"Who is this Pedro Moreno who has over two million bucks in a numbered account on Aruba?" Carly asked.

"Pete Moore. His real name, by the way. He just anglicized it to make life easier."

"Nine thousand a month?" Carly asked, remembering what Dan had said.

"Two payments of nine thousand each."

"That's not their wages, is it, Pete and Melissa?"

"According to the ranch records, Pete was paid three thousand a month and change. Melissa made about a thousand a month less."

"How do you know that?"

Dan shrugged. "Somehow the contents of the ranch computer ended up on my hard drive, and you never heard me say that."

"You're scary."

"Actually, a half-smart twelve-year-old could have hacked into the ranch computer. What's interesting is that at least one other charity fed 'contributions' into this same account. Minus three percent, of course."

"Three percent?"

"Transaction fee," Dan said dryly. "Once the amounts get into the high eight figures, the fee goes down. By the time you get to a billion, the transaction fee is usually one percent or even less."

She did the math and stared at him. "That's ten million dollars just to move money electronically from one place to the next," she said. "A little steep, don't you think?"

"Not if you have a dirty billion and get a clean nine hundred and ninety million back. Clean money that you're happy to pay taxes on and invest in legitimate enterprises because otherwise you'd have to hide all of it-in cash. At any given moment, there are trillions of black dollars zipping around the world, and every e-transaction takes a little bite of the overall pie."

"My head hurts."

"So think about what Pete Moore had on the Senator and/or the governor that would be worth eighteen thou a month to keep quiet."

"The governor, too?"

"According to the records, Josh had-and exercised-power of attorney for the Senator for the past four years. Unless the governor just let Pete do everything on the ranch bookkeeping, the governor had to know that about two hundred thousand bucks a year was going to questionable charities, so questionable that the Senator didn't even try to deduct them from his income tax payments."

"You're sure?"

"You want to see the tax returns?" Dan asked, his fingers poised over the keyboard.

"No. I don't even want to know you have them."

"Have what?"

"Ha ha." She twisted hair around her index finger. "So we're back where we started. Something that affected both father and son."

"At least we have a good reason for someone to kill Pete and Melissa. Blackmailers aren't real popular with their victims."

"But why kill the Moores now?" Carly asked. "Why not years ago, after Josh got the power of attorney? He must have known about the blackmail, or at least guessed that something was rotten in Denmark."

"Having power of attorney isn't the same as exercising it. He could have had a live-and-let-live attitude toward the Senator's expenses. It was, after all, the old man's money," Dan said. "Did you have any luck eliminating potential bastards who could have swapped places with the real Josh in Vietnam?"

"It sounds so bizarre when you say it right out. You only have to look at Josh to know he's the Senator's son."

"Yeah, but which son?"

"Too bad Melissa's dead. I'd ask her," Carly muttered.

"That reminds me," Dan said.

"What?"

"Somehow a file full of Melissa's family mementos found its way onto my hard drive."

"I can't hear a word you're saying. Print it out."

Smiling, Dan set up the printer, checked the paper, and went to work. As the computer spit out the first paper, Carly grabbed it and went to work.

"Both sides," Dan said.

"What?"

"I'm printing them the way I found them. A lot of the stuff had material on the back."

Carly nodded and went back to reading while the printer spit out paper at frightening speed.

Dan set up the last part of the file and turned to her. "What do you have?" he asked.

"A letter. The handwriting is… I'm getting used to it, okay?"

"What's the date?"

"November. Nineteen eighty-five." She flipped the paper over and saw the signature. "Betty Schaffer."

He connected the genealogical dots in his mind. "Susan Mullins's daughter by her husband, Doug Smith. Betty would have been closing in on forty when she wrote that. Wait, isn't that the year she killed herself?"

Carly didn't answer. She was concentrating on making sense of the jumbled, irregular handwriting.

Dan went to Carry's computer, searched old news files, and found the brief death notice in the obits. Betty Schaffer, nee Smith, daughter of Susan Smith, nee Mullins, had died on Christmas Eve, 1985. Recently divorced by husband. Reading between the lines, Betty had faced the family holiday with a load of booze, pills, and self-pity. Either she miscalculated the doses or she wanted out of her life. Whatever, she died. Survived by one daughter, Melissa Moore, nee Schaffer. At the time of death, Betty had been living on welfare in a room on the wrong side of town. No religious services mentioned.

"Is that a suicide note?" Dan asked Carly.

"No. Betty's crowing to her daughter about the new 'source' she has. Fifteen thousand bucks. And there's more, a lot more. Betty is sending the key to Melissa for safekeeping."

Dan's eyebrows raised. He'd photographed the documents but he hadn't tried to read them. He had been in too much of a hurry to get out of the Moores' apartment before Carly caught him where he wasn't supposed to be.

"Do the blackmail payments go back that far?" Carly asked.

"Not quite. First one-at least in the account I cracked-was in '86. She died in '85. A few days after she put the bite on her 'source' for fifteen grand."

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Carly asked.

"Blackmail can be a dangerous game. I'm betting she was helped into suicide. Backtracking Josh's whereabouts at the time is a job I'll leave for someone else."

Carly picked up the next sheet.

Dan leaned past her, grabbed the bottom half of the print pile, and started reading. When he was finished, he swapped for the sheets Carly was reading.

Other than a few disbelieving sounds from Carly, it was quiet.

Dan wasn't shocked. He'd spent quite a few years studying the underbelly of humanity. Without a word he started arranging the photos and documents in rough chronological order.

"I…" Carly cleared her throat. "Am I crazy or is there a vile kind of logic in these documents?"

"You're not crazy."

"Never again will I ask how people's lives get so screwed up." She blew out a breath and shook her head.

"Nobody starts out to end up the way they do."

"Just pieces of a puzzle, right?" she asked.

"Right. Let's begin with the piece called Susan Mullins," Dan said neutrally. He picked up one of the letters they had both read, but didn't look at it. "In 1941 Susan gave birth to Randal Mullins, called Randy, the Senator's bastard. The Senator had been shagging her, thinking she was of legal age. She wasn't. He dumped her when he found out, but kept her in drugs so she didn't care too much one way or the other."

"Lovely man."

"A real prince. Six years later she gets married. The guy is a drunk and an abuser. She sticks anyway. Her bastard by the Senator starts running away when he's seven, and usually ends up with Angus Snead." Dan paused, frowned. "Somehow, by the way Jim talked about the past, I always assumed Randy was his older cousin."

"Given the intimacy of the local gene pool, maybe he was. Wait a minute, let me refresh my memory." Carly flipped through the notebook she'd made and found the section marked Randal Mullins. "Randy grew up wild, hooky and sealed juvie record, hunting and trapping, poaching, public drunkenness, bar brawling, signed up for Vietnam, was a forward scout, several medals, killed in ambush in 1968."