Always Time to Die

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Is that legal?”

  “Mostly.”

  “And when it isn’t?”

  “It isn’t.” Dan looked away from the line on the screen that showed how close the program was to being fully executed. “That a problem?”

  “Um…”

  He smiled. “I’m not talking civil penalties if I’m caught, Carolina May.”

  “You’re talking ‘climbing accidents’?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She blew out a breath. “You go, um, climbing very often?”

  “This was the first time since I quit working for Uncle Sam. Somebody else was supposed to make the physical connection, but her baby came a month early so I pinch-hit for her.”

  Carly opened her mouth. Closed it. “Does that happen often?”

  “Early babies?”

  “Pinch-hitting.”

  “No.”

  “Thank you, God.”

  Dan pulled her down onto his lap. “Does that mean you’re not going to run screaming because I don’t have a regular nine-to-five gig?”

  She combed her fingers through his thick, dark hair. “Do I look like I’m running and screaming?”

  His computer made an I’m finished sound.

  Both of them looked at the screen.

  “Who is this Pedro Moreno who has over two million bucks in a numbered account on Aruba?” Carly asked.

  “Pete Moore. His real name, by the way. He just anglicized it to make life easier.”

  “Nine thousand a month?” Carly asked, remembering what Dan had said.

  “Two payments of nine thousand each.”

  “That’s not their wages, is it, Pete and Melissa?”

  “According to the ranch records, Pete was paid three thousand a month and change. Melissa made about a thousand a month less.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Dan shrugged. “Somehow the contents of the ranch computer ended up on my hard drive, and you never heard me say that.”

  “You’re scary.”

  “Actually, a half-smart twelve-year-old could have hacked into the ranch computer. What’s interesting is that at least one other charity fed ‘contributions’ into this same account. Minus three percent, of course.”

  “Three percent?”

  “Transaction fee,” Dan said dryly. “Once the amounts get into the high eight figures, the fee goes down. By the time you get to a billion, the transaction fee is usually one percent or even less.”

  She did the math and stared at him. “That’s ten million dollars just to move money electronically from one place to the next,” she said. “A little steep, don’t you think?”

  “Not if you have a dirty billion and get a clean nine hundred and ninety million back. Clean money that you’re happy to pay taxes on and invest in legitimate enterprises because otherwise you’d have to hide all of it—in cash. At any given moment, there are trillions of black dollars zipping around the world, and every e-transaction takes a little bite of the overall pie.”

  “My head hurts.”

  “So think about what Pete Moore had on the Senator and/or the governor that would be worth eighteen thou a month to keep quiet.”

  “The governor, too?”

  “According to the records, Josh had—and exercised—power of attorney for the Senator for the past four years. Unless the governor just let Pete do everything on the ranch bookkeeping, the governor had to know that about two hundred thousand bucks a year was going to questionable charities, so questionable that the Senator didn’t even try to deduct them from his income tax payments.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You want to see the tax returns?” Dan asked, his fingers poised over the keyboard.

  “No. I don’t even want to know you have them.”

  “Have what?”

  “Ha ha.” She twisted hair around her index finger. “So we’re back where we started. Something that affected both father and son.”

  “At least we have a good reason for someone to kill Pete and Melissa. Blackmailers aren’t real popular with their victims.”

  “But why kill the Moores now?” Carly asked. “Why not years ago, after Josh got the power of attorney? He must have known about the blackmail, or at least guessed that something was rotten in Denmark.”

  “Having power of attorney isn’t the same as exercising it. He could have had a live-and-let-live attitude toward the Senator’s expenses. It was, after all, the old man’s money,” Dan said. “Did you have any luck eliminating potential bastards who could have swapped places with the real Josh in Vietnam?”

  “It sounds so bizarre when you say it right out. You only have to look at Josh to know he’s the Senator’s son.”

  “Yeah, but which son?”

  “Too bad Melissa’s dead. I’d ask her,” Carly muttered.

  “That reminds me,” Dan said.

  “What?”

  “Somehow a file full of Melissa’s family mementos found its way onto my hard drive.”

  “I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Print it out.”

  Smiling, Dan set up the printer, checked the paper, and went to work. As the computer spit out the first paper, Carly grabbed it and went to work.

  “Both sides,” Dan said.

  “What?”

  “I’m printing them the way I found them. A lot of the stuff had material on the back.”

  Carly nodded and went back to reading while the printer spit out paper at frightening speed.

  Dan set up the last part of the file and turned to her. “What do you have?” he asked.

  “A letter. The handwriting is…I’m getting used to it, okay?”

  “What’s the date?”

  “November. Nineteen eighty-five.” She flipped the paper over and saw the signature. “Betty Schaffer.”

  He connected the genealogical dots in his mind. “Susan Mullins’s daughter by her husband, Doug Smith. Betty would have been closing in on forty when she wrote that. Wait, isn’t that the year she killed herself?”

  Carly didn’t answer. She was concentrating on making sense of the jumbled, irregular handwriting.

  Dan went to Carly’s computer, searched old news files, and found the brief death notice in the obits. Betty Schaffer, née Smith, daughter of Susan Smith, née Mullins, had died on Christmas Eve, 1985. Recently divorced by husband. Reading between the lines, Betty had faced the family holiday with a load of booze, pills, and self-pity. Either she miscalculated the doses or she wanted out of her life. Whatever, she died. Survived by one daughter, Melissa Moore, née Schaffer. At the time of death, Betty had been living on welfare in a room on the wrong side of town. No religious services mentioned.

  “Is that a suicide note?” Dan asked Carly.

  “No. Betty’s crowing to her daughter about the new ‘source’ she has. Fifteen thousand bucks. And there’s more, a lot more. Betty is sending the key to Melissa for safekeeping.”

  Dan’s eyebrows raised. He’d photographed the documents but he hadn’t tried to read them. He had been in too much of a hurry to get out of the Moores’ apartment before Carly caught him where he wasn’t supposed to be.

  “Do the blackmail payments go back that far?” Carly asked.

  “Not quite. First one—at least in the account I cracked—was in ’86. She died in ’85. A few days after she put the bite on her ‘source’ for fifteen grand.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Carly asked.

  “Blackmail can be a dangerous game. I’m betting she was helped into suicide. Backtracking Josh’s whereabouts at the time is a job I’ll leave for someone else.”

  Carly picked up the next sheet.

  Dan leaned past her, grabbed the bottom half of the print pile, and started reading. When he was finished, he swapped for the sheets Carly was reading.

  Other than a few disbelieving sounds from Carly, it was quiet.

  Dan wasn’t shocked. He’d spent quite a few years studying the underbelly of humani
ty. Without a word he started arranging the photos and documents in rough chronological order.

  “I…” Carly cleared her throat. “Am I crazy or is there a vile kind of logic in these documents?”

  “You’re not crazy.”

  “Never again will I ask how people’s lives get so screwed up.” She blew out a breath and shook her head.

  “Nobody starts out to end up the way they do.”

  “Just pieces of a puzzle, right?” she asked.

  “Right. Let’s begin with the piece called Susan Mullins,” Dan said neutrally. He picked up one of the letters they had both read, but didn’t look at it. “In 1941 Susan gave birth to Randal Mullins, called Randy, the Senator’s bastard. The Senator had been shagging her, thinking she was of legal age. She wasn’t. He dumped her when he found out, but kept her in drugs so she didn’t care too much one way or the other.”

  “Lovely man.”

  “A real prince. Six years later she gets married. The guy is a drunk and an abuser. She sticks anyway. Her bastard by the Senator starts running away when he’s seven, and usually ends up with Angus Snead.” Dan paused, frowned. “Somehow, by the way Jim talked about the past, I always assumed Randy was his older cousin.”

  “Given the intimacy of the local gene pool, maybe he was. Wait a minute, let me refresh my memory.” Carly flipped through the notebook she’d made and found the section marked Randal Mullins. “Randy grew up wild, hooky and sealed juvie record, hunting and trapping, poaching, public drunkenness, bar brawling, signed up for Vietnam, was a forward scout, several medals, killed in ambush in 1968.”

  “The same year that Josh Quintrell was injured,” Dan said.

  “Right. Over to you.”

  Dan looked back at the paper he was holding. “This is dated 1968. It’s chaotic—obviously Susan was loaded when she wrote it—but the bottom line is that she truly believed she’d seen her son Randy in Taos.”

  “After he was dead?”

  “Yes. What really knocked her sideways was when she approached him, looked him in the eyes, and started crying with happiness, he told her she was mistaken. Like she wouldn’t recognize her own son. She started yelling and he just shook his head, said he was sorry for her loss, and walked away. It freaked her out.”

  “Understandable. And,” Carly added, “it’s likely that she shared her freaky experience with her good friend and fellow sex worker, Liza Quintrell, who apparently said something to her daughter, your mother.”

  “Likely, but not yet proved for a court of law.”

  “I know. Just one more strand of the circumstantial web.”

  Dan smiled. “You’re spinning a beaut. Now we go back and check the geography and make sure no one was out of town when we have them in town, and vice versa.”

  “I understood that. Does that make me certifiable?”

  “No, what makes you certifiable is that you’re enjoying this as much as I am, even though we both know that, rationally, there’s a very good chance that a hype and booze hound might indeed mistake a blue-eyed half brother for a blue-eyed son who started making himself scarce when he was seven.”

  “I followed that, too. Now I’m worried.” She smiled at him. “As long as I keep thinking of this as a game, it’s fun. When I think of it as real…”

  “Don’t think of it that way,” Dan said instantly. “Right now, it is a game. If we get to the point of going to the law, then it’s not a game. We’re not there yet. We might never be.”

  “A game. Right.” She entered the date of the letter on the list she was keeping. There were other entries for the year. “That was the year Liza died. And Susan.”

  “No date on the letter itself?” Dan asked, leaning forward.

  “No, just our assumption that she wrote the letter the same year Josh came back from Vietnam, where her son died. Maybe there’s internal evidence in the letter itself.” Frowning, Carly read the sprawling, jumbled lines again.

  “Anything?”

  “No. Wait. She mentions sneaking a picture of him the next day after he walked off.”

  Dan dived for the papers and went through them in a rush. “Baby pictures, kiddie pictures, teen pictures in front of various dead animals—really nice buck by the way—standard army photo, and one in town of a man feeding a parking meter.”

  Carly fished a magnifying glass out of her hip pocket and studied the image. “Same chin.”

  “What?”

  “Same chin as Josh has. Same chin as the happy teenager standing next to the buck. I’d have to have more pictures to be certain—class books and such, but it looks like a younger Josh to me.”

  Dan flipped the piece of paper over. “August third, ’68.”

  Carly swallowed. Hard. “She died two days later, Dan. So did Liza.”

  “And another sex worker. Collateral damage, no doubt.” His voice was neutral but his eyes were bleak.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “It’s a military term for various things that get between you and your mission target.”

  Carly winced. “Things like people?”

  “It happens.” His eyes narrowed. The pattern was becoming clear, and it was uglier than most. “Where’s the article on the triple murder?”

  Wordlessly, she called up the article on the computer and turned the screen toward him.

  “Crazed hippie, huh?” Dan said, reading through it again. “Slicing up whores in the name of God. I wonder if the three were killed together or if he killed them in various places and dragged them to the same scene.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Assume you’re the impostor. Assume you were recognized. You kill that witness and anyone else the witness probably would have talked to. But you don’t want it to appear planned, because that might make the cops curious, so you whack someone else and throw them into the mix.”

  Carly took a sharp breath.

  “Then you find a big hippie who’s too stoned to care, stuff some angel dust under his tongue, roll him around on the bodies, hand him the bloody knife, and disappear.” From the tone of Dan’s voice, he could have been reading out stops on a bus schedule. “By the time the PCP kicks in and the poor stoner races out into the night with the knife, he’s way too far gone to be rational. Cops try to cuff him, he goes ballistic, cops pump seven bullets in him, and it’s over. Too bad, how sad, shit happens. Case closed.”

  “This isn’t feeling like a game anymore.” Carly rubbed her arms where goose bumps had formed. “We’re talking about a man who killed his own mother.”

  “Say the word and you’re out of here.”

  She looked at Dan’s level green eyes and knew he wanted her in a safe place. She wanted him there with her. “Will you go with me and leave this to the cops?”

  “We don’t have any proof that would make the cops want to take on the governor of New Mexico and a presidential contender. Everyone—everyone—who could prove anything is conveniently dead.”

  “Except Josh Quintrell. Or Randy. Or whoever the hell he is.”

  “Somehow, I don’t see him lining up at the confessional,” Dan said.

  “So you’re staying until we have something that will make the cops listen.”

  Dan nodded.

  “So am I.” She rubbed her arms again. “I don’t like it, but I can’t just blithely run off and leave a murderer sitting fat and happy. Especially one who’s running for president.”

  Dan pulled her onto his lap and rubbed his cheek against her hair. “That’s one of the things I love about you, Carolina May, even though it can drive me crazy from time to time. You don’t expect somebody with a badge and a gun to do all the work of civilizing the human beast.”

  “It’s one of the things I love about you, too, even though I suspect it will drive me crazy from time to time.” Climbing accidents, for example. “So what do we need to get the cops’ attention?”

  “Courtroom proof of the identity swap.”

  “MtDNA. That’s why Win
ifred sicced Dykstra on the governor, to force him to be tested.”

  “Winifred didn’t live at the ranch or even visit very often until after Sylvia had her accident. How would she know her nephew wasn’t completely her nephew?”

  Carly frowned. “Why else would she hate the governor so much? Why else would she have acted like the Castillo/Quintrell line ended with Sylvia? Why else was she working backward rather than forward with the Castillo family genealogical history?”

  “I agree, but I don’t see how we can prove it now. If Winifred could have proved it earlier, she would have. That’s what matters. Proof. Courtroom variety.”

  “She didn’t know about mtDNA until I came on the scene,” Carly said unhappily.

  “Don’t go blaming yourself. You’re the only innocent one around here.”

  Dan reached past Carly for more of the memento file. After a sigh, she picked up more papers. While both of them read, the fire crackled in the silence. When they were finished, she leaned back against his chest.

  “I think summaries are more in your line of work than mine,” she said.

  “Betty Smith Schaffer died shortly after a blackmail attempt that might or might not have been successful,” Dan said. “Her death was written off as suicide. She passed on the blackmail material to her daughter, Melissa, who had recently married an accountant who knew how to set up a laundry so the blackmail couldn’t be traced back to them. They fleeced the Senator for almost twenty years to the tune of two hundred thousand a year, more or less.”

  “Nice retirement money.”

  “If you invest it wisely,” Dan said dryly. “Interesting thing is, if this is the ‘proof’ of role-swapping Melissa had, it wouldn’t have held up in court. Yet the Senator paid anyway.”

  “Because he didn’t want Josh’s identity to be questioned.”

  “What about military records?” Carly asked.

  “If I’d been in the Senator’s shoes, I’d have asked for all the military records of my brave Taos County boys, switched some pertinent dental, blood, and fingerprint records, and built a monument to the dead soldiers.”

  “Could the Senator get away with that?”

  “Sure, as long as nobody looked at the records too closely. And why would they? People see what they expect to see. Nobody expected the Senator’s son to be anything but what he said he was.”