St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

have a hard time standing up straight.”
    “Okay. So Cain and Abel aren’t an exact description.” Carly paused. “But what if one of the bastards—”
    “Somehow took the place of a legitimate son?” Dan cut in.
    “Yes.”
    “How? When?”
    She fiddled with a strand of her hair. “It would have to be after Sylvia had her stroke, or whatever happened to put her in a coma.”
    “Why?”
    “No way Sylvia would let the Senator put one of his bastards in the family line of succession.”
    “I agree. Especially if she thought he was shagging their daughter.”
    Carly winced. “Not to put too fine a point on it.”
    “There’s no nice way to talk about incest.”
    She let out a breath. “You’re right. I just find the whole idea hateful.”
    “I’d be worried if you didn’t.” Dan kissed her gently, then released her, only to find she didn’t let go.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot for a moment that your mother…”
    “Might be a child of incest?”
    Carly nodded.
    “That’s no one’s fault but the Senator’s, and he’s dead.”
    Dan led Carly back to the work area they’d set up. They were using the bed as a table, the card table as a computer center, and various cowhide chairs as storage units for files. The floor took the overflow.
    “Okay,” he said, feeling the excitement of the chase humming in his blood. Even if the ideas went nowhere, they went nowhere in new territory rather than trudging through the same old same old. “Following your assumptions, the switch had to take place no earlier than Sylvia’s stroke.”
    “Unless the switch was what set her off so that she jumped the Senator,” Carly said. “My point was simply that she wouldn’t have sat still for it.”
    “Agreed.”
    Dan sat down in front of one of the three computers they were using—two were his and one was hers. He woke up his own, which had a much more flexible program for retrieving data than Carly’s, and which now held everything about the Quintrell family that hers did. Plus the ranch records he hadn’t told her about yet.
    “At that time,” Dan said slowly, “Josh would have been about twenty-seven. Anyone doing a switch with him would have to be close in age and build. Probably no more than five years on either side, and an inch either way in height. Also, that person would have to have ‘died’ when the switch was made. So I’m looking for a male senatorial bastard who was between six feet and six feet two inches in height, and between twenty-two and thirty-two years old, who died a few years on either side of 1967. Death certificates don’t give height, so I’ll do the age thing first.”
    He pulled out the CD Gus had left, fed it into the slot, and downloaded it. Very quickly he was querying his data pool.
    “Vietnam,” Dan said after a moment. “Has to be.”
    “Where he died?”
    Dan nodded. “And where the switch was made. If there was a switch.”
    “If there wasn’t, our assumption will fall apart pretty fast, won’t it?”
    “You’d be surprised,” he said absently. “Assumption is the mother of all fuckups and has many children.”
    Carly watched the screen anxiously. “Remind me to steal this program from you.”
    “I’ll modify it just for you. For a price.”
    She gave him a sideways glance, saw him watching her, and said, “It’s a deal.”
    “You don’t want to know what the price is?”
    “If I can’t afford it, I’ll think of something. Or you will.”
    “You’re distracting me,” he said.
    “Thank you.”
    “I’ll be damned,” he said, looking at his computer.
    “Excuse me?”
    “There are five candidates who fit the profile. Nine if you go the full five years on either side of twenty-seven years old.”
    Carly didn’t know whether she was excited or dismayed. “That many?”
    “Those are only the ones who died or disappeared and are reasonably close in height. A lot more than nine males were born in the area in the search years.”
    “They’re all the Senator’s?” she asked in a rising voice.
    Dan laughed. “No. There’s just nothing to prove they aren’t his bastards.”
    “I feel better. I think. The Senator might yet give Genghis Khan a run for his money.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “According to some genetic studies of Y-DNA in Asia, around eight percent of the population are direct patrilineal descendants of Genghis Khan,” she said. “Compared to the average man, that’s an astronomically successful rate of