St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

mistake a blue-eyed half brother for a blue-eyed son who started making himself scarce when he was seven.”
    “I followed that, too. Now I’m worried.” She smiled at him. “As long as I keep thinking of this as a game, it’s fun. When I think of it as real…”
    “Don’t think of it that way,” Dan said instantly. “Right now, it is a game. If we get to the point of going to the law, then it’s not a game. We’re not there yet. We might never be.”
    “A game. Right.” She entered the date of the letter on the list she was keeping. There were other entries for the year. “That was the year Liza died. And Susan.”
    “No date on the letter itself?” Dan asked, leaning forward.
    “No, just our assumption that she wrote the letter the same year Josh came back from Vietnam, where her son died. Maybe there’s internal evidence in the letter itself.” Frowning, Carly read the sprawling, jumbled lines again.
    “Anything?”
    “No. Wait. She mentions sneaking a picture of him the next day after he walked off.”
    Dan dived for the papers and went through them in a rush. “Baby pictures, kiddie pictures, teen pictures in front of various dead animals—really nice buck by the way—standard army photo, and one in town of a man feeding a parking meter.”
    Carly fished a magnifying glass out of her hip pocket and studied the image. “Same chin.”
    “What?”
    “Same chin as Josh has. Same chin as the happy teenager standing next to the buck. I’d have to have more pictures to be certain—class books and such, but it looks like a younger Josh to me.”
    Dan flipped the piece of paper over. “August third, ’68.”
    Carly swallowed. Hard. “She died two days later, Dan. So did Liza.”
    “And another sex worker. Collateral damage, no doubt.” His voice was neutral but his eyes were bleak.
    “What do you mean?” she asked.
    “It’s a military term for various things that get between you and your mission target.”
    Carly winced. “Things like people?”
    “It happens.” His eyes narrowed. The pattern was becoming clear, and it was uglier than most. “Where’s the article on the triple murder?”
    Wordlessly, she called up the article on the computer and turned the screen toward him.
    “Crazed hippie, huh?” Dan said, reading through it again. “Slicing up whores in the name of God. I wonder if the three were killed together or if he killed them in various places and dragged them to the same scene.”
    “Does it matter?”
    “Assume you’re the impostor. Assume you were recognized. You kill that witness and anyone else the witness probably would have talked to. But you don’t want it to appear planned, because that might make the cops curious, so you whack someone else and throw them into the mix.”
    Carly took a sharp breath.
    “Then you find a big hippie who’s too stoned to care, stuff some angel dust under his tongue, roll him around on the bodies, hand him the bloody knife, and disappear.” From the tone of Dan’s voice, he could have been reading out stops on a bus schedule. “By the time the PCP kicks in and the poor stoner races out into the night with the knife, he’s way too far gone to be rational. Cops try to cuff him, he goes ballistic, cops pump seven bullets in him, and it’s over. Too bad, how sad, shit happens. Case closed.”
    “This isn’t feeling like a game anymore.” Carly rubbed her arms where goose bumps had formed. “We’re talking about a man who killed his own mother.”
    “Say the word and you’re out of here.”
    She looked at Dan’s level green eyes and knew he wanted her in a safe place. She wanted him there with her. “Will you go with me and leave this to the cops?”
    “We don’t have any proof that would make the cops want to take on the governor of New Mexico and a presidential contender. Everyone— everyone —who could prove anything is conveniently dead.”
    “Except Josh Quintrell. Or Randy. Or whoever the hell he is.”
    “Somehow, I don’t see him lining up at the confessional,” Dan said.
    “So you’re staying until we have something that will make the cops listen.”
    Dan nodded.
    “So am I.” She rubbed her arms again. “I don’t like it, but I can’t just blithely run off and leave a murderer sitting fat and happy. Especially one who’s running for president.”
    Dan pulled her onto his lap and rubbed his cheek against her hair. “That’s one of the things I love about you, Carolina May, even though