A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  She got another bottle of water and scrubbed the sap from her hands. She’d found a nappy fleece jacket with a broken zipper that was at least thirteen sizes too big for her, but it was heavy. She hid it in the deadfall with the water.

  The sun went behind the mountains and took at least as much time to set below the horizon. The forest was filled with the sounds of the birds and the beasts going about their business, hunting, feeding, grooming. A bear sounded off in the distance, and Kate hoped he or she wasn’t heading toward the cabin.

  They came, as near as she could figure, around midnight. The witching hour, the hour when the blues band in your favorite neighborhood dive was just cranking it up, the hour when even Ted Koppel was ready to pack it in for the night, so it figured. They came in a nondescript pickup, a dull gray in color, plates the old blue-on-gold Alaska plates, no hubcaps, no mag wheels.

  Only it wasn’t they. It was only one man, whom Kate recognized as Erland the moment he stepped out. She couldn’t believe it. She was even a little annoyed. Was she, Kate Shugak, so easily dealt with that the task required only one man, and that one man not accustomed to doing his own heavy lifting? Had no one considered the possibility that she might escape and do some heavy lifting of her own?

  He saw the open door and halted, half in and half out of the vehicle. She began to descend the tree in stealth mode, glad her hair was no longer long enough to catch on spruce needles as she went.

  She froze halfway down when he reached into the truck and took the keys out. Damn.

  He walked up to the door. “Kate?” he said.

  She came up behind him, the canvas and fallen spruce needles masking her steps. “Go on in,” she said.

  He jumped and swore, and it did her heart all the good in the world. He sucked air in and let it out in an explosive breath. “You are one hell of a woman,” he said with what sounded like sincere regret.

  “Well, don’t sound so sorry about it,” she said. “Go on, go in. Sit down.”

  “How the hell did you get loose?”

  “Sit,” Kate said, and leaned up against the wall next to the open door.

  He sat, looking at her through the gloom. “Can we have a light? I think there’s an oil lamp around somewhere.”

  One of the things Kate had learned during a five-year intensive stint with the Anchorage DA was that, contrary to popular fiction, bright lights did not make people spill their guts. On the contrary, the darker the room, the more forthcoming the secrets. “I like it the way it is,” she said.

  She sensed rather than saw him shrug. “You’re the boss.”

  She didn’t believe that for a New York minute. “Who killed William Muravieff?” she asked.

  “Ah,” he said.

  Kate waited out the silence that followed. Erland Bannister was not the kind of man to be held accountable for his actions by anyone, from the IRS on down to Kate Shugak. Perhaps especially Kate Shugak, Alaska Native, female, two societies to which Erland had entrée but not membership and to both of which he almost certainly felt superior.

  “First of all, I didn’t kill him,” he said finally.

  “I did sort of figure that out on my own,” Kate said. “Was it Oliver?”

  There was another, longer silence. “Ah, Kate,” he said, and there was a world of sorrow in the words.

  “Was it really that petty?” she said. “William had the girl Oliver wanted, and Oliver killed him for it?”

  Again she sensed the shrug. “When you’re sixteen and male, girls are all you’re thinking about. And Wanda was something.”

  He still hadn’t admitted anything, but then she wasn’t wearing a wire, either. “And you let Victoria take the fall. It was just so convenient. She was making so much noise over your decision to replace your union employees with contract hires, and then, lo and behold, she gets arrested for murdering her own son. Her trial knocks your restructuring of the family business off the front pages long enough for you to get the dirty work done and over with, and then, my god, she’s found guilty. You must have thought you’d died and gone to heaven.”

  “I kept hoping she’d beat the rap, right up until the verdict,” he said heavily.

  “Bullshit,” Kate said. “She wouldn’t let her sons work for you after you announced what you were going to do, would she? And you didn’t have any sons of your own to carry on the family business. With Victoria in jail, you naturally assumed custody of Oliver, and put him right to work. What happened, Erland? Did he figure he had you by the short ones, since you were covering up each other’s dirty secrets? Is that how he could go to school and be a lawyer and start his own firm, leaving you high and dry?”

  Silence.

  “And then, thirty years later,” Kate said, “certainly long enough for all the buried skeletons to have long since deteriorated, Victoria gets cancer and her daughter hires me so she doesn’t have to die in jail. And you start tying up loose ends and a loose cannon. Eugene Muravieff, who was hiding in plain sight so he could stay in touch with his kids. And then Charlotte, because I wouldn’t leave it alone, and the only way you could see to make that happen was to kill my employer.”

  Erland must have read Disraeli. Never apologize, never explain. Arrogant but effective, especially when faced with three felony counts of murder, not to mention a felony count of kidnapping.

  “You must have wished that Victoria had choked to death on a bone,” Kate said into the silence. “She was always more trouble than she was worth anyway. Marrying that worthless Eugene. Finding out you were cooking the books.”

  A stir. “What?” he said, and his voice was no longer sorrowful.

  Kate checked to see that the doorway was still clear. “Of course you were embezzling funds, Erland,” she said. “Victoria was working in accounts payable, where she found evidence of double billing.”

  “How do you know all this?” Erland’s voice was very cold and very clear, and Kate instantly remembered one of the voices she’d heard when she first came to in the cabin. “You shouldn’t have hit her at all.” Of course not, Kate thought, a fist in the face is too obvious—the ME would have had no trouble recognizing it for what it was, and it would no doubt have been inconsistent with the other injuries her corpse would have presented when it washed ashore in Turnagain Arm. A dead giveaway—pardon the expression, she thought—that foul play had been done. She was equally certain that Erland wanted it to look like an accident. Not so much like his father after all.

  But who had he been talking to? “She told me,” Kate said.

  “She told you?” he said. “You’ve seen her since she got out? Where is she?”

  “Tell me something, Erland,” Kate said. “Did you farm me out?”

  “What?” he said.

  “Did you farm out my kidnapping,” she said. “I was just wondering. Sooner or later, you weren’t going to want any witnesses. I’m figuring it was sooner, and maybe that’s why you came up here alone.”

  For the first time, she heard tension in his voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do,” she said, and dived out the doorway in the same instant that he drew the gun and fired.

  20

  She tumbled into a forward somersault to come up on her feet running. Round one to her.

  She hit the trees in three strides, just as the gun cracked again. The sound of glass breaking on the truck made her laugh beneath her breath, as did the sound of Erland’s curses.

  She felt rather than saw her way to the water cache. She paused, listening. There was the sound of glass breaking. He was probably kicking out the remains of his windshield. The truck’s engine started.

  She would have to stick close to the road. He’d know that and stay on it, waiting for her to emerge.

  So she wormed her way under the deadfall, hoping that nothing had taken up residence in the hollow beneath in her absence. Nothing had. She felt for the oversized fleece jacket, snuggled into it and curled up into a ball. She wished for
Mutt’s warm bulk next to her, wished even for, god help her, Jim, and with that thought she dropped blessedly into a deep, dreamless oblivion.

  Birdsong woke her in that pale hour before dawn, three pure descending notes, repeated and answered. Kate blinked, yawned, and stretched, and reached for one of the bottles of water to relieve her morning mouth. She got to her knees to peer out from beneath the underbrush.

  The dew lay heavy on the bracken, a precursor of frost. She took a moment to be thankful it wasn’t. She didn’t see anyone or hear anything but animal noises, but that didn’t mean that Erland wasn’t sitting in his truck smack in the middle of the only road leading out, waiting for her to show up so he could shoot her dead and leave her to the bears to snack on. At this point he wouldn’t care if her death looked like an accident or not. He’d risk shooting her now and coming up with an explanation later, delivered no doubt by a fine battery of expensive attorneys.

  She’d been lucky so far and she knew it. Well, she thought, there’s no point in not pushing your luck when it was running in your favor. She peed where she’d slept, just to underline her determination to sleep between clean sheets that night, and pushed her way through the dead branches and into the open.

  The sky was light with the anticipation of sunrise. The three-note descant sounded again, sounding like an all clear, and Kate smiled. “Thanks, Emaa,” she whispered, and began to creep forward, keeping her head at the level of the poushki while avoiding their spiked leaves. The forest floor was dense with pine needles, all the better to muffle her steps, but she watched where she placed her canvas-shod feet anyway.

  She passed a cow moose with a yearling calf, so close that she could have touched them. The cow’s ears went back, but she didn’t get up, and Kate faded into the trees before she could.

  The forest ended at the road. Kate peered out beneath a clump of wild roses. No sign of the truck. She had a choice here. She could start down the road, chancing discovery to move faster, or stick to the trees, where it would take much longer but would be much safer.

  Erland Bannister wasn’t the type to cut his losses and get on the next jet for Rio. He had too much property and too much money and too much power to leave it all behind. His only choice, as he would see it, would be to kill Kate before she had a chance to take that all away from him.

  And it probably wouldn’t hurt him to take her out. Somewhere down deep inside, the practical businessman resented the hell out of these upstart Natives, these people who hadn’t done a lick of work in three hundred years’ worth of Alaskan history and who had had it all handed to them on a platter thirty years before and now were a force with which to be reckoned—a political force, a social force, a governmental force—dangerous to offend, impossible to ignore. They were even marrying into the goddamn families of the power elite, bastardizing a line of entrepreneurs and visionaries going back a hundred years.

  Well. One woman’s merchant adventurer was another woman’s pirate. Kate grinned to herself.

  If she were Erland, she would have driven down to where this road intersected with the next road. There was only one way into the cabin and the same way out. Kate had to stay on or near the road to get back to Anchorage, and help. Yes, that’s what she would do.

  Kate stepped out into the road and stood there for a moment.

  No one shot at her.

  The three notes sounded from a nearby branch, and Kate looked up to catch the cocky eye of a golden-crowned sparrow. The tiny, plump brown bird launched from the bobbing branch it had been perched on and flitted down the road from tree to tree. Kate followed.

  It was a long road and the sun was sliding up over the horizon when Kate rounded a corner and saw the intersection. She stepped into a thicket of alder and peered through the leaves. She didn’t see the truck, or any other vehicle. But then, she wouldn’t have parked in sight, either. She would have wanted to lure her quarry into the open.

  Okay. She was lurable. She soft-footed it down the little incline. The intersecting road was two lanes wide and the gravel hadn’t been graded in awhile. She still didn’t see the truck, so she stepped out on it, and again, no one shot her. Life was good.

  She put her back to the rising sun and set off down the road at a slow trot, working out the kinks of sleeping in the woods and working up some body heat while she was at it. She’d had peanut butter and crackers for breakfast, so she wasn’t hungry, strictly speaking, but she would have killed for a big plate heaped with bacon and eggs over medium, with a big pile of crisp home fries on the side. She was fantasizing over the home fries—with onions and green, red, and yellow peppers and garlic mixed in—when she rounded a corner and saw the truck, parked with its nose downhill.

  Without thinking about it, she dived for the side of the road and tumbled down a small bank, fetching up hard against a tree trunk.

  “Shit,” she said before she could stop herself. She got to her feet and found herself looking down the barrel of a pistol held in the shaking hand of Oliver Muravieff.

  He looked, if possible, even more terrified than Kate felt. “Uncle Erland?” he called over his shoulder. “Uncle Erland, I’ve got her.”

  “Shoot her, you moron,” Kate heard Erland say, and that was all she needed to hear. She made a diving tackle for Oliver’s bad knee. It cracked when she hit it and she knew a fierce satisfaction in the sound. Amazingly, he didn’t drop the gun. He tried to point it at her, but she had his wrist in both hands. They struggled, rolling back and forth, and Kate’s biggest fear at that point was the crashing of underbrush that signified Erland’s approach.

  “Drop it, you little weasel,” she said through her teeth, and at that moment the gun went off.

  Kate’s ears rang with the sound of the shot, and her nostrils stung from the smell of burnt powder. She jerked back and felt her torso, her legs, her arms. There was blood on her left hand and she stared at it, horrified, before realizing that it wasn’t her blood.

  She looked down at Oliver, at Oliver’s belly, where a huge red bubble was growing. “Oh fuck,” she said, and turned to meet the bull rush of Erland Bannister as he came crashing through a diamond willow. He looked past Kate to Oliver and said, “Goddamn you, Oliver, you useless little shit!” Given that moment of distraction, Kate grabbed for an overhead branch, hoisted herself up, and kicked Erland Bannister right in the chin. His jaw clicked shut and he fell backward most fortuitously against a white birch that had grown so tall its branches were a good eight feet above the ground. His skull hit the birch’s trunk with a very satisfying smack, a sound that Kate would have been happy to hear again, but there was no time. She rifled his pockets for keys and found them, and then she ran for it, flat out, right to the truck. It started at a touch and she put it in gear and floored the gas pedal.

  Halfway down the hill, she met Mutt and Jim Chopin coming up in one of those anonymous black SUVs that had government issue written all over it. Fred Gamble was driving.

  “Who took out the insurance policies on the kids?” Jim said.

  “Victoria did,” Kate said, “just like everyone said she did. They were maturation policies, generating funds for when the kids got old enough to retire, or to provide financing for their burials, should that be necessary before their time.”

  Brendan shook his head. “She never denied taking them out, did she?”

  “She never denied much of anything,” Kate said. “Erland told her he’d turn Oliver in if she did.”

  “Tell me that part again. I’m having a hard time with it.”

  Kate sighed and let her head fall back. “Oliver was in love with Wanda. He thought she was in love with William. Oliver drugged William with his mother’s sleeping pills, took a couple himself so they’d show up in the drug scan, and siphoned some gas out of his mother’s car, which he then ran from the fireplace to both sets of drapes. Then he put the gas can back in the garage, went upstairs, and climbed in bed to wait for the fire to catch and the smoke to rise to the second floor.”

/>   “I still don’t get it. He broke his leg trying to get out the window.”

  “I don’t think that was part of the plan.”

  “Going out the window?”

  “No, he meant to do that all along. It would have looked funny if he’d come down the stairs without trying to bring William with him. William’s bedroom was between his and the stairs. No, Oliver had to go out the window to make it look good.”

  “It looked pretty damn good,” Fred Gamble said. “It certainly fooled an entire police force. Not to mention a jury.”

  They were in Brendan’s office. Kate had been giving statements continuously since nine o’clock in the morning. It was now one o’clock in the afternoon. She was sticky with tree sap, grimy with sweat and dirt, and very, very tired. Her one consolation was the shaggy gray head pressed to her knee. She knotted her fingers in Mutt’s ruff and Mutt gave a comforting whine and leaned harder. She had been glued to Kate’s side since they’d found Kate that morning. Sooner or later, such devotion was going to make it difficult to go to the bathroom, but right now it was equal parts relief and reassurance.

  “And Victoria refused to speak to Charlotte because…”

  “I’m guessing, to protect her,” Kate said. “Victoria never told Charlotte that Oliver had killed William. Erland wouldn’t tell her, either, if Victoria would refuse to talk to her. He wanted a complete rift. So long as Victoria was in jail for William’s murder, no one would think to look at Oliver as a suspect. And Erland would have the heir he couldn’t provide for himself.”