Always Time To Die (24 page)

TAOS
FRIDAY NOON

CARLY STRETCHED
,
THEN BENT OVER THE MICROFILM READER AND WENT BACK TO
work on the articles about the death of Isobel Castillo Quintrell in 1880, when she was only thirty. Reading between the lines, Isobel had been worn out by marrying at fifteen, then bearing three live children, plus ten premature or stillborn babies in the next fifteen years.

“They had methods of birth control then,” Carly murmured into her recorder. “It must have been obvious what all the pregnancies were costing her. Why didn’t…cancel that. She was a deeply religious Catholic wife.”

Carly read quickly, skimming for the facts she would need to recreate the funeral in print. “‘Predeceased by only sister, Juana de Castillo y Castillo, tragically lost during the birth of her first child in 1872.’ Editorial comment: the Castillo sisters had a hard time with labor and pregnancy; maybe their parents married one too many cousins. Or maybe they married and started getting pregnant too early. Interesting. Wonder if there are any studies about the correlation between very young brides and wives dying very young.”

Her eyes searched the text, looking for names of people attending the funeral. There weren’t any unfamiliar names, so she went to the next item on her list and read, talking occasionally into her recorder. For the Castillo book, she would include reproductions of newspaper articles and images; she was already compiling a list for Dan to transfer. What she needed now was some sense of how close the children of the Castillo sisters had been.

After two hours of reading, it was clear that major events—funerals, marriages, baptisms, Quinceaneras—were shared by first cousins. The generation after that there was more separation. They gathered for some funerals, but little else. The Quintrells became the backbone of the emergent gringo political system. The Castillo/Simmons/Sandovals stayed a fixture within the hispano community, making up a secondary, nearly parallel government. Instead of taxes, there was tribute. Instead of cattle, there was smuggling. Instead of English, there was Spanish and/or Indian languages.

And through both cultures ran the same blood, the same genes, the same hopes and disappointments and joys.

A feeling of excitement fizzed in Carly. She forgot the careful list she’d made and simply enjoyed the tapestry of family and New Mexico history that was condensing in her mind. This was what she loved about her job, the moment when the chaos of facts and questions stopped whirling around and settled into a pattern of family generations played out against a timeless land and a constantly changing culture. This was what she wanted to give to future generations of Quintrells and Castillos, an understanding that each person was part of a chain stretching back across the centuries and reaching out to the coming centuries. This was—

The bang of the cellar door startled Carly out of her thoughts.

“You’re back early,” she said without looking up from the reader. “Or is it Gus come to babysit me again?”

“Keep guessing.”

Carly spun around and saw Sheriff Montoya standing six feet away.

He didn’t look happy to be there.

She felt the same.

“Good morning,” she said coolly. “Or is it afternoon?”

“Doesn’t much matter. I understand you had some trouble out at the Quintrell ranch yesterday.”

Well, that’s certainly blunt.
“Trouble?” She shrugged. “Something didn’t agree with me. I was sick.”

“What about your Siamese twin, Duran?”

“He threw up, too.” She didn’t say any more. She didn’t like the feeling of being grilled like a criminal about something she hadn’t asked for and nearly hadn’t survived.

The sheriff took off his hat and smacked it against his thigh. Snow sifted to the floor.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked curtly.

“Since when do citizens report hurling to the local cops?”

“You can’t be as stupid as you sound, Ms. May.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Dan said from the stairway. “There’s a big dose of stupid going around Taos right now.”

Montoya stiffened, then turned around to confront Dan. “You must have caught a double dose of it. What the hell were you doing with Armando Sandoval?”

Dan whistled softly. “Quite the grapevine you have, Sheriff. Or did Armando tell you all by himself?”

The sheriff didn’t answer.

Dan hadn’t expected him to.

“Well?” the sheriff asked.

For the first time in years, Dan wished he had federal credentials again. A gold FBI shield was something the sheriff could understand. But all Dan had these days was a business card that read
ST
.
KILDA CONSULTING
. Below that was a toll-free telephone number.

All things considered, Dan doubted that the sheriff was knowledgeable enough about the real world to be impressed by the card.

“Nobody told me you were working on my turf,” the sheriff said. “It purely pisses me off how arrogant you federal boys can be.”

Federal boys?
Carly’s eyebrows went up and her mouth stayed shut.

“Nobody told you because I’m not working for the Feds anymore,” Dan said.

“Then why were you talking to Sandoval?”

“Why do you care?”

“Listen here—”

“No,” Dan cut in. “You listen. Until Armando Sandoval is proved in court to be a
narcotraficante
and a murderer, he’s a citizen in good standing. What we have to say to each other is none of your business.”

The sheriff wanted to argue, but he had the losing side and he knew it. “You ever think I might be able to help?”

“Not after the first round of complaints we filed and you forgot,” Carly said behind him.

A dull red showed on the sheriff’s cheekbones beneath his toast brown skin. “I have enough problems with rich tourists,” he muttered, not taking his eyes from Dan. “I don’t need whining from a homeboy who sticks his nose in the wrong places and gets smacked for it.”

“Carly isn’t a homeboy. She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

Sheriff Montoya looked over his shoulder at her. “Sounds like somebody wants you to leave.”

“Sounds like,” she drawled. “Too bad this is a free country. I don’t feel like leaving.”

The sheriff’s dark eyes narrowed. “Ms. May, most times I’m lucky to have one deputy for every hundred square miles. That’s how free this country is.”

“Is that a threat?” she asked.

“It’s a fact. That’s why I don’t have any patience with troublemakers, and there’s trouble written all over both of you.”

“What? Armando Sandoval isn’t trouble?” Carly asked in disbelief.

“Armando Sandoval is the devil the sheriff knows,” Dan said. “If it wasn’t for Armando, there would be
narcotraficantes
killing each other until the next
jefe chingon
rose to the top of the cesspool and peace returned. With Armando in place, the sheriff knows there won’t be any Taos County voters caught in the crossfire of a drug war, which means the citizens are happy, which means the sheriff is real likely to hang on to his job. It’s win-win-win, except for the occasional outsider getting ground up between the gears of politics as usual.”

Carly grimaced, certain that she was the “occasional outsider” who was caught in the meat grinder.

“You’re a lot smarter than you used to be,” the sheriff said calmly to Dan.

Dan waited.

“Now show me how smart,” the sheriff said. “Take the little lady and go on a nice long vacation in the Bahamas.”

“Wait just a—” Carly began.

“I don’t have enough deputies to protect you if you stay here,” the sheriff said, pinning her with a black glance. “By the time I get to the bottom of the rats and slashed tires and bad food, you could be badly hurt. Or dead.”

TAOS
EARLY FRIDAY AFTERNOON

CARLY PUSHED AGAINST THE PLYWOOD
,
HOLDING IT IN PLACE WHILE DAN HAMMERED
nails in. The result was ugly, but kept the wind out of the little house. And right now, the wind was blowing hard enough to bring tears to her eyes.

“I still think—” Dan began.

“No,” she cut in loudly. “Not unless you have something new to say.”

“Shit.”

“That’s not new.”

He said something in Portuguese.

“Same word, different language,” Carly said.

He drove the rest of the nails in silence, letting the crack of steel on steel express his frustration. The longer he thought about Carly’s position, the less he liked it. He didn’t need a sixth sense to know that the whole situation was spiraling out of control.

How can anything so sweet and soft-looking be so bloody stubborn?

Carly winced as the final hammer blow drove the nail in so far the hammer left a dent in the plywood. “Feel better now?”

He shot her a jade green glance. Then the corner of his mouth turned up. “Yeah.”

She let out a long breath of relief and smiled at him. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Not hammering on me until I gave up.”

“Would it have worked?”

Her smile faded. “I’m scared, Dan.”

He tucked the hammer into the back of his jeans and pulled her close. “That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said in hours.” Before she could argue, he kissed her until she forgot everything, even fear. Slowly he lifted his mouth and leaned his forehead against hers. “We’ll get through this. There might be some mutual yelling from time to time, but I respect your courage too much to want to hammer it out of you. Okay?”

His eyes were a vivid green blur to her, whether from her tears or being so close she couldn’t focus, she didn’t know and didn’t care. “Okay. But I don’t feel real brave right now. I keep thinking about being alone on that ranch road, no one to pull me back and make me walk and…”

“I keep thinking about it, too. I don’t want to lose you, Carolina May. I spent too long wondering if I’d ever find someone like you.”

Her stomach growled as she kissed him. “You see what you do to me,” she said.

“Starve you?”

“Make me feel safe enough to be hungry.”

He smiled slowly and took her hand. “C’mon. I’ve got chili left. I’ll heat it while you check out more of those so-called might-be senatorial offspring.”

He opened the front door and nudged Carly into the relative warmth of the house.

“The problem is that a lot of those offspring are dead,” Carly said, frowning, “others have moved away, and all I have to go on is community speculation. The only way to be certain if they’re the Senator’s is DNA testing, and for that to be effective, we have to have a DNA profile of the Senator first. Short of exhuming him, there’s no way to get a sample for testing. Unless he froze his sperm for the ages, or something like that.”

“I’m sure if he had, it would have been front-page news in town.” The door closed behind Dan, shutting out the wind. “As for exhumation to take a tissue sample, I don’t see that happening short of a court order, and I don’t see us getting a court order.”

“Not unless the governor agrees, and I figure that will be about the time they hold the Summer Olympics in Siberia. Josh Quintrell really doesn’t like Winifred’s project.”

“Ya think?” Dan asked sardonically. He lit a match, turned on a burner on the stove, and started heating chili.

“So why keep on pursuing the maybe offspring?” Carly asked. “It’s a waste of time. We can’t prove anything more than rumor and innuendo, and that’s not the sort of thing I feel happy about putting in a family history.”

“Why pursue the offspring? Because Winifred told you to and she’s paying the bills?”

Carly smiled wryly. “Okay. But it doesn’t get us any closer to why somebody wants me to leave.”

“If we assume that someone doesn’t want the history done—”

“Good assumption.”

“—then getting the history done will get us closer to whoever is behind scaring you,” Dan finished.

It will also get Carly the hell out of Taos.

But he kept that to himself because she didn’t want to hear it.

Carly’s expression said that she wasn’t impressed with her assignment. With a shrug, she got a three-ring binder from one of her boxes in the living room and sat at the little card table that served as a dining table.

“Okay,” she said, flipping the binder open. “Here’s what I have so far. Let me know if any of the names tickle your fancy. Jesús Mendoza—son of Carlota Mendoza, a maid at the Quintrell ranch—went into the army, went to war, got decorated, married a San Diego woman, had four kids, died fifteen years ago. None of the kids have any connection to Taos or the Quintrells that I’ve been able to discover.”

Dan wrapped some tortillas in tinfoil and tucked them in the oven.

“María Elena Sandoval, daughter of one of the many Sandovals running through New Mexico in general and the Quintrell ranch in particular. Cousin lovers every one of them.”

He snickered.

“María Elena Sandoval finally married a gringo and moved to Colorado. Two children. No particular contact with New Mexico. She’s dead, the children have married and had children of their own. One lives in Florida. One in California.”

Dan tested the chili, stirred, and listened to the litany of people who were either old as dirt or already dead. Some hadn’t left children. Most had. None of their names made him pause.

“Randal Mullins. His mother was Susan Mullins, who worked at the ranch.”

Dan frowned and stirred chili. “Mullins. Susan’s son.”

Carly checked. “Yes.”

“I’ve run across his name before. Isn’t he on the Senator’s monument to the local dead in Vietnam?”

Carly flipped to the back of the binder, where she had printouts of important documents. The newspaper article that had listed the dead soldiers was one of them. She ran her finger down the column of names.

“Good catch,” she said after a moment. “Randal Mullins. Died in 1968. Four years after the Senator’s first son died. Wonder if they knew each other?”

“It’s possible,” Dan said slowly. “A lot of guys made it a point to get to know other soldiers who were from their own home areas. Made them feel less lonely. But since Mullins and A.J. are both dead, having them know each other won’t do us much good.”

“Do you suppose the governor knew about Mullins, a man who was possibly his half brother?”

“Doubt it. The governor didn’t spend much time here as a kid, so he wouldn’t have heard the gossip. I think he was in Vietnam when Mullins died. I’ll have to check.”

Carly sighed. “Right. Anyway, Randal never married, so we can’t ask his children what they remember, if anything, of their father’s childhood or their grandmother’s likelihood of having a Quintrell child.”

“Randal could have had children without a marriage license.”

“Bastards having bastards,” she muttered.

He smiled slightly.

She made a mark by Randal’s name. “How would we go about chasing his offspring?”

“He had a half sister, Betty. Mom went to school with her.”

“Your mother mentioned her?”

“Fat chance.” Dan spooned chili into a bowl. “There’s a photo somewhere in the newspaper archive of two pretty grammar school kids dancing around a Maypole. Mom was one of the kids. Betty was another.”

“Is Betty or her mother still alive?”

“Susan Mullins was killed along with my grandmother in 1968. Another sex worker was killed at the same time. Some guy wired on angel dust.”

“So Susan knew your grandmother?”

Dan shrugged. “They worked the same alleys, if that’s what you mean.”

Carly winced. “What about Betty?”

“She died twenty years ago, after her husband divorced her. Suicide. She worked at the Quintrell ranch until the booze and downers got to her. I think you have the article about it on your computer or in the printouts.”

“I do?”

“Under the single or double hits for the name Quintrell. How hot do you like your chili?”

“Are we talking temperature or spice?” she asked, flipping through a list of articles she’d printed out.

“Temp,” he said.

“Anything above freezing.”

He smiled, dished a bowl of chili for her, stuck a spoon in, and set everything in front of her on the card table. “Tortillas?”

“Please,” she said absently, reaching for her computer. She booted it up and began to eat while the machine tested all systems, reassuring the silicon brain that everything was in working order.

Dan sat down kitty-corner from her, uncovered the tortillas, and flopped one over her bowl of chili. She rolled the tortilla, scooped chili, and kept on eating, waiting for her computer to be fully functional. Then she did a search of the Quintrell database for an article that mentioned the Quintrell name along with the name Betty.

“Was Mullins Betty’s last name?” Carly asked.

“No. It was something common. Smith or Jones or Johnson, something like that.”

“How do you know all this stuff? And don’t tell me you grew up here. A lot of people did and they don’t know squat about the local begats.”

Dan chewed, swallowed chili, and swallowed again. “I was an odd kid. People interested me. Not just in the here and now, but what they were when they were young, and their parents, and grandparents.” He shrugged. “Maybe it came from not knowing who my grandfather was. Maybe I was just nosy. I spent a lot of time checking out old school year-books, working in the newspaper archives, trying to computerize everything so all I had to do was hit a button and watch the patterns emerge.”

“Patterns?”

“Who was named, who wasn’t, who stood next to the Quintrells in the photos, who didn’t, who went to weddings and funerals and baptisms and political rallies.” He shrugged. “All kinds of things. Like I said. Nosy.”

“Or curious about all the things your mother refused to talk about.”

“That too.”

“So what did you learn?”

“More about local marriages, births, divorces, and drunks than I should have,” he said dryly. “Mom saw me drawing up these elaborate relationship charts featuring people on the Quintrell ranch and their cross-connections with the local community—it was for my senior high school project. Man, did the caca fly. She got furious and said that the past was dead and buried and should stay that way.”

Carly’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. “Did you argue with her?”

“No, I asked her if it was true that the Senator was my great-grandfather.”

Carly swallowed hard. “What did she say?”

“She told me if I ever mentioned that name again in her home, I could start packing.”

“Yikers.”

“Yeah. So I shifted the topic of my senior project to protecting newspaper archives through specially designed computer programs. Then I started applying to every out-of-state college that might have me. I’d had a gutful of this place.”

“Where’d you end up?” Carly asked.

“Georgetown. Did I mention I was a geek with high grades who swam a mean backstroke and won various shooting contests? Georgetown gave me a full scholarship.”

“Athletic?”

“Nope. They wanted my brain, not my body.”

She smiled to herself. “They didn’t know what they were missing.”

His thumb skimmed her jawline. “Neither did I. Wait, it was Smith.”

“What?”

“Betty Smith, then she married someone—Shilling or Shafter or something like that. Melissa is their kid.”

“Melissa Moore?”

He nodded and took a big bite of tortilla.

“So Melissa could tell us about her mother who was half sister to Randy Mullins who might have been the Senator’s bastard?” Carly asked.

Dan swallowed tortilla. “Maybe. If she knows anything and wants to talk.”

“I’m sure Winifred will help with that.”

“If she’s well enough to care. What about the rest of those names, the maybe-bastards?”

“I hate that label.”

“What?”

“Bastard. Like it’s the kid’s fault.”

“The only bastards I care about are self-made.” He tugged at a stray piece of her hair, the one she kept twisting around her finger when she was fretting. “Illegitimate child takes too long to say and love child is the kind of lie that turns my stomach. My mother wasn’t any man’s
love
child.”

The edge to Dan’s voice reminded Carly that small towns had long memories and short forgiveness of personal choices. Diana had suffered for being born outside of marriage. Diana’s son accepted that, but he didn’t have to like it.

Carly turned back to her list of names of children perhaps conceived and certainly forgotten by Andrew Jackson Quintrell III, known to most as the Senator and to his sister-in-law as a philandering son of a bitch. The more Carly knew about him, the more she agreed with Winifred.

“Sharon Miller,” Carly said.

Dan shook his head. “No bells on that one.”

“She was the daughter of the Senator’s social secretary, born two years after he retired to Taos in 1977.”

“What happened to her?”

“Her mother took her and left Taos when she was a year old. No contact with the Quintrells after that, at least not that I’ve found in the records. Next one is Christopher Smith. Son of the replacement social secretary. She was married, by the way, so it’s likely the baby belonged to the husband, not the hound dog. It lasted six years.”

“The marriage?”

“The job with the Senator.”

Dan spooned a second helping of chili into his bowl and wondered how many more children the fornicating old goat had sired.