St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

Survived by one daughter, Melissa Moore, née Schaffer. At the time of death, Betty had been living on welfare in a room on the wrong side of town. No religious services mentioned.
    “Is that a suicide note?” Dan asked Carly.
    “No. Betty’s crowing to her daughter about the new ‘source’ she has. Fifteen thousand bucks. And there’s more, a lot more. Betty is sending the key to Melissa for safekeeping.”
    Dan’s eyebrows raised. He’d photographed the documents but he hadn’t tried to read them. He had been in too much of a hurry to get out of the Moores’ apartment before Carly caught him where he wasn’t supposed to be.
    “Do the blackmail payments go back that far?” Carly asked.
    “Not quite. First one—at least in the account I cracked—was in ’86. She died in ’85. A few days after she put the bite on her ‘source’ for fifteen grand.”
    “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Carly asked.
    “Blackmail can be a dangerous game. I’m betting she was helped into suicide. Backtracking Josh’s whereabouts at the time is a job I’ll leave for someone else.”
    Carly picked up the next sheet.
    Dan leaned past her, grabbed the bottom half of the print pile, and started reading. When he was finished, he swapped for the sheets Carly was reading.
    Other than a few disbelieving sounds from Carly, it was quiet.
    Dan wasn’t shocked. He’d spent quite a few years studying the underbelly of humanity. Without a word he started arranging the photos and documents in rough chronological order.
    “I…” Carly cleared her throat. “Am I crazy or is there a vile kind of logic in these documents?”
    “You’re not crazy.”
    “Never again will I ask how people’s lives get so screwed up.” She blew out a breath and shook her head.
    “Nobody starts out to end up the way they do.”
    “Just pieces of a puzzle, right?” she asked.
    “Right. Let’s begin with the piece called Susan Mullins,” Dan said neutrally. He picked up one of the letters they had both read, but didn’t look at it. “In 1941 Susan gave birth to Randal Mullins, called Randy, the Senator’s bastard. The Senator had been shagging her, thinking she was of legal age. She wasn’t. He dumped her when he found out, but kept her in drugs so she didn’t care too much one way or the other.”
    “Lovely man.”
    “A real prince. Six years later she gets married. The guy is a drunk and an abuser. She sticks anyway. Her bastard by the Senator starts running away when he’s seven, and usually ends up with Angus Snead.” Dan paused, frowned. “Somehow, by the way Jim talked about the past, I always assumed Randy was his older cousin.”
    “Given the intimacy of the local gene pool, maybe he was. Wait a minute, let me refresh my memory.” Carly flipped through the notebook she’d made and found the section marked Randal Mullins. “Randy grew up wild, hooky and sealed juvie record, hunting and trapping, poaching, public drunkenness, bar brawling, signed up for Vietnam, was a forward scout, several medals, killed in ambush in 1968.”
    “The same year that Josh Quintrell was injured,” Dan said.
    “Right. Over to you.”
    Dan looked back at the paper he was holding. “This is dated 1968. It’s chaotic—obviously Susan was loaded when she wrote it—but the bottom line is that she truly believed she’d seen her son Randy in Taos.”
    “After he was dead?”
    “Yes. What really knocked her sideways was when she approached him, looked him in the eyes, and started crying with happiness, he told her she was mistaken. Like she wouldn’t recognize her own son. She started yelling and he just shook his head, said he was sorry for her loss, and walked away. It freaked her out.”
    “Understandable. And,” Carly added, “it’s likely that she shared her freaky experience with her good friend and fellow sex worker, Liza Quintrell, who apparently said something to her daughter, your mother.”
    “Likely, but not yet proved for a court of law.”
    “I know. Just one more strand of the circumstantial web.”
    Dan smiled. “You’re spinning a beaut. Now we go back and check the geography and make sure no one was out of town when we have them in town, and vice versa.”
    “I understood that. Does that make me certifiable?”
    “No, what makes you certifiable is that you’re enjoying this as much as I am, even though we both know that, rationally, there’s a very good chance that a hype and booze hound might indeed