St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

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