St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

Winifred was alive and could give us permission to take a tissue sample from the Senator. And your grandmother.”
    “Why?”
    “I’ve been thinking about Sylvia, about her going ballistic and attacking the Senator. Why would she suddenly just lose it? She already knew he had the fastest zipper in the West. Was there any scandal, local or otherwise, that hit about then?”
    “That was ’67, right?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    Mentally Dan flipped through the history he’d once drawn of the Quintrells. “All that was going on was the hippie invasion in Taos, the Vietnam War, that sort of thing. No big divorces. No wife-swapping or getting caught with the gardener doing the nasty. No election or money-laundering scandals.”
    “That’s not much help. I’m trying to put myself in Sylvia’s shoes, how I’d feel if I was married to the biggest womanizer this side of Don Juan. What would it take to make me go crazy?”
    Dan laughed softly.
    “What?” she asked.
    “If you’d been married to the Senator, the first time you found out about his women, he’d have awakened two balls shy of a reproductive package.”
    Carly looked surprised. “What makes you say that?”
    “Anybody as passionate as you are in bed has a temper.” He stood up and walked toward her. “I like that, Carolina May. Women with the personality of elevator music make me run for the nearest exit.”
    “You’re not worried about your, um, package?”
    “Honey, you can play with my package anytime you want.”
    “I walked right into that one,” she said, laughing. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, lingered, and made herself step back. “You’re distracting me again.”
    He wanted to keep right on distracting her, but put his hands in his pockets instead. It was time—past time—for him to stop being on vacation and start using his brain. Standing close enough to breathe in Carly’s warmth didn’t quicken his thought processes one bit.
    But it sure picked up his pulse.
    “Okay,” he said. “Sylvia was used to infidelity. Where does that leave us?”
    Carly had a few thoughts on that subject. Several of them made her stomach clench. “Did she have a best friend? Someone she trusted who betrayed her with the Senator?”
    “That’s kind of a reach. Sylvia would have been just as likely to jump the friend as the Senator. It goes about fifty-fifty when you walk in and find them in bed.”
    “Fifty-fifty?”
    “Yeah. Do you jump the spouse or the lover?”
    Carly hesitated for a moment, then went on to the next possibility. “Okay. What about rape? If I found out my husband raped a woman, I don’t know what I’d do. Taking a swing at him with a cast-iron frying pan would be a definite possibility.”
    Dan weighed the idea and nodded. “Good idea. Melissa might know. She’s the one who brushed off Winifred’s talk of rape.”
    “If Melissa knew, she wasn’t eager to talk about it before.”
    “We didn’t lean very hard before,” he said.
    “What do we have to lean with now?”
    “Melissa can take her choice—talk to us and we won’t talk to the governor, or don’t talk to us and we’ll talk to the governor and say she did.”
    Carly raised her eyebrows. “Remind me never to get between you and something you want.” She took a deep breath. “Winifred said Sylvia tried to kill the Senator, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Okay.” Carly took another breath. “The only thing I can think of that would make me want to actually kill my husband would be discovering that he’d had sex with our daughter.”
    Dan whistled tunelessly. “That would put me over the top,” he agreed.
    “It would also explain why your mother hates the Senator so much. She could be the child of incest.”
    Dan didn’t like it. He certainly didn’t want to believe it. But it explained so much. “My grandmother wasn’t a saint, but why would she tell her daughter something like that, especially if it was true?”
    “Why wouldn’t she? She was a buzzed-up, drugged-out woman who hated life and the world because her father was a man with the sex drive of a goat and the morals of a maggot.”
    Dan stared into the fire, arranging and rearranging possibilities in light of what Carly had said. He didn’t like the pattern that emerged, but he was too smart to ignore it.
    Carly went to her computer, booted it up, and searched for references to Elizabeth, known as Liza, Quintrell. The photos came first. A young Liza on the Senator’s knee. Liza being