Always Time to Die Read online

  ALWAYS TIME TO DIE

  ELIZABETH LOWELL

  For

  Eric and Miranda

  The future is yours.

  QUINTRELL LINE

  MALE DESCENT

  Contents

  QUINTRELL LINE

  PROLOGUE

  The cutting edge of a winter storm made the old house sigh and moan as…

  ONE

  Two men squinted against the wind and stared down at the Quintrell family…

  TWO

  Carly may had been raised in the Colorado Rockies, which meant that she…

  THREE

  The Duran family lived on the outskirts of Taos, beyond the tourist area…

  FOUR

  Andy Quintrell V reached for another beer, only to have his father take the can away…

  FIVE

  Carly walked down a hallway in the old Castillo home. With each step she…

  SIX

  Dan shut the weathered door of the Taos morning record behind him. He …

  SEVEN

  Carly glanced around the clean, worn reception area of the Taos morning…

  EIGHT

  The writing was in the erratic faint scrawl of a man at the end of his…

  NINE

  Carly murmured into her collar as she bent over the microfilm reader…

  TEN

  “Thank you, missy,” Josh said, reaching for the sandwich Melissa Moore…

  ELEVEN

  Carly’s stomach growled…

  TWELVE

  At the back of the Quintrell house, Dan parked his truck, got out, and…

  THIRTEEN

  The kitchen door shut behind Carly, leaving her literally out in the cold…

  FOURTEEN

  Carly tried not to think about anything on the bumpy ride to Taos. She…

  FIFTEEN

  Carly struggled out of a nightmare of gutted rats and blood spurting in…

  SIXTEEN

  Josh Quintrell hung up the phone and rubbed his forehead…

  SEVENTEEN

  Carly flipped quickly through photographs, placing them in a kind of…

  EIGHTEEN

  Dan put another sheet on the glass bed of the scanner, punched the button…

  NINETEEN

  The sheriff’s temporary office was a lot newer than the tourist part of…

  TWENTY

  “What about Jim snead?” Melissa asked, resting her hip casually against…

  TWENTY-ONE

  As Carly climbed down the steps of the sheriff’s temporary quarters, the…

  TWENTY-TWO

  Lucia heard the rumble of her husband’s big ford expedition, the slam of…

  TWENTY-THREE

  Melissa opened the front door. “hello, dan, carly.” Though she hadn’t…

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Governor’s mansion had been designed to invite visitors to be comfortable…

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Dan glanced around his rental house. It looked like a photographic…

  TWENTY-SIX

  Dan stretched his left leg and kneaded muscles that wanted to knot up…

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Melissa covered her face while the helicopter settled onto the small pad…

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The house phone rang, waking Dan from a restless sleep. By the time the…

  TWENTY-NINE

  Jeanette Dykstra’s lips moved but no sound came from the TV screen…

  THIRTY

  Melissa made her final rounds of the house, checking that outer doors…

  THIRTY-ONE

  A bleary-eyed Dr. Sands confirmed what everyone already knew: Sylvia…

  THIRTY-TWO

  “What do we have so far?” Carly asked, looking at her checklist…

  THIRTY-THREE

  Governor Josh Quintrell shifted on the metal folding chair. His expression…

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Thanks to bad weather in new Hampshire, the governor’s plane had been…

  THIRTY-FIVE

  They hadn’t been on the road very long, but Carly knew she’d throw up if…

  THIRTY-SIX

  Winifred ignored the sluggishness of her body and mind, strength lost…

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Carly awoke with the first light slipping past the curtains into Dan’s bedroom…

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Dan parked in front of his parents’ house, next to the old car they had…

  THIRTY-NINE

  “Why can’t I come with you?” Carly asked. “why should Gus have to run…

  FORTY

  Snow lay sparsely along the narrow road. The housing was a combination…

  FORTY-ONE

  Carly stretched, then bent over the microfilm reader and went back to…

  FORTY-TWO

  Carly pushed against the plywood, holding it in place while Dan hammered…

  FORTY-THREE

  The winter sun was gone from the sky, leaving only the faintest tinge of…

  FORTY-FOUR

  The nightscope makes it easy. Good thing. The cold is taking the feeling…

  FORTY-FIVE

  Carly smacked her hands together. Even inside lined gloves, her fingers…

  FORTY-SIX

  They’re coming right toward me…

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Carly followed Dan along a trail only he could see. Wind followed them…

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The sniper tracked Carly and Dan through the nightscope, noting that…

  FORTY-NINE

  Moonlight glowed in frail splendor against the wall of glass framing…

  FIFTY

  Pete Moore woke up with a stiff neck and drool marks on the spreadsheet…

  FIFTY ONE

  The gray-blue curtains surrounding hospital beds in the emergency room…

  FIFTY TWO

  Dan parked his truck just beyond the place where another vehicle had…

  FIFTY THREE

  “Here are your nutcases for the day.” Jeanette Dykstra’ assistant…

  FIFTY FOUR

  Wearing a pair of Levi’s that hadn’t been tailored or ironed, Anne Quintrell…

  FIFTY FIVE

  Carly watched with growing excitement as archived data from the Newspaper’s…

  FIFTY SIX

  The governor’s phone vibrated against his thigh as he drove the winding…

  FIFTY SEVEN

  Carly only made two wrong turns before she found her way to the Duran…

  FIFTY EIGHT

  Melissa was packing an overnight case when Pete called her…

  FIFTY NINE

  The package from the lab was waiting by Dan’s front door. Carly picked it…

  SIXTY

  A dot of bright ruby light punched through the falling snow as the…

  SIXTY ONE

  Dan wasn’t happy with Carly coming along, but the idea of leaving her…

  SIXTY TWO

  Hunched against wind and blowing snow, Gus knocked hard on the door…

  SIXTY THREE

  Carly stared at the front door, then at Dan. “Are you thinking what…

  SIXTY FOUR

  “It’s Rubin,” Anne said, holding Josh’s cell phone out to her husband…

  SIXTY FIVE

  “How’s it going?” Carly asked Dan…

  SIXTY SIX

  The sound of helicopters rattled the silence of the snowy pastures and…

  EPILOGUE

  Carly smiled as she worked to translate a seventeenth-century Spanish…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY ELIZABETH LOWELL

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  NEAR TAOS, NEW MEXIC
O

  JANUARY

  TUESDAY, 3:00 A.M.

  PROLOGUE

  THE CUTTING EDGE OF A WINTER STORM MADE THE OLD HOUSE SIGH AND MOAN AS if someone was dying.

  Someone is. Soon.

  The ghostly smile, the laughter, and the words were silent.

  No one saw the intruder glide across the ancient Persian carpet on soundless feet. No one heard the door to the library open.

  The hospital bed and oxygen bottle looked bizarre among the ranks of leather-bound books and gilt-framed portraits of Andrew Jackson Quintrell I and his wife, Isobel Mercedes Archuleta y Castillo. The ambition that had created one of New Mexico’s biggest ranches and launched the national political careers of future Quintrells blazed out of A. J. Quintrell’s Yankee blue eyes. The matching ambition of one of New Mexico’s oldest families smoldered in Isobel’s hazel green eyes.

  The old man lying motionless on the hospital bed was their grandson. The fires of ambition had almost burned out in him. He would end his life as he had begun it, on the Quintrell ranch. No hospitals, no nurses, no doctors. No muttering and fussing and false smiles of hope.

  There wasn’t any hope.

  For nearly a century the Senator had enjoyed the wealth and prestige and power of the Quintrell family. For eighty years he had run the family with the closed fist of absolute power. Now he was slowly succumbing to congestive heart failure. At the moment, oxygen made him rest easier. In time it wouldn’t help. Then he would drown.

  Die, old man. Why can’t you just die and save us all a lot of trouble?

  No answer came but the slow, shallow, damnably steady breathing of Andrew Jackson Quintrell III.

  You lived like a pagan king. Why couldn’t you just die that way? But no, you had to have it all—pagan life and Christian afterlife.

  Father Roybal would be visiting again this morning, urging former Senator Quintrell to purge his soul of all evil and reach out for God’s forgiveness. Forgiveness would be there, waiting for him.

  It always was for prodigal sons.

  Confession might be good for the soul, but it’s hell on the living. I don’t want to live in hell, old man.

  It’s your turn to do that.

  Finally.

  Gloved hands removed the oxygen tube from the Senator’s nose. Gloved hands took a pillow from the bed and pressed it gently, firmly, relentlessly over the old man’s face. Breathing slowed, then stopped. He stirred just a little at first and then urgently, almost violently, but he was no match for the deadly gentleness that shut off his air. A minute, two minutes, and it was over, breath and heart stopped, death where life had been.

  It took less time than that for the murderer to tidy up the bed, reinsert the oxygen tube, replace the pillow, and walk out into the bitter caress of night.

  NEAR TAOS

  SUNDAY MORNING

  1

  TWO MEN SQUINTED AGAINST THE WIND AND STARED DOWN AT THE QUINTRELL FAMILY graveyard. It lay a few hundred yards below and six hundred feet away from the base of the long, ragged ridge where they stood. A white wrought-iron fence enclosed the graveyard, as though death could be kept away from the living by such a simple thing.

  At the edge of the valley, piñons grew black against a thin veneer of snow. Cottonwood branches along the valley creek had been stripped by winter to their thin, pale skin. In the black-and-white landscape, a ragged rectangle and a nearby tarp-covered mound of loose red dirt looked out of place. Three ravens squatted on the tarp like guests waiting to be served. A polished casket hovered astride the newly dug grave, ready to be lowered at a signal from the minister.

  The first of the funeral procession drove up and stopped outside the ornate white fence. There wouldn’t be many cars, because the graveside service was limited to clergy and immediate members of the Senator’s family. The public service had been yesterday, in Santa Fe, complete with a media circus where the famous and the merely notorious exchanged Cheshire cat grins and firm handshakes and careful lies while the smell of dying flowers overwhelmed the stately cathedral.

  Automatically Daniel Duran looked over his shoulder, checking that his silhouette was still invisible from below, lost against a tall pine. It was. So was his father’s.

  He and John weren’t famous or notorious. They hadn’t been invited to either the memorial or funeral service for the dead man everyone called the Senator. The lack of invitations didn’t matter to Dan. He wouldn’t have gone anyway.

  So why am I here?

  It was a good question. He didn’t have an answer. He wasn’t even sure he wanted one.

  The wind rushing down from the harsh peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains tasted of snow and distance and the kind of time that made most people uncomfortable. Deep time. Unimaginable time. Time so great it reduced humanity to an amusing footnote in Earth’s four-billion-year history.

  Dan liked that kind of time. Humans were amusing. Laughable. It was the only way to stay sane.

  And that was something he’d promised himself he wouldn’t think about for a few months. Staying sane.

  If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, chances are you don’t understand the situation. Why else would ignorance be called bliss?

  With a grim smile he turned so that his injured leg didn’t take the force of the brutal wind.

  “You should have stayed home,” John Duran said.

  Dan gave his father a sidelong look. “The exercise is good for my leg.”

  “That old man never acknowledged you or your mother as kin. Hell, he barely acknowledged his own legitimate daughter.”

  Dan shrugged and let the wind comb dark hair he hadn’t bothered to have cut in months. “I don’t take it personally. He never acknowledged any of his bastards.”

  “So why bother hiking here for the Senator’s funeral? And don’t waste your breath on the exercise excuse. You could do laps around the Taos town square with a lot less trouble.”

  For a time there was only the sound of the ice-tipped wind scouring the ridge. Finally Dan said, “I don’t know.”

  John grunted. He doubted that his fiercely bright son didn’t know why they were freezing their nuts off on Castillo Ridge watching one of New Mexico’s most famous womanizers get buried. Then again, maybe Dan truly didn’t know.

  “You sure?” John asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s the most hopeful thing that’s happened since you turned up three months ago.”

  Once, Dan would have smiled, but that was before pain had etched his face and cynicism had eroded his soul. “How so?”

  “You cared about something enough to walk three miles in the snow.”

  Dan’s dark brown eyebrows lifted. “Have I been that bad?”

  “No,” his father said slowly. “But you’re different. Much less smile. Too much steel. Less laughter. More silence. Too old to be thirty-four.”

  Dan didn’t argue. It was the truth.

  “It’s more than the injury,” John said, waving at his son’s right leg, where metal and pain had exploded through flesh. “Muscle and bone heals. Emotions…” He sighed. “Well, they take longer. And sometimes they just don’t heal at all.”

  “You’re thinking of Mom and whatever happened with her mother.”

  John nodded. “She still doesn’t talk about it.”

  “Good for her.” I hope.

  “You didn’t feel that way a few years ago.”

  “A few years ago I didn’t understand about sleeping dogs and land mines. Now I do.”

  And that’s what was bothering Dan. The Senator’s sister-in-law Winifred was running around kicking sleeping dogs right and left. Sooner or later she would step on a land mine and wake up something so brutal that his own mother had never once spoken of it, even to the man she loved.

  Silently the two men watched the shiny white hearse wait next to the graveyard’s wide gate. The couple in the rear seat, Josh Quintrell and his wife Anne, waited for the driver to open their door
s. Their son, A. J. V, called Andy, got out and turned his back to the windblown snow. When his parents stepped into the gray daylight, their clothes were as black as the ravens perched on the graveside tarp.

  A second car pulled up close to the hearse. As soon as it stopped, a tall, lanky woman emerged into the bitter wind with just enough hesitation to show her age. The iron gray of her hair beneath a black lace mantilla marked her as Winifred Simmons y Castillo, sister-in-law to the dead Senator, and a woman who in more than seven decades hadn’t found a man—or anything else—she couldn’t live without.

  “Hell on wheels,” John said almost admiringly.

  “Is that what you call someone who looks for land mines by stomping and kicking everything in sight?”

  John shook his head and shut up. He didn’t know why Dan was upset by Winifred’s quest for her family’s past. When he’d asked what the problem was, Dan had shut down, all hard edges and silence. John hadn’t asked again. When his son had worked for the federal government, he hadn’t talked about his job. After he’d quit a few years ago to work for St. Kilda Consulting, he still didn’t talk about his job.

  Another figure got out of the car with the lithe energy of youth. Whatever the woman wore was concealed beneath an overcoat that went to her ankles. The loosely tied wool scarf around her head lifted in the wind. She snatched it with gloved hands and knotted it more securely. But for just a moment, rich auburn hair burned in the winter light with the vivid colors of life.