Billy, chief of said tribe, looked up from his desk when Kate walked in, and, it must be said, paled at the sight of her. Kate, weary of this reaction, held up a hand. “It’s all right, Billy. You get to help me this time.”
He failed to hide his relief. “What do you need, Kate?”
Billy Mike’s face used to be as round as his body, and his smile at least as broad. He was thinner now, paler, too, and there was a bruised look in his eyes that had not been there before and that hurt Kate to see. It was only three months since he’d lost his youngest son, Dandy, and Billy and his wife, Annie, were both still grieving. They had taken in another child, a fourteen-year-old named Vanessa Cox, who was Johnny Morgan’s boon companion and who, Kate greatly feared, was rapidly becoming rather more than that. This was in addition to the Korean baby they had adopted when Annie began to suffer from empty nest syndrome, not to mention the six children who had grown up, gone to school, and, instead of moving back home, had stayed in Anchorage, where there were jobs and bars and cable television, and who were proving remarkably dilatory in providing the Mikes with the grandchildren both of them were vociferous about wanting.
That Billy and Annie didn’t blame Kate for Dandy’s death was a mystery for which she would be eternally grateful. That they had opened their home and hearts to Vanessa, the killer’s child, was even more extraordinary, but it was a fact that Vanessa, orphaned when both her parents had been killed in a car crash Outside and then shipped to Alaska to live with her nearest relatives, was looking more like a kid and less like a prematurely aged old woman than she had since she arrived in the Park the year before.
“I’m looking for Kurt Pletnikoff,” Kate said. “He’s not in the same old cabin out on Fool’s Gold Creek, is he?”
Billy shook his head. “He moved. He came into some money when his father died. The father evidently couldn’t figure out anybody better to leave, it to. Kurt bought Luba Hardt’s property off Black Water Road and built himself a house. Sort of.”
“I didn’t know that,” Kate said. “Did Luba move out of the Park?”
“No, she just got thirsty, and Kurt happened to be standing next to her at the Roadhouse with a fistful of his daddy’s cash when she did.”
“Where’s she living now?”
“Last I heard, she was on the street in Anchorage. I got George to put the word out at Bean’s Café and the Brother Francis Shelter that when she wants to come home, we’ll foot the bill.”
“I’m going to Anchorage myself tomorrow or the next day,” Kate said. “I’ll look around.”
Billy nodded. “Appreciate it. Why do you want to know where Kurt is?”
Kate looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
He waved her off. “Yeah, I know, ask a dumb question. Don’t kill him, okay?”
“No promises,” Kate said, and left.
Kurt Pletnikoff’s home, if you could call it that, had been built on an elevated foundation of cement blocks around a frame of two-by-fours in a space in the middle of a thick stand of tall, heavy spruce that blocked out the sun. It was a gloomy little clearing, but neat, the wood stacked and the trash picked up.
The steps to the front and only door were made of more two-by-fours, in which there were a lot of nail pops to catch at the soles of Kate’s shoes. The building shook slightly when she knocked on the door. “Kurt?”
There was no answer.
She knocked again. “Kurt Pletnikoff? It’s Kate Shugak.”
Still no answer. She tried the handle. It was unlocked. She peered inside.
It was one room, about the size of her former cabin, with neither the loft nor the charm. The inside was even less prepossessing than the outside. A narrow iron cot with a thin mattress stood beneath the only window, a couple of green army blankets smoothed across it. A broken-down couch stood on one side of an oil stove made from a fifty-five-gallon drum. On the other side of the stove stood a table made of an old door, with two-by-fours for legs. There was a pile of magazines, nothing too sophisticated—Guns & Ammo, Sports Illustrated, Penthouse. A cupboard minus the doors had been screwed to one wall and was filled with canned and dry goods. A bag of apples, the top knotted off, sat on top of a bag of dog food.
The floor was clean, and a big galvanized garbage can sat next to the cupboard. A bowl, a spoon, and a mug were upended on a dish towel spread next to the apples.
Kate touched the bowl. A drop of water coalesced on her fingertip. She felt rather than heard motion behind her, and she stepped quickly to the left, dropping to the floor in a shoulder roll and regaining her feet in the same movement. She picked up the chair and brought the seat down on the head of the man who had been sneaking up behind her, not hard enough to knock him out, just hard enough to get his attention.
“Ouch!” the man yelled. He grabbed his head.
“Hi, Kurt,” Kate said, and put the chair down. It had been a while, and it pleased her to know that she still had the moves. Especially after she’d gotten blindsided by that shovel in May, an event she still couldn’t think of without a certain amount of shame. Mutt, galloping up to the door, her tongue lolling out to one side, surveyed the situation with an expert eye, gave a short congratulatory bark, and went back to sniffing out the moose cow and calf who had left such an intriguing scent trail crisscrossing the yard around the cabin. She wasn’t all that hungry, but like Kate she liked to know that she still got game.
Fifteen minutes later, Kurt was sitting on the bed and Kate was sitting on the chair. Two mugs of steaming chamomile tea—Kurt was into herbal teas—sat on the table, along with a box of sugar and a spoon.
“Did you have to hit me so hard?” Kurt said plaintively, rubbing the crown of his head with a careful hand. “I mean, Jesus, Kate.”
“Did you have to shoot half a dozen bears just for their gallbladders?” Kate said. “I mean, Jesus, Kurt. Where are they, by the way?”
“I worked hard for those bladders, Kate. You can’t just—”
“Yeah, I can. Where are they?” When Kurt looked stubborn, Kate surveyed the cabin. “Well,” she said, “it’s not much, but it’s home, and I have to say I like your housekeeping. Be a shame if I had to start tearing it apart.”
Kurt muttered something. “I beg your pardon?” Kate said, and sipped her tea. “This is pretty good tea. I’ll have to get some for myself.”
He stretched out one shaking hand for the other mug. She waited until he’d gotten on the outside of the better part of it. “Come on, Kurt,” she said with a patient, even kindly air, “I’m giving you a choice. I can either take them in or I can take you in.”
He looked up from his mug, hope in his eye as he fixed on the one relevant point in her dialogue. “You’re not taking me in?”
“Not if I don’t have to,” she said. She let the pleasant smile on her face fade. “Not this time. You pull this again, Kurt, and it’s federal prison for you—no passing go, no collecting two hundred dollars.”
He looked back into his tea. “I’m broke, Kate,” he said in a low voice.
“We’re all broke,” she said, “so what else is new? Being broke is part of living in the Park. You want to get rich, move to Anchorage and get yourself a job with the state.”
“You should talk,” he muttered. “You’ve got a brand-new house you don’t even have to—”
“Stop right there, Kurt.” Kate took another sip of tea. It really was quite good, soothing the instinctive embarrassment that threatened to overwhelm her at his words. He was right. With a house like that, she was nowhere near as broke as he was. She forced herself to speak evenly. “My house has nothing to do with you shooting bears to harvest their gallbladders and sell them on the black market. It’s illegal, and you know it. It’s harmful to maintaining a viable population of grizzlies in the Park, and you know that, too. And if you don’t understand that if you do this again Jim Chopin is going to have to take you into protective custody so that Dan O’Brian won’t feed your ass to those same grizzlies, you’re
too stupid to live.”
He remained silent, head down.
“Where are they?” Kate said. “And don’t make me ask again.”
They were in a game bag secreted beneath a loose floorboard. They smelled pretty ripe.
Kurt watched her, glowering. She paused in the doorway, game bag in hand. “I don’t want to have to come back out here, Kurt.”
He maintained a surly silence. He wasn’t holding his head anymore, but he looked a little green. Nausea was a frequent companion to blunt-force head trauma, as Kate knew only too well, and she decided to leave him to it.
As she drove out of the clearing, she had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t be her last visit to Kurt’s cabin.
4
She spent that night at home, putting together a bag for Anchorage and reading the file Jim had handed her when she stopped by the trooper post in Niniltna with the bladders. His attitude amused her (a sort of “Here’s what you wanted, now don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out” kind of thing), but she didn’t have time to ride him, so she let it go with a knowing smile, which she knew full well annoyed the hell out of him.
The file was thick, the pages yellow and frayed, and the text in IBM Selectric typescript, with multiple errors fixed with X’s or whiteout. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a court document that wasn’t a computer printout, if ever. Jim had even managed to acquire a copy of the police file, probably as a means of avoiding her asking him for it.
She read steadily, cover to cover on both files, and was done before the lengthening shadows crept across the floor and she looked up to see the jagged blue-white peaks of the Quilak Mountains rearing up on the eastern horizon like destriers charging into battle, teeth bared, manes flying. Beneath their poised hooves, the Step dropped off abruptly to glacial moraine, which gave way to a long, wide valley crisscrossed by eight hundred miles of Kanuyaq River and attendant tributaries draining southward to Prince William Sound.
She sat there for a moment, just looking. It was still a source of amazement that she could sit on a couch in her own living room and without moving look up and out on such an incredible vista. “I am the luckiest person in the world,” she said out loud.
Kate Shugak wasn’t an especially humble person. She had a good opinion of her own intelligence and capabilities, and there was very little she had set out to do in life that she had not accomplished. She thought of the man she’d caught in the act of torturing a child as a prerequisite to murdering her, and she fingered the scar at her throat. She had killed him with his own knife, after he’d marked her for life. She’d saved the child, though, and what was a scar compared to the life of a child? It wasn’t the only time she had killed. The fact did not weigh heavily upon her. In each case, she had been defending herself or someone else. She had no regrets, and the only nightmares she had involved the children she hadn’t been able to save.
She was comfortable with who she was and what she had done to get there. Mostly, she did things for people. Most of the time, it helped, enough of the time it earned her a living, and she was comfortable with that, too.
She was, she admitted to herself, uncomfortable with being done for. The Park had come together as one unit, ranger and developer, subsistence and sport and commercial fisherman, lumberjack and tree-hugger, wildlife biologist and hunter, Native and white, all to build her, little old Kate Shugak, her own house. She still had trouble believing it. Old Sam had helped her to a vague understanding, but she feared she would never feel worthy of it.
She turned and looked at the living room, into which all of her former cabin could have fit with room to spare, never mind the kitchen, the bedrooms, the bathrooms. It still felt odd to have separate rooms for things, and doors into them.
“Okay,” she said out loud. “I guess I got you by doing what it is that I do, and I guess if I want to earn it out, I keep doing what it is I do.”
Mutt had mastered the art of opening the door on the first try, and she came in in time to hear the last of Kate’s announcement. She cocked a quizzical ear in Kate’s direction, received no enlightenment, and flopped down on the sheepskin in front of the couch with a sigh whose satisfaction might have had something to do with the tuft of parka squirrel fur adhering to her muzzle. “Been up on the hill again, have you, girl?” Kate said.
She made herself a cup of tea, seasoned liberally with honey, which was also low in the container, and she added that to her Costco list for town. She curled up with the tea and the two files again, leafing through them at random this time, pausing here and there to reread a section.
Whether the fire had been set in Victoria Muravieff’s house was not at issue. Traces of a trail of gasoline led from the fireplace in the living room downstairs to two different sets of drapes hanging at two windows on either side of the fireplace. It was a typically amateur attempt to hide arson, trying to simulate a wood fire in the fireplace sparking out of control and consuming the house. Kate was no arson investigator, but even she knew that it had been a long time since one had fallen for that trick.
She looked at the picture of the house in the police file. It was big and rectangular, with two stories and what had been a white paint job with pale green trim. She knew less than nothing about burn patterns, but from the smoke and char marks on the exterior of the house, it looked like the fire had started on the first floor and worked its way upstairs. A window on the extreme left of the second floor was open. The rest of the windows were broken, jagged pieces of glass still evident in the frames. What had been a nice yard had been trampled into a muddy mire.
William Muravieff, seventeen, had been asleep in an upstairs bedroom—probably not the room with the open window—when the fire had broken out. He’d been asleep, and according to the coroner’s report—Alaska had still had coroners back then—he had never woken up.
Oliver Muravieff, sixteen, had. He had managed to grope his way to the window, open it, and more or less fall out, landing awkwardly on his right leg, which had fractured in half a dozen places, which led to a charge of assault with intent. With the first-degree murder charge, and another for attempted murder, the assault charge was only gravy for the prosecutor.
The good news for Kate’s new client was that there was no physical evidence linking Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff with the crime.
The bad news was that there was a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing straight at her like a road sign at a crossroads with a choice of only one destination. Victoria lived in the house. The gas in the can in her garage was a chemical match for the traces of gas found in the living room. She had fought with William over how much time he was spending playing basketball, as opposed to doing his homework.
Kate snorted over that last piece of “evidence.” Like there was a parent out there who hadn’t fought with their teenager over something.
Both boys had been drugged with scopolamine. The coroner had gone on at length about the derivations of this substance (the nightshade family—chiefly from henbane). It acted by interfering with the transmission of nerve impulses. The symptoms were dilated pupils, rapid heartbeat, and dry skin, mouth, and respiratory passages. An overdose could cause delirium, delusions, paralysis, and stupor. It was found in a lot of nonprescription sedatives, one of which just happened to be found in Victoria’s medicine cabinet.
More damning was the insurance policy—for a cool $1 million—she had taken out the week before on William. However, she had taken out insurance policies on Oliver and Charlotte as well, and Charlotte had been with her mother when William was killed.
Kate went back to the trial transcript. Certainly, Victoria hadn’t had the most vigorous defense, but it didn’t necessarily look incompetent, either. She made a note of the attorney’s name, one Henry Cowell. He was probably retired, but if he was still alive, the bar association would have his address. A talk with him might prove useful.
On the whole, despite her disdain for circumstantial evidence—like ever
y law-enforcement professional, she wanted to find the perp standing over the body, smoking gun in hand—she was inclined to believe that the jury had come to the only possible verdict. Victoria was guilty of filicide, one of those wonderful clinical terms dreamed up by shrinks to put a bearable distance between the act and the description thereof. It was what it was, the murder of a child by its parent.
The death of a child by itself was traumatic enough. Parents were not supposed to outlive their children, it was unnatural. A child’s death guaranteed the mutual sympathy and terror of parents everywhere. The deliberate taking of a child’s life by a parent invoked a horror akin to what one might feel at a display of cannibalism.
What was that old Greek yarn, something about a husband seducing his wife’s sister and, in revenge, the wife killing their sons and feeding them to him? It would be pretty to think that such things happened only in ancient legend. Kate knew the truth, and it wasn’t pretty, not at all.
Mothers, who committed less than 13 percent of all violent crimes, committed 50 percent of filicides. Children under the age of five were the most at risk.
Kate looked back at the file. William had been seventeen. Not even close to the profile.
Filicide was usually characterized by a display of great violence—beating, shaking, stabbing, suffocation, poisoning—with little or no advance planning. And there was always postpartum psychosis, which the statistics said struck only one mother in five hundred, but which Kate had recent cause to know could sometimes lead a mother to a serial killing of her own children immediately after birth. The last time Kate had looked at the FBI stats, the experts had a mother killing a child in America every two or three days.
A Taint in the Blood Page 5