A Taint in the Blood

17

“There’s always a third possibility,” Max said.

He sounded grumpy, but that might have been because Kate had gotten him out of bed. They sat alone in the cafeteria at the Pioneer Home, both of them hunched over mugs of coffee.

“What third?” Kate said, sounding a little cranky herself. “I’ve got too much information going on here as it is.”

“What if Charlotte did it herself?”

Kate stared at him for so long, he began to get a little nervous. “You’re not going to cry or anything, are you?”

“Why,” Kate said finally, almost despairing, “why on earth would you think that Charlotte had set the fire that killed her brother? And why oh why would she ever have hired me to find her out?”

“Maybe she wanted to use you as her confessor,” Max said. “It happens.”

Kate knew that. It didn’t make her any happier to hear Max say it.

“Or maybe she really did want her mom out of the clink, and she figured it had been so long that even if you did find out enough to get her mom out, you’d never find out who really committed the crime.”

“My head hurts,” Kate said. “And I want to go home.” “Don’t blame you,” Max said. “So do I, and I don’t even have one.”

Gloom settled in over the table.

She could go home, she thought, sitting in the Subaru in the street outside. Victoria was out of jail, even if Charlotte was dead. Kurt had regained consciousness, and although he remembered little of the events leading up to the shooting and nothing at all about getting shot, the doctor, whom she’d spoken to earlier, had assured Kate that in traumas such as these, the memory often did return a little at a time. They would have to be patient.

Everyone wanted her to go home, Jim, Brendan, even Max had told her to pack it in. Mutt put her cold nose on Kate’s cheek and gave an imploring whine. Nobody wanted her to stay in Anchorage.

But she couldn’t let it go. She knew someone was running a scam on her, she knew she hadn’t come anywhere near the truth, and she knew that if they had their way, she never would. It was, she thought, resting her forehead on the steering wheel, a combination of things-a need to know the truth that would not be denied, and a fierce disinclination to lose.

So, wearily, because she hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep the night before, Kate went back to the town house to lay in supplies, and trundled back up the hillside to park inside a stand of alder down the road from Charlotte and Emily’s house. It was a little after 8:30 in the morning. After two hours, she’d finished Last Standing Woman by Winona LaDuke and a bottle of water, watched a moose cow with two leggy calves graze on alder bark off her right front bumper, eaten a chicken sandwich, watched three magpies chase off the moose, peed in the bushes, read a quarter of Lamb by Christopher Moore, and seen a big brown dog trailing a leash come kiyüng out of the underbrush with a small but irritated black bear close on his trail.

“Stay,” Kate said.

Mutt, who had long since abandoned the Subaru for the shade it cast, yawned wide enough for Kate to hear it from Mutt’s sprawled position beneath the car, just like she’d never given any thought to adding a new parameter to that chase.

The sun beat down on the roof of the Subaru. Kate had all the windows open, but she was still sweating into the driver’s seat. In the distance, the sounds muffled by trees, mothers would call to children, men would call for dogs, car doors would slam and engines would start. Kate would peer hopefully through the foliage, only to sink back disappointed when whoever it was left from the wrong house.

At 2:30 in the afternoon, a gold two-door Eldorado came almost silently up the road and turned into Charlotte’s driveway. Kate got out of the Subaru and slipped through the trees to the edge of the clearing surrounding the house. Fifteen minutes later, Erland opened the door of the Cadillac for Emily. The Cadillac purred down the driveway and vanished.

Kate didn’t wait. “Mutt,” she said, and Mutt emerged from out of the bushes. “Guard,” Kate said, and headed for the house. The front door was locked. So was the back door. A sliding glass door that opened from the master bedroom onto the upstairs deck was not, and Kate, proud that she was barely breathing hard from the climb up the crossbars, stepped inside.

The bedroom held a king-size bed with a matching suite of furniture, including a vanity and a dresser. Kate rifled through all the drawers and then the closet without discovering anything more exciting than a cutout bra that looked like it would be awfully uncomfortable. The master bath was cluttered with various oils, ointments, creams, lotions, and every brand of makeup Kate had ever seen advertised in a magazine.

The guest bedroom down the hall was neat, clean, and impersonal. The closet had a shelf full of wrapping paper, ribbon, and items marked with sticky notes reading “Sandy for Christmas” and “Carolyn for her birthday” and “Cathy for her birthday” and “CathyO for the dinner.” Downstairs, the kitchen looked like it was used, and through it, aha, an office.

There was a desk in the middle of the room and file cabinets lined all the walls except one, which had a bookcase filled floor to ceiling with cookbooks. Kate remembered that Charlotte was a caterer. She went to the desk and opened the first drawer that came to hand and found a big red book of lined pages full of writing Kate recognized from Charlotte’s check. Each page was dated. Sometimes you just got lucky.

She sat down and found the date of Charlotte’s death. From there, she worked backward, slowly and methodically, one eye on the clock.

All the Monday entries began the same way: “Went out to Eagle River, tried to see Mom.”

Kate closed the diary and looked around. There was a shelf full of similar diaries. She pulled down a few and leafed through them. Every Monday began with the very same entry: “Went out to Eagle River, tried to see Mom.”

There were only twenty-two diaries on the shelf, so Kate couldn’t confirm that Charlotte had been trying to see her mother every Monday for the past thirty years, but it was a safe bet.

She went back to the current year and began reading steadily, with critical attention to detail, from the first of January. Some of it was personal: “Emily and I talked. She’s working too much, too many late nights. I hardly ever see her anymore, and I don’t like it. She’s promised to cut back.” Some of it was business: “Catered the Williams-Lujon wedding. Everyone really liked the cheese puffs, so I’m including them in the A menu from now on.” Some of it was social: “Took the governor’s wife to lunch in hopes of interesting her in establishing a culinary arts school at UAA. We could use a friend at court, and she actually admitted to cooking the occasional-meal, so fingers are crossed.” Some of it was trivial. “Shopping at Nordie’s with Chris, who always makes me buy more than I should. But oh, how could I resist that little black dress! Emily will drool!”

And then, suddenly, an unexpected entry in mid-July.

“Dad called. He wanted to meet so I went out there. He wanted Oliver to come, too, but Oliver said no. Oliver says no a lot. He’s like Dad-he doesn’t think Mom did it. I don’t know why he won’t go out there with me. Dad’s all we’ve got left.”

Oliver didn’t believe Victoria was guilty? Since when?

Well. Kate sat back. Charlotte, in spite of protestations to the contrary, had kept in contact with her father. Witnesses always lied-any cop could tell you that-but it always pissed Kate off when they did.

Only one other entry did Kate find of interest, the one the night before Erland’s party, and Charlotte’s last entry:

“Uncle Erland’s party is tomorrow. I hate those things. I hated them when Mom used to make us help out with the ones Grandfather used to have, and I hate them now. The boys were braver than me when they told her they wouldn’t go anymore. I wouldn’t except for Alice. Alice needs somebody there.”

Kate replaced the diary and went out the front door, locking it behind her. “Come on,” she told Mutt, and led the way back to the Subaru, where they waited another hour for Emily to come home. As before, the gold Cadillac hushed up the driveway, there was the sound of a car door opening, a moment of murmured conversation, the door closed, and the Cadillac purred back down the driveway and out onto the road.

Kate waited for ten minutes before starting the Subaru and driving up to the house. Emily took a long time answering the door, and when she saw Kate, she closed it again immediately. Kate put a hand up to catch it before it latched. “Emily? I need to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

“Anyone, or just me?”

Emily tried to close the door again. Kate exerted a little muscle and Emily was forced back a step. “Emily, what did Charlotte tell you about hiring me?”

“Nothing.” Emily refused to meet Kate’s eyes.

“Driving to the Park takes at least a day. You didn’t ask her where she was going, or why?”

“No.”

Before her better self could take over, Kate said, “You and Charlotte were on the outs, weren’t you?”

Emily’s head jerked up. “What? That’s not true. It’s a lie. Where did you hear that? I-”

“You’d been working a lot of late nights, and Charlotte was tired of never seeing you. I can understand-no point in living together if you never see each other. Did she want you to move out?”

“No! She loved me! We loved each other. She would never have asked me to move out!”

“If you loved her so much, then help me find who killed her.”

Emily’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. Through stiff lips she said, “They caught the man who was driving the truck that hit her. He’s in jail.”

Kate waited until Emily looked up again, and said in a soft voice, “But you and I both know somebody paid him to do it. Who was it, Emily? And why? Am I getting too close to the truth of William Muravieff’s murder? Why didn’t Victoria fight harder? Why has she stayed in jail all this time without complaint?”

“She’s out now,” Emily said desperately. “It was what Charlotte wanted. That’s what she always wanted. Whatever you did, it got Victoria out. The job is finished. You’re done. Go home. Go home, and leave me alone.”

Kate regarded her in silence for a moment. “You’re terrified of something,” she said. “What? Or should I say, Whom?”

Emily cast a hunted look over Kate’s shoulder. “You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

“Make me understand.”

“Go home,” Emily whispered. “Go home now. Go home before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what? Emily? Emily!”

Emily closed the door, and this time Kate let her.

Kate manhandled the Subaru into the garage and slammed into the house.

Jim looked up from the couch in the living room, marking his place in the book he was reading. “You got up early.”

“I know.” She looked more closely. “Are you wearing glasses?”

He whipped them off and tucked them out of sight. “No. Well, yes. They’re just reading glasses. Listen, Kate. My case is done. I don’t have to go back to court. I could have gone with you this morning. Where did you go, by the way?”

She walked toward him, shedding her jacket and starting to unbuckle her belt.

He gaped at her. “Kate?”

“Put the glasses back on,” she said.

Half an hour later, he flopped back, gasping for breath. “Jesus,” he said, wheezing a little. “I think you broke something.”

Kate rolled off him and waited for the ceiling to come back into focus. She was suffused with a warm glow, trembling in every limb, covered in a fine mist of perspiration. Also, her knees were smarting from carpet burn. She definitely felt better. Maybe even leaning toward immortal. Who knew glasses could be such a turn-on?

They hadn’t made it out of the living room. One end of the sofa was jammed into a corner, the coffee table was tipped over, and the magazines on it lay splashed across the floor, along with the pillows from the couch and their clothes.

Jim wheezed some more. “Maybe even everything.” He mustered enough energy, barely, to raise his head and look at her. “Mind telling me what that was all about?”

“I saw, I wanted, I took,” she said, stretching lazily. “Oh yeah.”

“It’s not that I’m objecting.”

She grinned at the ceiling. “Shower?”

He groaned a little, getting to his feet, but he followed her upstairs.

She had an epiphany in the shower, and she told Jim.

“For God’s sake, I’m not a rabbit,” Jim said, but his body seemed willing to give it the old college try.

“Not that kind of epiphany,” she said, shoving him away and drawing back the curtain to reach for a towel. “Can you get me into the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility?”

“Who do you want to talk to?”

“The hit-and-run driver who killed Charlotte.”

Jim had to make a phone call before she’d let him get his pants on, and they arrived at the facility damp but determined.

A stocky corrections officer with a round face and a dimpled smile was waiting for them. “Sam,” Jim said. Jim.

“Thanks for setting this up.”

“I was never here, I saw nothing, and I’m about to go off shift anyway.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Feel kind of sorry for the little bastard,” Sam said as he buzzed them inside and escorted them down the hall.

“Why is that?”

“His wife was just here. They’ve got a kid with cystic fibrosis. She’s a waitress, and he drives a cab. They don’t have any kind of insurance. She was bawling her eyes out when she left.”

Jim’s eyes met Kate’s for a significant moment. “Really,” was all Kate said.

The interrogation room at CIPTF had been more recently painted than the one at Hiland Mountain. Otherwise, it looked exactly the same. A man in prison blues was already seated at the table, with a corrections officer standing against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. Sam nodded at him. “Thanks, Al.”

“No problem.” Al left, Sam crossed his arms over his chest and leaned up against the wall, Jim began a slow pace around the room, which took him in back of the man in the blues, and Kate pulled out a chair opposite him. “Ralph Patton?”

“Who wants to know?” It was a pitiful attempt at pugnacity from a skinny white guy with bad teeth, lank hair, and a skimpy attempt at the unshaven look so popular nowadays with male Hollywood starlets. He was twenty-three but looked seventeen.

“I’m Kate Shugak, and this is Sergeant Jim Chopin of the Alaska State Troopers. We’re here to ask you a few questions about the hit-and-run.”

“I was drunk,” Patton said immediately, as if that was some kind of excuse.

Kate opened the file she had carried in. “So you said in your statement, but your blood-alcohol level was point-oh-four, well below the legal limit.”

He hunched his shoulders. “I have a low tolerance for booze.”

Kate looked back at the file. “Along with a low tolerance for booze, you’ve got a wife, as well as a year-old child diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.”

Patton started to get out of his chair, but Jim slammed him back into it.

“Who paid you to kill Charlotte Muravieff, Ralph?”

“I want you to leave now,” Ralph said, his face contorting.

“And who helped you do it?”

“I want to talk to my lawyer. You can’t talk to me without my lawyer present.”

“Because the thing is, we went up to O’Malley to look at the crash site, Ralph, and we found the driveway where you waited until your lookout told you Charlotte was coming up the road. You pulled out on the road and accelerated at just the right time, with just enough speed to cause maximum damage. That took some planning.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You got a bank account, Ralph? Because I’m guessing that when we take a look at it, we’re going to find a large and recent deposit.”

“That money is mine,” Patton said, his voice rising.

“Nobody’s saying it isn’t,” Kate said soothingly. “If it’s in your bank account, of course it’s your money. So long as you can explain where it came from, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“It’s mine,” Patton said, “it’s my money, and it’s going to pay the doctors for my little girl. You can’t touch it!”

“Of course I can’t. It’s your money, just like you said. So long as the Internal Revenue Service gets their share, they don’t really care. Have you reported this money as income yet, Ralph?”

“It’s my money!” Patton shouted, spraying Kate with spittle. “You can’t touch it. I earned that for our baby!”

Jim slammed him back into his seat again and Kate pounced. “Who paid you, Ralph? Who paid you to crash your pickup into Charlotte’s car as she was coming home Tuesday night?”

“What the hell is going on here?” a voice said from the doorway.

Kate and Jim looked up, to see a man in a three-piece suit that screamed attorney standing in the doorway.

“Mr. Dial,” Patton said, shoving his chair over in his hurry to get to his feet, “I didn’t say anything, sir, I promise!”

“You don’t have to talk to these people, Ralph,” Dial said. He looked first at Kate and then at Jim. “I’m Joseph Dial, Mr. Pat-ton’s attorney. And you are leaving. Now.” He looked at Sam. “I understand you’re responsible for this meeting. I’ll be lodging a complaint with the governor’s office in the morning.”

Five minutes later, they were outside the front door. “I’m sorry as hell, Sam,” Jim said.

Sam didn’t appear to be upset. “The worst they can do is force me into early retirement, and I’ve already got my thirty in. Don’t sweat it, Jim. I owed you more than one.”

“Thanks,” Jim said, and they shook hands.

“Where now?” Jim said as he and Kate got into the Subaru.

“Max,” Kate said, and started the engine.

“Tell me about William,” Kate said to Max.

Max looked at Jim, standing at Kate’s shoulder. “You the boyfriend?”

“No,” Jim said.

Max surveyed him with palpable contempt. “If you’d said yes, I’d‘ve called you a lucky bastard. Now I’m just gonna call you a stupid one.” He looked back at Kate. “You want to know about William Muravieff.”

“Yes,” Kate said.

“He was only seventeen, Kate.”

“I know. Tell me anyway. Everything you can remember.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re done.”

Max made a production out of looking at his watch. “About lunchtime, I’m thinking.”

“Your nothing but a serial opportunist,” Kate said, and that was how Jim Chopin found himself seated at a table at Simon & Seaport’s, in the middle of a gaggle of tourists in purple polyester and straw hats, with a few shysters in three-piecers mixed in and reminding him uncomfortably of Dial. The chatter was deafening, but the food was great, and the view went south all the way to Redoubt.

Max gave the drinks menu prolonged, concentrated study and then ordered a Lemon Drop. “No martini?” Kate said, and with an airy wave, Max said, “I like to broaden my experience from time to time,” and then he ruined the comment with his nasty old man’s grin. Kate laughed, and Jim, so help him, resented the laugh-or rather, the fact that Max had elicited the laugh and not him. The man had to be ninety-three, for crissake.

Besides which, Jim knew he had no serious relationship with Kate Shugak. They were acquaintances merely. Acquaintances who were at present having most excellent sex, but that was simply a matter of propinquity, born out of the circumstances of her life being in danger because of the case she was working on. Didn’t matter a damn to him who made her laugh.

He’d like to see Morris “Max” Maxwell, Sergeant, Alaska State Troopers (Retired), protect Kate from a crazed killer.

Mercifully, at that moment his steak sandwich arrived and he used it to keep his mouth full.

Max’s second drink appeared as he was draining his first. “How do you do that?” Kate said.

“Do what?” Max said, smacking his lips.

“Never mind?” she said, shaking her head. “You’re going to be this case’s highest-paid informant, I’ll say that for you.”

His bristly cheeks creased. “Have to spend it on someone.”

“Okay, old man, earn your keep. Tell me about William Muravieff.”

Max shrugged. “Okay, but it ain’t going to do you no good. He was a seventeen-year-old boy. Didn’t have no record, not so much as a speeding ticket. He majored in basketball and only kept his grades high enough so he could stay on the team.”

“Was he good?”

“At b-ball?” Max shrugged again. “Nothing flashy. Had a dependable free throw. Didn’t foul except when the coach told him to.”

“How do you remember all this after thirty years?” Jim said. At Max’s glare, he added, “I can barely remember my own games.”

“You played b-ball?” Kate said, diverted. “I didn’t know that.”

“I was six feet tall by the time I was twelve,” he said. “I was recruited in grade school.”

Max, still affronted by Jim’s challenging his memory, said crushingly, “Tall ain’t everything. Hell, Butch Lincoln ran rings around players twice his size when he played for UAA.”

Kate jumped in to head off the pissing contest at the pass. Testosterone didn’t wane with age, evidently. “What else did William do besides play b-ball well?”

Max’s eyes narrowed. “What are you looking for?”

“She was wondering if he ever had a summer job working for his uncle,” Jim said.

Max’s expression told Jim that he was not allowed to speak. Jim, whose sense of humor was strong and broad, would normally have grinned. Jim, whose sense of humor was being seriously tested, found himself getting annoyed at how Kate Shugak hung on this old fart’s every word.

The old fart left off glaring at Jim long enough to look at Kate.

“What are you thinking, Shugak? That the kid worked for Erland Bannister long enough to stumble across something bent with his uncle’s company?”

“If’s a theory.”

“Have you talked to Victoria since she’s been out?”

Kate looked glum. “I can’t find her.”

Max snorted. “You’re not much of a detective, are you, girl?”

Kate sat up. “You know where she is?”

“I might.”

Jim started to say something. Kate shut him up with a single searing look. Max saw it and said, “Guess we know who’s top dog now, hey, boy?” He looked back at Kate. “Why don’t you go talk to his girlfriend, you want to know about William.”