"Anybody as passionate as you are in bed has a temper." He stood up and walked toward her. "I like that, Carolina May. Women with the personality of elevator music make me run for the nearest exit."

"You're not worried about your, um, package?"

"Honey, you can play with my package anytime you want."

"I walked right into that one," she said, laughing. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, lingered, and made herself step back. "You're distracting me again."

He wanted to keep right on distracting her, but put his hands in his pockets instead. It was time-past time-for him to stop being on vacation and start using his brain. Standing close enough to breathe in Carly's warmth didn't quicken his thought processes one bit.

But it sure picked up his pulse.

"Okay," he said. "Sylvia was used to infidelity. Where does that leave us?"

Carly had a few thoughts on that subject. Several of them made her stomach clench. "Did she have a best friend? Someone she trusted who betrayed her with the Senator?"

"That's kind of a reach. Sylvia would have been just as likely to jump the friend as the Senator. It goes about fifty-fifty when you walk in and find them in bed."

"Fifty-fifty?"

"Yeah. Do you jump the spouse or the lover?"

Carly hesitated for a moment, then went on to the next possibility. "Okay. What about rape? If I found out my husband raped a woman, I don't know what I'd do. Taking a swing at him with a cast-iron frying pan would be a definite possibility."

Dan weighed the idea and nodded. "Good idea. Melissa might know. She's the one who brushed off Winifred's talk of rape."

"If Melissa knew, she wasn't eager to talk about it before."

"We didn't lean very hard before," he said.

"What do we have to lean with now?"

"Melissa can take her choice-talk to us and we won't talk to the governor, or don't talk to us and we'll talk to the governor and say she did."

Carly raised her eyebrows. "Remind me never to get between you and something you want." She took a deep breath. "Winifred said Sylvia tried to kill the Senator, right?"

"Yes."

"Okay." Carly took another breath. "The only thing I can think of that would make me want to actually kill my husband would be discovering that he'd had sex with our daughter."

Dan whistled tunelessly. "That would put me over the top," he agreed.

"It would also explain why your mother hates the Senator so much. She could be the child of incest."

Dan didn't like it. He certainly didn't want to believe it. But it explained so much. "My grandmother wasn't a saint, but why would she tell her daughter something like that, especially if it was true?"

"Why wouldn't she? She was a buzzed-up, drugged-out woman who hated life and the world because her father was a man with the sex drive of a goat and the morals of a maggot."

Dan stared into the fire, arranging and rearranging possibilities in light of what Carly had said. He didn't like the pattern that emerged but he was too smart to ignore it.

Carly went to her computer, booted it up, and searched for references to Elizabeth, known as Liza, Quintrell. The photos came first. A young Liza on the Senator's knee. Liza being put up on a pony. Liza with a barrel racing ribbon from the local rodeo and a proud father standing by her stirrup.

"With his hand on her calf and lust in his eyes," Dan said from behind Carly.

"She can't be much older than thirteen."

"If gossip is correct, that's about the time she started going wild. Drugs, booze."

"That's also the last time the Senator and his daughter got together for a picture," Carly said. "Other people, other family, but not her."

"If what you think is true, Liza wouldn't want to be within a country mile of her father."

Carly divided the screen and called up the Senator's wedding. "I keep remembering one photo where he had his arm around his bride and-here it is. The look he's giving that other woman." She zoomed in on part of the photo, excerpted it, put it next to the photo of Liza and the Senator, and felt her stomach clench again. "I wish Sylvia had killed him."

Dan studied the two photos. Nothing had changed about the Senator's predatory look except the female it was directed at.

"When I think of how much my mother and grandmother endured because of him," Dan said finally, "I could kill him myself. There's only one problem."

"He's already dead?"

Despite the grim brackets around Dan's mouth, he smiled and tugged at the coil of hair Carly was winding around her finger. "That, too. But we're assuming that the secret-whatever it is-the one the governor is so worried about coming out, outlasted the Senator's death."

"Is there a statute on incestuous rape?" Carly asked bitterly.

"Sure. We have laws about when and where you can spit." Dan shrugged. "Even if we prove that the Senator had a child with his own daughter, I can't see it doing anything but getting a sympathy vote for Josh Quintrell. I doubt if the governor would get his dick in a twist over a fifty-year-old secret coming out. He would be publicly repelled, fund a committee to study and prevent the origins of incest and help the victims, and go to church to pray for the Senator's soul and that of his poor sister. None of the above would hurt him in the polls."

"So what you're saying is that no matter what crimes the Senator committed, legal responsibility for those crimes dies with him."

"Basically, yes. At least in terms of threatening Josh's political career at this point in time. There has to be something else that he's worried about."

"Worse than incest? That's a scary thought."

"Isn't it just." Dan frowned.

"Do you think Winifred knows-knew? Damn it, when will Melissa call us back about Winifred?"

"Whenever Josh gets here to spin everything for the media. Until then, my vote is with the hispano grapevine. Winifred is dead."

Carly closed her eyes. "I wonder if she knew?"

"The secret?"

"No. That she was going to die. It would explain why she mailed that letter to me."

"I wouldn't be surprised. Winifred was a woman out of her time. Maybe out of any time." Dan focused on the fire again. "If you wanted to prove incest fifty years after the fact, when both parties are dead and the living won't help, how would you do it?"

"Proof?"

"Genetic proof."

"I'd need a sample from the Senator. One from his daughter would be useful."

"But not vital?"

"Not at this point. The sample we really need is one from the sup-posed child of incest. If she shows the Senator's Y-DNA, then the Senator was her father. It's that simple."

" 'The child.' That would be my mother we need a sample from."

"Yes."

Dan pulled the bloody tissue from his pocket. "Would this work?"

Chapter 60

CASTILLO RIDGE

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

A DOT OF BRIGHT RUBY LIGHT PUNCHED THROUGH THE FALLING SNOW AS THE sniper sighted in his scope. The gallons of water he'd poured on the blind curve were invisible now, a sheet of black ice frozen beneath a dusting of snow. If ice didn't send their vehicle caroming out and down several hundred feet to level land below, then it would be up to close work to finish the job. On the whole, he'd much prefer an accident. Fewer questions that way.

Headlights glowed along the road from the ranch house. They bobbed and bounced but made good progress. Though the narrow road was technically on private land, the county managed to pass a blade over it often enough to keep ranch traffic moving. The headlights came on at surprising speed. Obviously the driver belonged to the part of the American population that believed four-wheel drive could handle anything weather could dish out.

Live and learn.