A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  “Christ,” Kate said.

  She went into the kitchen, filled a glass with ice, and poured a Diet 7UP over it. She took it into the living room and curled up on the window seat to watch the joggers go by.

  Erland Bannister. Victoria’s brother, the president and CEO of Pilz Mining and Exploration, PME Corporation after the postbankruptcy restructuring. He hadn’t been president when Victoria went to jail, but he had been on the way up.

  She remembered the response of the man on Brendan’s witness list: “Does Erland know about this?” She had the feeling that if Erland hadn’t known about her investigation into Victoria’s thirty-year-old case he did now.

  She went upstairs and climbed back into Jack’s shirt and socks. She went back downstairs and stood looking into the refrigerator for a while, as if it might hold the secrets to the universe, which refrigerators sometimes do. She wandered back out into the living room and ran a finger down the spines of the video library.

  On impulse, she called Brendan. “What are you doing home on a Monday night?” she said when he answered. “On any night, for that matter?”

  “Pining away by the phone, waiting for you to call,” he replied promptly.

  “You like tequila, don’t you?”

  He was amused. “Sure, why? You want to get me drunk and take advantage of me?”

  “There are a few bottles rattling around in the cupboards over here. One of them is a bottle of something called añejo. You want it?”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  He was, in fifteen minutes flat, and Kate fetched the bottle from the kitchen, along with a glass. He immediately slammed back a shot. “All right,” he said, looking impressed. He offered her the glass. “Your turn.”

  She shook her head.

  “Right, I forgot, you don’t drink. Darn, now I don’t have to share this bottle.”

  She laughed. “I’ve been calling the numbers on your list.”

  He leaned back into the easy chair, a big man comfortable with his size, and let his eyes run up the expanse of smooth skin between the bunched top of the thick socks to the tail of the blue plaid shirt. “What about them?”

  She smiled. Flirting was the thing Brendan McCord knew best how to do, next to litigation.

  “The response has been”—she hesitated—“mixed.”

  “Getting hung up on by the elite?” Brendan asked.

  “How did you guess?”

  “Yeah, well, hang on to your hat, because I’ve got some more bad news for you.”

  “Great.”

  “The investigating officer is dead.”

  Kate searched her memory. “Sgt. Charles Baltzo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn,” Kate said with real feeling. “Do you know of anybody else who was around at the time of the murder? Someone who might know something about the case?” She added, “Who is actually alive?”

  “I can see where alive would be good,” Brendan said gravely.

  “Also, is Henry Cowell still practicing in Anchorage?” He raised an interrogatory eyebrow. “Victoria’s defense attorney. I looked in the phone book. He’s not there.”

  He thought. “I don’t know the name.”

  “Could you find out where he is?”

  He poured himself another shot. “What’s it worth to you?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I figured you got your payment in advance.”

  He looked at the bottle and opened his mouth, and the doorbell sounded.

  Kate’s pulse scrambled. “Excuse me,” she said, and went to the door.

  Jim Chopin was on the doorstep, his face like a thundercloud. It seemed that Kate had credited him with more self-control than he actually had.

  “Jim,” she said, unable to keep a grin from spreading across her face. “How nice to see you again. What’s—”

  He stepped inside, shoved her against the wall, and kissed her hard.

  “Who is it, Kate?” Brendan said from the living room.

  Jim raised his head. “Who the hell is that?” He stalked into the living room, hands knotted into fists. Kate pulled herself together and followed.

  Jim looked from Brendan, shot glass in hand, taking his leisure in the easy chair, to Kate standing next to him in Jack’s shirt and socks and apparently very little else. He looked back at Brendan and said, “Get out.”

  Brendan thought about that for a little longer than Jim thought strictly necessary. He moved, but Kate grabbed his arm. “Thanks for coming over, Brendan,” she said. “Let me know what you find out. I’ll be here.”

  Brendan saw the barely repressed glee in her eye and threw in the towel, at least for tonight. “All right, don’t shoot. I’m gone.”

  He lumbered outside. The door had barely shut behind him when Jim turned and tossed Kate up into his arms. He took the stairs two at a time.

  “Oooooh,” she said, “I feel just like Scarlett O’Hara.”

  “Shut up,” he said.

  He woke up alone again.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  While Jim was jerking on his pants, full of a fine, righteous wrath, the source of which he did not bother to identify, Kate and Mutt were out for a run on the coastal trail. She didn’t run as a habit, but at home simple maintenance around the homestead kept her fit. In town, she took her exercise where she found it. Considerate of Jack to buy a house so close to the coastal trail.

  She was feeling much more limber this morning—the benefits of regular sex on the various muscle groups were not to be denied—and she ran smoothly, stretching her legs out in front of her, carrying her arms at midtorso, breathing deeply in and out, with no hint of labor. It was another day of unbroken sunshine, Susitna and Denali and Foraker were on her right, and she felt good. Hell, she felt great, every cell in her body was singing. Mutt, loping next to her, tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth, legs and haunches moving like pistons, looked not unhappy herself. Mutt knew how to live in the moment, to savor it, not to fear or try to second-guess the future. Kate decided that Mutt had a lot to teach her, and picked up the pace.

  They trotted down a hill and around a curve, and a park bench appeared. It was occupied.

  There were two boys, one lying on the bench, the other beneath it. Both were asleep. Two bikes lay on their sides on the grass nearby.

  The boys looked to be about ten and twelve, respectively. Kate slowed to a halt and stood looking down at them. Their eyelashes stood out darkly against their cheeks and their faces were smooth and innocent enough to break her heart.

  She could think of a number of scenarios that would result in the boys sleeping on a bench next to the coastal trail, chief among them trouble at home, a fight between parents maybe, resulting in the boys getting out of the house until it was all over.

  There was also the possibility they had not left their home voluntarily, that they could have been thrown out. Or had run from punishment, or abuse.

  She found herself reluctant to disturb them. At least in sleep, there was respite from whatever troubled them awake.

  But she was equally incapable of just walking away. “Hey,” she said.

  Neither boy stirred.

  She raised her voice. “Hey.”

  The boy on the bench moved, groaned, and opened his eyes. It took him a minute to focus. When he did, he sat up abruptly, accidentally kicking his companion, who banged his head against the bottom of the bench when he sat up.

  “Ouch!” He rubbed his head.

  His brother—the resemblance was obvious around the eyes and the way the hair grew stiffly from the hairline—risked taking his eyes off Kate for a moment. “You okay, Kevin?”

  Kevin rubbed his head. “Yeah. I’m all right. Who’s she, Jordan?”

  “Nobody.” Jordan got up and headed for his bike. “Come on, Kevin. Let’s go.”

  “Where you going?” Kate said.

  “None of your business,” he said shortly.

  “You’re right,” she said, which at
least surprised him enough to halt forward motion. “But I could give you some breakfast, if you’re interested.”

  He looked at her, frowning. Kevin rolled out from beneath the bench and brushed ineffectively at the leaves adhering to his clothes. “I’m hungry, Jordan,” he said plaintively.

  “We don’t know her, Kevin,” Jordan said. “She could be some kind of weirdo.”

  “Right again,” Kate said, noticing that Jordan wasn’t automatically making for home. “How about this? You follow me to my house. You stay outside, and I’ll bring the food out.”

  “You’ll call the cops is what you’ll do.”

  She met his eyes squarely. “Not unless and until you give me permission to,” she said.

  With the timing and tact of a seasoned diplomat, Mutt trotted over and shoved her nose under Jordan’s hand. Her tail whapped vigorously against Kevin’s knee.

  Even Jordan smiled.

  Jim was still at the town house when Kate and entourage arrived. He stood glaring at her from the front door. She almost lost the boys when they saw his uniform shirt. “He’s a trooper from the Bush, he doesn’t know from Anchorage,” she said quickly.

  They didn’t run, but they looked ready to.

  “Who’re they?” Jim said as she leapt the steps to the minuscule front porch.

  “Friends,” Kate said, “hungry friends.” She turned. “Come in or park it on the lawn, your choice.”

  In the end, the four of them sat down to breakfast together—eggs scrambled with cheese, onions, garlic, and green chilies, served on tortillas with salsa and sour cream. The boys had cocoa and she and Jim had coffee.

  I’m going to have to buy more eggs, she thought as she watched the boys, their heads bent over their plates. Hungry as they were, they ate neatly. Someone had been teaching them manners. That wasn’t always a good thing, in her experience.

  She looked at Jim. She saw him look at the boys. He opened his mouth, and she caught his eyes and shook her head once from side to side.

  He closed his mouth again.

  She wondered why he was still here. She wondered if he was ready to cave. Probably not, she thought. Probably just pissed off to wake up alone for a second time. Probably thought waking up alone the morning after was the sole province of women.

  She got up to get the coffeepot, and paused next to Jim to refill his mug. She took her time over it, leaning in, ensuring as much body contact as possible.

  He wrapped his hand around one of her thighs, and for a split second she didn’t know if that hand was going to slide up or shove away. It shoved, and she went with it, moving around the table to refill her own mug and replace the coffeepot. Neither of the boys, faces still in their plates, noticed anything. She slid into her seat, her eyes mocking. Jim looked very tense around the jawline. She smiled at him. His hand tightened around his mug. She hoped he wouldn’t throw it at her, as she didn’t know what the boys were running from and she didn’t want them to run from her house, too.

  They cleaned their plates and then cleared the table. “I guess we better go,” Jordan said.

  Kevin looked forlorn, but he nodded obediently.

  Jim looked at Kate.

  She pushed back from the table and draped a knee over one arm of the chair. “Where you going to go?” she said to the older boy.

  “Home,” he said.

  Kevin raised his head to give his brother a quick, alarmed glance.

  Kate nodded. “Think things will have calmed down since you left?”

  “They always do,” he said, his eyes bleak.

  Drinkers, she thought. They’ll have sobered up by now. And it’s chronic enough for the boys to know the routine. “You live off the trail?”

  The boys exchanged a glance. “Sort of.”

  Not even close to it, she thought. “I’d like to give you a ride home.”

  “No,” Jordan said immediately.

  Jim opened his mouth. Kate closed it with another look. “Guys, you did good. When things got bad, you left, you found a place to sleep, and you found a nonweirdo to feed you breakfast. You did good, but you were lucky, too. I’d just as soon you don’t have to be lucky again.”

  “We do okay,” Jordan said.

  Kevin said nothing, pale of face, standing very close to his brother.

  “I bet you do,” Kate said. “But you don’t have to do it alone.”

  Kevin plucked at his brother’s sleeve. “Jordan—”

  Jordan looked down at the pleading face of his little brother and all the fight went out of him.

  Their home was a trailer in Spenard, a good three miles from the coastal trail. Their mother came to the door after Kate pounded on it for a while. The smell of spilled booze and stale cigarettes was strong enough to rock Kate back a step.

  The woman, short-waisted and thick through the middle, looked to be at least part Aleut, something Kate had suspected from the first time she had seen the boys.

  She blinked at her sons. “Kevin? Jordan? What are you doing up already?” She saw Kate. “And who is this woman?”

  When Kate got back to the town house, Jim was still there. “You’re still here,” she said, brushing by him in the doorway.

  “We’ve got to talk,” he said, following her into the kitchen.

  “Really?” She poured the last of the coffee. “I wouldn’t wish the home those boys are living in on a dog.”

  Mutt looked reproachful, or as reproachful as she could pressed up next to Jim, tail wagging with delight.

  “Call DFYS.”

  Kate pressed her lips together. “They aren’t starving, and nobody’s hit them. Yet. I had a conversation with their mother. Might have scared her some. I’ll keep tabs.”

  Diverted momentarily from his mission, Jim said, “You can’t save everyone, Kate.”

  “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?” she said.

  “You know damn well what about,” he said. He kept himself well to the other side of the room, out of her reach.

  She cleared her face of all traces of a grin before turning. “I must be a little slow this morning,” she said, leaning against the counter, hands cradling her mug. She smiled at him through the steam rising up off the surface of the coffee. “Explain it to me.”

  He stared at her in fulminating silence for a charged moment, then finally blurted, “Those damn boys, for one thing! Are you out of your mind, bringing them home like that? You should have called DFYS the instant you walked in the door!”

  “No, I shouldn’t,” she said equably. “Is that all?”

  It was like throwing gas on an open fire, she noticed and waited hopefully, thinking she might be tossed over his shoulder and hauled back upstairs. To her disappointment, Jim managed to reign in his temper. That couldn’t be good for his blood pressure. She drained the mug and put it in the sink. “Well, I’ve got work to do, and I’m sure you do, too, back in the Park. I won’t keep you.”

  He found himself being ushered from the house. One moment he was in the kitchen, full of legitimate fury, and the next he was on the sidewalk, looking up at her framed in the doorway, with no clear idea of how he got there.

  “Kate,” he said.

  “Yes, Jim?” she said.

  He opened his mouth and closed it, several times.

  He looked so bewildered that she relented, if only a little. “Isn’t this how you wanted it?” she said.

  “What?” he said.

  “Isn’t this how you wanted it?” she repeated. “Straight sex with no complications—when it’s over we go our separate ways, no harm, no foul?”

  “Sounds good to me,” the man next door said, retrieving the newspaper from his front step.

  “You mind your own goddamn business,” Jim told him.

  The man, grinning, vanished back inside.

  When Jim turned back, Kate had closed the door in his face.

  9

  Kate was still chuckling at the memory of Jim’s baffled expression, when the phone rang.r />
  “Is that lucky bastard gone, or is he standing there ready to come up here and rain all over my sorry-ass parade once he knows it’s me?” Brendan McCord said.

  “He’s gone,” Kate said.

  “Good,” Brendan said. “Henry Cowell no longer practices law in the state of Alaska.”

  “Did he retire?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he move?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he die?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Brendan—”

  “Kate, this guy seems to have just vanished off the map.”

  “When?” Kate said.

  There was a brief silence. “According to the records, he represented no clients, or at least no Alaskan clients, after he rested his case for Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff.”

  “Victoria’s case was his last case?”

  “You’re a little slow on the uptake this morning, Shugak,” Brendan said. “That’s what happens when you’ve been up all night, I guess.”

  “Brendan,” Kate said, unheeding, “don’t you think it’s interesting that Victoria’s attorney vanishes right after her trial is over?”

  She could hear the amusement in his voice. “Boy, you’re desperate, aren’t you, Shugak? Like massive amounts of somebodies hightailing it out of Alaska and leaving no forwarding address is a new thing.”

  He was right, and she was a little deflated. “Yeah. Well, if you do stumble across some mention of him, let me know.”

  “Wilco,” he said cheerfully.

  “And you were going to BOTLF a cop who might have been around at that time, too, don’t forget.”

  “How about Morris Maxwell, a cop on the force at the time,” he said, “although I’m still working on what it’s worth to me.”

  Kate took a deep breath. “Brendan, at this moment I could lick whipped cream off your butt. Where do I find him?”

  “Oooooooh, Shugak, you—pardon the expression—silver-tongued devil you,” he said. “The Pioneer Home between I and L. And Kate, no guarantees on what he is or isn’t going to remember. The guy’s like a hundred and nine.”