A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  She moved with a brisk step, her shoulders square, no hint of osteoporosis about her. Her cheeks were pink, her wrinkles confined for the most part to the corners of her eyes and mouth, beneath her chin, and on the backs of her hands. Her eyes were dark blue and direct, fixing Kate with a puzzled stare. “You aren’t Caroline.

  Kate got up and offered her hand. “No, I’m Kate Shugak.”

  Victoria took it automatically in a strong, cool grip, one firm pump and release. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”

  “No,” Kate said.

  The older woman looked at the table and then at the floor next to Kate’s chair. “Didn’t you bring them?”

  “Bring what?”

  “The GED workbooks,” the older woman said impatiently.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to,” Kate said.

  Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff put her hands on her hips and looked down her nose at Kate. “How the devil am I supposed to teach my class without workbooks? Listen, Ms. Shugak, if this is another end run by the university around my program, I have told you people before that I won’t—”

  “I don’t work for the university,” Kate said.

  Victoria halted. “Then who the hell are you?”

  “I told you. Kate Shugak.”

  Victoria tapped her foot. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Her eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. Any relation to Ekaterina Shugak?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “I see.” A brief pause. “I knew her.”

  “Everyone did,” Kate said. There was a sick feeling rising in the pit of her stomach. “Have you talked to your daughter lately?”

  All trace of expression wiped itself from Victoria’s face. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth settled into a thin line. “What’s Charlotte got to do with this?”

  “She hired me,” Kate said.

  Victoria folded her arms. “To do what?”

  “To look into your case.”

  “What case?”

  The sick feeling intensified. “The case that put you in here, Ms. Muravieff. The murder of your son.”

  The tapping foot had stilled, but the older woman’s shoulders were so tight, Kate thought they might break off if someone tapped them. From the corner of her eye, Kate could see people turning to look at them, and she could hear conversations dropping off one by one into an expectant silence. Into it, Kate said, “Your daughter thinks you were wrongly convicted, Ms. Muravieff, and she hired me to prove it. I’d like to ask you some questions, if I may. First, I’ll need—”

  “You may not,” the other woman said in a taut voice.

  Kate, thrown off her stride, said blankly, “I beg your pardon?”

  “Tell Charlotte I fired you,” the other woman said. And with that, she marched off.

  Kate watched her go, not a little mystified, and recollected herself only when one of the officers started to move toward her. She held up a hand and headed for the door.

  She dropped the visitor badge off at the desk. As she was going out, another woman was coming in with a large box. Kate held the door for her, and as it closed behind her, she heard the fresh-faced young guard say, “Caroline, hey. I thought you weren’t coming. I thought you’d sent someone else today.”

  Kate kept going. Mutt was sunbathing on the hood of the Forester. “Let’s go,” Kate told her. She started the engine and drove out of the parking lot. About a mile down the road, she pulled a U-turn and drove back up the hill and into the parking lot, this time pulling into a space about two rows down and ten spaces over.

  Mutt gave her a quizzical look. “To confuse anyone inside who’s monitoring the cameras on the roof,” Kate said, pointing them out.

  Mutt looked pointedly at the door. Kate leaned over to open it up and Mutt got back up on the hood.

  The sun beat down. Kate rolled down first her window, then the one on the passenger side, then the two back windows. She kicked herself for not bringing a book, and cleaned out the glove compartment in lieu of reading. There was the car manual, a near-empty box of Wash ’n Dries, a handful of lemon drops, a Reese’s Cup that was silver with age but which Kate ate anyway, and a comb with a few strands of short, dark, curly hair caught in its teeth. She touched them gently. How strange that something grown by a man dead for almost two years could feel so alive.

  Kate had read in various places how scientists were mapping the human chromosome down to the last molecule, and how it might be possible in the future to reconstruct a human being from the DNA in a strand of hair. They wouldn’t have the same life experience, of course, the same memories. The all new and improved Jack Morgan wouldn’t necessarily like Jimmy Buffett, for example, and Jimmy Buffett had been responsible for bringing Jack and Kate together.

  She became aware that she could no longer see the hair or the comb for the tears in her eyes. She blinked them away and put the comb back in the glove compartment.

  The sun beat down some more. Mutt rolled onto her back, paws in the air in a disgusting display of abandon. Kate considered starting the engine just to see how high Mutt could jump from a prone position.

  An hour passed. The woman Kate had passed in the doorway came out and went to her car, a beige Toyota Camry that looked, if possible, even more beige beneath an unregarded layer of mud and dust. Kate opened the door of the Subaru. Mutt jumped as if someone had given her a nudge with a cattle prod and then slid down from the hood in an ignominious heap. She leaped to her feet and pretended that she had meant to do that.

  Kate approached the woman as she was about to get in her car. “Excuse me?”

  The woman looked over her shoulder. “Yes? May I help you?”

  “My name is Kate Shugak.”

  The woman looked puzzled. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”

  Twice in one day. If this kept up, Kate was going to get an inferiority complex. “No. I’ve been retained by Victoria Muravieff’s daughter to look into her case.”

  The woman looked more puzzled. “What case?”

  Kate sighed. “Listen, I’m fresh off a plane and I’m hot, and I’m hungry and I’m thirsty. Have you—what was your name?”

  “Caroline Landry,” the woman said, and then looked as if she wished she hadn’t.

  “So, Caroline, have you had lunch?”

  Caroline Landry hesitated, clearly trying to decide if Kate was dangerous or not. “No.”

  “Great. You like Mexican food?”

  They found a table at Garcia’s in Eagle River. “I’ll buy,” Kate said, absorbed in the menu.

  “I’ll buy my own, thanks,” Caroline Landry said.

  “It’s an expense,” Kate said.

  “For what job?”

  “Charlotte Muravieff has retained me to look into her mother’s murder conviction,” Kate said.

  Landry was still staring at Kate with her mouth slightly open when the waiter arrived. Kate ordered tostaditos to start and fajitas for the main course. Landry’s mouth relaxed into a smile. “You are hungry,” she said.

  “Don’t get a lot of Mexican food in Niniltna,” Kate said. “I’m making up for lost time.”

  “Tostada salad,” Landry told the waiter, “and something tells me I’m going to need a margarita.”

  The waiter, a slim young man with a hopeful smile, looked at Kate. She shook her head. “Water’s fine. If you could bring me a couple of wedges of lime, that would be good.”

  The margarita came and, surprise, so did the lime, and in her head Kate ratcheted up the tip. Landry took a long swallow of her drink. “Oh yeah,” she said, putting it down, “that hits the spot. Okay, what do you want to know?”

  “Anything you can tell me, Ms. Landry.”

  “Caroline.”

  “Kate. You know Victoria Muravieff. She thought I’d come in your place today.”

  “Yes,” Caroline said. “I work with her.”

  “Work with her?”

  Caroline raised an eyebrow. “Yes, work with her. Victoria runs the education dep
artment at Hiland.”

  “A prisoner runs the education department?”

  “Pretty much. The governor cut the budget a couple of years back, so the Department of Corrections had to cut fripperies like education. At this point, it’s pretty much up to the prisoners to drum up interest and funding from local groups and agencies if they want anything in the way of programming out there.”

  “How’s that working?” Kate said.

  “Pretty good, actually,” Caroline said. “A local computer supply store funded a course in Microsoft certification. A local cellist started a chamber orchestra with chairs underwritten by the Trial Lawyers Association.”

  Kate laughed. “A natural.”

  Caroline smiled. “It seems so. At any rate, there’s a waiting list to get in.”

  “Do they perform?”

  “Yes, in-house. They’re agitating to perform outside the facility, but the director hasn’t been beaten into submission quite yet. Another woman comes out every three weeks to teach classes in bead art, with supplies donated by the Bead Society, which puts on a show every year of inmate art. They call it Con Art.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. They got a write-up in the paper and a story on television, and now they’ve got so many submissions that they think they’re going to have to start jurying it.”

  “Are they selling?”

  Caroline nodded. “Oh yeah, check out the gift shop the next time you’re there. And then there’s the greenhouse. They make a lot of hanging baskets and start a lot of vegetables, and sell them, too. Victoria’s working on some of the master gardeners in town to start a master gardener’s program at the prison.”

  “And you were bringing GED workbooks in.”

  “Yeah. We’ve got so many inmates wanting to make up for time lost in their real lives that we’ve pretty much got a class going nonstop. It’s hard for some of them to finish because they’re not in for long enough.” She realized the humor of that last observation at the same time Kate did, and this time they both laughed. Lunch arrived, and Kate inhaled the aroma of charred beef with vast satisfaction.

  When she’d gotten on the right side of most of it, she said, “Who’s ‘we’?” When Caroline gave her a blank look, she said, “You said ‘we’ve pretty much got a class going nonstop.’ You and who else?”

  “I thought I said,” Caroline said with some surprise. “It’s all Victoria. None of this would be happening without her.”

  According to Caroline Landry, Victoria Muravieff had been committed to Hiland Mountain Correctional Facility the day the verdict had been returned in her trial, some thirty years before, with a B.A. in education already in her pocket. “She was a bookkeeper before…” Caroline hesitated. “Well, she was a bookkeeper. She enrolled in a correspondence course for her BA practically the day she arrived, and after that she went for her master’s. I think she got the first in eighteen months and the second a year later.” She smiled. “I’ve read her thesis. ‘Teaching on the Inside: Why Prisons Need Schools.’”

  “Yeah?” Kate said, suspending her construction of the perfect fajita for a moment. “How bad was it?”

  “It wasn’t bad at all,” Caroline said sharply. “It was even published, and I understand it’s a reference work for prisons across the nation.”

  “My mistake,” Kate said, and went back to building her fajita. She’d read a lot of dissertations turned into books, enough to know that most academics can’t write worth shit, but she wasn’t being paid to interrupt the flow of information with literary criticism.

  Mollified by Kate’s compliance, Caroline said, “After that, she got the head of the education department out here at that time to take her on as her assistant. Trustee, in prisonspeak. She’s…” Caroline hesitated again. “Do you know who she is? Her family?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Well, she’s managed to bribe, seduce, or coerce all of them and all of their friends into donating something in the way of money or books over the past thirty years. The education program here is privately funded; it wouldn’t exist without her. And the people she has helped—my God, you wouldn’t believe some of the stories, women who have never had any decent role models or positive reinforcement in their lives.” She paused. “One time, Victoria was reading some student essays out loud. Some of these essays were so bad they’d make a first grader blush, but Victoria has this way of making even the most hopeless people believe they can achieve something. After class, one of the women came forward and said to Victoria, ‘Nobody ever told me I could do anything before.’ I wanted to cry. That woman”—Caroline pointed her fork at Kate—“that woman went on to get her GED, and when she got out, she had twelve college credits. She went on to complete a degree in accounting.”

  “What’d she do to put her in jail in the first place?”

  A brief pause. “Check kiting,” Caroline said a little reluctantly. She met Kate’s eyes and they both laughed again.

  “You like her,” Kate said. “Victoria.”

  “I revere her,” Caroline said.

  “Ah, but would you want her to move in next door to you when she gets out?”

  Caroline flushed and she played with her food. “Do you think there’s a chance that you’ll get her out?”

  “You think she should be out?”

  There was a brief silence while Caroline stared out the window that looked out on the parking lot. “Her crime was horrific. I have a son. I can’t imagine—”

  “You think she did it, then?” Kate said, surprised.

  Caroline met her eyes. “She’s never denied it. She pled not guilty at her trial, but that’s the last time she said she didn’t do it to anyone, so far as I know.”

  Kate raised an eyebrow.

  “Okay,” Caroline said, “I looked up the trial after I started working with her. I wanted to know who I was dealing with. She’s never denied doing it to me,” she repeated.

  “Did you ask?”

  “Once, yes, when I was new to the program, when I didn’t know who she was. I learned afterward that it’s best not to know what they’ve done. It’s easier to work with them when you don’t know.” She hesitated. “It was hard,” she said in a low voice, “hard to come back to work with her after I’d read the newspaper accounts of the trial.”

  I’ll bet, Kate thought, remembering some of the women she’d been responsible for putting away. She wouldn’t have worked with any of them at gunpoint, starting with Myra Hartsock. “What did she say? When you asked if she’d done it?”

  “She said, ‘The jury thought so.’”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  Kate contemplated this for a moment. “Do you think she did it? Do you think she killed her son for the insurance money?”

  “Everybody in prison is innocent,” Caroline said, “to hear them tell it.”

  Kate nodded. “I know. I’ve spent a fair amount of time putting people in them. They’re all as pure as the driven snow.”

  Caroline turned the now-empty margarita glass between her fingers. “But Victoria…”

  “Yes?”

  Caroline shoved her glass to one side and leaned forward. “Listen, Kate, Victoria Muravieff has been a phenomenal force at that prison. It’s practically an adjunct institution for the University of Alaska. I’m the liaison between the two, my job is predicated on there being an education department at Hiland, and the education department is there only because Victoria is.”

  “You’ll lose your job if I get her out, is that what you’re saying?”

  Caroline flushed again. “No, of course not.” She sat back. “Well, yes, but that’s not what I meant. I’m just saying—look, if I’d met Victoria on the outside, I would have been proud to call her my friend. Guilty, innocent, I don’t know. She’s made a real difference every day she’s been in that place. It’s not too much to say that she has literally changed lives. She has given hope to people who never knew before what that w
ord meant. Much less how to spell it.”

  “You make her sound like some kind of saint.”

  “That’s nothing,” Caroline said a little sadly. “The inmates? They think she’s a god.”

  6

  Kate walked into Brendan’s office to be scooped off her feet, tossed in the air, and roundly kissed. She heard cheering from the hallway. “Put me down, you lummox,” she said.

  Brendan sighed and let her slip to the floor. “’Twas ever thus,” he said sadly. “I require large amounts of food to get over the lack of self-esteem your rejection has forced upon me.”

  Kate handed him a take-out carton. He opened it and pursed his lips in a long, reverent whistle. “Steak and shrimp fajitas, my favorite. I’m kissing you again, Shugak, I swear.”

  “Shut up and eat your lunch.”

  He settled behind his desk and tucked in. She sat in a chair opposite and regarded him with affection.

  He was a big man with sandy hair, blue eyes, and a face as chronically red as his grin was wide. He was an assistant district attorney for the state, and while it was true he had no chance of ever becoming DA, due to an undiplomatic endorsement of the sitting governor’s opponent in the last election with a television camera pointed his way, it was also true he had no ambition to do or be anything other than what he was. “I like putting the bad guys away,” he’d told Kate once. “Gives me the warm fuzzies. And it makes me feel like I’d’ve had a shot at Grace Van Owen.” He liked the legal system, too, its intricacies and nit-picking and arcane rituals. Kate remembered that he thought British attorneys were one up on American attorneys in that they got to wear wigs. “Ever seen those in the movies?” he’d said. “Makes ’em all look like Sam’l Pepys.”

  “Where is the wolf?” he said with his mouth full.

  “I made her wait in the car. I was afraid she might be competition for the fajitas, and you’d have to take her out.” She grinned at him. “You owe me, McCord.”

  “The hell you say,” Brendan said, and chucked a manila envelope at her.