Always Time to Die

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Carly watched the screen anxiously. “Remind me to steal this program from you.”

  “I’ll modify it just for you. For a price.”

  She gave him a sideways glance, saw him watching her, and said, “It’s a deal.”

  “You don’t want to know what the price is?”

  “If I can’t afford it, I’ll think of something. Or you will.”

  “You’re distracting me,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, looking at his computer.

  “Excuse me?”

  “There are five candidates who fit the profile. Nine if you go the full five years on either side of twenty-seven years old.”

  Carly didn’t know whether she was excited or dismayed. “That many?”

  “Those are only the ones who died or disappeared and are reasonably close in height. A lot more than nine males were born in the area in the search years.”

  “They’re all the Senator’s?” she asked in a rising voice.

  Dan laughed. “No. There’s just nothing to prove they aren’t his bastards.”

  “I feel better. I think. The Senator might yet give Genghis Khan a run for his money.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “According to some genetic studies of Y-DNA in Asia, around eight percent of the population are direct patrilineal descendants of Genghis Khan,” she said. “Compared to the average man, that’s an astronomically successful rate of reproduction.”

  “What was his secret?”

  “Rape and murder. Murder the men and boys, impregnate the women and girls, and move on. If the accounts passed down can be believed, he was, um, tireless on more than the battlefield.”

  Dan’s eyebrows lifted. “The things I learn hanging around with a naïve genealogist.”

  “Naïve?”

  “Beautiful. Did I mention beautiful?”

  “Now I know that bullet caused brain damage.”

  Before Dan could retort, he felt the brush of her lips against his temple. Distracting. Very distracting.

  “Candidates,” he said out loud. “What other requirements would they need beyond dying or disappearing or—honey, if you keep breathing in my ear, you’re going to be in my lap real quick, and I’m going to be in yours real deep.”

  Carly straightened and stepped back from temptation. “Candidates. Um, age, death. Got that.” She blew out a breath. “What about height, eye color, that sort of thing?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  She went to her own computer, booted up the family pictures and descriptions, and brooded over them. A.J. IV had black hair like the Senator and dark eyes like his mother. Josh had black hair and blue eyes, a complete senatorial copy. Liza had blond hair and dark eyes. The sister who had died of polio at nine had brown hair and blue eyes. Diana Duran had black hair and dark eyes. Dan had dark hair and the most amazing green eyes…

  Don’t even start.

  Carly jerked her mind back to phenotypes. There certainly was a variety to choose from. Everything from black hair and dark eyes to blond and blue-eyed. No help at all.

  So she began thinking about why Pete and Melissa had to die. Who benefited?

  Their children, probably, but they were grown and living out of state.

  Carly’s mind returned to the intriguing idea of an identity switch. Certainly the Senator must have known. Did he do it willingly, just to have his own genetic son inherit the land and the power, or did the impostor have something to hold over the Senator?

  Something like incest?

  Murder?

  Not that Sylvia had died, but she certainly had been a victim of assault.

  Carly pulled over a yellow pad and began thinking on paper. Who certainly knew about the incest. Who might have known. Who was still alive in the present that might threaten the governor—if indeed he was an impostor.

  The Senator and Liza certainly knew. Given Liza’s instability, she might have told or hinted to her best friend that her father had raped her. Probably more than one rape. She started going wild at thirteen but didn’t have Diana until she was sixteen. Of course, it could have been one of Liza’s boyfriends or tricks that impregnated her. As soon as Genedyne finished the test series, they would know if Diana had the Senator’s Y-DNA. Until then, it was an assumption that fit the circumstances and memories of the living.

  Carly circled the Senator’s and Liza’s names. Obviously Liza could have been blackmailing the Senator—probably was, one way or another—but Liza died a long time ago and Pete and Melissa had just died, so to connect them through blackmail was a stretch.

  Susan.

  Susan Mullins, grandmother of Melissa Moore. She’d died a long time ago, too.

  With Liza.

  Carly felt the sizzle of energy that came when she was working a promising genealogical trail.

  If Susan knew, she could have told her daughter or her son—or even the Sneads, who might or might not be the Senator’s grandsons.

  Wonder if they would agree to sending cheek swabs to Genedyne.

  If the daughter—what was her name, Letty, Kitty, Betty? That was it, Betty. If Betty knew, she could have told her own daughter, Melissa.

  Carly drew lines of genetic connection and lines of circumstantial and geographic connection. Nothing impossible so far. Everything could have happened. That didn’t prove everything did happen. That was why courts were iffy on the subject of circumstantial evidence.

  She looked up and saw Dan watching her. “What?” she asked.

  “Just enjoying watching another analytical mind at work.”

  “Fanciful is more like it, at least on my end.” She wound a strand of hair around her finger and made a sound of disgust. “Well, it was fun while it lasted.”

  “What was?”

  “It’s too convoluted and loopy to explain.”

  “Trust me. I have a very convoluted and loopy mind.”

  Carly hesitated. “You’re going to laugh.”

  “No. At this stage in the investigation, nothing is so far-fetched that it’s laughable.”

  She looked at him and saw he meant it. “If you so much as smile, I’ll bite you.”

  “Now you’re tempting me.”

  Carly rolled her eyes but otherwise resisted the lure. “If there was an impostor, the Senator had to be in on it, right?”

  Dan nodded. “The man wasn’t exactly father of the year, but chances are that he’d know his own son.”

  “So there are two choices—the Senator agreed to go along or he was blackmailed.”

  “With what?”

  “Incest.”

  “How would the impostor know about the incest?”

  “Susan Mullins,” Carly said. “She was Liza’s friend—”

  “Coworker,” Dan said. “She turned tricks to pay for drugs.”

  “But she could have known.”

  “Agreed. In fact, it’s likely. A background of incest isn’t all that rare in the sex trade. It’s one of the things prostitutes bond over.”

  “God,” Carly said starkly. “What planet do those abusers come from?” Then she held her hand up, palm out. “Rhetorical question. Yes, I’m naïve. I don’t want to think about that kind of sick, ugly…” She forced out air in a whoosh. “Sorry. Empathy can be a bitch.”

  “Can you think of this as parts of a puzzle rather than human beings who hurt and cried and hoped and lost?” he asked.

  She went still. “You feel it, too, don’t you?”

  “I try not to.”

  “But you do.”

  “Yes. And all it does is get in the way of doing the job.”

  Carly took Dan’s hand, held hard, and let go. “Puzzle. Right. Here we go. Where were we?”

  “Susan Mullins reasonably could have had knowledge of the Senator’s incestuous relationship with his daughter.”

  “Relationship? As in more than once or twice?”

  “Incest, like rape, is about power rather than sex
,” Dan said neutrally. “As long as the child is within the age range of the predator’s interest, the incest continues.”

  She didn’t want to ask, but she couldn’t help it. “Age range?”

  “Abuse doesn’t really have an age range. Abuse that has a sexual outlet is subject to the same peculiarities of preference as healthy sexual attraction. Some abusers are attracted only to prepubescent children. Some prefer infants.”

  Carly’s skin crawled.

  Dan’s voice continued, relentlessly neutral. “Some abusers prefer the postpubescent child. The Senator seems to have been in the last category. Young, but not obscenely so. I believe thirteen is still considered a marriageable age in some states. In some countries, menstruation is the only division between a child and a woman. Between one week and the next, a girl becomes a sexually available woman.”

  Pieces of a puzzle. Carly forced herself to breathe. Just pieces.

  “In other words,” Dan said, “yes, the incest probably lasted until Liza left the house and possibly continued until she was thirty. So, yes, Susan could have had knowledge that would be useful to blackmail the Senator. Whether or not that happened…” Dan shrugged.

  “If she did have knowledge, she could have told her daughter, Betty.”

  Dan nodded.

  “Who could have told Melissa,” Carly continued, “who could have decided to continue the blackmail.”

  “Only until the Senator died.”

  Carly nodded.

  “Then why arrange an accident for Melissa?” Dan asked. “The only reason—other than bad luck—for the Moores to die is that someone alive had something important to lose if Melissa lived.”

  “If there was an impostor, and Melissa knew, couldn’t she have blackmailed him—the Senator and/or impostor—over that?”

  “Yes. So could her sort-of cousins, if they knew.”

  Carly blinked. “Sort-of cousins? Oh, the Sneads. I hadn’t thought about them. Their father Randal Mullins could have known about the incest, and he could have passed the information on to his lover—”

  “Folks were pretty clear on that point,” Dan cut in. “Randal and Laurie Snead were a one-night stand, if they got it on at all.”

  Carly sighed. “So you don’t think the Sneads are involved?”

  “Jim Snead has my nomination as the sniper. He knows the land better than any man alive and is a dead shot at any distance under five hundred yards. I just haven’t found a decent circumstantial thread to connect him to you.”

  “Me?” She sat up straight. “Me?”

  “Jim or his brother empties live rattraps at the house.”

  Carly remembered the rat in her room. A rat, according to Dan, that had still been warm. Dead and gory all over her pillow, but still warm.

  “Jim is the official Quintrell ranch predator control. He comes and goes from the place at will. He goes to town with the mail and brings back supplies. Sometimes Blaine does the errands. It depends on how straight Blaine is when he shows up wanting work.”

  “You’re saying it was Jim Snead.”

  “No,” Dan said, “I’m saying he has the skill and the opportunity. I just can’t find a reason, and without a motive the rest is just so much circumstantial blue smoke and mirrors.”

  “Besides, there are the Sandovals,” Carly said.

  “You lost me.”

  “Given the number of Sandovals dodging in and out of the Senator’s life, and Liza’s, it easily could have been a Sandoval who had knowledge of the incest and/or the substitute son, and therefore a reason to blackmail the Senator and/or the governor. God and the county sheriff know that some of the Sandovals have the means and mind-set required for crime.” Carly muttered unhappy words under her breath. “The list of possible circumstantial suspects has just exploded. No wonder that kind of evidence is viewed with suspicion.”

  Dan closed his eyes and tried to do what he’d been trained to do. Find patterns.

  Forget how close you are to the problem. Take your own advice.

  Pieces of the puzzle. That’s all. Not people. Just pieces.

  But he kept remembering how it had felt to have Carly go dead limp against him, kept remembering the endless time marching up and down that frozen road, kept realizing how close Carly had come to dying.

  CHIMAYO

  MONDAY EVENING

  64

  “IT’S RUBIN,” ANNE SAID, HOLDING JOSH’S CELL PHONE OUT TO HER HUSBAND.

  “He won’t take no for an answer.”

  “I was expecting it,” Josh said, taking the cell phone. “Hello, Mark.”

  “You sound like a frog.”

  “I told you I needed downtime. Now I’ve got a cold.”

  “Flu,” Rubin corrected instantly. “Only plebes get colds.”

  “What couldn’t wait until Wednesday?” Josh asked, then covered the phone and sneezed. “Sorry, what was that again?”

  “Dykstra,” Rubin said. “She’s on the air every ten minutes pumping the blood test thing. The networks have picked it up. Even the New York Times is looking interested.”

  “Slow news week.” He sneezed again.

  “Yeah. So let’s put our spin on this. I want you to do a sit-down with Jansen Worthy.”

  Josh looked surprised. “Going right to the top, aren’t you? He’s been anchoring a major news show longer than most people have been alive.”

  “It’s called clout and credibility. He has enough of both to bury Dykstra. So go on his show and tell the voters about your personal and recent losses, that sort of thing.”

  “You want me to play the sympathy card.”

  “Hell, yes. You’ve lost a father, a mother, and a beloved aunt—”

  Josh’s sneeze sounded more like a laugh of disbelief.

  “—and now this wannabe news bitch is doing the vulture thing with your life. Not satisfied with intruding on your grief, she’s demanding that you prove what everybody already knows, and she’s only doing it to hype up her flat ratings. She hasn’t even waited for the test results to begin baying after you. Why? Because there won’t be a story afterward. Now you know that elected officials are legitimate targets of interest to the media yada yada yada, but this is too much. If you can’t make the interview good for a huge sympathy vote, you’re no politician, and we both know you’re a hell of a pol.”

  “How soon?”

  “Tomorrow. Jansen is in Arizona on his ranch. He’s agreed to fly with you to the ranch for an interview. The satellite relay stuff will be in place by noon.”

  “The ranch? Why not the governor’s mansion?”

  “Because this is personal,” Rubin said patiently. “You’re a grieving son, yada yada yada. Wear a dark sport jacket, plain cowboy boots, and jeans. Pale blue shirt, not western, just a shirt. When you’re asked questions about your parents and aunt, pause a little, keep a stiff upper lip, and face the camera with manly emotional restraint. You know the drill. Any questions?”

  “Just one.”

  “What?”

  “I could have the blood results as soon as tomorrow. Is this charade really necessary?”

  “I get you a freebie on the evening news with a powerful, sympathetic national institution, and you ask me if it’s necessary?”

  The governor sighed. “Sorry. Must be the fever.”

  “Take something for it. This is too important to blow. If you have the DNA results before the interview, give them to Jansen and let him shove them up Dykstra’s ass. Then we can get on with something that matters, like winning votes.”

  Josh hung up and went to look for aspirin.

  TAOS

  TUESDAY 10:00 A.M.

  65

  “HOW’S IT GOING?” CARLY ASKED DAN.

  He didn’t look up from either of the computers he had in front of him. “I’m getting there.”

  “Where’s that?” She stood and stretched the kinks out of her back. She and Dan had been working for four hours already.

  “To the end of the charity
food chain.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “If it means what I think it does, somebody was hosing the Senator for about nine thousand a month since at least 1986. Eighteen thousand, really. Two separate payments, separate charities.”

  Carly pushed back from the most recent of the diagrams of people and circumstances and geography she was drawing. She felt like a spider on acid, spinning a crazed web.

  “Why two separate payments? Why not one?” she asked.

  “Federal law requires banks to report any transaction over ten thousand dollars. It’s a way to slow down money laundering.”

  Carly started to ask another question.

  “Gotcha,” Dan said, his voice oozing satisfaction.

  “What?” she asked, forgetting her own question.

  “Two of the automatic monthly charitable contributions the Senator made were to a laundry. Nine thousand bucks in the charity accounts, but somehow the amount never gets recorded. The amount minus transfer fee goes on to an account in Aruba. No name. No number. No way of tracing who’s getting fat. At least there’s not supposed to be, but there always is. Otherwise no one could collect on the Aruba end.”

  She started to ask another question, stopped, and waited while Dan’s fingers flew over the keyboard. There was no hesitation now. He was a hound on a hot scent, running flat out to overtake the prey. He typed in a final sequence of commands and sat back, waiting for the computer to run some names to ground.

  “Looks like you’ve done that before,” she said.

  “That’s what I do, chase black money. Charities are a particular favorite. It looks really tacky to investigate good intentions. Like asking your mother if she was a virgin when she got married.”

  Carly stayed with the part of the conversation that mattered to her. “Okay, you find black money. Then what happens?”

  “Depends on what the client requested. Usually there’s a finder’s fee, anywhere from twenty to forty percent of what’s recovered.”

  “Recovered?”

  “The ransom in a kidnap. Blackmail like this. Property stolen in such a way that the client has no recourse in law. Black money in a warlord’s or narcotraficante’s account. That sort of thing.”