St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die Read Free Page A

interesting.”
    Andy’s blue eyes narrowed. He turned and stalked after his parents.
    Winifred laughed, a sound almost as rusty as a raven’s warning cry. “Just like the Senator. Doesn’t think there’s a female alive that won’t spread her legs for him.”
    Carly hesitated, then decided that it had to be covered sometime, and now was as good as any. “My research hinted that the Senator was rumored to be very, um, sexually active when he was young.”
    “He lifted every skirt he could get his hands on, and he got his hands on most. When he was too old to perform, he got those erection pills and kept at it until he died.”
    Carly’s eyebrows rose. “He managed to keep his romantic life out of the media.”
    “Romance had nothing to do with it.” Winifred’s thin upper lip curled. “Lust, that’s all. The reporters always knew how he spent his nights and lunch breaks. But back then, a politician could fornicate with anything willing or unwilling and no one said a word. Then Clinton came along.” Winifred made a dismissive gesture. “By that time the Senator was on his way out of elected public life. Stories about his shopgirls and prostitutes weren’t news anymore.”
    Carly made her all-purpose sound that said she was listening. It was what she was best at: listening.
    And remembering.
    “Who are those people?” she asked, looking beyond the fence. “The ones who didn’t come to the graveside.”
    Winifred looked at the couple waiting patiently just outside the gate. “Pete and Melissa Moore. Employees. He’s the Senator’s accountant. She’s the housekeeper.”
    The one who forgot I was coming?
    But Carly didn’t say it aloud. The Senator’s death must have thrown the household into turmoil. She would find out when she met Melissa if there was anything deliberate in the oversight. Carly hoped there wasn’t and at the same time was prepared for the opposite. It wouldn’t be the first time she hadn’t been welcomed by some members of the household whose history she’d been hired to record. An important part of her job was to disarm hostile people, getting them to relax and open up to her.
    “Well, no need to stand here freezing,” Winifred said. “Leave the diggers to finish their work. Then I’m going to buy some shiny red shoes and dance on that philandering bastard’s grave.”
    The old woman marched toward the waiting car with the stride of a woman decades younger than her nearly eighty years.
    Carly glanced for the last time at the grave, memorizing small details of color and temperature, wind and scent. After a few moments she sensed a flicker of motion on the ridge that defined the other side of the valley. She looked up just in time to see two silhouettes drop down the far side and out of sight.
    Someone hadn’t even cared enough to stand outside the fence.
    When I get to know Miss Winifred better, I’ll have to ask her who else wants to dance on the Senator’s grave.
    The only tears cried at this funeral had been clawed out by the icy wind.

TAOS
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
3
    THE DURAN FAMILY LIVED ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF TAOS , BEYOND THE TOURIST AREA with its timeless adobe buildings and modern parking meters measuring out minutes in silver coins. The Durans inhabited a Taos few visitors saw, a place of modest houses crouched among winter-bare pastures, surrounded by willow-stick and barbwire fences.
    John drove into a narrow adobe garage that had once been a tack room and turned off his truck. Though the building was more than two hundred years old, it had been wired in the twentieth century. Motion-sensing lights flashed to life, revealing every timeworn adobe brick. The space itself was clean. Neither of Dan’s parents tolerated garbage, clutter, or worn-out machinery tossed around the property. Some of the neighbors felt that every man had a right to his own junkyard, but no one got upset about it either way. New Mexico had a long history of live and let live.
    “You think Mom’s