Always Time To Die (19 page)

QUINTRELL RANCH
THURSDAY 4:00
A.M.

A BLEARY-EYED DR. SANDS CONFIRMED WHAT EVERYONE ALREADY KNEW: SYLVIA
Castillo Quintrell had died in her sleep. He went to the telephone and called Governor Quintrell on his private line.

“What?” The word was a growl.

“Governor Quintrell, this is Dr. Sands. I’m sorry to tell you that your mother has passed away.”

At the other end of the line, there was silence, a woman’s voice asking a question, and then Josh said, “Thank you for calling. Do you need anything from me immediately?”

“No. Miss Winifred has a list of Sylvia’s wishes. She’ll be cremated and her ashes scattered over the ranch. Given that she has been ill for so many years, I’ve recommended against an autopsy. There’s no point in distressing the family any more than death already has. It’s a miracle she lived as long as she did.”

“I appreciate that. I have nightmares about the sleaze media ghouls drooling over autopsy photos. How is Winifred doing?”

“Not well,” Dr. Sands said. “She wasn’t strong before this. Pneumonia in a woman her age is very dangerous, but she refuses to go to a hospital.”

“Sylvia was all she had to live for.”

“Yes. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but you should be prepared. It’s quite probable that Miss Winifred’s life span can be measured in days. A few weeks at the outside. She’s not responding well to the antibiotic. I’ll switch to another, of course, but in patients her age, pneumonia often is the body’s way of saying it’s tired of struggling with life.”

“You think she’s given up?”

“Finding her sister dead was very hard on her.”

There was a long silence.

Finally Josh said, “I’ll check my schedule, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get up to the ranch today. I’m booked for three meals a day in New Hampshire for the next six days. But if I could combine seeing Winifred with a memorial service for Sylvia…yes, that would be possible. A red-eye both ways. There will be a memorial for Sylvia Quintrell within forty-eight hours.”

Dr. Sands was impressed with Josh’s ability to juggle personal and private demands when awakened from a dead sleep at 4:00
A.M
. “In addition to my condolences, Governor, please accept my congratulations. I believe you’ll make a fine president.”

“Thank you. I’ll send you an invitation for my next fund-raiser.”

Laughing, Dr. Sands hung up the phone and made arrangements to have Sylvia’s body taken to a crematorium.

TAOS
THURSDAY MORNING

“
WHAT DO WE HAVE SO FAR
?”
CARLY ASKED
,
LOOKING AT HER CHECKLIST
.

Dan shifted on the uncomfortable wooden chair that was the best the newspaper archive offered. He was bleary-eyed from old photos and computer monitors, and frustrated by his relentless physical awareness of Carly. Yesterday’s hours and hours of solid, boring groundwork on Winifred’s project should have taken the edge off his need.

It hadn’t. It was there today, up close and personal. If Carly felt the same way, she wasn’t sharing the information.

Swearing silently, he tapped out a few more commands on the keyboard and hoped she would catch up with him soon. Never had the wait for someone to discover what was obvious to him seemed so long.

While Dan worked, Carly unrolled a sheet of paper that was twenty inches long and ten wide. Penciled notes went down the left margin. A faint grid divided the sheet into six long sections. The top center of the sheet was labeled
CASTILLO SISTERS
,
GENERATION
6. From there, each horizontal section was labeled 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, separating generations of the family.

“Marriage date for Isobel Castillo and the first Andrew Jackson Quintrell is March 11, 1865,” Dan said. “Isobel was born in 1850, probably before March 11, because her age is given as fifteen for the marriage. Quintrell was thirty, according to his Civil War record. Johnny Reb, by the way.”

Carly wrote quickly, connecting married couples and keeping track of special dates along the margin for each generation. It wasn’t the approved method for creating a genealogy, but it worked for her. Later she would transfer everything onto ready-made forms.

“Still want me to concentrate on the female Castillos?” Dan asked.

“For now. I’ll go through the list of possible illegitimate offspring later. I can’t believe there are eleven of them.”

“All maybes,” he reminded her.

“The Senator was a swine.”

“Swine are fertile.” Dan looked at the computer screen. “Isobel’s sister Juana married Mateo on June 3, 1870, at the ripe old age of seventeen. Mateo’s age isn’t listed. Neither is his family history.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Carly muttered. “If Juana wasn’t Isobel’s sister, I doubt that the marriage would have made the newspaper at all.”

“Welcome to the wonderful world of society sections.” Dan hit another key. “Juana died in childbirth in September of 1872. The baby, María, survived. In May of 1887, María married Hale Simmons. She died of cancer after a long illness on August third, 1966. Since a surviving husband isn’t mentioned, I assume old Hale kicked the bucket before then. Nothing in the archives about a funeral, though.”

Carly worked quickly, neatly, filling in blanks with a mechanical pencil, the better to erase it later if/when new information appeared.

“After an improbable gap of almost thirty years, María gave birth to—”

“Improbable? Is that what the archive says?” Carly cut in.

“No. It’s plain old common sense.”

Smiling, Carly put a question mark in the margin and said, “Go on.”

“Sylvia María Simmons y Castillo, no exact birth date. All we have is 1916.”

“That’s okay. I have lots of sources I haven’t tried yet. We’ll stick with the archives and Winifred’s stuff for now and fill in gaps later.”

“Eighteen years after Sylvia’s birth, in a totally fab June wedding complete with white roses and just
yards
of satin—”

Carly snickered at Dan’s warbling tone and kept writing.

“She married Andrew Jackson Quintrell III. Do I get to mention the Quintrells now?”

“Hard to avoid them.”

“Let’s see…A. J. Three’s grandmother was Isobel and his great-aunt was Juana, right?”

Carly nodded and looked up. “Why?”

“I’m trying to figure something out. Sylvia’s grandmother was Juana and her great-aunt was Isobel, right?”

“Right. So?”

“So they were cousins, of a sort.”

“Not close enough to upset the civil or religious authorities. From what you translated on the death certificate Winifred gave me, Isobel and Juana were only half sisters and might even have been simply cousins. You’d have to be a genealogist to even care about the degree of blood relationship in their offspring. Besides, consolidating the land came first. Ask the royal families of Europe. They raised cousin-marrying to a high art.”

Dan stared at the screen a moment longer, trying to figure the exact degree of kinship between offspring of half sisters or cousins twice removed. Or was it three times? He shrugged. If Carly decided it mattered, he’d strain his brain over the answer. Better yet, he’d let Carly strain hers.

“I’ve got the wedding date for A. J. Three, universally known as the Senator, and Sylvia María Simmons y Castillo,” Carly said. “And the four children’s birth dates, plus three death dates for the kids.”

“Plus the Senator’s death date. Wonder whatever happened to his sisters? He had three of them, right?”

Carly checked her notes. “Three, all older. I’m saving them for later. Winifred only—”

“Wants Castillo history,” Dan cut in. “Got it. On to Generation Three, children of the Senator and Sylvia. Whoa. There’s a lot of stuff. Once the Senator became a senator, he couldn’t take a dump without the paper doing a two-page spread.”

“Now there’s a visual I could live without.”

Shaking her head, Carly went back to sorting the Sandoval photos on one of the long tables. She’d been so obsessed with recording Winifred’s material that she hadn’t done anything else. Now it was time to see if she could fill in some gaps. While many of the photos weren’t dated, a lot of them had writing on the back. She arranged them in rough order, oldest to newest.

“Holler when you find something worth recording,” Carly said. “I’ve got all the birth dates for the kids, but I’m really short on photos of Josh. Older brother Andrew got all the camera time. I’m hoping something will turn up in the Sandoval family photos at the yearly barbecue.”

“Don’t hold your breath. From all that’s been left
out
of the newspaper, Josh must have been a hell-raiser from the time he could walk.”

“Too bad there wasn’t more than one newspaper. I’d like to see more of the Spanish and Native American side of the local history.”

Dan winced at the thought of what more newspapers would have meant in terms of archiving. Even with his nifty, mostly homemade program, the process still took time.

“The white-bread approach wears thin in the sixties,” he said. “There’s more ink for the hispano politicos, and more hispano politicos in areas that have a big Anglo population.”

“Thus all the yearly barbecues,” Carly said, lining up the photos. “Taking the pulse of the hispano voters over a rack of ribs and a keg of beer.”

“It worked. Without support from the hispano communities, the Senator wouldn’t have made it, and neither would his son. Josh Quintrell is the first Anglo governor New Mexico has had in years. It was a close race. Without the Sandovals he couldn’t have made it.”

“The same Sandovals that run drugs and hold cockfights?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you saying that the governor is involved in the drug trade through the Sandovals?”

“If by involved you mean getting paid on a regular schedule, probably not. If you mean accepting political contributions and having a damn good idea where the funds came from and how they were laundered, yes.”

“I haven’t read anything like that in any newspaper.”

From overhead came the slam of the side door, followed by the sound of footsteps and heavy rolls of paper being moved across the floor.

Dan glanced at the ceiling and then back at the computer. “You won’t read about laundered political contributions in this newspaper, no matter how many rolls of paper Gus uses up.” Dan shrugged. “Unless someone gets caught dirty with a bag of cash, of course, but it’s not likely. The Quintrell family might be a lot of things that I don’t like, but stupid isn’t one of them.”

“No wonder Winifred wants to distance herself from them.”

“Winifred would have hated any family her sister married into.” Dan typed rapidly, scanned the screen, and typed again. “Besides, the Castillos are a lot closer to the Sandovals by blood and choice. And it’s not like the Quintrells are the first politicians on the planet to accept laundered money in political contributions. Hell, in the bad old days on the East Coast and in Chicago, the pols didn’t care if the cash was laundered, just so it was plentiful and green.”

“You have a sour view of politicians.”

“Realistic,” he corrected. “And don’t forget bankers and lawyers. One runs the laundries and the other facilitates the process. Then they take the squeaky-clean cash and invest it in legitimate enterprises on behalf of the illegitimate. Welcome to the real world, honey, where nothing is the way it seems and everybody’s hand is in somebody else’s pocket.”

Carly grimaced and kept looking at the backs of photos. Some were dated. Some had names.

One of the names was J. Quintrell.

She flipped the photo over, picked up a magnifying glass, and went hunting for the younger Josh. He’d been caught in the act of upending a bottle of beer over another boy’s head. Both young men—teenagers, probably—were laughing and leaning drunkenly on each other. In the background, the Senator watched with a grim line to his mouth. Next to the Senator was another young man, but this one stood straight and tall.

“I have a feeling Josh went back to boarding school right after this,” she said.

Dan got up and walked over to Carly. He bent over the table near her, close enough to smell the light spice of her shampoo. He told himself that he hadn’t left the computer just to inhale her unique scent, it was just a very nice side benefit. Like breathing.

“Good catch,” he said. “If there’s another newspaper photo of Josh before he came back from Vietnam, I haven’t been able to find it, not even in the fifties and sixties stuff I scanned in a few years ago when I was home for three months.”

“Months? How’d you manage that much time off?”

“Leave of absence,” Dan said, staring at the rawboned young Josh. “Just like now.”

“But you’re not in the military.”

“No. Just clumsy.” He looked at the date on the photo and then went back to his computer.

“Clumsy,” she said under her breath. “Yeah. Right. I’ve seen professional athletes who are less coordinated. Must have been one mean volcano you climbed.”

He ignored her and set up a search for the name Quintrell, starting with one week on either side of the date on the photo. Then he skimmed through the articles he’d recalled, clicking from one highlighted Quintrell name to the next. The Senator was most often mentioned, with A. J. IV getting some ink for having graduated from college and then volunteering for the army. He was posted to Fort Benning, Georgia, for ranger training.

Poor bastard. Wonder if he knew what he was getting into?

“What was that?” Carly asked.

Dan realized he’d spoken his thoughts aloud. Not good. He was getting entirely too comfortable around Ms. Carolina May.

“A.J. IV was a ranger,” Dan said.

“Ranger? Are we talking National Park Service and Smoky the Bear?”

For a few seconds Dan wondered what it would be like to live in a world where the first association with the word
ranger
was a cartoon figure. “Special Ops.”

“Ops? Operations?”

“Yeah. The balls-out warriors.”

“Another visual I could have lived without,” she said. “Did he make it, or was he a wannabe?”

“A.J. IV made the grade and the Senator didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. The old man was furious that his son didn’t take the cushy admin job in the Pentagon that was all laid out for him.”

“What article did you find?” Carly took the photo over to where Dan was and began reading the computer screen over his shoulder. “Where does it say that?”

“Between the lines.”

She read aloud the section he pointed to on the screen. “‘The Senator, while naturally disappointed that his son passed up an opening at the Pentagon as a public information officer, is very proud that Andrew Jackson Quintrell IV has been accepted into the elite Army Rangers.’ So what are you talking about? It says the Senator was proud.”

“You didn’t know him. Anyone who crossed the old man paid in blood. Lots of it. I’d love to have heard that father-son screaming match, but it happened before I was born. I’m betting that A.J. told the Senator to go crap in his mess kit. And I’m betting that’s why Josh was invited home from his first year of college abroad, just for the barbecue. It would be the Senator’s way of telling his first son that there was another heir in the pipeline.”

Carly studied the photo again with the magnifying glass. “So the handsome dude with the rebar up his butt is A.J. IV?”

He looked where she pointed. “Handsome, huh?”

“Hey, they can’t all be tall, dark, and oozing sex like you.”

Dan wanted very much to bite the tender lobe of her ear but didn’t. If he did that, the next thing he’d do was stick his tongue in her mouth and pretty soon after that they would be rocking and rolling on top of the heavy wooden table.

And how would this be bad?

“He sure looks more than three years older than Josh,” she said.

“Ranger training is hell.”

“Been there, done that?” she asked.

“I know some of them.”

“The, um, balls-out warriors?”

“Yeah.” In addition to being trained by them, he’d debriefed a lot of special forces types, but that was just one more on the long list of things he wasn’t supposed to talk about, because the men weren’t supposed to have been in the places Dan had been. And vice versa.

He watched Carly looking at the photo and tried not to think about how good it would feel to have her mouth all over him.

“Why are you frowning?” he asked after a few moments. Anything to get her talking instead of him fantasizing about stripping her naked and diving in.

“I’m trying to see the future Governor Quintrell in that rawboned baboon pouring beer over his primate buddy. The eyes are right but the chin looks off. Must be the stubble. He’s got quite a crop of it. Josh’s eyeteeth are just like the Senator’s—that slight overlap that is more a sexy come-on than a flaw. He must have had them straightened later.”