Always Time To Die sk-1

by Elizabeth Lowell

  "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 sup-posed 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?"

  Chapter 60

  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 dropoff. 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.

  Chapter 61

  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.

  Chapter 62

  TAOS

  MONDAY AFTERNOON

  HUNCHED AGAINST WIND AND BLOWING SNOW, GUS KNOCKED HARD ON THE DOOR

  of Dan's rental and simultaneously turned the doorknob. It was locked, even though his truck was out front. Gus shook his head. His brother was the only person he knew who locked his doors when he was home.

  "Dan, it's Gus! I'm freezing my butt off out here!"

  Thirty long, miserable seconds later, the front door opened. Carly peeked out, stepped aside, and slammed the door shut again one second after Gus got in the living room. Even so, Carly heard Dan swearing as various genealogical charts and papers went flying, courtesy of a frigid gust of wind.

  "Sorry," Gus said. He gestured to the boarded-over window. "What happened?"

  "Brick meets glass. Glass breaks," Dan said. "Snarky renter gets plywood and covers the hole."

  "Somebody deliberately broke your window?"

  "Yeah."

  "What did the sheriff say?" Gus asked.

  "You're kidding, right?" Carly said, disgusted. "I don't think we bothered him with that incident."

  "We didn't," Dan said, "because there were others we did report and he didn't care. That's why she's living here rather than at the ranch."

  "Dang, and here I was getting ready for nieces or-"

  "Gus, shut up," Dan cut in.

  Gus made muffled sounds like he was talking around a hand over his mouth.

  Carly snickered.

  Dan shot his brother a green glance that was halfway from amused to outright irritated.

  "Okay, okay," Gus said. He turned to Carly. "When my older-much, much older-brother gets that look in his eyes, he's about to kick something. I don't want it to be me." He reached inside his snow jacket and pulled out a big envelope with the newspaper's logo on it. "This is a list of all the children in the area who were born within ten months of a visit from the Senator. The ones with an asterisk by the file name were born to women of the right age to attract the Senator."

  "Puberty to menopause?" Carly asked.

  "Near as I can tell, he didn't have many women who were over twenty-nine," Gus said. "Certainly none who looked it. The older he got, the younger he liked them, if you can believe gossip."

  Carly thought of the picture of the middle-aged Senator with his hand on his thirteen-year-old daughter's leg. "Oh, I can believe it. What I can't believe is that nobody ever called him on it."

  "Just one of the prerogatives of power," Dan said.

  "Like leaving office richer than when you went in?" she retorted.

  "Just like it." Dan opened the envelope, saw the CD he'd loaned his brother, plus a new CD. "How many names?"

  "Didn't count," Gus said cheerfully. "Too many. We're a fertile bunch in Taos."

  "You see Mom lately?" Dan asked.

  "This morning."

  "How's she doing?"

  "She's pretty shocked about losing Pete and Melissa, but-"

  "Losing?" Carly interrupted, startled. "Did the governor fire them?"

  Gus looked from one to the other. "You don't know." It was a statement, not a question. "They were killed in a car accident yesterday on the way into town."

  Carly just stared at him.

  "Where?" Dan asked flatly.

  "Do you know where the ranch road comes around the toe of Castillo Ridge and winds back along it on the way to the highway?"

  Carly stopped breathing.

  "I know it," Dan said. "What happened?"

  "They must have been running late, because Pete was going along too fast. He hit ice, lost it, and went over the edge. They weren't found until early this morning. The Sneads were coming in with some emergency supplies for the line cabins, so if someone got lost they could survive until help came."

  Dan nodded. It was a common, and decent, thing for ranchers to do.

  "The Sneads saw light glowing under the snow at the bottom of the ridge, on the town side. It was headlights. They went down and found Melissa." Gus shook his head. "Took them a while to find Pete, about a hundred yards uphill from the truck. He must not have worn a seat belt. If the wind hadn't been blowing snow around, and Jim's dog hadn't had a good nose, no one would have found Pete until spring."

  "What does the sheriff have to say about it?" Dan asked.

  "There hasn't been a formal autopsy yet, but all the injuries look like what you'd expect from a nasty wreck. Why?"

  Carly barely heard. All she could think of was the sniper on Castillo Ridge, able to fire toward the ranch or toward the far side of the ridge.

  She looked at Dan.

  He shook his head slightly. "Thanks for all your help, Gus. Now go back and spend time with your family. Give them all hugs
for me, okay?"

  "Here's my hat, what's my hurry, is that it?" Gus asked Dan.

  "Yes. Don't call me, Gus. Don't be seen with me. And I'd stay clear of Mom, too. Just for a while."

  "What's going on?" Gus demanded.

  "I don't know. Until I do, stay away from me, and from her."

  "What about Carly?" Gus asked.

  "Same goes," she said in a low voice. "Stay away. Think of it as a temporary quarantine." At least I hope its temporary.

  "Please," Dan said to his brother. "Think of your kids."

  "You're serious." Gus stared at his brother. "You're really serious."

  "Yes."

  "Does Mom know?"

  "Don't ask her," Dan said. "Don't ask anyone. Don't trust anyone."

  "Even-"

  "Anyone," Dan said curtly.

  Gus blew out a breath, turned, and stalked to the front door. "See you around, bro. And when I do, you'd better have an explanation for me. A good one."

  The door closed behind him. Hard.

  Chapter 63

  TAOS

  MONDAY AFTERNOON

  CARLY STARED AT THE FRONT DOOR, THEN AT DAN. "ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I'M thinking?" she asked.

  "That somebody could be getting away with murder around here?" he said.

  "Isn't it the only statute that doesn't have any limitations?"

  "Yes."

  "But I'm having a tough time connecting the past with the present."

  "So am I. There are too many people who hated the Senator, and too many good reasons for someone to kill him. Or…"

  "What?"

  "Blackmail him."

  "Does that help us?"

  "Just one more handful of pieces that don't fit anywhere. Why?"

  Carly frowned. "When I get to this point in a genealogy, too many facts and no coherent pattern, I stop and take another approach, another way of looking at or getting to information."