His cell phone rang. Kerney flipped it open and answered.
“What kind of fix have you gotten yourself into out there?” Andy Baca, Kerney’s old friend and chief of the New Mexico State Police, asked.
“What’s up?” Kerney asked, raising a finger to signal Lowrey that he’d only be a minute.
“I just got a call from my district commander that some deputy sheriff, a Sergeant Lowrey out of San Luis Obispo County, wants an officer sent to inform a Mrs. Claudia Spalding of her husband’s death and to determine your relationship to the woman, if any.”
“Interesting,” Kerney said.
“I’ve got two grandchildren in my lap, one on each knee,” Andy said, “ready to head off to the Albuquerque zoo to see the polar bears. What’s going on with you?”
“I’ll call you when I know more.”
“That’s it?” Andy asked, sounding a bit exasperated.
Kerney laughed. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“I’ll be home by dinnertime,” Andy said. “Unless you get locked up, call me then.”
“I’ll do that. Have fun.” Kerney disconnected and smiled at Lowrey. “Are we done here, Sergeant?”
Lowrey smiled back. “We’ll talk again after I’ve heard back from your department.”
“I’ll be around,” Kerney said, thinking Lowrey was doing her job and doing it well. Still, he didn’t have to like it.
Ellie Lowrey made another visual sweep of the cottage before the EMTs took Spalding’s body away. After they rolled him out, she gathered up the dead man’s luggage, put it in the trunk of her cruiser, and drove a back road to the sheriff’s substation in Templeton.
The station was housed in a fairly new single-story faux western frontier-style office building with a false front and a slanted covered porch. It had been designed to fit in with the old buildings on the main street left over from the town’s early days as a booming farming and ranching community. Now, the charm of the village and its convenience to Highway 101, which ran the length of the West Coast, drew droves of newcomers looking to escape the sprawl of the central coast cities, creating, of course, more sprawl.
As second-in-command of the substation, Ellie Lowrey served under a lieutenant who was on vacation with his family in the Rocky Mountains. She parked in front of the closed office, carried Spalding’s luggage inside, and placed it on her desk.
She’d secured the dead man’s effects to ensure their safekeeping, which required her to do an inventory. She got out the forms she needed and glanced at the wall clock, wondering how long it would take to hear back from the New Mexico authorities.
Ellie had decided not to rely on Kerney’s department for information until she knew for sure whether there was or wasn’t a personal relationship between the chief and Mrs. Spalding. Of course, if there was something going on between the two, both of them could lie about it. It was best to get corroborating information from an independent source such as the New Mexico State Police, in case they did have something to hide.
Spalding’s overnight bag yielded nothing but toiletries and a change of clothes. The attaché case was a bit more interesting. A manila envelope contained a photograph