Always Time To Die (31 page)

TAOS
SATURDAY AFTERNOON

THE PACKAGE FROM THE LAB WAS WAITING BY DAN
’
S FRONT DOOR
.
CARLY PICKED IT
up and held it while Dan unlocked the door, locked it again behind them, and reset the alarm system.

“Okay,” she said. “Spit it out.”

“What?”

“Whatever it is that’s making you look like you want to hit something.”

“I’m just kicking myself for being an idiot.”

“Anything in particular?” she asked.

“Yeah. No matter how many times my nose was rubbed in it, I still acted like I was on vacation.”

“You’ve been shot, had a brick heaved through your living room window, suffered a sneering sheriff, been drugged until you yakked up your toenails, and twice drew a gun with every intention of shooting someone. Which part of that qualifies as a vacation?”

Dan would have smiled if he hadn’t been so disgusted with himself. “My job is to gather and analyze information and draw pretty damned accurate conclusions, but so far I haven’t been real effective. Comes from being too close to the problem.”

“I’m not sure I like being called a problem.”

“Not just you, honey. The Quintrell mess. Mom knows a lot more than she’s telling me.”

“Do you think your father knows, too?”

Carly set her package down long enough to shake the snow off her coat and hang it by the front door. She toed off her snow boots and walked across the floor in thick wool socks. Dan did the same.

“If Dad does, he’s never admitted it. But, no, I don’t think he knows,” Dan said. “He’d never have pushed Mom hard enough to make her talk.”

“Who, besides your mother, might know?” Carly asked.

“That’s just it. Her mother is dead. I don’t know who Mom’s father is and she says she doesn’t know either.” Dan shrugged. “The Senator might have known, but that’s no help now.”

“Ditto for Sylvia and Winifred.”

“Jim Snead,” Dan said.

“Who?”

“The wolfer. His family has been around the Quintrell ranch forever.”

“So has Melissa’s,” Carly said. “But she won’t talk about it. What about the Sandovals?”

“They’ll talk only if the pertinent statutes have run out,” Dan said. “Jim is probably our best bet.”

“Doesn’t he have a brother?”

“Blaine. If he’s not too drunk or whacked out on something, he might talk to me. Or he might have the same problem with statutes that the Sandovals do. For sure he’s on parole.”

“Lovely.”

Dan shrugged and started stacking kindling and piñon chunks in the little adobe hearth. “Welcome to rural America. Folks who think crime only happens in the cities have never lived anywhere else. People are people no matter where they call home.”

Carly watched Dan strike a match. Smoke curled up, then tiny flames bit into fragrant wood. Soon light danced and glowed in the small hearth.

“I wish,” she said, “that Winifred was alive and could give us permission to take a tissue sample from the Senator. And your grandmother.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been thinking about Sylvia, about her going ballistic and attacking the Senator. Why would she suddenly just lose it? She already knew he had the fastest zipper in the West. Was there any scandal, local or otherwise, that hit about then?”

“That was ’67, right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Mentally Dan flipped through the history he’d once drawn of the Quintrells. “All that was going on was the hippie invasion in Taos, the Vietnam War, that sort of thing. No big divorces. No wife-swapping or getting caught with the gardener doing the nasty. No election or money-laundering scandals.”

“That’s not much help. I’m trying to put myself in Sylvia’s shoes, how I’d feel if I was married to the biggest womanizer this side of Don Juan. What would it take to make me go crazy?”

Dan laughed softly.

“What?” she asked.

“If you’d been married to the Senator, the first time you found out about his women, he’d have awakened two balls shy of a reproductive package.”

Carly looked surprised. “What makes you say that?”

“Anybody as passionate as you are in bed has a temper.” He stood up and walked toward her. “I like that, Carolina May. Women with the personality of elevator music make me run for the nearest exit.”

“You’re not worried about your, um, package?”

“Honey, you can play with my package anytime you want.”

“I walked right into that one,” she said, laughing. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, lingered, and made herself step back. “You’re distracting me again.”

He wanted to keep right on distracting her, but put his hands in his pockets instead. It was time—past time—for him to stop being on vacation and start using his brain. Standing close enough to breathe in Carly’s warmth didn’t quicken his thought processes one bit.

But it sure picked up his pulse.

“Okay,” he said. “Sylvia was used to infidelity. Where does that leave us?”

Carly had a few thoughts on that subject. Several of them made her stomach clench. “Did she have a best friend? Someone she trusted who betrayed her with the Senator?”

“That’s kind of a reach. Sylvia would have been just as likely to jump the friend as the Senator. It goes about fifty-fifty when you walk in and find them in bed.”

“Fifty-fifty?”

“Yeah. Do you jump the spouse or the lover?”

Carly hesitated for a moment, then went on to the next possibility. “Okay. What about rape? If I found out my husband raped a woman, I don’t know what I’d do. Taking a swing at him with a cast-iron frying pan would be a definite possibility.”

Dan weighed the idea and nodded. “Good idea. Melissa might know. She’s the one who brushed off Winifred’s talk of rape.”

“If Melissa knew, she wasn’t eager to talk about it before.”

“We didn’t lean very hard before,” he said.

“What do we have to lean with now?”

“Melissa can take her choice—talk to us and we won’t talk to the governor, or don’t talk to us and we’ll talk to the governor and say she did.”

Carly raised her eyebrows. “Remind me never to get between you and something you want.” She took a deep breath. “Winifred said Sylvia tried to kill the Senator, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Carly took another breath. “The only thing I can think of that would make me want to actually kill my husband would be discovering that he’d had sex with our daughter.”

Dan whistled tunelessly. “That would put me over the top,” he agreed.

“It would also explain why your mother hates the Senator so much. She could be the child of incest.”

Dan didn’t like it. He certainly didn’t want to believe it. But it explained so much. “My grandmother wasn’t a saint, but why would she tell her daughter something like that, especially if it
was
true?”

“Why wouldn’t she? She was a buzzed-up, drugged-out woman who hated life and the world because her father was a man with the sex drive of a goat and the morals of a maggot.”

Dan stared into the fire, arranging and rearranging possibilities in light of what Carly had said. He didn’t like the pattern that emerged, but he was too smart to ignore it.

Carly went to her computer, booted it up, and searched for references to Elizabeth, known as Liza, Quintrell. The photos came first. A young Liza on the Senator’s knee. Liza being put up on a pony. Liza with a barrel racing ribbon from the local rodeo and a proud father standing by her stirrup.

“With his hand on her calf and lust in his eyes,” Dan said from behind Carly.

“She can’t be much older than thirteen.”

“If gossip is correct, that’s about the time she started going wild. Drugs, booze.”

“That’s also the last time the Senator and his daughter got together for a picture,” Carly said. “Other people, other family, but not her.”

“If what you think is true, Liza wouldn’t want to be within a country mile of her father.”

Carly divided the screen and called up the Senator’s wedding. “I keep remembering one photo where he had his arm around his bride and—here it is. The look he’s giving that other woman.” She zoomed in on part of the photo, excerpted it, put it next to the photo of Liza and the Senator, and felt her stomach clench again. “I wish Sylvia had killed him.”

Dan studied the two photos. Nothing had changed about the Senator’s predatory look except the female it was directed at.

“When I think of how much my mother and grandmother endured because of him,” Dan said finally, “I could kill him myself. There’s only one problem.”

“He’s already dead?”

Despite the grim brackets around Dan’s mouth, he smiled and tugged at the coil of hair Carly was winding around her finger. “That, too. But we’re assuming that the secret—whatever it is—the one the governor is so worried about coming out, outlasted the Senator’s death.”

“Is there a statute on incestuous rape?” Carly asked bitterly.

“Sure. We have laws about when and where you can spit.” Dan shrugged. “Even if we prove that the Senator had a child with his own daughter, I can’t see it doing anything but getting a sympathy vote for Josh Quintrell. I doubt if the governor would get his dick in a twist over a fifty-year-old secret coming out. He would be publicly repelled, fund a committee to study and prevent the origins of incest and help the victims, and go to church to pray for the Senator’s soul and that of his poor sister. None of the above would hurt him in the polls.”

“So what you’re saying is that no matter what crimes the Senator committed, legal responsibility for those crimes dies with him.”

“Basically, yes. At least in terms of threatening Josh’s political career at this point in time. There has to be something else that he’s worried about.”

“Worse than incest? That’s a scary thought.”

“Isn’t it just.” Dan frowned.

“Do you think Winifred knows—knew? Damn it, when will Melissa call us back about Winifred?”

“Whenever Josh gets here to spin everything for the media. Until then, my vote is with the hispano grapevine. Winifred is dead.”

Carly closed her eyes. “I wonder if she knew?”

“The secret?”

“No. That she was going to die. It would explain why she mailed that letter to me.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Winifred was a woman out of her time. Maybe out of any time.” Dan focused on the fire again. “If you wanted to prove incest fifty years after the fact, when both parties are dead and the living won’t help, how would you do it?”

“Proof?”

“Genetic proof.”

“I’d need a sample from the Senator. One from his daughter would be useful.”

“But not vital?”

“Not at this point. The sample we really need is one from the supposed child of incest. If she shows the Senator’s Y-DNA, then the Senator was her father. It’s that simple.”

“‘The child.’ That would be my mother we need a sample from.”

“Yes.”

Dan pulled the bloody tissue from his pocket. “Would this work?”

CASTILLO RIDGE
SATURDAY AFTERNOON

A DOT OF BRIGHT RUBY LIGHT PUNCHED THROUGH THE FALLING SNOW AS THE
sniper sighted in his scope. The gallons of water he’d poured on the blind curve were invisible now, a sheet of black ice frozen beneath a dusting of snow. If ice didn’t send their vehicle caroming out and down several hundred feet to level land below, then it would be up to close work to finish the job. On the whole, he’d much prefer an accident. Fewer questions that way.

Headlights glowed along the road from the ranch house. They bobbed and bounced but made good progress. Though the narrow road was technically on private land, the county managed to pass a blade over it often enough to keep ranch traffic moving. The headlights came on at surprising speed. Obviously the driver belonged to the part of the American population that believed four-wheel drive could handle anything weather could dish out.

Live and learn.

Or die.

The sniper waited, invisible on the ridge, white on white, patient.

The small truck bored through the late-afternoon gloom, eating up the road. Ruts made for a bouncy ride, but there were so many ruts they were bound to grab the tires from time to time.

The sniper was counting on it.

As the vehicle approached the deadly curve, the sniper’s finger slowly, slowly took up slack on the trigger.

The front tires of the truck hit icy ruts and lunged toward the drop-off. The driver fought it and was on the verge of regaining control when a red dot gleamed on the inside of the right front tire and snow-muffled thunder cracked. The tire collapsed, headlights bobbed and lurched.

The truck slid wildly on ice, then shot off the road and somersaulted into the gloom below.

The sniper waited, watching snow fall.

And waited.

When he was certain no one had seen the accident, he strapped on snowshoes and took a roundabout way down to the road and then on down the rest of the ridge to the wreck.

He found the man first. DOA, definitely. The fool hadn’t worn a seat belt. The sniper continued on down to the wreck itself. The woman was still alive, dazed and bleeding, her face a mess against the shattered rime of glass that was all that remained of the passenger window. He sat on his heels, found her pulse, and sighed.

Not quite.

He took her chin in one hand, the side of her forehead in the other, and gently searched for just the right angle.

Her eyes opened, slowly focused on him in the gloom.
“You,”
she said weakly. “But I killed them both for you…the Senator and Winifred…to keep the secret.”

“Always a good idea.”

There was a single snapping sound.

The sniper stood and glided away on snowshoes into the concealing veils of snow.

QUINTRELL RANCH ROAD
SUNDAY MORNING

DAN WASN
’
T HAPPY WITH CARLY COMING ALONG
,
BUT THE IDEA OF LEAVING HER
alone with his mother hadn’t appealed, either. Besides, Carly was the one with permission to come and go at the ranch. What she would be doing wasn’t, technically, breaking and entering. She still had the keys to the ranch house, plus she had a copy of Winifred’s holographic will.

What Dan planned to do was a lot more dicey, legally speaking. So he wasn’t telling Carly about that part. If it went from sugar to shit, he wanted her to be able to say she didn’t have the faintest idea what he’d planned and was shocked, really shocked.

The only good news was that the snow came and went in squalls, rather than in endless veils that clung and buried everything. The ten inches they’d already had was quite enough. If the storm cleared later tonight as it was supposed to, the wind would begin to blow and powdery snow would blow with it. Dan wanted to be back in Taos before that happened.

Besides, if he entered one more picture into the computer, or filled out one more genealogical form, or thought any more about what his mother had said, he was going to go nucking futz.

There were two sides to his personality; the other side wanted some exercise.

There was only one bad patch of ice on the road, but since Dan was driving like every foot of the way was black ice and hugging the road cuts, he kept control of the truck without a problem. The fact that he had large, studded snow tires helped.

“Yikers,” Carly muttered, bracing herself on the dashboard when the truck bucked.

“Yeah. We’ll have to remember that one on the way out.”

The windshield wipers moved sluggishly, compacting snow to the side of the rubber blades. The truck turned around the toe of Castillo Ridge and headed into the valley that held the Quintrell ranch. Gradually the snow squall thinned and vanished. The sky showed a few pale ribbons of blue and a glow where the sun was shrouded in clouds.

Except for security lights along the driveway and walkways, all of the ranch buildings were dark despite the gloomy day.

“Looks like Lucia was right,” Carly said. “Sunday is everyone’s day off.”

Lucia had been very glad that Carly and Dan didn’t want to see her, so glad that she’d chattered on for several minutes before Dan could gracefully hang up.

Dan pulled up to the front of the house and turned off the engine. “Ready?”

“Even with Winifred’s permission, I feel like a thief.”

“That’s why we’re going to go right up to the front door, turn on all the lights, and in general behave like lords of the manor.”

Carly got out with her digital camera, computer, and a box in case she found anything really interesting to take with her. Dan followed, carrying his own electronic equipment in a suitcase. She’d watched while he packed what looked to her like at least one hard drive, various cables and connections, a portable computer, a beefy camera, and some stuff she couldn’t identify. All she knew for sure was that he’d spent fifteen minutes on the cell phone with some people from St. Kilda Consulting before they left Taos.

“You start in Winifred’s room,” Dan said.

“Then Sylvia’s room, then the Senator’s office,” Carly said. “I remember. What are you going to be doing?”

“You didn’t ask that question.”

Carly thought about it, started to object, and thought about it again. “What question?”

She went to Winifred’s room, flipping on every light she could reach along the way.

As soon as Carly disappeared, Dan pulled on exam gloves. Without turning on any lights, he walked quickly to the Senator’s office, booted up the office computer, got past the laughable security in less than three minutes, and began copying the contents of the ranch’s hard drive onto the one he’d brought with him.

While the computers were mating, he went through the desk with a competence that would have made Carly really nervous. Nothing caught his eye. No keys to files. No P.O. Box keys. Nothing but the usual paper clips and pens. The file folders were empty of everything except a few invitations to attend local groundbreakings. The most recent was nine months old.

With economical motions Dan examined the few books in the office. Decoration only. No papers slipped inside the pages, no pages dog-eared, nothing hidden beneath the endpapers. The closet held only supplies. The locked filing cabinet came unlocked in a few seconds and had neatly bound files with
SCANNED IN
stamped across them. Apparently the ranch records were fully computerized.

That would make his work a lot easier. Quicker, too.

Dan went back to the computers, saw that they were still passing bytes from one to the other, and went to the end of the house where Melissa and Pete had their apartment. The glassed-in walkway was frigid. The locked door could have been opened by a monkey with a credit card. No office, just a master bedroom. The dresser drawers were stuffed with the usual things. Nothing had been taped underneath. Nothing surprising was between the mattresses or under the bed. The closet had clothes, shoes, boots, shoe boxes…

Bingo.

One of those shoe boxes was bound with a new rubber band. The box was worn at the corners and the lid was broken. Carefully Dan pulled out the box and took off the lid. There was a batch of postcards, letters, and photos inside.

He laid everything out on the bed in the order it had come from the shoe box. Then he flipped on the lights and began photographing. The Nikon digital camera he used had a built-in wireless connection to his computer. The wireless was good for four hundred feet. The Senator’s office was a lot closer than that. He photographed the front and back side of every item from the box.

As soon as he had the last image, he flipped everything over again, stacked it in the same order he’d found it inside the box, slipped the worn lid into place, snapped on the rubber band, and replaced the shoe box precisely as he’d found it. Each of his motions was quick, economical, and spoke of practice. A lot of it. What the Feds hadn’t taught him, other members of St. Kilda Consulting had.

He turned off the lights and headed for the Senator’s office again. The computers were finished. He disconnected his own, instructed the Senator’s to forget it had ever been booted up, shut it down, and positioned the computer exactly within the faint rectangle of clean desktop where he’d found it.

The maids were getting careless about dusting. No surprise there. Nobody but Pete and Melissa lived here anymore.

As soon as Dan checked that the documents he’d photographed had been received by his computer, he packed everything into the suitcase and headed out for his truck. He swapped the suitcase for a tool belt with a battery-powered drill and a selection of twenty-four-inch bits which had been designed for drilling through everything from concrete to steel. There were several small containers from Genedyne Lab held like oversize bullets in the loops of the tool belt.

Dan grabbed the pick and shovel from the bed of the truck and headed for the Quintrell graveyard.