St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

it can drive me crazy from time to time. You don’t expect somebody with a badge and a gun to do all the work of civilizing the human beast.”
    “It’s one of the things I love about you, too, even though I suspect it will drive me crazy from time to time.” Climbing accidents, for example. “So what do we need to get the cops’ attention?”
    “Courtroom proof of the identity swap.”
    “MtDNA. That’s why Winifred sicced Dykstra on the governor, to force him to be tested.”
    “Winifred didn’t live at the ranch or even visit very often until after Sylvia had her accident. How would she know her nephew wasn’t completely her nephew?”
    Carly frowned. “Why else would she hate the governor so much? Why else would she have acted like the Castillo/Quintrell line ended with Sylvia? Why else was she working backward rather than forward with the Castillo family genealogical history?”
    “I agree, but I don’t see how we can prove it now. If Winifred could have proved it earlier, she would have. That’s what matters. Proof. Courtroom variety.”
    “She didn’t know about mtDNA until I came on the scene,” Carly said unhappily.
    “Don’t go blaming yourself. You’re the only innocent one around here.”
    Dan reached past Carly for more of the memento file. After a sigh, she picked up more papers. While both of them read, the fire crackled in the silence. When they were finished, she leaned back against his chest.
    “I think summaries are more in your line of work than mine,” she said.
    “Betty Smith Schaffer died shortly after a blackmail attempt that might or might not have been successful,” Dan said. “Her death was written off as suicide. She passed on the blackmail material to her daughter, Melissa, who had recently married an accountant who knew how to set up a laundry so the blackmail couldn’t be traced back to them. They fleeced the Senator for almost twenty years to the tune of two hundred thousand a year, more or less.”
    “Nice retirement money.”
    “If you invest it wisely,” Dan said dryly. “Interesting thing is, if this is the ‘proof’ of role-swapping Melissa had, it wouldn’t have held up in court. Yet the Senator paid anyway.”
    “Because he didn’t want Josh’s identity to be questioned.”
    “What about military records?” Carly asked.
    “If I’d been in the Senator’s shoes, I’d have asked for all the military records of my brave Taos County boys, switched some pertinent dental, blood, and fingerprint records, and built a monument to the dead soldiers.”
    “Could the Senator get away with that?”
    “Sure, as long as nobody looked at the records too closely. And why would they? People see what they expect to see. Nobody expected the Senator’s son to be anything but what he said he was.”
    “A chip off the rotten old block.”
    Dan’s smile wasn’t pleasant. “Yeah. No wonder Mom was too frightened by the past to talk about it.”
    “Do you think she knows?”
    “I—” He stopped abruptly and pulled the buzzing, vibrating cell phone out of his pocket. The caller was from Genedyne. “Duran here,” he said into the phone. “What do you have for me?”
    “Do you have a pen and paper,” Cheryl said, “or do you trust your memory?”
    “Both.”
    “All females share the same mtDNA, with a very minor variation in the fourth female. Perfectly normal. Nothing stays the same forever. And I went the whole nine yards on this one. The chance of these women not being from the same mtDNA line isn’t worth mentioning. Probably within the same three- or four-generation group.”
    “Translation?” Dan asked, writing quickly on a tablet.
    “Same grandmother or great-grandmother. As far as mtDNA goes, they could have been sisters. When you throw in the Y-DNA it turns out you have two sisters and two daughters.”
    Dan wrote quickly.
    “The male sample you sent me has precisely the same Y-DNA as two of the female samples. Ergo, they’re his daughter.”
    Dan’s eyes narrowed. Not unexpected, but not nice. The Senator indeed had had a child with his daughter, and that child was Dan’s mother.
    “Got it,” Dan said. “Is the second male sample done yet?”
    “Just finished.”
    His pulse kicked. “And?”
    “Definite match for mtDNA on mother’s side and Y-DNA on father’s side.”
    Dan couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “What? You’re certain?”
    “It’s my job, sweetie. I’m certain. And considering the stature of the