St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

it’s laughable.”
    She looked at him and saw he meant it. “If you so much as smile, I’ll bite you.”
    “Now you’re tempting me.”
    Carly rolled her eyes but otherwise resisted the lure. “If there was an impostor, the Senator had to be in on it, right?”
    Dan nodded. “The man wasn’t exactly father of the year, but chances are that he’d know his own son.”
    “So there are two choices—the Senator agreed to go along or he was blackmailed.”
    “With what?”
    “Incest.”
    “How would the impostor know about the incest?”
    “Susan Mullins,” Carly said. “She was Liza’s friend—”
    “Coworker,” Dan said. “She turned tricks to pay for drugs.”
    “But she could have known.”
    “Agreed. In fact, it’s likely. A background of incest isn’t all that rare in the sex trade. It’s one of the things prostitutes bond over.”
    “God,” Carly said starkly. “What planet do those abusers come from?” Then she held her hand up, palm out. “Rhetorical question. Yes, I’m naïve. I don’t want to think about that kind of sick, ugly…” She forced out air in a whoosh. “Sorry. Empathy can be a bitch.”
    “Can you think of this as parts of a puzzle rather than human beings who hurt and cried and hoped and lost?” he asked.
    She went still. “You feel it, too, don’t you?”
    “I try not to.”
    “But you do.”
    “Yes. And all it does is get in the way of doing the job.”
    Carly took Dan’s hand, held hard, and let go. “Puzzle. Right. Here we go. Where were we?”
    “Susan Mullins reasonably could have had knowledge of the Senator’s incestuous relationship with his daughter.”
    “Relationship? As in more than once or twice?”
    “Incest, like rape, is about power rather than sex,” Dan said neutrally. “As long as the child is within the age range of the predator’s interest, the incest continues.”
    She didn’t want to ask, but she couldn’t help it. “Age range?”
    “Abuse doesn’t really have an age range. Abuse that has a sexual outlet is subject to the same peculiarities of preference as healthy sexual attraction. Some abusers are attracted only to prepubescent children. Some prefer infants.”
    Carly’s skin crawled.
    Dan’s voice continued, relentlessly neutral. “Some abusers prefer the postpubescent child. The Senator seems to have been in the last category. Young, but not obscenely so. I believe thirteen is still considered a marriageable age in some states. In some countries, menstruation is the only division between a child and a woman. Between one week and the next, a girl becomes a sexually available woman.”
    Pieces of a puzzle. Carly forced herself to breathe. Just pieces.
    “In other words,” Dan said, “yes, the incest probably lasted until Liza left the house and possibly continued until she was thirty. So, yes, Susan could have had knowledge that would be useful to blackmail the Senator. Whether or not that happened…” Dan shrugged.
    “If she did have knowledge, she could have told her daughter, Betty.”
    Dan nodded.
    “Who could have told Melissa,” Carly continued, “who could have decided to continue the blackmail.”
    “Only until the Senator died.”
    Carly nodded.
    “Then why arrange an accident for Melissa?” Dan asked. “The only reason—other than bad luck—for the Moores to die is that someone alive had something important to lose if Melissa lived.”
    “If there was an impostor, and Melissa knew, couldn’t she have blackmailed him—the Senator and/or impostor—over that?”
    “Yes. So could her sort-of cousins, if they knew.”
    Carly blinked. “Sort-of cousins? Oh, the Sneads. I hadn’t thought about them. Their father Randal Mullins could have known about the incest, and he could have passed the information on to his lover—”
    “Folks were pretty clear on that point,” Dan cut in. “Randal and Laurie Snead were a one-night stand, if they got it on at all.”
    Carly sighed. “So you don’t think the Sneads are involved?”
    “Jim Snead has my nomination as the sniper. He knows the land better than any man alive and is a dead shot at any distance under five hundred yards. I just haven’t found a decent circumstantial thread to connect him to you.”
    “Me?” She sat up straight. “Me?”
    “Jim or his brother empties live rattraps at the house.”
    Carly remembered the rat in her room. A rat, according to Dan, that had still been warm. Dead and gory all over her pillow, but still