A Taint in the Blood

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?”

“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 deja 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.

“You Shugak?” the first one said, and walked inside without waiting for an answer. “I’m Becky. This is Lael.”

“Hi,” Kate said.

“Where is she?”

“In the living room. She’s pretty shook.”

“I don’t blame her,” Becky said gruffly. “I’d hate to think how I’d react if Lael-” And here the two women exchanged such an unexpected and naked look of emotion that Kate felt like she was intruding on something very private, and she averted her eyes.

“I tried calling her aunt and uncle,” Kate said, “but they aren’t picking up.”

“Hah!” Becky said.

“I left a message,” Kate said.

“Hah!” Becky said again.

“Oh, Becky!” Emily said from behind Kate, and rushed forward to be enfolded in an all-encompassing embrace. “Charlotte’s gone! Charlotte, oh my God, Charlotte!”

“It’s okay,” Becky said, patting Emily’s back soothingly. “If’s okay, Emily, Lael and I are here now. We’ll take care of you.”

Lael was already producing a bottle of pills from the day pack she was carrying. “A sedative,” she explained to Kate in a soft voice.

“You a doctor?” Kate said.

Lael nodded.

“Did you hear how Charlotte died?”

Lael’s lips tightened. “Charlotte Bannister was a good friend of mine, Ms. Shugak.”

“And she was my client, and she’s just been killed in what could be considered suspicious circumstances.”

Lael’s eyes widened. “I thought it was a hit-and-run.”

“It was.” Kate glanced over her shoulder at Becky and Emily and lowered her voice. “Look, I can’t say anymore right now, but just keep the doors and windows locked, okay? And here’s my number, if you need me for anything.”

“What are you doing here anyway?”

“Charlotte hired me to get her mother out of jail,” Kate said baldly.

Jim, still sequestered in his neutral corner, noticed that discretion had just suffered a hit. Kate’s favorite weapon had always been the bludgeon, and she would regard Charlotte’s death as a personal affront that had to be avenged. He felt a spark of sympathy, albeit a very tiny spark, for the perp. Like Kate, like any cop worthy of the name, he didn’t think much of coincidences. He was still pretty sure Victoria had committed the crime of which she had been found guilty, but he was equally certain that Kate, in ferreting around after the circumstances of that crime, had stirred up something nasty associated with that crime that had lain dormant for thirty-one years. There was nothing worse than that kind of nasty. Old nasty had a tendency to ripen. Left alone, it would eventually rot away. Exposed to the bright light of day before that happened, the stench rolled out and over everyone in sight. Considering the wealth and power connected with this case, the smell could reach all the way to Juneau and maybe even Washington, D.C.

Lael was quick. “And you think that might have something to do with Charlotte being killed?” she asked Kate.

“I don’t know. But I think if’s interesting that she was killed right after she hired me to start investigating a thirty-one-year-old murder case.”

In the car on the way down O’Malley, Jim said, “You’re taking the gloves off.”

She spared him a brief glance. “One. I hire Kurt Pletnikoff to do some legwork for me. Two, he finds a dead man-I’m guessing someone connected to this case. Three, he is shot and left for dead himself. Four, somebody tries to take me out. Five, my employer is killed.” She pulled to the side of the road, provoking an indignant honk from the Chevy Suburban that had been riding their bumper all the way down the mountain. “And notice I’m not even mentioning the attempt to buy me off with the Niniltna VPSO job.”

He looked around. “What are we doing? Kate, you parked right on the bike trail.”

She pointed at a shred of crime-scene tape tied to a tree branch. “This is where Charlotte got hit.”

A narrow dirt road intersected O’Malley at right angles. The trees grew in close and closed in overhead to form a canopy. Kate walked down it, Jim pacing behind. At intervals, houses were visible through the trees, but there was a good hundred feet before the first driveway. Kate turned around and paced back, looking down. She stopped and squatted. “Look,” she said, pointing.

Jim squatted next to her, scrutinizing the dirt track. There were tire tracks from a big vehicle, and a dark patch where the engine had leaked oil. “Somebody was parked here.”

Kate nodded. “Waiting.”

“And then started fast, spinning the tires, kicking dirt.”

“A big black pickup.” Kate rose to her feet and walked out to the intersection. It was 10:30, the sun well up in the sky, beating down on the backs of their heads as they looked west. “See the way the road rises just before it gets here?”

Jim nodded. “Yeah. Charlotte wouldn’t have seen them coming until the last minute.”

“The question is, how did they know when to hit the gas?”

A brief silence. “There were two of them,” Jim said finally. “Jesus Christ. There were two of them, with walkie-talkies or cell phones. The one down the road called the one parked in the lane, waiting until Charlotte was about to come over the rise, and told the guy in the truck when to go.”

Kate nodded. “Yeah.” She walked back to the Subaru and pulled her own cell phone from her day pack. Jim’s jaw dropped about six inches. She ignored him and called Brendan McCord.

She dropped Jim at the state courthouse. He sat in the car for a moment. “Two people, connected to the case you’re working on, both dead within a day of each other,” he said.

“I know,” she said a little grimly. “I’m glad I didn’t bring Johnny in with me.”

“Kate,” he said, and caught her chin in one hand and pulled her face around so she had to look at him. “It occurs to me that you could be in some danger.”

She let a slow smile spread across her face, and instead of pulling away like any normal Kate Shugak would have done, she leaned into his grip and purred, her lips touching his as they moved. “Were you thinking I’d need my very own personal bodyguard?”

“Ah shit,” he said, and kissed her hard. “Take care of yourself, damn it.” He opened the door and something-he didn’t know what-stopped him half in and half out of the car. Over his shoulder he said gruffly, “I should be out of here before five. You want to meet somewhere for dinner?”

She spent two hours going back over the case file, reexamining the record of the chain of events, the eyewitness testimony, the physical evidence. She reread the trial transcript, resetting her internal bullshit monitor up a notch to filter out all the extraneous information that was a part of every criminal trial (e.g., Q: “Where were you at 8:00 P.M. the evening of the twelfth, Miss Doe?” A: “Well, I was having dinner with my friends right after work-you know Sally is going through a really rough time with her boyfriend and Margie said we should show our support by giving her a good time-and boy I can tell you the margaritas at La Mex are the way to go, and anyway I didn’t get home until 7:00 p.m. and my mother called the minute I walked in the door, and she and Dad are thinking about retiring to Flagstaff next year and they wanted to know what I thought of the area and how often I could get down there, and when she finally hung up, Carrie-that’s my dog, named for the girl on Sex and the City, you know?-anyway Carrie really had to go, so I took her for a walk, and then I ran into Paul, the hunk who lives two doors down, and we were talking, and gosh, ”Kate could just imagine the adorable giggle‘-I guess I was talking to Paul about then. We kind of, you know, hit it off?“).

Unfortunately, none of the facts had changed since the last time Kate had visited them. Victoria was the one who had called in the fire, and, according to the statements of the firefighters, she was found sitting outside the burning house, crying and clutching fifteen-year-old Charlotte. Cowell had dabbled with the notion that the older, deceased brother, William, had set the fire to try to kill Oliver, the younger brother, motive determined to be an unnamed schoolgirl they were both in love with, which sounded like such a ludicrous stretch that even the judge had made fun of him. Of course, Cowell had also, in the best tradition of defense attorneys, speculated on the motives of everyone involved, up to and including the firefighters.

Only Victoria had any motive that could be supported by evidence however circumstantial. And only Victoria had not spoken in her own defense.

Why not?

“What?” Victoria said. “You’re afraid you won’t be paid?”

Kate looked at the proud chin, which was trembling a little now, and forbore to answer in kind. “I’m so sorry,” she said again.

Victoria was sitting in her usual fashion, straight-backed, head up, fixing Kate with a fierce, fearless eye. Kate felt that same reluctant admiration that she had before, but she needed answers and she needed them now. “I’ve been doing some research, Ms. Muravieff. Thirty-two years ago, your father laid off over a thousand Bannister employees and replaced them with contract hires. A company isn’t required to pay the same benefits to a contract employee as a union employee-health benefits, a retirement plan, workman’s comp, things like that. What’s more, he did it in the middle of the construction of the TransAlaska Pipeline, the biggest cost-plus contract in the history of this planet, when union members had the pipeline consortium by the short hairs and twisted them to their heart’s content. Teamsters rioted at Isabel Pass when they were refused steak for lunch, seven-ninety-eighters refused to share living space with other unions, and electricians walked thirty at a time when the plumbers got Sundays off with pay and they didn’t. Average union wage with overtime was something like twelve hundred dollars a week, back when twelve hundred dollars a week was real money. They were pretty much sitting up and begging to be slapped down, and your father was the first one to do so. He was hailed as a hero by every corporate owner in the state, and his action was a snowball that started a landslide, leading to the beginning of privatization of state services.”

Kate paused. Victoria’s breath was coming a little faster, but her expression was graven in stone. “You were quoted in the press as being adamantly opposed to that action. You marched with the employees. There are pictures of you holding a sign that read ‘People Before Profits.” You excoriated your father in the newspapers, on radio and television, all over the state. You even made it to the Washington state papers, and I found at least one op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. They hammered you, but consider the source.“

Jolted out of her grief, Victoria said involuntarily, “You’ve done your homework.”

“It’s what I do,” Kate said, who was still nauseated from yet another dose of microfiche. “Did your action against your father have something to do with the fire at your home and the death of your son?”

“No,” Victoria said. She sounded very calm, a little too calm.

“He was probably at that fund-raiser you and Charlotte went to that evening. He probably knew you would be there. Maybe he didn’t mean to kill anyone. Maybe it was just supposed to be a warning to you, to shut you up, to stop you organizing the peons, so he could continue to rip off the average Alaskan Joe in the best tradition of robber barons since J. P. Morgan. It’s not like it’s a new story in American history, after all. At least your father spent what he ripped off right here in the state, instead of retiring Outside to spend it all in Palm Springs.”

“No,” Victoria said, refusing the carrot. She wouldn’t implicate her father even if it meant exonerating herself.

Kate tried very hard not to lose her temper. For one thing, it wasn’t fair. Kate could walk away, Victoria couldn’t. For another, it was usually unproductive of anything except fear in her target. Although Victoria did not look noticeably fearful. “Look, Ms. Muravieff,” Kate said tightly, “it’s obvious that the death of your daughter Tuesday night is connected in some way to the death of your son William thirty-one years ago.”

“I don’t see why,” Victoria said with flinty composure.

“Come now,” Kate said a little impatiently. “I show up and start asking questions about a thirty-one-year-old homicide, moreover a closed case, a case for which someone has been convicted and imprisoned, and suddenly people related to the case start dying, including the one who hired me to ask the questions. Seems like, gosh, cause and effect.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Victoria said, and waved a hand at her surroundings. “It’s not like I could have seen anything. I don’t get out much, you know.”

“There has been another death,” Kate said, and placed on the table in front of Victoria the head shot O’Leary had given her. “Someone killed him hours before my associate had a chance to ask him any questions, and then tried to kill my associate, as well.”

She watched Victoria, but the woman had herself well in hand. She raised her eyes to look at Kate. “I don’t know who that is,” she said in a voice like flint, but Kate heard the quaver beneath.

“Ms. Muravieff-”

“I don’t know him,” Victoria repeated in a stronger voice. “If that’s all, Ms. Shugak, I have work to do.”