Read Online Slow Kill by Michael McGarrity - Free Book Online Page B

she’d gotten a card from her about a year after Calderwood disappeared. So, I called the friend, who told me Calderwood had written to her from Taos, New Mexico, where she was living on a commune at the time. Remember, that was back in the early seventies when all that flower power and antiwar stuff hadn’t completely faded away yet.”
    “What else did the note say?” Kerney asked.
    “That she was moving with an unnamed boyfriend to a small town in southern Colorado. But she’d didn’t say exactly where. So, I got out the atlas and phone book and called a bunch of places trying to locate her. When that didn’t work, I phoned some town marshals, sheriffs, and police departments, and still came up empty.”
    “Did you tell Spalding that you’d actually done some real work on the case?” Kerney asked.
    “Nope. But I put everything I’d learned in my report. That’s when he fired me. End of story.” Ferry coughed hard into his hand again. “It got me to thinking that maybe Spalding was up to maybe something more than trying to appease his unbalanced wife.”
    “Like what?”
    “Don’t know,” Ferry said breathlessly, waving the question away as if it was an angry hornet buzzing around his head.
    “Did you check out Spalding before you spent the retainer he gave you?” Kerney asked, switching gears.
    “Smart question.” Ferry smiled slyly and held up a trembling index finger. “Rule number one for a PI, always know who you’re working for. I made some calls, but I can’t remember most of what I learned.”
    “What stands out?”
    “He’d made a lot of money in the hotel business in a relatively short period of time. He went from owning a mom-and-pop motel in Albuquerque to building a resort hotel outside of Tucson in something under five years. That’s what got him started playing with the big money boys.”
    Ferry’s head sank against the pillow and his eyes closed. The fatigue in his face ran deep into the wrinkles of his cheeks and cut into the furrows of his forehead. A vein throbbed in his skinny neck.
    “Did you keep copies of your reports?” Kerney asked.
    “No copies,” Ferry said in a weak voice. “That was part of the deal.”
    “You need to sleep,” Kerney said as he stood.
    Ferry’s eyes fluttered open and he winced in pain. “Yeah, maybe I’ll get lucky this time and won’t wake up.”
    Kerney left the bedroom quietly. In a dining area off the front room, Ferry’s wife sat at the table talking softly in Spanish on the telephone. She looked at him with cool disinterest when he waved good-bye and left.
    Outside under the street lights, some kids were kicking a soccer ball around, and two teenagers sat in an old primer-gray Chevy smoking cigarettes and playing loud rap music on the car stereo.
    It wasn’t the Santa Barbara in the travel posters or real estate ads. Not that there was anything mean or menacing about the area. It was just another one of those tucked-away places you could find in any city that the underclass lived in and everyone else avoided.
    Kerney drove away thinking about Lou Ferry. He’d spent a lifetime on the job as a cop and a PI. All he had to show for it was ownership of a run-down trailer park and a woman who couldn’t wait for him to die. It wasn’t the happiest of endings.
    What Kerney had learned about Clifford Spalding’s efforts to defeat his ex-wife’s search to find her son gnawed at him, as did the New Mexico connection that kept popping up. He decided, if time allowed, to speak to Penelope Parker again and get a little more background on the man.
    He glanced at the dashboard clock. But first there was Sergeant Lowrey to deal with. He hoped she was stationed outside his motel room waiting for him to show.
    Five blocks from his motel, Kerney’s cell phone rang. He pulled to the curb and answered. It was Ramona Pino.
    “What have you got for me, Sergeant?”
    “Interesting stuff, Chief. We’ve just finished up with Nina Deacon. It seems