"Now there's a visual I could live without."

Shaking her head, Carly went back to sorting the Sandoval photos on one of the long tables. She'd been so obsessed with recording Winifred's material that she hadn't done anything else. Now it was time to see if she could fill in some gaps. While many of the photos weren't dated, a lot of them had writing on the back. She arranged them in rough order, oldest to newest.

"Holler when you find something worth recording," Carly said. "I've got all the birth dates for the kids, but I'm really short on photos of Josh. Older brother Andrew got all the camera time. I'm hoping something will turn up in the Sandoval family photos at the yearly barbecue."

"Don't hold your breath. From all that's been left out of the newspaper, Josh must have been a hell-raiser from the time he could walk."

"Too bad there wasn't more than one newspaper. I'd like to see more of the Spanish and Native American side of the local history."

Dan winced at the thought of what more newspapers would have meant in terms of archiving. Even with his nifty, mostly homemade program, the process still took time.

"The white-bread approach wears thin in the sixties," he said. "There's more ink for the hispano politicos, and more hispano politicos in areas that have a big Anglo population."

"Thus all the yearly barbecues," Carly said, lining up the photos. "Taking the pulse of the hispano voters over a rack of ribs and a keg of beer."

"It worked. Without support from the hispano communities, the Senator wouldn't have made it, and neither would his son. Josh Quintrell is the first Anglo governor New Mexico has had in years. It was a close race. Without the Sandovals he couldn't have made it."

"The same Sandovals that run drugs and hold cockfights?"

"Yeah."

"Are you saying that the governor is involved in the drug trade through the Sandovals?"

"If by involved you mean getting paid on a regular schedule, probably not. If you mean accepting political contributions and having a damn good idea where the funds came from and how they were laundered, yes."

"I haven't read anything like that in any newspaper."

From overhead came the slam of the side door, followed by the sound of footsteps and heavy rolls of paper being moved across the floor.

Dan glanced at the ceiling and then back at the computer. "You won't read about laundered political contributions in this newspaper, no matter how many rolls of paper Gus uses up." Dan shrugged. "Unless someone gets caught dirty with a bag of cash, of course, but it's not likely. The Quintrell family might be a lot of things that I don't like, but stupid isn't one of them."

"No wonder Winifred wants to distance herself from them."

"Winifred would have hated any family her sister married into." Dan typed rapidly, scanned the screen, and typed again. "Besides, the Castillos are a lot closer to the Sandovals by blood and choice. And it's not like the Quintrells are the first politicians on the planet to accept laundered money in political contributions. Hell, in the bad old days on the East Coast and in Chicago, the pols didn't care if the cash was laundered, just so it was plentiful and green."

"You have a sour view of politicians."

"Realistic," he corrected. "And don't forget bankers and lawyers. One runs the laundries and the other facilitates the process. Then they take the squeaky-clean cash and invest it in legitimate enterprises on behalf of the illegitimate. Welcome to the real world, honey, where nothing is the way it seems and everybody's hand is in somebody else's pocket."

Carly grimaced and kept looking at the backs of photos. Some were dated. Some had names.

One of the names was J. Quintrell.

She flipped the photo over, picked up a magnifying glass, and went hunting for the younger Josh. He'd been caught in the act of upending a bottle of beer over another boy's head. Both young men-teenagers, probably-were laughing and leaning drunkenly on each other. In the background, the Senator watched with a grim line 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 AJ. 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.

"AJ. 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?"

"AJ. 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 AJ. 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 AJ. 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.