A Taint in the Blood

10

After Kate dropped Max off, she spent ten sweaty minutes figuring out how to dial out on her new cell phone. She was not helped in this by Mutt, who was intrigued by the sounds it made when the keys were pressed, which sounded a lit-de like ptarmigan talking among themselves. Eventually, woman triumphed over machine and Charlotte answered on the second ring. “Do you remember the make and model of the car your mother was driving the year your brother died?”

There was a brief silence. “No,” Charlotte said.

“Is there someone who would?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I want to know if it had a locking gas cap.”

“Just a minute, I’ll go out in the garage and check.”

Charlotte put the phone down before Kate could say anything, which was all right since Kate was speechless. When Charlotte picked up the phone again, Kate said, “You’ve still got the car your mother was driving before she went to jail?”

“It still runs,” Charlotte said, “why wouldn’t I? It doesn’t have a locking gas cap. I’m not sure they were even making locking gas caps back then.”

“Me, either,” Kate said. “One more thing, Charlotte. Have you heard from your mother’s attorney since the trial?”

“Henry?” Charlotte’s voice changed. “No, I certainly have not.”

“You didn’t like him?”

“If he’d done his job, my mother wouldn’t be in jail.”

“I see,” Kate said. This was not an atypical response from someone whose attorney had failed to earn his client an acquittal. “So you haven’t heard from him.”

“He would know better than to call me. I told him what I thought of him in court the day the verdict came in.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No. And I returned anything I got in the mail with his address on it.”

“You got mail from him?”

“Bills,” Charlotte said. “Like I would pay them after he got my mother put in jail.”

“How do you know they were bills if you didn’t open them?”

“What else would they be?” Charlotte said.

“Okay,” Kate said, repressing a sigh. “Thanks, Charlotte.”

“Wait,” Charlotte said, “does this mean you’ve found something?”

“A few somethings,” Kate said, “but nothing to convince a judge that Victoria didn’t set that fire.”

“Oh,” said Charlotte. She rallied. “But you’ll keep looking.”

“That’s what you’re paying me for,” Kate said.

“Until you find something to get her out.”

Kate said nothing.

In a forlorn whisper Charlotte, said, “Because I want her out.”

The outfit was still hanging in Jack’s closet, although Kate had to do a little excavation to find it. Jack had poked a hole in the bottom of the trash bag for the hook of the hanger and tied the bag in a knot at the bottom. She hesitated before untying the knot. It was silly, but Jack had tied that knot with his own hands. She thought about tearing the bag open from the top, but that seemed even sillier. What was she going to do, save the garbage bag so she could save the knot? She could just hear Jack, and the thought made her smile.

The jacket was short, single-breasted, with a V neck that revealed a discreetly sexy cleavage. It was covered with bright red sequins, which glittered in the light. The pants were black silk, with a single stripe of lighter black silk running in a trim line down the outer seam of both legs. She rummaged around the closet and found the shoes tucked into their original box.

Jack had bought her this outfit nearly three years before, in order to infiltrate a party Ekaterina was throwing at the Hotel Captain Cook for the Raven Corporation shareholders during the annual Alaska Federation of Natives convention. They’d been investigating a double homicide at the time. Kate, brutally rebuffed when she had suggested they go as servers in white shirts, black pants, and comfortable shoes, had been coerced into Nordstrom entirely against her will, and then into a glorified barbershop to have her hair done, also entirely against her will.

A grin stole slowly across her face. It had been worth it to see the expression on Jack’s face when the first group of men had caught sight of her in all her glory. She’d cleaned up pretty well.

In a drawer of the dresser she found the diaphanous lingerie that Jack had taken such pleasure in selecting, and she slipped into it. The jacket, worn alone, felt heavy against her skin. The tuxedo pants, by comparison, felt barely there.

She looked in the mirror. Her hair, cut short to the nape, was brushed straight back from her forehead. For the hell of it, she wetted it down and parted it high up on the right. She looked like Victor/Victoria. She ruffled it up again. No jewelry, because she didn’t own any and wouldn’t have worn it if she had. Her feet hadn’t changed any in the intervening years and she stood a inch taller in the shoes.

She surveyed herself in the mirror. “Okay,” she said.

Mutt whined.

“Yeah, yeah, heard it all before,” Kate told her. “You coming?”

They headed for Turnagain.

At Minnesota, she pulled off into the Texaco station and got out her cell phone. She managed to dial the number without yelling out the window for help, but it was a close call.

“Yeah,” Brendan said.

“It’s Kate, Brendan.”

“Yeah,” Brendan said, drawing it out, and Kate could imagine him leaning back in his chair and putting his feet up, a grin spreading across his face. “Light of my life, heart of my heart, sexiest thing walking around town on two legs. What can I do for you? Apart from the obvious.”

“I got invited to this party,” she said.

“Really? Need an escort?”

“No. Especially not you.”

He laughed, and she realized how that had sounded. “No, I meant I don’t want to use you yet.”

He laughed harder.

“Damn it!” she said, half laughing, half exasperated. “I don’t want anyone to know I have an in at the DA’s, not yet.”

“Could be deeper in,” he said.

“Down, boy,” she said.

“Too late,” he said.

“Will you please behave? I’m going to Erland Bannister’s for a cocktail party.”

Dead silence.

“Brendan?”

“Why?” he said finally. All humor had left his voice.

“He invited me.”

“Erland invited you?”

“Yes.”

Another silence. “Again I ask the question. Why?”

“He’s my client’s uncle.”

Another silence, followed by, “I don’t think that’s a good-enough reason, Kate.”

“I don’t, either,” she said. A big shiny black Ford Explorer pulled into the pumps. It had a bumper sticker that read I’m too poor to vote republican. Kate doubted that, given what bumper that sticker was on.

“If you don’t need an escort, why did you call?” Brendan said.

“I don’t know.” She hesitated. It sounded ridiculous, now that she came to put it into words. “I was thinking someone should know where I was.”

He didn’t laugh. “So noted. Kate?”

“What?”

A brief, taut silence. “Park for a quick exit.”

“I always do,” she said. “Brendan, at the party, what should I watch out for?”

“Assholes.”

She laughed, and started out again for Turnagain with a lighter heart.

The Turnagain neighborhood had been one of the first residential suburbs of Anchorage and one of the hardest hit during the 1964 earthquake, magnitude 9.2 on the Richter scale. Half of it fell into Turnagain Arm and the other half just felt apart. Frantic to keep people in the state following the earthquake, the city traded home owners in the area for property up on what was now Hillside, the west-facing slopes of the Chugach Mountains, where now, if you didn’t have five thousand square feet beneath one roof, including the indoor swimming pool and the marijuana grow, you weren’t shit. For example, Charlotte Bannister Muravieff lived on Hillside.

Of course, twenty years later waterfront property again began looking good to people with short memories and a greedy turn of mind, and the previous owners of property below the Turnagain Bluff successfully challenged the city for title to that property. Now, the rich and powerful were building mansions on what was essentially in midquake quicksand, and since Alaska sat on the northern edge of the Ring of Fire and experienced literally at least one earthquake per day, the future was ripe with the possibility of violent death, not to mention potential litigation. “Ah, Alaska,” Kate said out loud, threading the Subaru down the switchback. “The land of opportunity, and of opportunists.”

Mutt yipped agreement. “What do you know about it?” Kate asked her as they emerged from the trees to a vast parking lot in back of a house the size of the Hyatt Regency Maui. The view was superb, though, a gentle slope of green grass down to the coastal trail, after which the land gave way to mud flats and Knik Arm. It was a lovely evening, and the Knik was placid as a pond. On the far side of the water, Susitna, the sleeping lady, lay in peaceful repose, and beyond her Foraker and Denali scratched at the sky.

“Might be worth it,” Kate said after a few moments’ judicial study, “might just be worth living with the constant prospect of eminent death to have this view.”

This from a woman who hated to get her feet wet on a hunt. Mutt gave this observation the credulity it deserved, shoving past Kate when she opened the door. Kate left a window open for her and didn’t bother locking the car.

The front door of the mansion was actually two, reached by a wide set of stairs that spilled to either side in graceful arcs around a carefully tended grouping of flowers arranged by hue and height. Sidelights and a fanlight let a gentle interior glow leach through, and Kate could hear the sound of many voices and the tinkling of glasses. She supposed it might sound inviting to some.

She looked down at Mutt. “Want to come in?”

Mutt bared her teeth.

“Okay, try not to get into too much trouble,” Kate said, and at a hand signal Mutt was off the porch and into the underbrush like an arrow from a bow.

Someone cleared his throat. Kate looked around and beheld a young man in what looked like a bellhop’s uniform, an ingratiating smile on his face. “May I park your car?” he said.

“It’s already parked,” Kate said, and headed up the steps.

He nipped ahead of her and opened the door. She eyed him suspiciously. His smile stayed in place. The door remained open. “Thanks,” she said after a moment.

She went in, and the gates of mercy closed behind her.

The room was large, the biggest private room she’d been in, with floor-to-ceiling windows framing the spectacular view and hardwood floors polished to a shine bright enough to hurt your eyes. Not that Kate could admire either the view or the shine, because the room was jammed with what seemed to her appalled eyes like simply hundreds of people. Most of the men were in suits. Most of the women were in black, with the only variables the depth of the neckline and the height of the hemline. There was a lot of loud jewelry flashing from ears and wrists, and everybody had big hair, even the men. There was an occasional black face and a few more Native ones, but this could not be construed in any way by even the most nearsighted viewer as a multicultural gathering. Kate could feel her skin getting darker by the second.

They were all talking at the tops of their voices. The resulting roar sounded like a 747 on takeoff. It took a few moments for Kate’s ears to accustom themselves to the cacophony.

“Excuse me? Mr. Mayor, I’m so glad to have this opportunity to shake your hand and tell you what a fine job I think you’re doing for the city. You’ve got my vote all the way.”

“That’s great. I’m not the mayor, but I’ll be sure to tell him when I see him.”

“Down to there and up to here. She couldn’t be more obvious if she was wearing her own billboard.”

“That’s not what they taught us at Harvard.” Modest laugh. “I’m sorry, I went to Harvard. MBA. With honors.”

“I believe you mentioned that already. Seven or eight times.”

“Erland was telling me the other day that he’s bidding on the leases opening up in the Beaufort next year.”

“He thinks the tax breaks are getting through, then?”

“-and now he’s going for full custody, and how he can ask for that with a straight face with that bimbo he’s got living in his brand-new house-”

“Sounds like you could use an attorney. Mine took Phil to the cleaners for me. I’ve got his card here somewhere-”

“It’s buried so deep in committee it’ll never see daylight again.”

“Who sits on that committee? Maybe Erland’ll make a few calls.”

“Harvard, schmarvard. Wharton’s the place you want your kids to go to if you want them to learn anything about making money.” Modest laugh. “Class of ‘eighty-eight. I’ll make a few calls for you.”

“The union is just going to have to suck it up. The state can’t foot the entire insurance bill. People are going to have to ante up their share. I’m telling you, it’s not an option. If they don’t like it, they can get a job in the private sector.”

“The legislature makes one move on the permanent fund and Jay is going to rise up out of Lake Clark like Saint George coming after the dragon.”

“I keep thinking if we just explain to people, educate them-”

“We’ve been sucking at the federal tit since Seward bought Alaska from Russia. We don’t know how to do anything else.”

“Erland says all we have to do is cut the fat out of the budget.”

“So we got a granite countertop and, would you believe it, they’ve put it in three times and they’ve broken it every single time.”

“Sounds like you could use a better contractor. Let me give you my card.”

“I come from Seldovia. There used to be five goddamn canneries in Seldovia when I was growing up. You know where the name comes from? Seldevoy. Russian word, means herring town. No goddamn herring in Seldovia anymore. Not much goddamn salmon left, either. We used to be able to pull goddamn king crab right out of Seldovia Bay. They aren’t even in the Kachemak anymore. What, you never read the book Cod?”

“Yeah, but that was the Atlantic.”

“The Pacific’s just another ocean. I’m telling you, we need to go to a thousand-mile limit and start arming the goddamn Coast Guard with cannons so they can sink a few of those goddamn fish processors. And I ain’t talking about just the foreign processors, either, ”cause the American processors are just as bad, if not goddamn worse.“

“Well, as long as I can pull a king salmon out of the Kenai, I’m happy.”

“Global warming’s a myth.”

“Right, and so’s the Pribilofs remaining ice-free year-round, and golfing in Palmer in January.”

“They were acting like they were at a slumber party, instead of prosecuting a rape-murder, with the victim’s family right there in the courtroom. I sent the DA an E-mail and told her so.”

“What’d she say?”

“The usual-the media blew it all out of proportion, it wasn’t really that bad, Anchorage DAs are held to a high standard, yakety-yak.”

“Erland went to school with her, didn’t he? Maybe you should talk to him about it.”

Glasses clinked, people put pinkish blobs of something into their mouths and kept talking around the blobs, and the air was thick with cigarette and cigar smoke. Kate’s sinuses gave a single vicious throb, and instinctively she made as if to turn back to the door, everything in her telling her to escape from this hellhole before she saw someone she knew.

“Kate!”

Inches from a clean getaway, she took courage in hand and turned back to face the room. “Oh,” she said a little weakly. “Hi, Pete.”

Pete Heiman elbowed through the crowd and stood grinning at her. “Couldn’t believe my eyes when you walked in. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was invited,” she said, trying to talk without breathing.

“Really? You know Erland?”

She shook her head. Not breathing wasn’t working, so she tried to breathe through her mouth instead. “His niece.”

“Charlotte?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, hell, small world.” He was still grinning. He looked her over. “You clean up pretty damn good, Katie.”

“Pete? Nobody calls me Katie.”

“I know. It kinda puts me in a class by myself, don’t it?”

He pretended to preen, and she had to laugh.

Pete Heiman was the legislative senator (for life, some people had started saying after the last election) from Kate’s district, her mouthpiece in Juneau and like Max one of the original Alaskan old farts. He’d played pinochle with Abel and fished for salmon alongside Old Sam and swung a pick, if only for a photo op during an election swing, next to Mac Devlin. His politics were conservative but erratic; he was a member of the Republican party, but he voted against the majority in Juneau often enough to keep his liberal and Libertarian constituents happy, and he’d managed to weasel his way through the subsistence issue without having to take a firm stand in one camp or another. He was pro-choice, which always surprised the hell out of Kate, until she remembered that he was a longtime friend of Auntie Vi. Kate had a feeling that Auntie Vi had something on Pete, but she’d yet to find out what.

“Want a drink?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Come on.” He grabbed her hand and towed her through the crowd, nodding and smiling with that practiced politician’s charm to clear a path. There was a bar with a smiling bartender, who seemed genuinely disappointed to pour her only a glass of club soda with a twist of lime.

“Want something to eat?” Pete said. “What am I saying, you always want something to eat,” and he towed her forthwith to a buffet laden with shrimp, crab, salmon, and halibut, six different kinds of cheese, a dozen different kinds of crackers, chips and dips, and a dazzling display of Godiva chocolates.

Kate took one look and said, “Why are the plates so small?”

Pete eyed the column of shrimp leaning like the tower of Pisa from the tiny saucer held in Kate’s hand and said, “Couldn’t tell you.” He turned to survey the crowd. “Eat up. There are some people I’d like you to meet.”

“Some people” turned out to be every second person in the joint. Kate gulped her food-the pink blobs turned out to be cheese puffs, which didn’t explain why they were pink-and endured handshakes that ranged from the limp noodle to the damp rag to the hearty grip to the bone crusher, and smiles that ranged from tight-lipped to a vast expanse of synthetic enamel, from the ingratiating to the predatory.

The women were impressed by her outfit, less so by her hair and lack of makeup, and greeted her with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Whose man was she there to take? Red was a power color. Whose attention would she usurp? The men wondered if she was Pete’s protegee or his new girlfriend, or both, and what that might mean in the next legislative session in terms of lobbying. Would she be long-term or short? If long-term, how much influence would she wield over Pete’s vote? Would she drink on their tab, or would her favor be more labor intensive to acquire? Would they have to sleep with her? Would she sleep with them? Some were clearly hoping for the latter.

One woman, a slender, hard-faced blonde, who wore a black blazer over a black silk shell, white leggings, and black boots with four-inch heels that buckled over the instep, looked Kate up and down and drawled, “Cute outfit honey. Your mother pick that out for you?”

“Sondra-” Pete said, or started to.

“That’s all right, Pete,” Kate said, and smiled at Sondra. “Not my mother, my man.” She ran one teasing finger down the buttons of the glittering red jacket and back up again to trace the neckline. “He liked the idea of… buttons.” She gave the man hovering at Sondra’s elbow a languishing glance and ran her tongue slowly over her lower lip.

The man inhaled part of his drink and started to cough, spraying green liquid of some kind over Sondra’s leggings. Sondra swore. “You moron!” She brushed ineffectually at her leggings and glared at Kate.

Pete threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“Um,” the man said, his eyes watering a little, “I’m Greg Nowaka. And you are-”

The woman transferred the glare from Kate to him.

Still laughing, Pete waved him off. “Way out of your league, buddy boy. Run, run for your life.”

He towed Kate away as she said to the woman over her shoulder, “Did you practice that nostril flare in the mirror? It’s kinda cool, makes you look like you’re about to charge a red cape.”

“Jesus, Shugak, enough already.” When they had achieved what Pete considered to be a safe distance, he stopped to grin down at her. “Where’d you learn to do that? I figured I was shepherding a lamb through the wolf pack, but I’m thinking now I got that backward.”

“When in Rome,” Kate said, and wondered how soon she could get the hell out of there.

A touch on the shoulder stopped her. She turned to see Charlotte, Emily at her elbow. Emily looked at Kate with the first expression of approval Kate had yet seen. Charlotte was even smiling. “Thanks,” Charlotte said.

“For what?” Kate said.

Charlotte looked over her shoulder. “Hi, Pete.”

“Hi, sweetie.” Pete kissed her cheek and then Emily’s. “How you doing?”

Charlotte’s smile widened. “Better now.”

Pete laughed. “I bet.” He grinned down at Kate.

Kate, mystified, was about to inquire as to what had just happened, when Charlotte said, “Let me introduce you to my aunt.” She nodded to Pete, who stepped back. Charlotte led Kate to a chair tucked into a corner next to the windows. “Aunt Alice?”

The woman seated in the chair wore a sleeveless scoop-necked mauve linen sheath and was chatting animatedly with a well-dressed, smooth-featured man twenty years her junior, who looked like he was trying not to appear bored. She looked around at Charlotte’s greeting. Her hair had been artfully streaked, her large gray eyes were exquisitely made up, her fingernails were polished the same shade as her toenails, displayed in elegant sandals with delicate straps. Her collarbone was a knife edge above the neckline of her dress, her arms about the width of a piece of spaghetti, and there was something wrong with her face. The skin was very smooth and very taut, but it seemed to be pulling her lips open to show the fleshy inner lips inside. It tugged at the corners of her eyes and eyebrows, narrowing the eyes and elongating the brows. Kate wondered if perhaps Alice was recovering from burns of some kind. She’d seen burn victims grow just that kind of new skin.

“Aunt Alice, I’d like you to meet Kate Shugak.”

Aunt Alice extended a hand, the back of which was mottled with age spots. “How do you do, Ms. Shugak.”

Kate accepted the hand and wondered if she was expected to kiss it. “Kate, please,” she said.

Alice gave a perfunctory smile and said to the bored-looking man, “Alvin, meet Kate Shugak.”

Alvin took Kate’s hand. “How nice to meet you.” His eyes traveled down her throat. “Hmm.” He raised one hand and, before she could step out of reach, traced her scar with impersonal fingers. “Who’s your surgeon?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your plastic surgeon, who is he? Never mind. Whoever he is, he ought to be shot. Here.” Alvin produced a business card. “Give me a call. We’ll set up an appointment.” He took her chin in cool, impersonal hands and turned her face from side to side, and Kate was so dumbfounded at the uninvited familiarity that she let him. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-five,” Kate said.

“Hmm,” he said again. “Not much else to be done there, at least not yet. In another twenty years, we’ll probably have to do some work on those eyes.”

“What’s wrong with my eyes?” Kate said, and then she pulled herself together. “There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. Who the hell are you anyway?”

Alvin produced a wide smile of practiced charm. “I’m sorry. I’m Alvin Bishop. I’m a plastic surgeon.” The mirthless smile widened. “Beautiful faces are us.”

“I’ve already got one, thanks,” Kate said smartly, and looked down at Alice. She understood the face now, although she would never understand the impetus behind the edifice. She had to work at keeping the pity out of her own (already beautiful) face.

“And how do you know my niece?” Alice said brightly.

Before Kate could reply, a booming male voice said, “And who do we have here?”

Kate peered up through the steadily thickening haze at what appeared to be quite the tallest man she’d ever met in her life.

The man stooped to kiss the cheek Alice presented. “Have I told you tonight how lovely you look, dear?” He dismissed the plastic surgeon with a look that stopped just short of insult. Dr. Alvin Bishop faded into the crowd, Kate catching a look of relief on his face as he went.

“Just fine, dear,” she replied. “This is Kate Shugak, a friend of Charlotte’s.”

He straightened. “Is it. Well now.” His eyes ran over Kate assessingly, and Kate got that instant vibe that every woman gets when a man is interested. Her own eyes narrowed a little.

He was a big man, long-limbed, rangy. She knew him to be in his late sixties or early seventies, but he looked twenty years younger. His face was long, the nose and chin very strong, his eyes blue and intent. His smile was more charming than Alvin’s, but there was power in it, and the arrogance that comes with power. Erland Bannister would be a man whose every move, from the wink and the slap on the back to the unfriendly takeover of a rival corporation, would be calculated for a specific effect. He looked like a man who got what he wanted when he wanted it and not a second later.

He was dressed more casually than anyone in the room, in slacks and a well-worn gray tweed sport jacket over an oxford shirt open at the neck. Kate was reminded of a story about Napoleon’s coronation, when he made all his generals wear gold braid while he wore a simple soldier’s uniform. Make everyone dress up and then dress down yourself. Yet another example of his power, a small one, but telling.

An arm snaked through Erland’s and a voice purred, “Erland, darling, who’s your little friend?”

The blonde in the green-stained leggings was back, looking at Kate as if she’d crawled out from under a rock. Next to Kate, Charlotte stiffened. Alice’s smile looked even more rigid, and it wasn’t just her latest face-lift. Suddenly, Kate understood the subtext of the little scene a few minutes before. She looked at Alice. Fitzgerald was right: The rich really were different. But Hemingway was righter; the only difference was they had more money, which they could spend on more dumb things. It occurred to Kate for the first time that there were advantages to being broke for most of your life.

She looked back at the blonde and examined her face with interest. “You must be a patient of Alvin’s, too,” she said, putting as much innocence into her wide eyes as she could muster.

The blonde went a dull red. She opened her mouth, but whatever bile had been about to spew out was forestalled when Erland patted her hand. “Why, you’ve met.”

“Not formally,” Kate said with her biggest smile.

“Well, then, allow me to introduce you. Sondra Blair, this is Kate Shugak. Sondra, you know my wife, Alice, and my niece, Charlotte, already.”

There was something in Erland’s voice that alerted Sondra. Her hostility vanished, to be replaced by an oozing enchantment, which fooled no one it was aimed at. “Of course. How do you do? Alice, Charlotte, lovely to see you again.”

“And Emily,” Charlotte said in a tight voice.

“And Emily, of course,” Erland said with no less charm.

“So nice to meet you, Emily,” Sondra said, stifling a yawn. “And you, too, uh, Kaley, wasn’t it?”

Kate laughed in her face.

There was a startled silence. Charlotte couldn’t repress a smile. Emily chuckled. Alice woke up from cryosleep and looked at Kate as if Kate were her last hope of heaven.

Erland grinned down at Kate. “Feisty little thing, aren’t you?

Let me buy you a drink.“ He let Sondra’s arm fall and slipped a firm hand beneath Kate’s elbow.

Sondra looked livid.

“Uncle Erland-” Charlotte said.

“Now, Charlotte, you just relax. I won’t eat her.” He smiled down at Kate. “Unless she asks me to. Nicely.”

Again, Kate felt that jolt. She didn’t think any woman under the age of eighty wouldn’t have. It put her even more on her guard. Men like Erland Bannister didn’t come on to a woman without an ulterior motive, and it wasn’t just because he was bowled over by her manifest charms.

The dull look was back on Alice’s face as they left. Charlotte opened her mouth as if to say something, then shut it again, worried eyes meeting Kate’s, as if trying to impart a message of some urgency. Whatever it was, Kate didn’t get it.

The crowd parted for Erland as it never would for Pete, and if people had been curious about Kate on Pete’s arm, they were doubly interested to see her on Erland’s. A brief electric silence would fall at their approach, succeeded by a buzz of comment and speculation after they had passed. “It’s like a fishbowl in here,” Kate said.

Erland smiled down at her. “I know. People will gossip about their superiors.”

“Why are they here, if you hold them in such contempt?”

He didn’t bother denying it. “I find them useful.”

“All of them?”

He shrugged. “Most of them. Some come with their very own Kato Kaelins, and they have to be fed and watered along with the rest of the cattle, but it’s the price I pay to get their masters in the door.” He didn’t bother lowering his voice, she noticed. He paused next to the bar and smiled down at her. “What can I get you?”

“Club soda, with a twist of lime.”

He didn’t try to talk her into anything stronger, which she appreciated. He got a scotch and water for himself and led her to a plush love seat tucked into a bow window. A couple seated there were dismissed with the same ease and finesse with which Erland had dismissed Alvin, had cut through the crowd, and had gone to the head of the line at the bar. Kate took the corner with the view; Erland took the corner with the view of Kate and crossed his legs so that a richly polished loafer touched one of hers. She let it stay there, for the moment.

“You’re not quite what I expected,” he said, watching her over the rim of his glass.

“What did you expect?” she said, sipping her club soda.

He smiled. “A little less city, a little more Bush?”

She smiled back. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I’m not disappointed.” He let his eyes wander over her. “No, indeed.”

“Why am I here?” she said. Kate didn’t do subtle.

“I knew your grandmother,” Erland said.

“Everyone did,” Kate said. “How did you know I was in town?”

He swallowed scotch. “Word gets around.”

“What word?”

He smiled again. It came easily to him, and it lent him charisma. He would have found that out early on. He would have put it to work for him, the way he was putting it to work for him now. “A friend called. Said you’d been making inquiries about my sister’s case.”

The man she had called from Brendan’s list who had refused to talk to her. “Charlotte didn’t tell you,” Kate said in a neutral voice.

His smile faded. “No,” he said, a hint of sadness in his voice. “We’re not as close as I’d like.”

“Have you talked to Victoria?”

He shook his head. “Not in thirty years.”

“Not since she went inside?”

“No.”

“Why?” Kate said baldly. “She’s right up the road, twenty minutes door-to-door.”

He shrugged helplessly, which Kate didn’t buy for a New York minute. “She refuses to speak to any of us.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Guilt, I suppose.”

“So you think she’s guilty.”

His eyes were very blue and very intent. “She didn’t deny it. She didn’t even take the stand in her own defense.”

Kate nodded. “I know. I’ve read the trial transcript.”

Someone approached the couch. Kate looked up to see Oliver Muravieff leaning on his cane.

“Oliver,” Erland said, getting to his feet and extending a hand.

It was grasped warmly. “Uncle Erland,” Oliver Muravieff said. He looked down at Kate. “Ms. Shugak.”

“You’re late, boy.” Erland clapped him on the shoulder. “Let me get you a drink.”

Kate watched him go thoughtfully. She didn’t expect Erland Bannister fetched drinks for just anybody. She looked at Oliver. What did Erland want from his nephew that he would wait on him?

He took his uncle’s place. “What do you think of the party?”

“Interesting,” Kate said.

Oliver gave a short laugh. “That’s what you say when you see a painting you hate. ”Interesting.“”

She didn’t contradict him. “Why are you here?”

He shrugged. “Uncle Erland asked me.”

“And you come when he calls.”

She was being deliberately offensive, but he smiled. It was an oddly grim expression, having little to do with amusement. “Yes,” he said, “I do, and so does everyone else here.”

“Oliver,” a voice said, and Kate looked up, to behold a man with more and bigger teeth than JFK, all of them switched on. Looking into that smile was like staring through a dark night into headlights turned on bright.

“How the hell are you?” Smiley Face said, beaming down at both of them, and without waiting for a reply, he added “Who’s your friend?”

Oliver’s face took on an even more dour cast. “Kate Shugak, Bruce Abbott.”

“Ah,” Bruce Abbott said, nodding wisely. “Ekaterina Shugak’s granddaughter. I heard your speech at AFN a couple of years back. Rousing, I thought.”

“You didn’t think I went over the top on the fish farming,” Kate said, sitting up and looking anxious.

He extended a hand and she put hers into it, which allowed him to pat it reassuringly. “Certainly not. We must protect our wild stock at all cost if we are to maintain the reputation for quality Alaska salmon enjoys. Not to mention a healthful subsistence lifestyle for the Native peoples.” He affected a shudder. “Nasty stuff anyway, farmed salmon. Dry, they have to dye it pink, diseased, tasteless. Your points were well taken.”

Interesting, Kate thought, especially since her impromptu speech had begun with a story about a moose kill and she hadn’t said a word about farmed fish. She beamed a smile at him that rivaled the brilliance of his own. Oliver made a sound in the back of his throat and stood up. “Take my seat, Bruce. I need a drink.”

He walked away before Bruce could answer. “May I?” Bruce said.

“Certainly,” Kate said, patting her hair and maybe fluttering her eyelashes a little. What the hell, give ol‘ Bruce a thrill while she figured out what the hell the governor’s chief of staff had to say to little old Kate Shugak from the Park. “We’ve met before, you know,” she said in breathless, confiding accents. She leaned forward and looked at him with wide, admiring eyes, or what she was hoping might be a close approximation thereof.

He looked astounded. “No,” he said in a tone of nattering disbelief. He gave her the once-over and flashed his teeth again. “I’m sure I would remember if we had.”

He’d been in some kind of supervisory position with the Department of Corrections at the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility, back in the days when Kate used to be an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney. She had never liked the glad-handing, brownnosing little prick from the first time she’d watched him oil his way out of responsibility for the prisoner suicide that had happened on his watch. It had never been made officially known, but the employee grapevine said that he’d had his feet up on his desk, reading the newspaper instead of watching the monitors in the mods, one of which was trained on the suicide’s cell. The dead guy had been put on a suicide watch, too, so it wasn’t like Bruce Abbott wouldn’t have known the guy was at risk.

Kate decided that now was not the time to remind Bruce Abbott of past misdeeds. She smiled instead.

Under the influence of those admiring eyes, Bruce puffed out his chest and started dropping names. Every sentence began ‘The governor said to me“ and every other sentence began ”And then I said to the governor“ and all of their conversations were liberally sprinkled with references to the political high and mighty, both state and federal. Any local contacts, it went without saying, were dismissed as being too paltry even to mention.

Kate threw in a couple of bright-eyed “Reallys!” and one “Fascinating!” and stifled a yawn, but his acute political instincts told Bruce he was losing his audience. He switched on his smile again. “You’re being spoken of in high places, Kate. I may call you Kate?”

Something told her that what Bruce Abbott said next would turn out to be why she had been invited to this party. “Really,” she said. “I can’t imagine what anyone in the governor’s office might have to say about little old me.”

His eyes narrowed fractionally, and for a moment she thought she might have overdone it. But his smile switched on again, brighter than ever, accompanied this time by a fruity chuckle. “Oh, I didn’t mean to mislead you, Kate. Not necessarily the governor’s office, but certainly at high levels.”

“Really,” she said for what felt like the seventeenth time. The secret to a successful interrogation was to make the suspect do all of the talking. She would not ask what “they” had been saying about her. Besides, Bruce was dying to tell her, and why should she thwart him, poor man?

Realizing she was about to doze off with her eyes wide open, she pulled herself together.

“Yes, you have been mentioned as quite the little up-and-comer,” Bruce said.

“Have I?” Kate said. “Really, I can’t imagine why. As you know, Bruce, I’m not in politics myself.”

“Not everyone can be,” he said earnestly, “some just don’t have the gift for it. But we need you out here, too.” A gesture encompassed the greater part of the Great Unwashed, of which Kate presumed he meant she was a voting member. Not that she’d voted for his boss, but she didn’t find it necessary to say so at this very moment. She batted her eyelids again. Her eyes were drying out from trying to keep them open.

Bruce smiled and patted her hand again. “Yes, being Ekaterina Shugak’s granddaughter, well, that certainly puts you first on any list.”

“I’m on a list?” Kate said, suddenly wide awake.

He beamed his teeth at her. “Of course you are,” he said warmly, “and first on it, like I said.”

“For what?” Kate said, and kicked herself for asking.

He smoothed the lapel of his jacket. “As I’m sure you know, the Alaska state troopers are opening a new post in Niniltna. You live there, I believe?”

“I do,” Kate said.

“And of course you used to be an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney.”

“I did,” she said.

He smiled some more. “The Department of Public Safety is thinking of assigning a VPSO to Niniltna.”

She stiffened, enough so that he noticed. “Are they?” she said. The words were bitten off more than spoken.

“Indeed, yes,” he said, looking a bit bewildered, clearly not expecting hostility as a reaction to his good news.

He was easy to read. Jobs of any kind were scarce in the Alaskan Bush. Surely she knew what this meant? A monthly salary, in a village with only two others, the trooper and the postmaster. Medical insurance, workman’s comp, a retirement plan. He couldn’t understand her lack of enthusiasm, or for that matter the complete absence of overwhelming gratitude that he had come to expect from these little chats. The current governor of Alaska was a past master at the art of patronage, and Bruce Abbott the designated dispenser thereof. It was a job he clearly enjoyed, and now Kate was ruining it for him.

She took pity on him, in spite of the anger building beneath her breastbone. He was just a go-fer, after all, a yes-man, a beck-and-call boy who only implemented the decisions made by the people in authority. He would never wield that authority himself, but credit where credit was due, he would never want to. He was a round peg in a thoroughly round hole, he’d found his niche, and he knew it. “I appreciate the thought, Bruce, but I really wouldn’t be the right person for the job.”

Bruce didn’t just look disappointed, he looked aghast. It might have been the first time anyone had ever turned down the governor’s offer of a job. “But-but the salary. The-the benefits,” he said, actually stuttering. “Oh, if you’re worried about the time it would take you to go through the academy in Sitka to qualify, I’ve been instructed to tell you that in your case, because of your training-we’ve been told you did a year at Quantico right after taking your degree in social justice from UAF-and your experience on the job-your record is, hell, it’s flawless-well, after all that, the state would be willing to waive the academy requirement. We don’t have that many people of your caliber available, Kate.”

She almost lost her temper. Almost, but not quite. She was here on a fact-finding mission, not to indulge her evil twin. She rose to her feet and plastered a false smile on her face. “I’m sorry, Bruce.”

“But we like to recruit VPSOs locally whenever we can!” He stood up. “You’re Alaskan-born and -bred, Kate, and what’s more, you live in the very place you’ll be posted in!”

She forbore from pointing out that that wasn’t always a good thing in the Bush. All too often when the village public safety officers arrested someone, either they were related to the perp or the rest of the village was. It was frequently an argument for arresting no one, no matter how severe the crime. “There are a lot of people who would like and would be suited for the Niniltna VPSO job.” She wondered at the near panic she saw on his face, but not enough to relent. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, and headed for the door.

By the time she got there, Erland Bannister had returned to the love seat and was standing in close consultation with Bruce Abbott. Oliver was with them, a little apart, a frown on his face as he watched her slip out the door.