A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  “A friend in college was Filipino. This was a dish her father taught her to make. He told her never to tell what the secret Filipino ingredient was.”

  He laughed, but not for long. “Kate. Who do you think the dead man is?”

  She sighed. “Eugene Muravieff.”

  He digested this in silence for a moment. “Really.”

  “I can’t be sure. I haven’t seen any pictures of him. But the dead man had a picture of the three Muravieff kids on a boat in what I think is Kachemak Bay. And he’s the right age.”

  “Did he have any ID?”

  She nodded, breaking open the pea pods and tossing them in with the ribs. “O’Leary said his name was Gene Salamantoff.”

  “So, probably Aleut. And Eugene Muravieff was Aleut.” Jim frowned. “I don’t get it. Why’d he change his name?”

  “Somebody shot him today, Jim. Who knows how long they’d been looking for him?”

  The rice cooker clicked off and she found two trivets and set them on the table and the pots on the trivets. He found plates and silverware while she got the soy sauce out of the refrigerator. “I’ve got some phony lemonade,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said, and they sat down and dished up their dinner. “Yum,” he said after the first bite.

  “Yeah,” she said, and dug in.

  He cleaned his plate twice before putting down his fork. “Had rigor subsided?”

  “No. He was cold and stiff. Lividity was pronounced. They shot him while he was sleeping.”

  “Sometime last night or this morning, then.” Jim thought about that. “If they shot—we’ll call him Muravieff for the duration, okay?—if they shot Muravieff hours before, what were they doing hanging around till this afternoon?”

  “Waiting for Kurt,” Kate said.

  “Which means they felt that Kurt was as dangerous to them as the dead man was.”

  “And me,” Kate said, and got up to clear the table. She put the leftovers in a Tupperware container to take to Kurt the following day.

  His mouth tightened. “And you,” he said evenly, and went into the living room to turn on the television news.

  She was putting her clothes in the dryer when she heard him call her name. She went to the living room and poked her head in the door. “What?”

  He turned up the sound on the television with the remote.

  “Charlotte Bannister Muravieff, well-known local caterer, was killed by a hit-and-run driver late last night as her car was struck by a large pickup truck on O’Malley Road. A witness told Channel Two News that—”

  Jim looked at Kate, whose eyes were fixed on the screen. “That’s your client, right?”

  She nodded dumbly.

  The witness, a woman walking her Scottish terrier on the bike trail leading to the zoo before they both turned in for the night, had little to say beyond describing the hit-and-run vehicle as a pickup, dark in color. She thought it was a man at the wheel but she couldn’t be sure—“It’s hard to tell the difference nowadays, you know?” The terrier, held in her arms, yipped accompaniment until the woman took firm hold of its muzzle.

  Mutt, sitting next to Jim on the couch, got down and padded over to Kate to shove her head under Kate’s hand.

  Charlotte had been pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. There was a brief shot of the Cadillac Escalade, crushed like an accordion from the driver’s side door over, another of Emily, described as Charlotte’s good friend, weeping on her way into their house, and then Erland Bannister’s face flashed on the screen, looking tight and angry. The newscaster’s voice did a voice-over that said Erland Bannister was offering a $100,000 cash reward for the arrest and conviction of the driver of the vehicle that had killed his niece.

  This time, the guard at the Hiland Mountain front desk welcomed Kate with a smile. “Brendan McCord says hey.” The guard was a willowy blonde, and from the inquisitive blue eyes busily inspecting Kate for flaws, she was evidently somewhere on Brendan’s list.

  Kate smiled. “Tell him hey back next time you talk to him,” she said, insinuating that the guard would be talking to Brendan long before she would.

  It was the right tack. The blonde relaxed, beamed, and waved her through.

  Victoria was waiting in an interview room. She wasn’t happy. “Evidently I didn’t make myself clear the last time you were here,” she told Kate as Kate came through the door. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  It wasn’t visiting hours, and only Brendan’s prior relationship with the willowy blonde had gotten Kate in the door and Victoria into the interview room.

  Victoria was just as militant as she had been the first time Kate had seen her, and Kate realized with a sinking heart that no one had told Victoria that her daughter was dead. She wanted to turn and run from the room and keep running until she got all the way home. She wanted to hunt up Erland Bannister and kick him in the balls.

  “May I?” she said instead, indicating the chair opposite Victoria.

  Victoria snorted. “You don’t need my permission to sit in this place.” Nevertheless, the request softened her attitude a little.

  Kate pulled out a chair and sat down, slumping against the chair back, hooking a foot over the edge of the table, trying to present as relaxed an attitude as possible.

  Her problem was, she liked Victoria. She liked a woman in jail for life who refused to be coerced or intimidated. “Did they threaten you to get you in the same room with me?”

  Victoria snorted again. “Like you didn’t know.”

  “Humor me,” Kate said.

  Victoria put both hands on the table and leaned in. “They told me they’d cancel my class for a week.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kate said, and she meant it.

  “Sure you are. You’re so sorry, you’ll walk out of this interview under protest because I was brought into it under duress.”

  Kate thought about it, shook her head ruefully. “Not that sorry,” she said.

  It surprised a laugh out of Victoria. She suppressed it immediately, looking annoyed. “What do you want?” she snapped.

  “Your daughter hired me to look into your case because you have been diagnosed with uterine cancer and she doesn’t want you to die in jail,” Kate said.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Victoria tossed up her hands and rolled her eyes. Before she could throw Kate out again, Kate said quickly, “You said you knew my grandmother.”

  Victoria gave Kate an assessing look. She knew she was being distracted, but then she took the bait anyway. “She died recently, didn’t she?”

  “Going on three years ago.”

  Victoria nodded. “She was a fine woman, and a great leader.” She frowned, and then she said abruptly, “She visited me here.”

  “You were friends?”

  Victoria thought about it. “Acquaintances,” she said at last. “We met through my mother-in-law, Mary Muravieff. Mary worked on the land claims act with Ekaterina. When I started the school here, Ekaterina heard of it and came to offer help. There are a disproportionately higher number of Alaska Natives in jail, as you know.”

  “I know,” Kate said.

  “That’s right, you put some of them in here.”

  “I did,” Kate said without apology.

  “She was proud of you,” Victoria said. “Proud of what you have accomplished. Which reminds me. What does the Anchorage DA have to do with reopening a thirty-year-old case?”

  “Nothing,” Kate said, “I don’t work for them anymore.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a private investigator,” Kate said, “which is where I came in. Your daughter hired me to look into your case. She doesn’t think you’re guilty of the crime for which you have been imprisoned. She wants me to reopen the investigation and find out who did it.”

  “I did do it,” Victoria said. She met Kate’s eyes squarely.

  “Did you?” Kate said, hiding her surprise.

  “I did,” Victoria said firmly. “I won’t sa
y I’m innocent, because I’m not. I won’t thank you for trying to get me out of here, because the judge was right to sentence me to life. I deserved it. I siphoned the gas out of my car, I splashed it all over the living room, and I set it to go off after Charlotte and I were safely at the fund-raiser at my brother’s house in town.”

  “Hmmm,” Kate said. “How did you set it to go off?”

  “A delayed fuse attached to a timer,” Victoria said promptly.

  Exactly as had been presented by the district attorney at Victoria’s trial. “How did you learn to do that?”

  “From a book,” Victoria said.

  Kate gave a thoughtful nod. “You can find anything in the library, can’t you?”

  Victoria blinked. “Well, yes, I suppose you can. That’s what it’s for.”

  “It is indeed,” Kate said. “Why did you do it?”

  “Money,” Victoria said. “I was broke.”

  Kate winced and shook her head. “You had me going there, Victoria, I admit. But money as a motive?” She leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “To burn your sons alive?”

  For the first time, she saw Victoria flinch. She recovered immediately, though, and met Kate’s eyes with a stony gaze.

  Kate sat back. “Do you ever hear from your attorney?”

  Victoria’s browed furrowed at this change of subject. “Henry?”

  “Yes. Do you ever hear from him?”

  Victoria was wary, but she couldn’t come up with a reason not to answer. “No.”

  “When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “At my sentencing.”

  “No further contact after that?”

  Victoria shook her head.

  “How about your ex-husband?”

  Victoria became very still. “Gene?”

  “Yes,” Kate said, watching Victoria from beneath her eyelashes.

  “I haven’t heard from Gene since our divorce.”

  “Didn’t he try to see the children?”

  “He had no visitation rights under the divorce decree. I had sole custody.”

  That wasn’t what I asked you, Kate thought. “He was their father,” she said. “Seems odd that he wouldn’t try to work something out with you so he could spend at least some time with his children.”

  “He didn’t,” Victoria said. Her elegant shoulders were looking very tense.

  “Charlotte and Oliver were both underage when you went inside,” Kate said. “Who did they go to?”

  Victoria stared at a point on the wall in back of Kate’s head. “My brother Erland took them in. It wasn’t for long. Charlotte was sixteen, Oliver was seventeen. They were in college and out of his house in a very short time.”

  Kate nodded. “I see.” She folded her hands on the table in front of her and took a deep breath. “Ms. Muravieff—” She paused. “You kept the name,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You kept your husband’s name. Even after the divorce.”

  Victoria’s eyes narrowed, as if she were really looking at Kate for the first time. “Why are you here, Ms. Shugak?” Despite her best efforts, something of what she was feeling must have crossed Kate’s face, because Victoria sat up straight in her chair. “Tell me at once,” she said, snapping it out like an order.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news, Ms. Muravieff,” Kate said. She took another breath and said steadily, “Your daughter, Charlotte, was killed going home yesterday evening by a hit-and-run driver.”

  Victoria sat very still, frozen in place. Kate couldn’t even hear her breathing.

  When she spoke, her voice was frail and thready. “Yesterday? Charlotte’s been dead all day today?”

  “Yes. I’m so very sorry, Ms. Muravieff.”

  Victoria spoke again through stiff lips. “Leave me.”

  Kate got up at once and left the room.

  14

  Jim was waiting for her when she got back to the town house. “My trial was continued until tomorrow,” he said the minute he saw her.

  “Oh, save it,” she snapped, and stamped upstairs to take another long hot shower. She was turning into a ritual bather. Lucky she had her own bathroom to go back to. She wished more than ever that she could go back to it right now.

  She had her face turned into the spray when she heard the shower curtain being drawn back. She didn’t move, and she didn’t jump either when his hands slid around her waist to draw her against him. By unspoken agreement, they took their time, drawing it out to a point way past pleasure, something that was almost pain, and when they were done, she let her head fall back against the tiles and laughed out loud for the sheer joy of it.

  He mumbled something into her neck.

  “What?” she said.

  He raised his head, and she was moved almost to pity by the look of despair on his face. “I don’t understand how it can keep getting better.”

  She laughed again, low in her throat. “Don’t you?” No one, not even Kate’s best friends, had ever said she was a nice person, and she proved it now. She raised his hand to her face, nuzzled into his palm, and sank her teeth into the base of his thumb.

  He swore, but he didn’t pull his hand away. Instead, he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, where he tossed her onto the bed and followed her down.

  “I’m going to stay in town for a while,” he said later.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Maybe I could hang out here.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s only until this case of yours is finished.”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, somebody just took out your client.”

  Kate willed away the remembered fury, the images of Kurt on the floor and Eugene with the bullet hole in his head, the footage of Charlotte’s crumpled car, the tears on Emily’s face, Victoria’s stricken expression. Not now, she told herself. Not now.

  “Stands to reason whoever did it might think you know something you shouldn’t.”

  “They might.”

  “Seems to me they might think twice about trying something if you had a trooper hanging around.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “And there’s nothing really pressing back at the post, and Tok and Cordova have promised to cover for me if something happens.”

  “Good to know.”

  “And I might be recalled to the stand tomorrow.”

  “You might.”

  There was a brief silence. “Oh fuck,” he said.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” she said, and rolled over on top of him.

  “I don’t want to talk to anyone.” Emily stood in the open doorway with a tear-blotched face, arms crossed, hugging herself tightly. Every line in her brow looked deeper, her eyes seemed sunken, and her hair lay lank and lifeless upon her head.

  “Is anyone else here?”

  Emily shook her head miserably, and Kate shoved her way in, closing the door behind her, Jim barely making it inside. She took Emily in a firm, impersonal grip and steered her into the living room. Emily sat on the couch and stared in front on her with unseeing eyes. Kate found the kitchen and made hot, sweet tea. She took it into the living room and pressed the mug into Emily’s hands. “Drink.”

  “I don’t want it,” Emily said.

  “Drink,” Kate said firmly.

  It took half an hour, another cup of tea, and a box of Kleenex to get Emily to where she could speak in more or less coherent sentences. Kate was unfailingly kind and patient, never at a loss for what word was needed next. Jim, observing from a neutral corner, was reminded of a rock battered by waves of emotion and incipient hysteria, only to emerge each time from the sea spray with the same unshakable face. Kate Shugak was the only person he’d ever met able to combine the qualities of the irresistible force and the immovable object at once. It was only a matter of time.

  Evidently, Emily came to realize that, too. Lying back against the couch, she closed her eyes and said in an exhausted voice, “What do you want?”<
br />
  “Why weren’t you in the car with her on the way home from the party?” Kate said.

  A tear slid down Emily’s cheek, but only one this time. “I drove to Erland’s from work. Charlotte had to haul the food to Erland’s house, and she had to be there early to set things up.”

  Kate suffered a slight feeling of déjà vu, remembering where Victoria and Charlotte had been the night William had been killed. Bad things had a habit of happening when the Bannister women were away from home, and in particular when they were helping host parties at their male relative’s house.

  Still, two similar occurrences thirty-one years apart didn’t necessarily constitute a pattern. “Were you behind her on the road?” Kate said.

  Emily shook her head miserably. “Ahead. I left right after you did. There’s only so much of that crap I can take.”

  “Then why do you go?”

  “Because Charlotte wants me there. Wanted.” Another tear. “She hates all that glad-handing stuff. She isn’t a public person. Wasn’t.”

  “Were you home yesterday?”

  “What?”

  “Did you stay home yesterday, or did you go into work?”

  Emily, uncomprehending, said, “I stayed home, I—I couldn’t go to work.”

  “Did a man come to see you?”

  Emily gave a convulsive sniff. “All kinds of men. Policemen, mostly. Knocking, knocking at the door, they wouldn’t leave me alone. They kept asking questions about Charlotte, and her mother, and her father, and I just didn’t see what that had to do with anything, I just couldn’t, I—oh God, oh God, I can’t believe she’s dead.” Emily buried her face in her hands and began to rock back and forth. “Charlotte, oh God, Charlotte.”

  “Emily.” Kate grasped her hands and pulled them from her face. “Is there someone I can call? Someone who can come and stay with you?”

  Kate couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her there all alone. Emily kept shaking her head—at the thought of her loss or the thought of enduring companionship, Kate couldn’t tell. She looked for and found a desk, located an address book inside the top drawer, and started calling numbers. Twenty minutes later, two women showed up, so alike they were almost twins, stocky, short, cropped gray hair and piercing blue eyes.