St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

to his mouth. Next to the Senator was another young man, but this one stood straight and tall.
    “I have a feeling Josh went back to boarding school right after this,” she said.
    Dan got up and walked over to Carly. He bent over the table near her, close enough to smell the light spice of her shampoo. He told himself that he hadn’t left the computer just to inhale her unique scent, it was just a very nice side benefit. Like breathing.
    “Good catch,” he said. “If there’s another newspaper photo of Josh before he came back from Vietnam, I haven’t been able to find it, not even in the fifties and sixties stuff I scanned in a few years ago when I was home for three months.”
    “Months? How’d you manage that much time off?”
    “Leave of absence,” Dan said, staring at the rawboned young Josh. “Just like now.”
    “But you’re not in the military.”
    “No. Just clumsy.” He looked at the date on the photo and then went back to his computer.
    “Clumsy,” she said under her breath. “Yeah. Right. I’ve seen professional athletes who are less coordinated. Must have been one mean volcano you climbed.”
    He ignored her and set up a search for the name Quintrell, starting with one week on either side of the date on the photo. Then he skimmed through the articles he’d recalled, clicking from one highlighted Quintrell name to the next. The Senator was most often mentioned, with A. J. IV getting some ink for having graduated from college and then volunteering for the army. He was posted to Fort Benning, Georgia, for ranger training.
    Poor bastard. Wonder if he knew what he was getting into?
    “What was that?” Carly asked.
    Dan realized he’d spoken his thoughts aloud. Not good. He was getting entirely too comfortable around Ms. Carolina May.
    “A.J. IV was a ranger,” Dan said.
    “Ranger? Are we talking National Park Service and Smoky the Bear?”
    For a few seconds Dan wondered what it would be like to live in a world where the first association with the word ranger was a cartoon figure. “Special Ops.”
    “Ops? Operations?”
    “Yeah. The balls-out warriors.”
    “Another visual I could have lived without,” she said. “Did he make it, or was he a wannabe?”
    “A.J. IV made the grade and the Senator didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. The old man was furious that his son didn’t take the cushy admin job in the Pentagon that was all laid out for him.”
    “What article did you find?” Carly took the photo over to where Dan was and began reading the computer screen over his shoulder. “Where does it say that?”
    “Between the lines.”
    She read aloud the section he pointed to on the screen. “‘The Senator, while naturally disappointed that his son passed up an opening at the Pentagon as a public information officer, is very proud that Andrew Jackson Quintrell IV has been accepted into the elite Army Rangers.’ So what are you talking about? It says the Senator was proud.”
    “You didn’t know him. Anyone who crossed the old man paid in blood. Lots of it. I’d love to have heard that father-son screaming match, but it happened before I was born. I’m betting that A.J. told the Senator to go crap in his mess kit. And I’m betting that’s why Josh was invited home from his first year of college abroad, just for the barbecue. It would be the Senator’s way of telling his first son that there was another heir in the pipeline.”
    Carly studied the photo again with the magnifying glass. “So the handsome dude with the rebar up his butt is A.J. IV?”
    He looked where she pointed. “Handsome, huh?”
    “Hey, they can’t all be tall, dark, and oozing sex like you.”
    Dan wanted very much to bite the tender lobe of her ear but didn’t. If he did that, the next thing he’d do was stick his tongue in her mouth and pretty soon after that they would be rocking and rolling on top of the heavy wooden table.
    And how would this be bad?
    “He sure looks more than three years older than Josh,” she said.
    “Ranger training is hell.”
    “Been there, done that?” she asked.
    “I know some of them.”
    “The, um, balls-out warriors?”
    “Yeah.” In addition to being trained by them, he’d debriefed a lot of special forces types, but that was just one more on the long list of things he wasn’t supposed to talk about, because the men weren’t supposed to have been in the places Dan had been. And vice versa.
    He watched Carly looking at the photo and tried