St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

can you say that?”
    “She didn’t do anything to change it.”
    Carly looked at the silver and darkness of the grave. “Maybe she couldn’t.”
    “Such a tender soul.” Gently he touched Carly’s face with a cold gloved fingertip. “She never tried, Carolina May. Not even once.”
    “She didn’t deserve to be murdered.”
    “No one does, but it happens just the same. You want a picture of this headstone?”
    Carly knelt and waited for the autofocus to wake up and get its job done. Light flashed once. She viewed the image, approved it, and turned the camera off again.
    “Do you suppose Susan Mullins was buried here? She was a longtime employee, after all.”
    “And her daughter was probably the Senator’s bastard.”
    “That, too.”
    Dan and Carly continued down the fence, searching for depressions in the snow cover that would indicate earth sagging into a grave when the coffin gave way to a combination of time and water. Other than an occasional Sandoval and two Sneads, Dan and Carly didn’t find any names they recognized.
    The wind flexed, stretched, ran cold between the white metal bars of the fence.
    Carly stood and looked at the moon-silvered ridgeline that loomed a few hundred yards away.
    “What were you doing up there?” she asked. “It was you, wasn’t it, the day the Senator was buried?”
    Dan followed her glance to Castillo Ridge. “Me, my dad, and one of the Sneads. Jim probably. Blaine isn’t that good on the stalk.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Dad and I parked off the highway and climbed up the back side of the ridge. There’s an old trail there. Hunters use it a lot. So does their prey. Anyway, Dad and I watched the whole thing from up there. Neither of us noticed anyone, but when we started walking out, I saw where there were some tracks. Someone else had been up on the ridge with a dog, watching the burial.”
    “And you think it was Jim Snead?”
    “He’s the only one I know of who can get close to me without giving himself away. I have good senses.”
    “Is that why you keep looking up toward the ridge?” she asked. “You think he’s up there now?”
    “I’ve felt watched a few times since we left the house. Then it goes away. Probably just the wind making branches move.”
    “Or Jim Snead looking down from the ridge?”
    “Maybe,” Dan said.
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know.”
    And as soon as Dan had Carly in a warm, safe place, he was going to climb the ridge and backtrack, assuming the wind and shifting snow didn’t cover everything before he got back here from Taos.
    If he was alone, he’d have climbed that ridge the first time his neck started itching. But he wasn’t alone.
    “Can the ridge be climbed from this side?” Carly asked.
    “Sure.”
    “Is it hard?”
    “Not if you have good boots.”
    “Let’s go.”
    “What?” Dan said, not believing what he was hearing.
    “I want to climb the ridge and look out over the valley and see the ranch in moonlight and darkness, the way it must have looked a hundred years ago.”
    He listened to his inner senses, found nothing that was worth arguing over, and gave in. “I’ll break trail.”

CASTILLO RIDGE
FRIDAY NIGHT
46
    THEY ’ RE COMING RIGHT TOWARD ME .
    Quickly the sniper thought about shooting angles and avenues of escape. He should go to ground and wait for them to drive around the back of the ridge. That was the plan.
    That plan hadn’t called for freezing his ass off while the two of them photographed graves and took a midnight hike up Castillo Ridge. If he had to wait much longer, he’d be too cold to shoot straight. Then somebody could die instead of just bleeding a lot all over the snow.
    It wasn’t that he minded the killing itself; like everything else, it got easier with practice. But a fatality was always investigated more thoroughly than a simple “accidental” shooting.
    They were still coming toward him. Any closer and he’d have to use his eye rather than the scope. As it was, he couldn’t see more than one or two square inches of the target at a time.
    Finally Carly and Dan veered away, following the informal trail horses and cattle used in the summer when they were turned loose to graze.
    The sniper began to breathe a little more easily as the targets got farther away. When he realized they were going to climb all the way to the top of the ridge a few hundred yards from him, he sighted in and recalculated the angles.
    Then he smiled. If they stood and admired the