Always Time To Die (34 page)

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 Winifred 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.”

“A chip off the rotten old block.”

Dan’s smile wasn’t pleasant. “Yeah. No wonder Mom was too frightened by the past to talk about it.”

“Do you think she knows?”

“I—” He stopped abruptly and pulled the buzzing, vibrating cell phone out of his pocket. The caller was from Genedyne. “Duran here,” he said into the phone. “What do you have for me?”

“Do you have a pen and paper,” Cheryl said, “or do you trust your memory?”

“Both.”

“All females share the same mtDNA, with a very minor variation in the fourth female. Perfectly normal. Nothing stays the same forever. And I went the whole nine yards on this one. The chance of these women not being from the same mtDNA line isn’t worth mentioning. Probably within the same three- or four-generation group.”

“Translation?” Dan asked, writing quickly on a tablet.

“Same grandmother or great-grandmother. As far as mtDNA goes, they could have been sisters. When you throw in the Y-DNA it turns out you have two sisters and two daughters.”

Dan wrote quickly.

“The male sample you sent me has precisely the same Y-DNA as two of the female samples. Ergo, they’re his daughter.”

Dan’s eyes narrowed. Not unexpected, but not nice. The Senator indeed had had a child with his daughter, and that child was Dan’s mother.

“Got it,” Dan said. “Is the second male sample done yet?”

“Just finished.”

His pulse kicked. “And?”

“Definite match for mtDNA on mother’s side and Y-DNA on father’s side.”

Dan couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “What? You’re certain?”

“It’s my job, sweetie. I’m certain. And considering the stature of the people involved, I’m
really
certain.”

“Well, shit.” He rubbed his eyes wearily. “Send me e-files of the tests on all subjects.”

“Can I take a coffee break first? I’ve been working fourteen straight hours.”

“Go ahead,” Dan said. “And thanks.”

He was talking to a dead phone. Cheryl had disconnected.

“You don’t look happy,” Carly said.

“I’m not. A bulldozer just drove through our beautiful circumstantial web and ripped it to atoms.”

“What?”

“Josh Quintrell is Sylvia’s son.”

TAOS
TUESDAY NOON

THE SOUND OF HELICOPTERS RATTLED THE SILENCE OF THE SNOWY PASTURES AND
penetrated through ancient adobe walls.

“World War III?” Carly asked sardonically.

Dan glanced away from his computer, where he was writing reports, and looked at her. She looked flat, exhausted, and altogether on the losing side of the war. He looked and felt the same way.
That will teach me to fall in love with a glittery chain of circumstantial evidence.

“Probably the governor and the press corps heading for the ranch for the ‘intimate’ interview they’ve been promoting every fifteen minutes for the last four hours.”

Carly grimaced. Dan’s TV was small, but loud. She had heard every single word of every single promo for Jansen Worthy’s exclusive interview with Governor Josh Quintrell at the home ranch, with hints of a breathtaking exclusive announcement, exclusively on this channel, exclusively for
you
.

“You’re a masochist,” she told Dan, gesturing at the TV.

“It helps to remind me of just how wrong circumstantial evidence can be. And it reinforces the roll of coincidence and randomness in everyday life.” He shook his head. “Gotta admit, it’s the first time my instinct for patterns has led me so far astray. Like to a whole different universe.”

“I was with you every step of the way.”

He smiled crookedly at her. “Best part of the trip.”

His cell phone rang. He looked at the window and switched to message text.

Open your e-mail, sweetie.

“Anything interesting?”

“I’m guessing it’s the Genedyne file of test results.”

“Print them, okay?”

“Now who’s the masochist?” he asked.

“Except for your mother’s results, they’re part of the history Winifred paid for.”

Dan opened his e-mail and started printing stuff that looked like nothing he’d seen before. “If you can understand this, you can be a computer programmer.”

“I’ll leave that to you.” She collected the tests results, labeled each with the name of the person.

Carly spread the charts out on the bed. The Senator and Josh shared the same Y-DNA to the limit of testing ability. He was the Senator’s son. She pulled out the mtDNA for Sylvia and Josh, compared them, and sighed. A very slight variation in haplotype number, the kind of subtle, meaningless mutation that happened in the DNA of a germ cell.

“Well, damn,” she muttered.

“Hoping Cheryl was wrong?” Dan asked.

“Yes.”

“She wasn’t.”

Carly didn’t bother to answer. She lined up Sylvia’s and Winifred’s results and checked the haplotype number. Exactly the same. The mutation in the mtDNA had occurred in Sylvia’s germ cell and was passed to her son, where it stopped. Unless it was also passed on to her daughter, Liza…

After shifting papers quickly, Carly had Liza and Sylvia together. Their haplotype sequence was precisely the same.

“Okay,” Carly muttered. “One got it and one didn’t, which means the mutation was limited to one egg. So Diana won’t have it.”

Carly put the last chart in place and looked at it.

And looked again.

Then she started twisting a strand of hair around her finger.

“What is it?” Dan asked.

She shifted some of the sheets around without answering. Then she picked up a yellow marking pen and began highlighting parts of each chart.

“Carly?”

“The haplotypes—”

“English, please,” he cut in.

She looked up. “That’s going to be tough. Like putting a computer program into English.”

“Give it a try.”

“Y-DNA, mtDNA, any DNA is just a series of sequences of compounds. The makeup and order of those compounds determines if you get a man, a woman, an elephant, or a guppy.”

“Gotcha.”

“Apparently there are a lot of nonsense sequences in germ cell DNA, sequences that don’t appear to do anything to the final organism. Some of those nonsense sequences are called haplotypes. Every so often a mutation will occur when a sequence is being reproduced and you’ll have two identical sequences where before you just had one. And if my genetics professor could hear me now, he’d be tearing out his hair with all the stuff I’m not mentioning.”

“Keep skimming the surface,” Dan said, smiling.

Carly blew out a frustrated breath. “The change in the sequence is passed along to the next generation. To way oversimplify, you have a haplotype 5 where you had a haplotype 4, that is, five repeats of a specific sequence instead of four, but nothing material changes in the organism that is born. It’s a mutation that doesn’t matter to anyone but geneticists. Still with me?”

“Just don’t give me a pop quiz.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Hey, you’re the one who asked me to explain. I’m doing my best.”

“I’m listening, Carolina May.”

She looked at his intent, intensely green eyes and believed him. “The numbers going down the right-hand column on each page of the sheets are various mtDNA haplotype sequences. Winifred’s and Sylvia’s and Liza’s are exactly the same through all haplotype sequences. The Senator’s is very different, of course. He got his mtDNA from his own mother. Josh got his from Sylvia. See this number? Then this one?”

Dan leaned down to look at a highlighted number. “It’s not the same.”

“Right. All the other haplotype sequences are a dead match except for that one, which means there was a mutation in Sylvia’s germ cell that was passed on to her son, Josh.”

“What about Liza?”

“Nope. But your mother has the same mutation.”

Dan looked at the sheets, absorbing the implications of the highlighted numbers. “Is that possible?”

“Anything’s possible. But this one is about as
probable
as two people having identical fingerprints.”

“Not worth betting on.”

“Not with my money.”

“What do you need to sort this out?”

“I’d like to see if you have the same mutation.”

“No problem.” He punched up a familiar number on the cell phone. “Cheryl? Yeah, it all came through perfectly. Now we need mine for comparison.” He winced at whatever she said. “Two pounds of really fine dark chocolate? A bottle of two-hundred-dollar champagne? Both. Right.” He punched out.

“Bribery?” Carly asked, smiling.

“Grease makes the wheels go round.”

“I’ll get one of the test kits for you.”

“No need.” He went to his computer. “My genetic profile is already on record with the lab.”

“Really? Why?”

“To make double-damn sure any remains that are found in some backwater are really mine.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“So far, so good. Gotta watch those climbing accidents, though.” Dan’s e-mail pinged. He opened the file and printed it. “Here you go. Without your highlighting it all looks like the same old same old to me.”

Carly grabbed the paper and looked at it. And looked again. She checked the date on the file. It had been created three years ago.

“That’s because it is,” she said, frowning.

“What?”

“The same old same old.” Carly put Dan’s genetic profile down next to Josh’s.

They were identical.