Always Time to Die

by Elizabeth Lowell

“What’s the rush?”

  “The governor isn’t the Senator. I’m having a hard time keeping my temper with him. It’s time to move on, begin the rest of our life.”

  Melissa’s dark eyes searched her husband’s face and found only impatience.

  “A week,” she said. “We need at least that much lead time or the plane tickets will cost a fortune.”

  Pete nodded. “Okay. A week. Then we’re gone. And if the books are a mess, the governor can just cope. I’m sick of this job and the ranch. Too many people dying.”

  “They were all as old as dirt.” She shrugged. “What do you expect?”

  The doorbell chimed.

  “I’ll get it,” Pete said. “You finish packing for our time off in town. It’s snowing pretty good. If we don’t get out in the next hour, we might not get out at all.”

  Melissa hesitated, then followed Pete down the hall instead of staying and packing. She listened while the men exchanged meaningless words about the weather and how sad Winifred was dead yada yada yada.

  The governor must have been as impatient as Pete. It didn’t take but a few minutes to get to the bottom line: as of midnight, everyone at the ranch was terminated. As soon as they vacated the ranch, they’d receive three months’ pay to ease the transition.

  “I’m sorry,” the governor said. “I know you’ve given long and faithful work to the Quintrell family. There will be an extra six months’ pay for you and Melissa. And of course I’ll be happy to provide any references you need.”

  “I appreciate that,” Pete said, managing a smile. “I’ll tell the rest of the staff as they show up Monday, unless you’d rather do it?”

  Josh closed his eyes briefly. “I should, but I don’t have the time. I didn’t have the time to come up here, but I just couldn’t do this over the phone. Not with you two.” He looked up, saw Melissa, and walked swiftly to her. “I’m very sorry, Melissa. I wish there was another way.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, her smile almost real. “There have been so many changes lately, this isn’t exactly unexpected.”

  A few minutes later, Pete and Melissa watched the governor drive away. His generic white rental disappeared into the snow.

  “He can’t fire us, we quit,” Melissa said, laughing without humor. “He just didn’t know it.”

  “Good thing, too. You don’t get severance pay when you quit.” Pete smiled rather fiercely. “Rio de Janeiro, here we come.”

  TAOS

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  59

  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

  60

  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 wom
an 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

  61

  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.