A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  “And it worked,” Jim said. “For thirty years.”

  Kate nodded. “Okay, your turn. You guys have been pumping me dry for four hours. What happened here?”

  “I woke up, you were gone, the boys saw you get taken, they caught the tags, Brendan found that they were registered to a buddy of Ralph Patton’s.”

  “Was Ralph one of the men who took me?”

  Brendan shook his head. “I had a prowl car go out to his place. He was home with his wife and kid.”

  Kate looked at Gamble. “Not that I wasn’t happy to see you, Fred, but how the hell did you get involved in this?”

  Gamble looked at Brendan. Brendan brushed fruitlessly at a speck of something disgusting on his tie and said to it, “I had reason to believe the FBI might have an interest in PME and all those who sail in her.”

  Kate’s eyes narrowed.

  “We were watching Oliver. We followed him to the cabin,” Gamble said primly. “And that’s really all we’re prepared to tell you.”

  Racketeering? Money laundering? Kate wondered just what it was that had pulled PME back from the brink of bankruptcy all those years ago, and just how legal it had been.

  She noticed Jim looked uncomfortable, and wondered what that was about. An enormous yawn split her face, and she decided to leave it for another day.

  The phone rang. Brendan answered it, listened for a moment, said “Thanks,” and hung up. “Well, that was the crime-scene guys. They’ve been going over the cabin. Seems they found a grave.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “What’s left of what they think was a man.”

  “Henry Cowell,” Kate said.

  Brendan nodded at her. “We’ll have the lab put a rush on it, but that’s what I’m thinking.”

  “He wouldn’t stay bought.”

  Brendan said, “You think Erland paid him to throw the case?”

  “Maybe not throw it,” Kate said, standing up and stretching. “Even old hanging Judge Kiddle might have noticed that. But Henry Cowell sure didn’t try very hard to get Victoria off.”

  Back at the town house, she showered and changed into clean clothes and started to pack. Mutt knew what that meant and she was tiresomely happy about it.

  Kate left her duffel by the door and called the cleaning service. They promised to come by the following morning. “Oh,” Kate said, “and there’s some fresh stuff—fruit, vegetables, some meat—in the refrigerator. Tell your people to take it all.”

  She drove everything she’d bought to a shipping firm that specialized in palletizing goods and shipping them into the Bush. On the way home, she detoured over to Kevin and Jordan’s house.

  Their mother opened the door. She looked sober, for the moment. Kate introduced herself in case the woman had been too drunk last time to remember her, and said, “Your boys have been eating and sleeping at my house off and on for the last couple of days. I’m leaving now, so I won’t be there for them. You’ve got two choices, ma’am. You can sober up and shape up and start taking care of them, or I can call the Division of Family and Youth Services and report you for child neglect and endangerment.”

  She took Max to a late lunch to wash the taste of that out of her mouth.

  “Goddamn it,” Max said with a bitterness that not even the best mixed martini would soothe.

  “Not your fault,” Kate said. “It was a family conspiracy. There’s nothing harder to crack.”

  “Bullshit,” Max said. He looked like a very old and very irritated eagle, with his fierce blue eyes and his hawklike nose.

  Yes, he was very like Abel. Abel Int-hout, another quintessential Alaskan old fart with an independent streak as wide as the Yukon and an attitude as convivial as a wolverine’s.

  “We should have figured it out,” Max said. “It’s what we’re paid to do. Instead, we imprisoned the wrong perp for thirty years.”

  “Well, she’s out now, and pardoned. Plus, after all the hoo-ha dies down, there will be no stain on her character,” Kate said. “She’s going to take over PME, they say.”

  “What about her cancer?”

  “It’s operable, about an eighty percent survival rate. She got a second opinion. She’s going in for the operation this week.” Kate cocked an eye at him. “I gave her your number.”

  “Me?” Max didn’t look so much surprised as outraged. “Why the hell did you do that?”

  “She’s walking into the lion’s den, Max,” Kate said. “The FBI’s running some kind of investigation of what they are calling PME’s ‘past improprieties,’ and PME’s board of directors were all hand picked by her brother. You think he won’t be trying to pull strings from the inside?”

  Max snorted. “He’s never going to see the inside. He’s going to be out on bail by the end of business today.”

  “All the more reason Victoria could use a sharp-eyed old fart like you to watch her back. Not too many flies on you, old man.”

  He smiled, albeit reluctantly.

  Kate went for the jugular. “She could use a friend about now. All three of her children are lost to her, two to death, one to jail.”

  “Okay, all right, enough with the violins,” he said. “I’ll talk to her.” He denied any softening by giving her a sharp look. “What about you?”

  “Me?” Kate said. “Well, my record on this case has not been what you might call stellar. I got my employer killed. I got my employer’s father killed. I hired my first employee and almost got him killed.”

  Max snorted again. “I don’t know how to break this to you, Shugak, but you’re just not that powerful. You didn’t make the calls. You didn’t pull the triggers.”

  “Maybe I could have been a little smoother,” she said. “A little more subtle.”

  “Maybe you could,” he said, “and maybe pigs’ll fly. Anybody who hires you finds out fast that your chosen instrument is the sledgehammer, not the scalpel.”

  He surprised a laugh out of her at a time when she didn’t feel much like laughing.

  “Not much point in looking back,” Max said. “Waste of time. Look forward.”

  He leaned forward to give her knee a sharp rap. “There’s almost always tomorrow.”

  She made one more stop on the way to the airport.

  “Hello, Emily,” she said, when Charlotte’s partner opened the door.

  Emily’s hand went to her mouth. There was almost nothing left of the smart, aggressive attorney Kate had met just days ago. Emily looked as if she hadn’t showered since the day of Charlotte’s death. She was dressed in the same gray sweats Charlotte had been wearing the first time Kate had visited this house. Her hair was lank and her face was colorless. She’d aged ten years since the last time Kate had seen her. “Oh,” she said listlessly. “It’s you.” She walked away from the door without closing it behind her.

  “Stay,” Kate said to Mutt in a soft voice, and followed Emily into the living room where she had curled up on the couch beneath a worn quilt decorated with illustrations of Holly Hobby.

  “What do you want?” Emily said, still in that listless, disinterested voice.

  “Has anyone told you what happened?”

  Emily shook her head.

  Kate told her everything.

  “Oliver?” Emily said. “Oliver killed his own brother?”

  “Knock it off, Emily,” Kate said.

  Frightened eyes raised to meet Kate’s. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You knew it was Oliver all along,” Kate said. “I don’t know how you figured it out, maybe it came out of being his law partner, maybe he let something slip at the office one day, but you knew.”

  Emily’s eyes filled with tears.

  “You were Charlotte’s heir,” Kate said. “You knew about Oliver, and when Charlotte died, you confronted Erland. You threatened to expose Oliver. He threatened to contest Charlotte’s will if you talked to me or anyone else about it. Stalemate.”

  She waited. Emily picked at a loose thread on the afghan. “This
house is so big, so expensive, I couldn’t afford it on my own. And I wanted to keep it, it’s all I have left of her now—”

  “Surely not all,” Kate said, looking at Emily with equal parts pity and disgust.

  “You don’t understand! I have to maintain a certain standard of living, I have to entertain, it’s expected by my clients!”

  “So you let Erland walk away from the cold-blooded murder of the person you loved most in the world. You did that for a house? For a career?”

  Emily’s face crumpled. “Don’t,” she said, warding off Kate with a shaking hand. “No more.”

  Her face was contorted with pain and grief, but superceding them both was an agonizing, overwhelming guilt. She had betrayed Charlotte in life by keeping her knowledge of Oliver’s guilt a secret, and betrayed her again in death by bowing to Erland’s blackmail, and what that meant was only now becoming clear to her.

  There was nothing Kate could say that would make Emily feel any worse, and suddenly the desire to do so receded. She turned and left. Behind her she could hear Emily dissolve into helpless, racking sobs.

  By the time Kate hit the door, she was running.

  He saw the cab and knew it was them. He busied himself with preflighting the Cessna. He was back in full trooper regalia, from the perfectly centered set of the ball cap with the trooper insignia on his head to the glossy black of his half boots, and in between everything blue pressed to a knife-edge crease and everything gold polished to a high gleam. He was the very model of a modern major general, only in this case an Alaska State Trooper sergeant, and no apologies to either Gilbert or Sullivan, thank you very much.

  It felt like armor, and he welcomed it. This was it, he told himself. No more putting it off, no more allowing her to fog his mind with sex, no more following her up the stairs of that town house and down onto that enormous bed in the master bedroom. No more losing himself in that firm muscle beneath smooth skin, those tip-tilted hazel eyes, that rich ripe mouth.

  He yanked his wandering imagination back under control. They were done. There had never been a “they.” He wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for the fact that he’d spent some time with Kate Shugak, a night or two—okay, six, and he wasn’t such an asshole that he couldn’t say good-bye nicely when he had to. He wasn’t one of those guys who just walked away when it was over. No, by God, he took his leave properly, like a gentleman, and he would do no less with Kate Shugak.

  The thing was, he didn’t want a relationship. He’d never wanted one. We are what our parents make us, somebody once said, and it was true. His parents were your typical suburban couple who’d had their one token child, raised him to be a functioning, productive adult, and then agreed to coexist for the rest of their lives in the neutral zone they had made of their ranch-style home. He’d never wanted anything that subdued, that lacking in passion, that colorless. If that was what marriage was about, and he had no evidence to the contrary—Bobby and Dinah Clark were clearly an aberration, Billy and Annie Mike the exception that broke the rule—then he wanted none of it.

  He didn’t want passion, either, none of that headlong, the world well lost, only for you in mine eyes nonsense. Deliberately, he willed to mind Virgil and Telma Hagberg. If passion meant you were instantly blind to all of your lover’s faults, up to and including infanticide, he didn’t want any part of that, either.

  No. Better to pursue a more cautious middle road, a series of well, better not call them relationships. Affairs, perhaps? How about good old carnal knowledge? Scratch the itch and move on. There was nothing wrong with single, footloose, and fancy-free.

  “Look at Old Sam Dementieff,” he told the gas tank. “He must be a hundred and three, and he still scuttles down to Alaganik Bay and gets it on with Mary Balashoff every chance he gets. And that’s only when she doesn’t send word via Park Air to meet her in Anchorage first. He looks perfectly happy to me.”

  The gas tank remained blandly nonresponsive.

  The cab stopped on the tarmac and Kate got out. Mutt trotted over to greet Jim, who was on a stepladder, topping off the gas tank in the left wing.

  Kate remembered Max’s words. “There’s almost always tomorrow.”

  He was right. Tomorrow always came, and there was only one time when you didn’t see it. William, Eugene, and Charlotte were dead. Emaa was dead. Her parents were dead.

  Jack was dead.

  But all that was yesterday, and yesterday was past praying for. She was alive.

  She looked over at the Cessna, at Jim Chopin in glorious blue and gold, checking something beneath the cowling.

  Jim was alive.

  Mutt gave a distinctly feminine little yip, front paws as high as she could get on the ladder, begging for attention, and Jim dropped an absent hand to pull on her ears. Kate smiled, a long, slow, anticipatory smile.

  Mutt was right. So was Max. Much better to focus on today.

  She saw Jim spot her, and her smile widened at his expression.

  Today, there was a chance of joining the Mile High Club.

  Read on for a preview of the next thrilling installment in the world of Kate Shugak

  RESTLESS IN THE GRAVE

  On Sale February 2012 from Minotaur Books

  Also by Dana Stabenow

  The Kate Shugak Series

  Though Not Dead

  A Night Too Dark

  Whisper to the Blood

  A Deeper Sleep

  A Taint in the Blood

  A Grave Denied

  A Fine and Bitter Snow

  The Singing of the Dead

  Midnight Come Again

  Hunter’s Moon

  Killing Grounds

  Breakup

  Blood Will Tell

  Play with Fire

  A Cold-Blooded Business

  Dead in the Water

  A Fatal Thaw

  A Cold Day for Murder

  The Liam Campbell Series

  Better to Rest

  Nothing Gold Can Stay

  So Sure of Death

  Fire and Ice

  Thrillers

  Prepared for Rage

  Blindfold Game

  The Star Svensdotter Series

  Red Planet Run

  A Handful of Stars

  Second Star

  Anthologies

  Powers of Detection

  Wild Crimes

  Alaska Women Write

  The Mysterious North

  At the Scene of the Crime

  Unusual Suspects

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  RESTLESS IN THE GRAVE. Copyright © 2012 by Dana Stabenow. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (TK)

  ISBN: 978-0-312-55913-7

  This one is for the Danamaniacs,

  and especially for

  Cathy Obbema,

  Cathy Rose,

  Carolyn Bright,

  and

  Sandy Nolfi—

  Liam returns, just for them

  “… It’s with us in the room, though. It’s the bones.” “What bones?” “The cellar bones—out of the grave.”

  —Robert Frost, “Two Witches”

  One

  November

  Sangin District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan

  THEY KEPT IT SIMPLE. THEY COULD CUT OFF his right hand, or he could use it to learn how to fire the weapon they gave him.

  They had even picked the target. He knew before they told him, it would be American. By now he could repeat the Malawian’s Friday harangue to do jihad on the invaders word for word.

  All he had wanted was to go home. Pakistan was a hungry place for a young Afghani man with no family or friends. His father had been killed when the Americans invaded i
n 2003, and his mother had taken the children and fled over the border, joining the hundreds of thousands of others in the camps. When she died, he found his way back to his own country, where he had not been so much recruited by the Taliban as kidnapped.

  At least they fed him.

  The camp three hundred yards up the narrow valley was small, an outpost dug into a small saddle between two hills, consisting of forty American soldiers. The top of the hill in front had been leveled to provide a landing place for a helicopter. He had been waiting for it for three days, broiling by day and freezing by night beneath the camouflage netting that had been stolen, they told him, from the enemy in another firefight in another valley.

  The weapon was beautiful and deadly, brand new, light of weight, black in color, made of heavy plastic married to a dense, dark metal with a dull shine. A zippered sheath kept it free of the dirt and sand that filtered through the netting to layer his clothing and coat the inside of his nostrils so that he could barely breathe.

  In the distance, a few tumbledown buildings marked a primitive landholding. A boy herded goats toward a patch of earth that showed the barest hint of green and hosted a few wormword bushes twisted into nightmare shapes from lack of water. Those fields he could see lay fallow, the only cash crop this area had ever known rooted up by the invaders.

  A faint sound of wings disturbing the air and he looked up. A steppe eagle had been hunting this valley every morning and evening, soaring overhead on brown wings spread six feet from wingtip to wingtip, black tail spread wide, feathers ruffling in the air.

  This sound wasn’t the eagle, though. It was the helicopter, coming at last.

  It hurtled up the valley, barely time enough for him to get the rifle out of its protective sheath. He settled his eye to the scope, as he had been taught, and sighted in. The magnification of the scope threw the aircraft into startlingly immediate relief. The windshield was scratched and sandy and the sun rendered the Plexiglas nearly opaque, so that the figures at the controls on the other side were barely visible to him. He caught the barest glimpse of a smooth cheek, nearly hidden beneath helmet and sunglasses. Too young yet to shave. His age.