On his desk he found a note to call the lab in Albuquerque. He dialed the number and spoke to a senior tech, who gave him the results of the DNA comparison testing. The remains were not those of George Spalding.
Friday night, Sara came home at a reasonable time with news from the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory at Walter Reed. As she fed Patrick his dinner in his high chair, she told Kerney what had been discovered.
“The remains in Spalding’s casket belong to a chief petty officer. He was lost overboard when his strike assault boat came under fire during a mission to pick up a SEAL team operating near the Cambodian border in 1972. According to eyewitness reports, he took rounds in the chest. Several other sailors were wounded.”
“At least he wasn’t a murder victim,” Kerney said, “which means we have one less crime to worry about. How was his body retrieved?”
Sara wiped Patrick’s chin with a napkin. “There’s no record that it was, at least by our personnel. The file does show that South Vietnamese naval commandos mounted several search and recovery missions for his body after the SEAL pullout. But there are no follow-up action assessment reports. They were probably burned before Saigon fell. Lots of official documents were destroyed to keep them out of the hands of the North Vietnamese.”
“What about mortuary records?”
Sara held out the spoon to Patrick. He took it and banged it on the high chair. “According to the quartermaster corps, the sailor ’s remains were never received at either Da Nang or Tan Son Nhut. From what we now know, the likely scenario is that after Spalding faked his death, someone at the mortuary sent the body bag home under Spalding’s name, and whoever processed it stateside made sure no questions were asked.”
“I wonder how many gemstones were in the body bag, and how Spalding left Nam without getting caught.”
“Given his job, it would have been easy for him to assume a dead soldier ’s identity. He probably came home on a chartered troop transport flight.”
“He would have needed orders to do it.”
“Which a processing clerk could have provided for a hefty bribe.”
“That makes sense,” Kerney said. “Has the sailor ’s family been notified?”
Sara shook her head as she tried to get Patrick to eat more dinner. He pushed the spoon away. “No, but when they are told, there will be no mention of the fact that his remains were unearthed in a casket buried over thirty years ago under another man’s name.”
“I think he’s finished eating.” Kerney took Patrick out of his high chair and plopped him on his lap. “That would be an embarrassment to the military.”
Sara gave him a guarded look. “Do you think they should be told the truth?”
“I don’t think that would be wise,” Kerney said. “The family has had over thirty years to wonder, hope, and grieve. Let them bury him and move on. What are the Army’s plans to find George Spalding?”
“JAG and CID have mounted a full-scale investigation into the entire gemstone smuggling operation. It’s quite possible that a quartermaster officer, who has since retired at a fairly high rank, may have been involved.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The officer in question authorized the release of the remains to Clifford and Alice Spalding and logged in the body bag containing the gemstone shipment that was intercepted.”
Patrick smeared a sticky hand on Kerney’s shirt and burped. “Are you still in the loop on the case?”
Sara shook her head. “Only peripherally, but I’ll keep an eye on it. When will you tell Alice Spalding about her son?”
“Not right away,” Kerney replied. “Although with her deteriorating mental condition it might not matter when I did. Are you busy tomorrow night?”
“Of course not, it’s Saturday.”
“Good. I’ve booked dinner reservations at a Georgetown restaurant. Afterward, we have tickets for a chamber music concert in the city. I’ve already arranged for a babysitter.”
Sara smiled. “That sounds nice.”
Kerney lifted a very smelly Patrick off his lap. “I think our young friend needs his diaper changed.”
“Your turn,” Sara said. “I’ll do the dishes.”
Kerney took Patrick away and cleaned him up. Through the open door he could hear Sara loading the dishwasher. She was still a bit preoccupied and overworked, and not her usual self. But the tension between them had diminished.
Kerney thought it best to let the situation ride. He didn’t want anything to spoil his last two days in Arlington.
He put a clean diaper on Patrick and tickled his belly. “Let’s have a great weekend, Champ, before I head back to Santa Fe.”
Patrick giggled in agreement, burped, and kicked his little feet in the air.
A late afternoon summer sky greeted Kerney upon his return to New Mexico. The sun flooded golden light on the desert and made the distant peaks behind Santa Fe flutter miragelike against a hot blue horizon.
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?