St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

NEAR TAOS, NEW MEXICO
JANUARY
TUESDAY, 3:00 A.M.
PROLOGUE
    THE CUTTING EDGE OF A WINTER STORM MADE THE OLD HOUSE SIGH AND MOAN AS if someone was dying.
    Someone is. Soon.
    The ghostly smile, the laughter, and the words were silent.
    No one saw the intruder glide across the ancient Persian carpet on soundless feet. No one heard the door to the library open.
    The hospital bed and oxygen bottle looked bizarre among the ranks of leather-bound books and gilt-framed portraits of Andrew Jackson Quintrell I and his wife, Isobel Mercedes Archuleta y Castillo. The ambition that had created one of New Mexico’s biggest ranches and launched the national political careers of future Quintrells blazed out of A. J. Quintrell’s Yankee blue eyes. The matching ambition of one of New Mexico’s oldest families smoldered in Isobel’s hazel green eyes.
    The old man lying motionless on the hospital bed was their grandson. The fires of ambition had almost burned out in him. He would end his life as he had begun it, on the Quintrell ranch. No hospitals, no nurses, no doctors. No muttering and fussing and false smiles of hope.
    There wasn’t any hope.
    For nearly a century the Senator had enjoyed the wealth and prestige and power of the Quintrell family. For eighty years he had run the family with the closed fist of absolute power. Now he was slowly succumbing to congestive heart failure. At the moment, oxygen made him rest easier. In time it wouldn’t help. Then he would drown.
    Die, old man. Why can’t you just die and save us all a lot of trouble?
    No answer came but the slow, shallow, damnably steady breathing of Andrew Jackson Quintrell III.
    You lived like a pagan king. Why couldn’t you just die that way? But no, you had to have it all—pagan life and Christian afterlife.
    Father Roybal would be visiting again this morning, urging former Senator Quintrell to purge his soul of all evil and reach out for God’s forgiveness. Forgiveness would be there, waiting for him.
    It always was for prodigal sons.
    Confession might be good for the soul, but it’s hell on the living. I don’t want to live in hell, old man.
    It’s your turn to do that.
    Finally.
    Gloved hands removed the oxygen tube from the Senator’s nose. Gloved hands took a pillow from the bed and pressed it gently, firmly, relentlessly over the old man’s face. Breathing slowed, then stopped. He stirred just a little at first and then urgently, almost violently, but he was no match for the deadly gentleness that shut off his air. A minute, two minutes, and it was over, breath and heart stopped, death where life had been.
    It took less time than that for the murderer to tidy up the bed, reinsert the oxygen tube, replace the pillow, and walk out into the bitter caress of night.

NEAR TAOS
SUNDAY MORNING
1
    TWO MEN SQUINTED AGAINST THE WIND AND STARED DOWN AT THE QUINTRELL FAMILY graveyard. It lay a few hundred yards below and six hundred feet away from the base of the long, ragged ridge where they stood. A white wrought-iron fence enclosed the graveyard, as though death could be kept away from the living by such a simple thing.
    At the edge of the valley, piñons grew black against a thin veneer of snow. Cottonwood branches along the valley creek had been stripped by winter to their thin, pale skin. In the black-and-white landscape, a ragged rectangle and a nearby tarp-covered mound of loose red dirt looked out of place. Three ravens squatted on the tarp like guests waiting to be served. A polished casket hovered astride the newly dug grave, ready to be lowered at a signal from the minister.
    The first of the funeral procession drove up and stopped outside the ornate white fence. There wouldn’t be many cars, because the graveside service was limited to clergy and immediate members of the Senator’s family. The public service had been yesterday, in Santa Fe, complete with a media circus where the famous and the merely notorious exchanged Cheshire cat grins and firm handshakes and careful lies while the smell of dying flowers overwhelmed the stately cathedral.
    Automatically Daniel Duran looked over his shoulder, checking that his silhouette was still invisible from below, lost against a tall pine. It was. So was his father’s.
    He and John weren’t famous or notorious. They hadn’t been invited to either the memorial or funeral service for the dead man everyone called the Senator. The lack of invitations didn’t matter to Dan. He wouldn’t have gone