A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  There were far too many ways to kill children. It happened when an exhausted mother shook a baby to make it stop crying and instead shook it to death. It happened when a fourteen-year-old got pregnant and stuffed her newborn into a garbage can. It happened when a wife tried to leave an abusive husband and, in retaliation, the husband killed all three kids, the wife, and then himself. It happened when whatever filter the parent had screwed to her lens allowed her to see the child as a threat, and it happened when that filter let her believe the best thing she could do for the child was kill it.

  Kate had had coffee with a fireman awhile back, and he had told her that there was a feeling among arson investigators that filicide by fire, despite going undetected too often and being underreported more often than that, was increasing at an alarming rate. All too frequently, the fireman had said, the natural sympathy one feels for parents who have lost their children led investigators to overlook evidence that might give rise to the suspicion that the fire that took the child’s life might have been deliberately set. Most of the victims were young, he’d told her, and again she considered the age of the victim and the intended victim in this case. William had been seventeen, Oliver sixteen.

  Sometimes, the children had been shot or smothered, and the fire set to cover the evidence. Sometimes, the escape routes were blocked—doors jammed, windows nailed shut.

  Kate rummaged around for the picture of the Muravieff home. The photo showed the top-floor window was still wide open, one side of the curtain hanging outside, maybe because of the wind. Or, if it were Oliver’s bedroom, because of his swan dive to escape the smoke.

  She wondered how hard Victoria had tried to get the boys out. She went back to the trial transcript, and surfaced a little while later with no clear answer to her question. The defense had laid out a timetable that showed where Victoria and her daughter, Charlotte, had been that evening—at a fund-raiser at her brother Erland’s for one of the gubernatorial candidates. The man had subsequently lost the election. It cheered Kate to know that the rich and famous could be just as bad at picking politicians as she was.

  But she was straying from the point. Victoria and Charlotte had gone to Victoria’s brother’s house early that afternoon to help with the preparations. Kate found that odd. Didn’t the Bannisters and the Pilzes have serfs to do that stuff for them? She had a hard time imagining Charlotte Muravieff with a vacuum cleaner in hand. She and her mother were probably needed to spread pâté made from salmon that had never seen a commercial net. On ladyfingers, no doubt. Not that Kate had ever seen a ladyfinger in real life, but she was very well read, and they ate ladyfingers and cucumber and watercress a lot in English novels. None of it sounded very appetizing.

  Again, she was straying from the point. Victoria and Charlotte had remained at Victoria’s brother’s house until the party was over. Everyone who had been interviewed agreed the party broke up at 10:00 P.M. Victoria and Charlotte had arrived home a little after eleven. Victoria’s brother’s house was in Turnagain. Victoria had lived in the valley north of Anchorage, on five acres near Bodenburg Butte, maybe an hour away by car, which fit.

  When had the fire been set? The trial transcript didn’t say. Kate found that odd, and one, if not the only, point for her side. If the defense attorney could have demonstrated that the fire might have started while Victoria was on the road or even still at her brother’s, he could have given the jury reasonable doubt as to opportunity. Alternatively, if the prosecution could have made a case for the fire in the fireplace taking as many hours to travel the gas paths across the carpet to the curtains as it took Victoria and Charlotte to drive to the party, plus the length of the party itself, that would have significantly improved the state’s case.

  Usually the parents in such cases were in their twenties and thirties. Victoria was thirty-six the year the fire had burned down her house and killed her son.

  Still, the various inconsistencies didn’t necessarily mean anything. Serial killers were all supposed to be skinny little twenty-five-year-old white guys with no beards, usually preying on young women in their teens and twenties. And yet four months ago, Kate had helped apprehend a sixty-year-old white woman, definitely on the plump side, who was a card-carrying member of the Republican Party, who had killed five of her own children before they learned how to focus their eyes. There were no hard-and-fast rules for this kind of crime, only percentages and statistics that sometimes helped nudge the investigator in the right direction.

  One thing Kate didn’t understand was how Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff had managed to run out of money to the extent that she had to resort to murder, and filicide at that, to replenish her share of the family coffers known to all to be overflowing. That also was not in the trial transcript. Evidently, the prosecuting attorney and the jury both felt that the lure of six zeros was enough, no matter how rich you already were.

  The other thing she didn’t understand was where Mr. Muravieff was. He hadn’t even been called as a witness at the trial.

  The third thing she didn’t understand, which probably had nothing to do with the case, was what the lily white clan of Pilzes and Bannisters were doing allying themselves with somebody named Muravieff. What made this interesting was that the marriage would have taken place years before the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act gave Alaska Natives land and money in exchange for a right-of-way down the middle of Alaska to build the TransAlaska Pipeline. Land and money equal power in Western society, and Alaska Natives had had very little of any of the three prior to ANCSA.

  In the cities and in the state overall, the power structure was built on white blood, American mostly, with contributions from stampeders from all over the world, including Scandinavians looking for free land in a place physically similar to their peninsulas, and Russians escaping the Revolution.

  Like every other student at the University of Alaska required to take History 341 to graduate, Kate Shugak knew all about the Pilzes and the Bannisters. Hermann Pilz had been a German mining engineer who had come north with the Klondike stampede and stayed to start the first coal mine in Kachemak Bay, which had led to a timely investment in the Alaska Steamship Line, which evolved into a shipping company that specialized in getting freight to every community in Alaska not on the road system. Since most of the communities were not on the road system, the formation of an airline was initiated out of necessity. For a while, the Pilz name had been painted on virtually anything that moved in and out of the Alaskan Bush. Now everything was owned and managed by various holding companies that had pieces large and small of various other essential Alaskan businesses, such as grocery businesses.

  Which led to the Bannisters. Isaiah Bannister had been attached to Lt. Henry Allen’s army expedition in 1885 up the Kanuyaq River to the Tanana, down it to the Yukon, up it to the Koyukuk, back down to the Unalakleet-Yukon portage, and on down to St. Michael. He survived the mosquitoes and the bears and left the navy to form a company to import supplies, edible and otherwise, into Alaska. The Arctic Trading Company now owned the largest chain of grocery stores and supermarkets in the state, and Safeway and Kroger’s had both been rumored to be sniffing around about a possible buyout.

  Isaiah Bannister, well-established in Alaska by 1898 (it wasn’t the stampeders who got rich; it was the people who sold them food and supplies), had bankrolled Hermann Pilz’s Kachemak Coal Company. Hermann had reciprocated, in what was generally held to be a tit-for-tat kind of deal, by marrying Isaiah Bannister’s thirty-nine-year-old spinster daughter, his lone ewe lamb, who rejoiced in the name of Calliope. Calliope had surprised everyone by bearing a son a year for five years, raising them to be good men and true, and outliving her much-younger husband by twenty-seven years.

  The Muravieffs, on the other hand, didn’t come from anywhere, they were Alaskan-born and -bred, with a little Norwegian and a lot of Russian thrown in. There was another story, one not in the history books, something about a Muravieff maiden and Capt. James Cook, but that was only talk la
te at night around the fire, and not around Muravieff fires, either. The Muravieff ancestor of choice was Mikhael Muraviev, a Russian expatriate who patrolled the coast of Alaska from Ketchikan to Barrow as captain of a Coast Guard cutter and who left descendants in nearly every port. Pre-modern Alaska Natives admired and respected procreation in any form. The more kids you had young, particularly male kids, the better you ate when you got old.

  In short, Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff was Alaskan history walking around on two legs, even if those legs currently languished in the Hiland Mountain Correctional Facility in Eagle River.

  Kate could practically smell the trial judge’s horror at Victoria’s crime and his unswerving conviction that she was guilty. He sustained all but one objection by the prosecution and none by the defense, although the defense didn’t make that many. When the jury returned a guilty verdict, the judge issued a life sentence without leaving the bench, and said for the record that he was sorry Alaska didn’t have a death penalty, because that was what true justice demanded and Victoria deserved.

  The list of witnesses called to testify during the trial read like a Who’s Who of the previous hundred years of Alaskan history. Kate read through the names, torn between a natural reluctance to stir up that much shit and an even more natural delight at the prospect. She thought Victoria was most likely guilty as hell, but she figured Victoria’s daughter had a bunch of money she was going to give away to someone to tilt at this windmill, and it might as well be Kate.

  Besides, given that someone had tried to burn her own cabin down around her ears not four months before, the case kind of resonated with her.

  She filled a duffel bag with clean clothes, set her alarm, and turned in for the night.

  5

  George touched down at Merrill Field just before 10:00 A.M. Mutt gave him a loving farewell with the rough end of her tongue, which he pretended to hate. “When do you want to come back?” he said, tossing her duffel into the back of the cab he’d called for fifteen minutes out.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said.

  “One of the long jobs?”

  “I’m dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of a thirty-year-old case. I figure it’ll take me twenty-four hours, if that. I’ll stretch it out a little for the sake of the fee, but not much.”

  George pulled a small, extremely tattered spiral notebook that had served, or something very like it, as Chugach Air Taxi’s reservation system for as long as Kate had known him. It was as covered in airplane grease as George was. “This is the twenty-third, so okay, I’ll put you down for a return on the twenty-eighth. I’ve got the Bingleys coming out with their kids for school shopping that morning.”

  “Sounds good.” He was lifting off the end of runway 24 as the cab went through the light at sixth and Karluk. Mutt recognized the Cessna and gave a farewell bark, which frightened the taxi driver, a middle-aged Russian emigrant who had been prepared to admire Kate until he got a load of her bodyguard.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were deposited on the doorstep of one of a row of town houses lining the north shore of Westchester Lagoon. Kate unlocked the door and they went in. It was a barn of a place, three stories, including the garage. The kitchen, dining room, living room, a small room meant to be a den, and a three-quarter bath were on the second floor, the third floor given over to more bedrooms and bathrooms. Kate tossed her duffel onto the couch, turned on the refrigerator, and checked the phone for a dial tone. There was one, and she turned on the answering machine.

  The Subaru Forester in the garage needed a wash but it started just fine. The first stop was an Anchorage branch of Last Frontier Bank, just to make sure Charlotte’s check was good. It was, and the cashier’s reaction to all those zeros had Kate, momentarily forgetting her own response, toying with the idea of applying for a loan. She remembered in time that she didn’t need to buy anything her checking account couldn’t cover and got the hell out of there.

  Hiland Mountain Correctional Facility housed women convicts and male sex offenders, which Kate had never understood. She’d been in and out of the place often when she’d worked for Jack, but a new governor had been elected since then and all the faces were new, including the fresh-faced young woman riding the desk out front, who hadn’t been lied to by enough cons to have lost her innocence. She frowned prettily at Kate. “You want to see Victoria Muravieff?”

  “Yes, Officer.”

  The young woman, whose badge was difficult to sort out from all the other patches and shields adorning her bountiful bosom but whose name Kate thought might be T. Offerut, looked Kate over. Kate tolerated the examination of her attire—her usual jeans, T-shirt, and tennis shoes, no coat because it was in the blisteringly high seventies—with what passed for her for equanimity.

  The young woman realized that the frown was producing an unsightly line across her forehead, smoothed it away with one hand, and turned the frown into a smile. “Of course, you must be the one from UAA,” she said, as if that and that alone would explain the jeans.

  Kate didn’t deny it.

  “May I see some identification, please?”

  Kate produced her driver’s license, was deemed to be who she really was, and was permitted entry. When the door closed behind her with a solid thud, she had the same reaction she always did: an overwhelming wave of claustrophobia, which was not alleviated by the wall of windows that lined one side of the large room to which she had been admitted and which looked out on a spectacular view of the Chugach Mountains. The worst part of Kate’s job with the district attorney had been having to enter various correctional facilities around the state voluntarily to interview perps. She’d hated it then, and she hated it now. She took a deep breath, trying to fill her lungs with fresh air that wasn’t there.

  The room was filled with long tables and plastic bucket chairs, and there were a couple of kids running around, obviously on visits to their mothers, who were hunched over tables, talking either to their mothers or their lawyers. At another table, a group of women were laboring over some arts and crafts project. A couple of them were in bright orange jumpsuits, which meant that they had misbehaved in some way on the inside, which could mean anything from petty theft to assault. A majority of them were Native and black, big surprise.

  Kate was ushered to a chair at the end of one table and told firmly to wait there. She sat. Lunch was being cooked somewhere—burgers, at a guess—and her stomach growled.

  “Kate Shugak?”

  She looked up and saw a woman standing in front of her. The last time Kate had seen her, Kate had been seated in the witness chair and she had been at the defendant’s table next to a public defender who was trying to impeach Kate’s testimony. Kate searched her memory and dredged up a name and, with a little more effort, a case file. “Myra Hartsock,” she said. Child endangerment, fourth offense, and the judge had taken away her children and evidently thrown enough jail time at her to keep her in Hiland for six years.

  “Are you here to see me?” Myra said.

  “No,” Kate said.

  “I’m sober now.”

  “I see that.”

  “And I’m straight. I been straight for four, going on five years now.”

  “Good for you.”

  Myra hesitated, hands clenched on the edge of her tray. “My kids,” she said. “I see them sometimes.”

  “Really.”

  Myra nodded. “My mother brings them here to visit me.”

  “Good for her.”

  “I read to them, and we play games.”

  “Good for you.”

  Myra gestured with her head. “I’ve been working in the prison greenhouse. My case officer says she thinks she can place me in a job pretty easy when I get out.”

  “Good for her.”

  Myra took a deep breath. “Because I’m coming up for parole in seven months.”

  “Really?”

  “You could speak for me at my hearing.”

  “I could,” Kate agreed.


  Myra’s look of hope faded. “But you won’t.”

  “No.”

  Myra bared her teeth. “Bitch.”

  “Backatcha,” Kate said.

  Myra started to cry. “Why won’t you help me?”

  “Because your kids come first for me,” Kate said, “like they should have with you. Reading to them and playing games with them one or twice a month doesn’t make up for the fact that Andy had to learn how to write left-handed because you broke his right hand in so many places that he can’t even brush his teeth with it, and that Kay will probably be in therapy for the rest of her life because you sold her for money you used to buy booze and drugs.”

  “I was a drunk and a junkie back then!” Myra said, her voice rising. “I told you—I don’t do that anymore!”

  “You don’t in this adult day-care center of yours,” Kate said. “Doesn’t mean you won’t when you get out again. Best thing that can happen to your kids is for you to be away from them as long as possible. If I had my druthers it’d be forever.”

  “Let’s move it along, Myra, shall we?” a guard said, coming up behind her.

  He took her arm. She yanked free, glared at Kate, and stomped off.

  Kate could feel the eyes on her from all over the room. Oh yeah, it was old home week for her here at Hiland Mountain, a regular felons reunion. A few minutes later, the officer returned, Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff in tow.

  She didn’t look anything at all like Kate had imagined she would. For one thing, she didn’t look ill, and for another, she didn’t look sixty-seven. She was a tall woman with a thick head of gray hair cut bluntly to a determined jawline and parted over her right eye. Her brow was broad, her eyebrows arched, her nose so high-bridged as to be almost hooked, which it probably would be eventually, her mouth full and firm. She was wearing street clothes, a faded pink T-shirt tucked into a pair of button-front Levi’s, and tennis shoes with Velcro fasteners.