A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  Inside were a list of names and addresses, both business and home.

  “It’s the witness list from the Muravieff trial—who’s still around, and where,” Brendan said.

  Kate met his eyes and dropped her voice an octave. “I have never wanted you more,” she said.

  He flung back his head, roaring with laughter. She waited for it to subside. “What do you think?”

  He gave her his wide and uncomplicated trademark grin. “She’s in jail, isn’t she?”

  “Come on, Brendan.”

  “I haven’t read the file, just the witness list. You want my professional opinion?”

  “Always.”

  “You’re going to put an eye out, you keep fluttering your eyelashes at me that way,” he said. “Okay, all right, I’ll read it. You at Jack’s?”

  She nodded.

  “Johnny?”

  “With Auntie Vi. I don’t know how long this case is going to take, and school starts in a couple of weeks.”

  Brendan dropped his eyes and shook his head.

  “Why are you smiling?” Kate said.

  “You really think you’ve got a chance of getting her out?”

  Kate remembered the stubborn line of Charlotte’s mouth. “I’m being paid to think so.”

  “Ah.” There was a wealth of understanding in the one word. “I’ll look at the trial transcript. I just had a case settle, so I can squeeze a half hour into my schedule.”

  “And on a Saturday, too,” Kate said. “Thanks, Brendan.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “How grateful are you?”

  She laughed, and watched him dribble steak juice down the front of his polyester suit (Sears, on sale), but it sort of matched the dull brown color, not to mention the—what was it, oatmeal?—he’d left there at breakfast that morning. “One more thing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Could you find out if the investigating officer is still around?”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Charles Baltzo. Sgt. Charles Baltzo.”

  “Sure, why not, since it looks like I’m working for you instead of the state this week anyway.”

  “Brendan—”

  He laughed. “Lighten up, Shugak. That was a joke.” He burped behind a napkin and sat back. “So what else you got on the agenda?”

  “I talked to Victoria today.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “And she fired me.”

  He stared at her. “You’re kidding me.”

  “But it didn’t take, since she wasn’t the one who hired me.”

  “Interesting, this is,” he said. “And unexpected.”

  “Stop talking like Yoda. Do you know anything about Victoria Muravieff, Brendan? Like what she’s been doing in prison for the last thirty years?”

  “Sure. She’s even been written up in the paper a couple of times. According to the local editorial writers, she’s a cross between Socrates and Anne Sullivan.”

  “And that doesn’t impress you?”

  “I don’t have to tell you how easy it is to be the good guy in prison, Kate,” he said. “No drugs, no booze, no men to fight over, no kids to drive you crazy. She’s an intelligent woman with, evidently, a strong drive to succeed. She’s in prison, I might add, because she succeeded at murder.”

  “She got caught.”

  “I said she was intelligent. I didn’t say she was smart enough to get away with murder. Very few people are.”

  Kate sighed.

  “Ah hell, Kate,” he said. “If it was easy, everybody’d be doing it.”

  On the way home, Kate stopped in at City Market to load up on groceries, and, as was her deplorable wont when she was in Anchorage, she overdid it on the fresh fruit and vegetable front. It was hard to be in the produce section of any Anchorage grocery store with a lot of money in the bank. She consoled herself with the thought that the back of George’s Cessna was large and that she could take home whatever was left over at the end of the job.

  She made herself an enormous fruit salad with Auntie Vi’s special sweet dressing made from mayonnaise, white vinegar, and honey. She ate it at the dining room table, next to the window overlooking the lagoon, watching walkers, joggers, bladers, and bikers on the bike trail that ran next to the water’s edge. When she was done, she looked at Mutt and said, “Let’s go scare some of those sissy city dogs.”

  They walked around the lagoon and through the tunnel beneath the railroad tracks that led to the coastal trail. It was a beautiful evening, clear, with a warm breeze, which was strong enough to keep the bugs off but light enough not to dissipate the rich aroma rising up off the massed Rosa rugosa bushes crowding the fence. Mutt trotted next to her, looking down her lupine nose at the dogs going in the other direction, who had to be kept on leashes and still lunged out to the ends of them, barking hysterically at anything that moved. When a pair of Dobermans got especially yappy, she snapped her teeth together, just once. It sounded like the cock of a pistol. They shut up. If they’d had tails, they would have tucked them between their legs. Their owner, clinging desperately to the other end of their leashes, glared at Kate.

  “She’s like that around dogs with no manners,” Kate told him.

  They went over a bridge that crossed a creek whose mud banks were exposed by low tide. Where the creek’s current debouched into the inlet, the white backs of beluga whales gleamed against the grayish brown water. Eating on the salmon fixing to head upstream to spawn, Kate thought, and raised her eyes to the horizon, where the block of Foraker and the arc of Denali stood out in white relief against the deep blue sky. It was a beautiful day, and she was in a comfortable house in a great Anchorage neighborhood, a house that was paid for, but she couldn’t help wondering if it was as beautiful a day in another and much less crowded neighborhood two hundred miles to the northeast.

  There was an answer for that. The sooner she got the job done, the sooner she could go home.

  “Go ahead,” she said to Mutt, and like an arrow loosed from a bow, Mutt leaped the boulders piled against the bank, landed on the strip of sand below, and streaked off, not in pursuit of anything—she knew better than that in town—but just indulging in a nice little minimarathon to stretch her legs. She was going to be hungry later on, and she wasn’t going to be happy with the dog food Kate had bought at the store.

  Kate started walking again, hands in her pockets, a frown on her face. A fat woman with frizzy blond hair who was doing something that looked like slow-motion karate saw the frown and lost her balance.

  Kate was having difficulty reconciling the woman who had burned down her home to kill her sons in order to get the insurance money with Saint Victoria of Hiland Mountain Correctional Facility. She wondered if perhaps Victoria had had a habit—drugs or alcohol maybe. It happened in the best of families, and a substance-abuse problem all too frequently led to other problems, which often included bankruptcy. It could have been one way Victoria, even with her moneyed background, could have wound up desperate enough for funds that she’d committed filicide. Kate added another to the list of questions she was accumulating for Charlotte.

  A short rise through a thick growth of birch trees and the trail opened out into a fenced playing field where what looked like a hundred ten-year-olds swarmed around a soccer ball. Two benches were bolted to the pavement at the edge of a cliff. On one of the benches, a young couple in bike pants and helmets sat with their legs up on the crossbars of their bicycles, glowing with sweat and gulping down water from bottles that matched their bikes.

  Kate went to the edge of the cliff and shouted, “Mutt! Come!” and sat down on the other bench. There was a short silence from the young couple, followed by a concerned murmur when Mutt came galloping up the cliff a few moments later, her tongue flopping out of the side of her mouth. She skidded to a halt in front of Kate and set her teeth in the hem of Kate’s jeans.

  “Knock it off,” Kate said, but Mutt kept tugging until she pulled Kate off the bench. Mutt leaped away
and crouched down, her tail wagging furiously.

  “Uh, are you okay?” the man asked.

  “I’m fine,” Kate said, shaking with laughter. She got to her feet. “Okay,” she told Mutt, “you wanna play, let’s play.”

  Mutt gave a joyous bark and headed for the cliff. She was halfway down the narrow, twisty little trail before Kate hit the edge. Mutt sprinted the rest of the way and waited for Kate at the bottom. Fortunately, the tide was out, exposing the narrow strip of sand between the cliff and the vast expanse of glacial silt that made up the mud flats of the northern reaches of Cook Inlet. “Okay,” Kate said menacingly, “let’s see what you got.”

  They roughhoused up and down the beach for thirty minutes, until Mutt’s coat and Kate’s hair were filled with sand. Other dogs and owners appeared and then disappeared as quickly. The couple on the bench came to the fence to watch the crazy woman running with her wolf, and soon they were joined by others. The light started to go, and Kate woke up to the fact that the sun was beginning to set. She suspected she’d have bruises the next day, but she felt good anyway, loose and ready for action. “Not that there’s going to be any action,” she told Mutt.

  She labored back up the cliff to the trail, where the crowd had dispersed, and they headed for home.

  Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff had looked straight as an arrow when Kate had met her that day, but that didn’t mean anything. Some of the pleasantest people Kate had met had been in prison, where confinement had separated them from their drug of choice and they were sober and straight for the first time in their lives. Prison was detox at its simplest.

  Myra Hartsock, case in point.

  Back at the town house, she showered and put on one of Jack’s blue shirts, the tail of which hit her knees, and a pair of his thick wool socks. She’d just come back downstairs for a snack and to find a movie to watch when the doorbell rang. She looked at the clock on the bookcase, a solid dark green jade cutout of Alaska, the numbers pegged out in gold nuggets and a small plaque beneath announcing “John ‘Jack’ Morgan, Investigator of the Year,” presented by the Anchorage Police Department. She remembered that year, and the case that had precipitated the award.

  The doorbell rang again. Mutt raised her head and gave Kate a questioning look. It was almost 10:00 P.M. “All right,” Kate told her, “I’ll answer it, but I’m not in the mood for wrestling with Brendan.”

  She looked through the sidelight and a smile started at the corners of her mouth. She opened the door and pulled it wide. “Well, hey. Jim.”

  Jim glared down at her. “Where is he?”

  “Where’s who?” Kate said, running her eyes over him and taking her time about it. It really was worth the effort; even on days when she hadn’t been able to stand the sight of him, Jim Chopin was, well, just this short of magnificent, especially suited up in his state trooper’s uniform. “Come on in,” she said.

  He hesitated. Her smile broadened. She pulled the door wider and raised one eyebrow ever so slightly.

  It was obvious she had little on beneath the oversized man’s shirt. Jim might actually have blushed, but he shouldered by her before she could be certain and closed the door firmly behind him before Kate could show off that length of bare leg to anyone else. Mutt hurtled out of the living room, reared up to place both paws on Jim’s shoulders, and gave him the tongue bath of his life.

  He couldn’t help but laugh. “All right, Mutt. All right, damn it, knock it off. Jeeze.” He wiped his face in the crook of his arm and looked down at her gazing up at him adoringly, tongue lolling out of one side of her mouth, tail wagging hard enough to achieve liftoff. “You’d think we hadn’t howdied in a month.”

  “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” Kate said, and watched him try to pretend that he’d forgotten she was standing there. “What can I do for you, Jim?” She let her eyes linger on his mouth. It was wide and firm and she already knew he could kiss.

  With a fascination he couldn’t help, he let his eyes roam, too. Then he remembered why he was there and said in a gruff voice, “Where’s Kurt Pletnikoff?”

  She blinked. “Kurt?”

  “You heard me. I know he came to town. George said he followed you in today.”

  “What?”

  “Where is he?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What do you want with him anyway? I told you I’d stop him poaching bears for bladders, and I did.”

  “Oh, really? That must be why Dan called me this morning and said he’d found another carcass.”

  “What?” she said again, smile vanishing. “Where?”

  He pulled off his cap and smacked it against his thigh. “Just below the Step, if you can believe that. Jesus, the nerve of this guy, shooting a bear that close to the ranger station. If Dan had caught him at it, I’d be working a homicide investigation right now. Anyway, that’s it. Kurt’s going down. Where is he?”

  “He didn’t shoot it,” she said. “Not that bear anyway.”

  “How do you know?”

  She thought back to the man she had confronted in the cabin the day before. “I just know.”

  Jim rolled his eyes. “Well, that’s it, then. I’m totally convinced. I’ll head on back to the Park and find out who really did it.”

  “Kurt’s not why you’re here,” she said softly.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re the one who followed me to town, not Kurt.”

  They were still standing in the entryway. He was a step, two at the most, from the front porch, ten feet from the door of his borrowed truck, thirty feet from the street and escape. He turned his head a fraction of an inch at a time and found her looking at him. He’d never been able to determine the color of her eyes. Sometimes they were hazel, sometimes brown, sometimes even green. Now they just looked dark, a little slumberous, and far too knowing.

  He was suddenly and acutely aware of how alone they were in this house, how far they were from the Park and all the prying eyes and listening ears that helped him keep his balance on the tightrope of his libido. At the moment, his safety net of Auntie Vi and Auntie Joy and Auntie Balasha and Old Sam and Bernie and Bobby and Dinah was two hundred miles away.

  A small plane buzzed far overhead. Outside, light was fading from the sky, and stars not seen for four months were winking into existence to preen themselves in the still mirror of the lagoon. Inside, the silence was still and heavy with expectation.

  “Kate,” he said, or tried to say. His tongue felt thick.

  A slow smile curled lips that looked fuller and redder than they had a moment before. “Jim,” she said, softly mocking. She stepped forward, and in spite of the red lights and the sirens going off in his head, he couldn’t stop himself. He leaned down into her kiss.

  Skin on skin, that’s all it was, the light touch of her breath on his cheek, the faint smell of soap and shampoo and sweat and wood smoke that was uniquely Kate Shugak. He couldn’t help that, either. He reveled in it, in fact, but then he caught himself and pulled back. “I don’t want to do this,” he said, his voice sounding weak in his own ears.

  “Don’t you?” she said, eyelids drooping, voice husky. “Okay.”

  He didn’t move.

  Still with that damn knowing smile on her face, she let her eyes slip down over him again. He could feel her gaze like a touch. He couldn’t breathe inside his shirt. It was too tight, his pants were too tight, and his tie was knotted too tightly around his neck. His hand came up to loosen it.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Why not?” was all he could think of to say.

  “So I can do this.” She knotted a hand in the tie and used it to lead him up the stairs.

  He looked down and saw his feet moving of their own volition. Their footsteps were muffled by the plush blue carpet on the stairs. It seemed forever before they got to the bedroom, which had what looked like an acre of bed in it, and at the same time he saw the journey in flashbacks, still shots, the heel of her thick white so
cks a little worn, the blue flannel caressing her ass. Her hair was damp and finger-combed, the ends drying in slight curls against her neck.

  He halted in the center of the room and stood, dumbstruck, as she stripped leisurely out of her clothes, keeping her eyes on his face as a slight smile played around the corners of her mouth. She reached for his belt, and he might have made some kind of protest, one last plea for leniency, but by then she had swung him around and pushed him so that he landed on his back on the bed, and she was over him, and on him, and in him, and he gave himself up to the woman and to the night.

  He woke up alone, splayed out like a starfish and about the same temperature. He was back on the bed, thank God, although the mattress had slid partway off the box springs. The pillows were gone. He turned his head and saw them piled in front of a chair, and remembered how they’d gotten there. The blanket was jammed between the edge of the mattress and the bed frame, the fitted sheet had popped its corners and clumped up into a ball, and all he had covering him was the top sheet, which appeared to be tangled around his left leg. He didn’t have the energy to reach for it, so he lay there, goose-pimpled and numb, mostly because he wasn’t sure he could move and he was afraid to find out.

  He knew he must have slept at some point during the night, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember when he’d had the time. Kate had been like a force of nature, overwhelming, relentless, inexorable. “Here,” she’d said, and dutifully he’d gone there. “Harder,” she’d said, and obediently he had stroked or sucked or thrust harder. “Again,” she had said, and the good soldier had done as he was told. There had been no escape, even if he’d been inclined toward it, which parts of him most definitely weren’t. He looked down to see if anything remained between his legs. He was immensely relieved to find that there was, although he wasn’t certain there was any fluid left in his body.

  He’d done it. He’d spent the night with Kate Shugak, the one thing he had been avoiding all summer long. He stared at the ceiling and watched the storm clouds gather.

  Kate Shugak was a serial monogamist. That worked for some people, and she was one of them, but that group didn’t include him. It was the one thing he knew absolutely. A relationship to him meant sex and a lot of it, along with a lesser amount of lazy affection, which he was more than willing to provide so long as it didn’t take a lot of emotional work on his part. He didn’t want anything to do with love. Love, Jesus, there was a word to frighten the living hell out of you. Love led to things like marriage and children and growing old together, not to mention spousal abuse and infanticide and murder. He’d responded to his share of domestic disturbances, he knew all he needed to know about love and marriage. He’d never told a woman he loved her, and he never would, and he sure as hell wasn’t starting with the woman who had shared this bed with him, no way, no how. The very thought of it sent a chill right down his spine. Even if he couldn’t feel his spine at the moment.