A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  Now that the worst of the story was out, Charlotte was eager to speak. “It was mostly circumstantial. She lived in the house with us, she’d just taken out insurance policies on all our lives—”

  “All?” Kate said.

  “All three of us.”

  “There was a third child?”

  “Yes, my other brother, Oliver.”

  “Where was he?”

  “He was in the house, too.”

  “But he survived.”

  “Yes. He got hurt getting out, but he survived.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I was with my mother. We were coming home from my uncle’s house. There was a party that went on a little late.” Charlotte paused. It was obvious that the memories were painful. “When we pulled into the driveway, the house was already on fire. And then Oliver fell out of one of the upstairs windows.”

  Kate was forcibly reminded of the night the previous May when she had driven into her clearing and found her cabin on fire. The cabin her father had built for her mother, the cabin in which she had been conceived and born, the cabin where she had lived most of her life following their deaths. Johnny had been camping at the Lost Wife Mine, or she could have come home to something far more horrible than a pile of smoldering embers. In spite of herself, she sympathized with the pain she saw in Charlotte’s eyes. “Was he badly injured?”

  “Yes. His right leg shattered on impact. He still limps.” Charlotte’s voice was stronger now, the words coming as if by rote, as if she had said them too many times before. “It wasn’t until the next day, when the firemen were able to go into the ruins, that they found William’s body. We were hoping he’d slept over at a friend’s house and just hadn’t heard about the fire at home.”

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Kate said. “You’re not exactly a kid, and I’m assuming your brothers aren’t, either. What are you all doing still living with your mom?”

  Charlotte looked surprised. “Oh, we aren’t.”

  “Well then, I really don’t understand,” Kate said. “Were you all home on a visit? Did this happen over the holidays, or what?”

  “Oh, no,” Charlotte said, “it was in the spring.”

  “This last spring? April, May?”

  “Oh, not this spring. The fire and my brother’s death happened thirty-one years ago.”

  Charlotte said it in such an offhand way that it took a moment for her words to sink in. They caught Kate with her mug halfway to her mouth. “You,” she said finally, “have got to be kidding me.”

  “No,” Charlotte said, her lips firm now, her mouth a straight, determined line. “I’m not kidding. She didn’t do it, she has served thirty years for a crime she did not commit, and I want you to get her out of jail.”

  “Thirty years,” Kate said.

  “Almost thirty-one,” Charlotte said.

  “Oh,” Kate said, “almost thirty-one. Of course, that changes things completely.” She knocked back the rest of her coffee, ignoring the scalding slide down her throat, and blinked the resulting tears away. She got to her feet. “I’m sorry, Ms. Muravieff. I can’t help you.”

  Charlotte wouldn’t get up. “You have to. I’ve asked everyone else. You’re the only one left.”

  How flattering, Kate thought sourly. What, she was now the patron saint of lost causes? “Who gave you my name?” she said.

  Charlotte looked up, hope kindling in her eyes. “An attorney.”

  Kate was immediately suspicious. “Which attorney?”

  “Brendan McCord.”

  Kate took a deep and, she hoped, unobtrusive breath. “Did he,” she said through her teeth. If this was some kind of joke, there wasn’t going to be enough left of Brendan McCord, Esq., to feed to a parakeet.

  On the other hand, Brendan had helped a great deal on her last case. If this was payback, she owed him. She took another deep breath, not bothering to hide this one. “Did you tell him you were coming to me?”

  Charlotte nodded, beginning to tear up.

  “What did he say, exactly?”

  Charlotte produced a delicate lace handkerchief and caught each individual tear before it damaged her makeup. She folded it neatly and put it back in her pocket. “He said that you were expensive but that you were the best in the state.”

  Well. At least Brendan wasn’t sending her charity cases. Still, her shower—always supposing she ever got a chance at the hot water—and her books and her bed were no less inviting than they had been half an hour before.

  “Oh,” Charlotte said, “and he also said that you owed him one.”

  Son of a bitch. There wasn’t going to be enough left of Brendan McCord to feed a goddamn earthworm.

  Charlotte looked at her uncertainly. “Are you all right? Your face looks kind of red.”

  “Me?” Kate said. “I’m fine. Peachy.” Just because she owed Brendan McCord one—well, several—oh hell, probably a baker’s dozen—didn’t mean she was giving up without a fight. “Did Brendan happen to mention just how expensive I am?”

  Before Charlotte could answer Johnny came out of the bathroom in clean sweats, rosy, tousled and damp. He looked cheerful until he saw that Charlotte was still there.

  “Is there any hot water left?” Kate said.

  “Sure,” he said, and vanished into his bedroom. The door shut most definitely behind him.

  There was a brief silence, broken by Charlotte. “I was thinking that you could look at the evidence. Maybe with all this new DNA technology, there would be some way of proving she didn’t do it.”

  “Ms. Muravieff—”

  “Charlotte, please.”

  “Charlotte,” Kate said, “your mother’s been in jail for thirty years. We haven’t been a state much longer than that. Back then the Alaskan judicial system was still figuring out how to find its own ass without even a flashlight, much less two hands. Besides, we’re not talking about a cold case here. Your mother was tried and convicted. They’d have had no reason to keep whatever physical evidence they had in your mother’s case. It’ll be long gone.”

  “Well, then, witnesses,” Charlotte said.

  Kate didn’t know if this was loyalty or stubbornness speaking, but she admired both, which kept her response more civil than it might have been. “Same goes,” she said. “Thirty years. Some of them are bound to be dead, or just unfindable.”

  “But Brendan says you’re the best,” Charlotte said stubbornly.

  Exasperated, Kate said, “Why did you wait thirty years to do this?”

  “She’s dying,” Charlotte said.

  There was a long pause. “I see,” Kate said at last. “What does she have?”

  The tears began to flow again. The handkerchief reappeared. “Uterine cancer.” She met Kate’s eyes. “I don’t want her dying in prison. I won’t let that happen.” Charlotte rummaged in her genuine-leather day pack and pulled out a checkbook. She scribbled Kate’s name, an amount, and a signature, and ripped it out and handed it to Kate.

  The amount of zeros made Kate a little dizzy.

  “That amount again when you get my mother out,” Charlotte said. “Plus expenses, of course.”

  Kate put the check down on the table between them and pushed it across to Charlotte. She didn’t bother asking if Charlotte had that much money. She said as gently as she knew how, “This is a waste of your money and my time.”

  “She didn’t do it,” Charlotte said, pushing the check back.

  “Even if she didn’t,” Kate said, “even if someone else did it, and even if he or she were alive for me to find, it would be a miracle if I picked up a trail this old and this cold.” She pushed the check back at Charlotte.

  “She didn’t do it,” Charlotte said, shoving the check back so hard that it slid across the table into Kate’s lap.

  Johnny slammed out of his bedroom and rummaged in the kitchen cupboards for food. Fortunately, Top Ramen kept well. He started a pot of water boiling and got down the sesame oil, which also held up un
der benign neglect.

  He was fourteen, and in spite of an avowed determination to quit school as soon as he was legally old enough to do so, Kate was equally determined that he was going to at least get a GED and learn some kind of trade before he embraced Park rathood permanently. Besides, he was showing signs of serious interest in wildlife biology, serving what amounted to an apprenticeship in the middle of one of the most prolific wildlife areas in the world, with expert supervision from people like Park ranger Dan O’Brien, geologist Millicent Nebeker McClanahan, and self-taught naturalist Ruthe Bauman. Kate nourished the faint hope that Johnny might change his mind about college. And college cost money.

  She looked at the obstinate lines of Charlotte’s expression and reflected that she found herself doing a lot of things she never used to do before she became a mom.

  She swore to herself. “All right,” she said, and crumpled the check in a fist and jammed it into a pocket. “You’ve got yourself a private investigator.”

  The lines of Charlotte’s face eased. She was wise enough to display no triumph. “Thank you, Kate.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Kate said, “please.”

  Charlotte stood up. “Thank you for the coffee, then.” She hesitated. “Do you need help with a place to stay in Anchorage?”

  “I have a place,” Kate said, aware that Johnny had gone motionless behind her.

  “Oh. Good.” Almost timidly, Charlotte added, “When can I expect to hear from you?”

  Kate stood up and started walking her out. “I just got home. I’ll need a day or two to get things arranged.”

  Involuntarily, Charlotte looked over her shoulder at Johnny. “Ah.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course,” Charlotte said, producing keys to unlock the monster SUV, which she would never have gotten down the trail had Mac Devlin not opened the way for the house-raising the previous May. Leaving Kate’s homestead open to every itinerant petitioner with a tale of woe.

  Who locked their car in the Park.

  Charlotte climbed in and started the engine. Kate walked to her door, and the electric window slid down silently.

  “Do you want to get your mother out of jail because she’s innocent,” Kate said, “or because she’s dying?”

  Charlotte’s lips trembled. “Both.”

  The Cadillac reversed smoothly, swung wide in a circle, and vanished up the trail. Mac Devlin had cut quite a swath through Kate’s section of the Park with his D-6, but not quite wide enough for two cars to pass each other, so Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin had to pull over to wait for Charlotte to pass.

  This was good, because it allowed Kate a few extra moments to collect the elements of her vamp persona and fix them firmly in place.

  Dump her, would he?

  Oh, she didn’t think so.

  3

  Mutt, of course, bounced up to the white Blazer with the state trooper’s seal on the door, generating enough energy with her tail to open a portal into the fourth dimension. Kate strolled after her, and Jim, fending off Mutt’s attentions with an absent pat, watched her approach with a reluctantly fascinated eye.

  Kate was only five feet tall. She didn’t have enough leg to be able to stroll toward him with that much sexual menace. Nevertheless, he felt himself taking an involuntary step back, at which he was thwarted by his vehicle. He swallowed hard and, unable to do anything else, watched her come toward him.

  It was true Kate Shugak was only five feet tall. It was true that taken individually her features—high, flat cheekbones, narrow hazel eyes that slanted up just a hint and that were sometimes brown and sometimes almost green and sometimes gray, a wide, full-lipped mouth, pale gold skin with an olive tint that tanned easily to a warm honey color—were nothing that would excite a Paris designer into hiring her as a model for his next show. Her hair, thick and short and impossibly black, trimmed to her ears and swept back from a broad brow by an impatient hand, was nothing a trendy New York stylist couldn’t improve upon with a hacksaw. Her clothes, white T-shirt, faded jeans, a worn brown leather belt, thin white ankle socks, black-and-white tennis shoes, were so unself-consciously nondescript as to be almost characterless.

  The scar, a thin rope of pale, knotted skin that bisected her throat almost literally from ear to ear, could not by any stretch of the imagination be called arousing. If anything, one look at that, one listen to the rusted voice that throat produced ought to have a sensible man beating feet in the opposite direction at once, if not sooner.

  Instead, when she smiled at him, a wide, knowing smile that revealed a set of healthy white teeth whose incisors seemed to him to be noticeably longer than they had been the last time he’d seen them, he had an inexplicable desire to fall to his knees and bare his throat and let her suck right out of him the last drop of any bodily fluid he had on offer.

  Maybe it was the way her hips moved beneath the denim, or the way the knit fabric outlined her breasts, or the way her hands curled slightly at her sides, as if in anticipation. Maybe it was the way she moved, a smooth, confident fusion of muscle and bone that did a good job of hiding the strength, the quickness, and the agility latent beneath.

  He’d known other women who exuded sex. He’d known other women who had been able to slay men with a single smile.

  Kate smiled at him now. “Hey, Jim,” she said, and the two words ran like a rasp right up his spine to the base of his skull.

  He’d just never known one like this. Everything he had was at attention. He cleared his throat. Hormones. He was male, she was female. He’d react the same way to any woman. “Kate.”

  He was helpless to stop the single syllable from sounding like a plea, and he watched her smile widen. Desperately, he sought for something to say. “I haven’t seen you around the Park lately.”

  She laughed, a low, intimate sound in the increasing dusk. A strand of hair fell into her face and she tucked it behind an ear, holding his eyes all the while. “Is that what you came to tell me?” She took a step closer. “Have you been missing me?”

  “No,” he said, “no, not at all. I’ve been too busy to miss anybody.”

  “Really? What with?”

  He tried to think of something noteworthy he’d accomplished over the summer. “Oh. Well. You know. Claim jumping. Fishing behind the markers. Hunting out of season. Rape, robbery, murder. The usual.”

  She didn’t move. She didn’t look away from him, either. He started to sweat. It was getting harder and harder to remember why he’d walked away from her last May, why he’d announced an end to his ongoing pursuit, why he’d renounced his goal of getting her into his bed.

  It was something about love—he remembered that much. Well, he didn’t love her, and he wasn’t going to, wasn’t going to get anywhere near it, or her, damn it.

  Johnny Morgan, elbows on the railing, watched from the deck. It was pitiful, was what it was. Here was this tiny little woman, couldn’t weigh 120 pounds wringing wet, facing down this big, strong, good-looking guy, an Alaska state trooper no less, a man accustomed to command, a man who hunted down criminals and brought them to justice, a man to whom Park rats of every age, culture, and occupation looked to to lay down the law of the land. He had to be at least six two, although the Mountie hat he used to wear had made him look even taller than that, and he had to weigh two hundred pounds easy, although the bristling arsenal of badges and guns and epaulets and handcuffs and nightsticks added heft. He was good-looking, too, with heavy dark blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and strong features—jaw, cheekbones, nose. He didn’t look like a wimp, and if half of the Park gossip Johnny had heard was true, he’d had a ton of girlfriends. He just wasn’t a needy kind of guy.

  Kate glided another step forward, moving in a way that reminded Johnny irresistibly of a large, powerful cat. Jim looked like cat food, inches away from leaping into his vehicle and roaring off.

  Wimp, definitely.

  An object lesson was what his teacher, Ms. Doogan, would have called it. No way was he ev
er going to fall into that honey trap, which was what Old Sam Dementieff called it. The irresistible force meeting the not-quite-immovable object was what Bobby Clark called it.

  He shook his head, half in pity for a fellow man, half in shame, and went back inside. It was just too painful to watch.

  Just for the hell of it, just because she could, just because her mere presence affected Jim Chopin in a manner that she had to admit she found deeply satisfying, Kate took another step forward, bringing her into physical contact. She could feel his badge, his belt, what she thought might—or might not—be his gun pressing against her. She smiled up at him and purposely dropped her voice to a whisper. “How can I…help you, Sergeant Chopin?”

  “Knock it off,” he said through clenched teeth.

  She blinked innocently at him. “Knock what off?” She ran one finger down the buttons of his shirt.

  He caught her hand before she could start messing with his belt buckle. “Damn it, Shugak, knock it off.” He shoved past her and found a safe, Kate-free place in the exact center of the clearing, free of corners into which she could back him.

  No law she couldn’t stalk him, however, pacing after him with that slow, deliberate, unmistakably predatory stride. Her hair gleamed in the last rays of the setting sun like the coat of a healthy, proud animal reveling in her prime. “Hot for this time of year, isn’t it?” she said. She pulled the tail of her T-shirt free and knotted the hem beneath her breasts, leaving a good six inches of smooth, taut, golden-skinned midriff exposed.

  Jim thanked God her jeans weren’t low-riders. He wasn’t sure he had a spine that would stand up to the seductive power of Kate’s belly button.

  He also felt slightly shell-shocked. It wasn’t that no one had ever seduced him before, usually with his active and enthusiastic cooperation, it was just that he’d had no idea that Kate Shugak could turn it on like this. She was always so sensible, so matter-of-fact, so businesslike. Not to mention hostile, antagonistic, and downright bitchy. It had been clear from the beginning that if she let a man into her life, it would be on her terms, and now, suddenly, she was revealing a secret identity, the Circe inside the Shugak.