Murder Once Removed

by S. C. Perkins

  The men filed out and the taqueria quieted down, the only sounds coming from my chopping and Ana clearing the dining area. The front door opened another time or two as Flaco took out some trash. A couple of minutes later, he came in and picked up the knife I’d laid down while transferring a mound of chopped zucchini into an empty bowl.

  “I finish this now, Lucia. We open again in thirty minutes. That means they will only give you fifteen.”

  I was confused. “What are you talking about, they will only give me fifteen?”

  “Bah, Lucia! Just go around the corner, okay?” He gestured toward the dining room before going back to chopping squash and muttering something about having to do everything.

  I rinsed and dried my hands, took off my cap, and went around the corner, releasing my chignon into a ponytail as I did so. Ana was folding up the legs of the first long table when a voice from behind her asked if she needed any help. Ana smiled and said, no, the tables were lighter than they seemed. She moved away, and I stared, my face no doubt registering an Oh crap expression.

  Sitting at one of Flaco’s regular tables, in his plaid pants and dark green sweater, was Senator Applewhite.

  NINETEEN

  He looked at me, not especially welcomingly. “I had no idea the scheming young woman who tried to get past my security detail on Friday and my charming young waitress this afternoon were one in the same. Although it seems you were scheming again, even while performing your job with such charm.”

  I threw caution to the wind. “I think if you combine scheming and charming and multiply it by two, it equals out to an inquisitive genealogist who merely wants to get all the information she can. No matter what it takes.”

  He eyed me for a long moment before I continued.

  “Also, while I have come to consider Gus Halloran a friend through our work together on his family tree, my business relationship with him has concluded and he has no idea I’m here. My reasons for wanting to talk to you are solely my own as a genealogist, though I will say I see them as being for the greater good of both the Halloran and Applewhite families.” I lifted my chin, straightened my shoulders. “As well as for the memory of my friend Winnie Dell.”

  I got another long moment of character appraisal. “You should know that Flaco had to make a deal with me in order to make this conversation happen, Miss Lancaster.” Finally, he indicated that I should sit down.

  I sat, hating that Flaco had made a deal against his will.

  Ana appeared at our table with two glasses. “Señor Flaco says to tell you that all conversations go better with tequila. But since Lucy here does not care for it outside of a margarita, he serves you scotch.”

  “I didn’t know he kept scotch here,” Senator Applewhite said.

  “He doesn’t.” Ana grinned. “He had me take it from your bottle.” She tilted her head back toward the cash register, where the senator’s Laphroaig 18 sat next to a canister full of individually wrapped pralines.

  “You play dirty, Medrano!” the senator yelled toward the kitchen.

  Flaco’s voice boomed out an off-color reply in Spanish. Ana and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh.

  “What did he say?” the senator asked me. Just as quickly, he said, “Never mind. I think I heard ‘donkey’s butt’ somewhere in there, so I got the gist.”

  I grinned and held out my glass to him. “Senator, I like your style, even if you don’t like mine. Cheers.”

  He hesitated for a moment, and then clinked his glass to mine. “Miss Lancaster, if I didn’t appreciate your tenacity as well, no amount of cajoling could get me to sit here. Salud.” We sipped and he said, “But we still need to get on with it. Mark and Trey will be at those doors in exactly thirteen minutes.”

  I wanted to ask which one was which, but I quickly decided I was happier thinking of them as Winky and the Other One, so I jumped into the reason for this afternoon’s charade.

  “Senator, your security presence and the involvement of the FBI tells me you’ve had a threat on your life of some sort. I’m guessing it began after Gus Halloran’s press conference where he announced his great-great-grandfather had been murdered on the orders of someone known only as C.A.”

  “Miss Lancaster—” The senator’s hard expression told me he wasn’t supposed to discuss it and I was rankling him by asking.

  “Please, call me Lucy,” I said and plowed on. “Now, since the FBI is no doubt keeping you informed, I’m guessing you’ve heard I think Winnie’s killer is a woman in her forties who was seen rushing out of the event around the time Winnie was killed. The security guard at the Hamilton Center saw the woman leave with a large handbag, which was likely full of stolen daguerreotypes from Winnie’s office. I think this woman believed one of them contained the image of Seth Halloran on the day of his own murder.”

  The senator blinked when I put it like that.

  “Then you also may have heard my office was broken into and trashed, and, at the time, I thought the person responsible was looking for the daguerreotype. Then last night at my friend’s Halloween party, I was attacked by a guy who I assume is working with the woman from the event and he more or less told me they had the Seth Halloran photo, but that something was missing from its case.”

  Maybe it was telling him that I’d been attacked, maybe not, but he seemed to thaw toward me a bit.

  “The page from Jeb Inscore’s journal,” the senator replied after taking a sip of scotch. “Possibly with the real name of the man Inscore called C.A. You think Winnie may have hidden it somewhere.”

  I nodded. “Right, so we’re both up to speed on that.”

  “Do you think these people are members of the Halloran family?” he asked.

  “There’s almost no chance, Senator. The Hallorans have their proof Seth was murdered and it’s undeniable; there’s no need for them to steal the daguerreotype.”

  There was a conviction in my voice the senator heard, and after a long moment, he tilted his head in acceptance that it wouldn’t so easy as to simply pin all of what happened to the easiest targets available: the Halloran family.

  “Regardless, I hope you won’t be so foolish as to try and go looking for these people,” he said.

  “I have no intention of it,” I said, which was the truth. “But I’m hoping that if I can figure out what these people are looking for—what makes that journal page so important to them—that, if nothing else, I might be able to help the police and let the FBI do the tracking down.”

  The senator seemed to accept that. Still, he glanced at his watch, then at me, raising his eyebrows a smidge. I needed to get to the point. I linked my fingers together and rested them on the table.

  “Senator, I wanted to ask you two things. One was to see if you had any stories that had been passed down about your three-times great-grandfather. Maybe some journals or papers of his that might show a connection with Seth Halloran. I’m hoping they would help me figure out whether Caleb was the man Jeb Inscore referred to as C.A., or whether it was another contemporary of your ancestor’s named Cantwell Ayers. I know you asked Winnie to help clear Caleb’s name, and it’s something I’d now like to try and do for you in her honor.”

  The senator looked down his nose at me, but not unkindly. “You do realize that, should you find the proof Caleb was this C.A., you will be making me into the great-great-great-grandson of a murderer?”

  I nodded.

  “And while that knowledge won’t have any effect on the career I’ve had thus far, and cannot and will not affect any piece of legislation I have helped to pass, you do realize this could potentially affect my campaign to be reelected?”

  Again, I nodded. I was quiet for a moment, and then said, “But if the situation were reversed, don’t you think you would want to know what really happened to your ancestor? Don’t you think it would be important to you?”

  He took another swallow of scotch. “Not really, no. I’m interested in my lineage, yes, but I think people like you who m
ake their family’s past into who you are as a person today are few and far between. Not to mention wrong in doing so. You are who you are, Lucy. Not who your ancestors were. Especially just one ancestor.”

  I felt a smidge belittled, but only a smidge. Over the years, I’d encountered many people who felt the way the senator did and, by this point in my career, I’d come to accept it as one of the many ways of looking at ancestry.

  “I understand what you mean,” I said. “You have Caleb’s blood in you, yes, but you also have the blood of his wife and the fourteen other people who make up your eight sets of great-great-grandparents. Then there’s your four sets of great-grandparents, not to mention your grandparents and parents. If Caleb were indeed the kind of man who took the life of another—and if we are talking strictly personality traits that are passed down through the DNA in your blood—his influence has been diluted so much that it really is insignificant to you.”

  “In a nutshell, yes.”

  “Still, maybe you might look at this a different way. While Caleb’s methods of obtaining either success or the things he wanted may have taken the form of bodily harm or coercion, your own clarity of purpose has taken the form of hard work”—my mouth quirked up a little—“including maybe a little bit of harm to your opponents’ reputations. Or possibly even some coercing of the truth in order to obtain your own success, as well as pass legislation you believe will work best for our country as a whole.”

  I took a breath, and then downed my scotch, all while the senator stared at me, deep in thought.

  “You’re basically saying that Caleb and I aren’t so different. That I’m following in his footsteps more than I realize, and, therefore, his life as my forefather should be important to me.”

  I smiled. “Maybe. Or maybe you’re following in the footsteps of Caleb’s wife, Imogen Masonfort Applewhite. She apparently had as much ambition as Caleb, if not more, and was said to be instrumental in his campaign to be elected to the Texas Senate.”

  Senator Applewhite smiled back at me. “Imogen was indeed an extraordinary woman, yes. All right, point taken. My lineage influences me more than I know.”

  “I happen to think so,” I said.

  The senator said, “I understand, I really do. Yet, I’m afraid I don’t have anything physical of Caleb’s to show you except a gold pocket watch, which I keep in a safety deposit box, and a painting of him done during his days in the Texas Senate. The family Bible was lost long before I was born and I’ve never heard of any diaries existing. The only papers of his that survive are the records of his time in the Texas Legislature.”

  I was a little deflated, but not shocked. It was hardly a rarity for a family to have few physical remembrances of an ancestor from that long ago.

  “What was your second question?” the senator asked.

  I said, “I wanted to know if you recalled anything Winnie may have said to you during your conversation on the day she died. Specifically, something that might indicate where she would have put the journal page.”

  Senator Applewhite shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re two for two. Besides Winnie and I discussing clearing Caleb’s name, she and I only talked about your discovery of the photo itself and the fact that Gus pulled you into his press conference when you were, shall we say, less aware of your surroundings.”

  I flushed a few shades of beet. “In his defense, he had no idea.”

  The senator waved it off as water under the bridge.

  “Tell me, Lucy. Have you researched my lineage yet? I mean really researched it?”

  I was surprised at the question. “Some, but not as extensively as I’d like yet. I’ve read quite a bit about Caleb and his children, but I figured your ancestry beyond Caleb would be pretty easy to trace considering your family’s continued public stature, so I started on Cantwell Ayers’s first.”

  “And?”

  “Well, unlike the Applewhites, the Ayers family didn’t remain prominent after Cantwell’s death in 1860,” I said. “His wife had passed away in 1857, and his son fought and died early in the Civil War, in 1861. He also had two daughters. One inherited money, married, and moved to Tennessee. The younger one, Mary-Eliza, inherited money and all Cantwell’s Texas lands. She sold her father’s lands to Caleb in 1865. Did you know?”

  “I didn’t,” he said, his eyebrows briefly lifting in surprise. “I find it interesting that Seth, Caleb, and this Cantwell Ayers were all so connected, though.”

  “It’s actually not so surprising,” I said. “In the 1840s, San Antonio was a very small town of only around a thousand people. Each of the three was a prominent businessman who owned land next to or near each other, and Seth and Cantwell were both sheep ranchers early on, though Cantwell quickly got into politics and left the sheep farming to others like Seth. The chances the three didn’t know each other are almost nonexistent.”

  The senator’s expression went hopeful. “Any chance you have a photo of this Cantwell Ayers guy? With all that’s gone on I never got to search to see what he looked like.” Touching his beak of a nose, he said, “It’s hard to believe there’d be another guy with the initials C.A. and a schnoz as big as the one Caleb passed down to so many of his descendants.”

  With a laugh, I pulled out my iPhone, which had been on silent in my server’s apron for the past two hours. I nearly faltered when I noticed two calls from Agent Turner.

  Actually, the calls were from “BAT in the Bureau,” as I’d been feeling snarky when I’d added him to my contacts list.

  He’d said that he was going to call me at five o’clock sharp to check in. The time on my phone said it was 5:06 P.M.

  Oops.

  With visions of Agent Turner speeding over to my condo to check on me—compounded by the vision of him wanting to throttle me if he found out I was talking to Senator Applewhite—I opened my phone and found the photo of Cantwell Ayers’s profile.

  The senator was looking at the photo when, from behind me, I heard the taqueria’s doors open.

  “Senator, are you ready to—What the…?”

  The senator chuckled at the look of annoyed defeat on my face as Winky and the Other One advanced on me at high speed.

  “It’s all right, guys,” he told them. “We were only talking.”

  Winky once again went to protest, but the senator stood and stopped him with a calm hand to the shoulder.

  “Trey, it’s fine. I promise. Men, this is Miss Lucy Lancaster of Ancestry Investigations.”

  Both men hesitated, then the Other One spoke first. “Agent Mark Ronten,” he said, holding a hand out to me.

  Because my moments with both men had been brief and furtive, I hadn’t really gotten a solid look at them beyond noticing basic features and the fact that they were both dark haired.

  While neither had looks that stood out in a crowd—a sign of a good protection detail, no doubt—Mark was the more interesting of the two, with a triangular-shaped face, high cheekbones, and expressive lines around his mouth and brown eyes. I judged him to be around thirty-five.

  We shook and I smiled. “Thanks for not shooting me, Mark. Both times.”

  He gave me a brief grin showing even teeth, and I counted that as a victory. I then turned to Winky, who was closer to my age.

  “Trey Koblizek,” he said finally, and without an offered hand to shake.

  He was the cuter one, traditionally speaking. His square face had more fullness than his partner’s, and he only had a hint of crow’s-feet showing up around his eyes, which were also brown. Yet, while they were a lighter shade and clearer, they radiated no warmth like Mark’s did. Instead, he glared at me, not unlike how my buddy Agent Turner was so fond of doing, and if Trey had an accent at all like his cohort, it wasn’t coming through his tightened jaw.

  “I knew you weren’t Hispanic,” Trey said.

  I replied in rapid-fire Spanish, lacing my words with sweetness. Confusion washed over Trey’s face. Mark, however, was happy to translate.

  “
Dude, her great-grandmother’s Spanish, but was born and raised in Mexico. She’s definitely part Hispanic.”

  The senator clapped Trey on the shoulder with a laugh. “She’s got you on that one, Trey. This intelligent young woman is who found the evidence pertaining to Gus Halloran’s great-great-grandfather.”

  I blushed with pleasure. Mark smiled. Trey didn’t.

  The senator stood up, telling the men he’d meet them at the doors. Trey pulled out his cell and muttered something about calling headquarters. The senator addressed Mark. “If you’ll call my wife and let her know I’m on my way home, I’d appreciate it. I’ll just be a few more minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mark said. As the two agents walked off, the senator moved a bit closer to me and lowered his voice.

  “Lucy, I hope I can trust you to keep what I’m about to tell you to yourself, but, well, my ancestry might be a little harder to research than you realize.”

  “Why’s that?” I said with a teasing grin. “Are you going to tell me you’re an impostor and don’t really carry the Applewhite DNA? I think the nose you inherited might be saying otherwise.”

  “Oh, I’m an Applewhite by DNA all right,” he replied. “But while my official bio you’ll find online says I descend from one of Caleb’s two sons, my closest link to the surname is actually in the mitochondrial way, last inherited three generations ago.”

  I stared at him. One of his caterpillarlike eyebrows was slightly lifted. He was giving me a verbal puzzle to test my genealogical acumen, and also to see if I understood what he wasn’t expressly telling me.

  I didn’t have to think about it long. Mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, is a part of every person’s genetic code. But unlike regular DNA, which a person gets from both parents, mtDNA is solely inherited from one’s mother. No matter how many generations a person went back, their mtDNA would be an exact copy of the woman from whom they descended.

  For instance, while the senator had the same mtDNA of his mother, his maternal grandmother, and so on, he did not carry any mtDNA from his father, grandfathers, and so forth. Each of those men carried different mitochondrial DNA because each one had a different, unrelated mother. Also, while men carry mtDNA, they do not pass it to their children. It’s a genetic job strictly in the mother’s domain, and for that reason mitochondrial DNA testing is a key component in evolutionary studies to trace long-term matrilineal ancestry back over thousands of years.